Category Archives: Year B

Daily Bread That Gives Life to the World

Eucharist, John, Uncategorized, Year B

Sunday Sermon – August 19, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

Year B Proper 15
John 6:51-58

I can still remember the first time I received communion. I was nine years old! I grew up in a small Anglo-Catholic parish, and when I was a little girl, we still did the whole “first communion” thing, rather than focusing on baptism or on our own hearts. For a few Sundays over the course of the fall, my friends Rebecca, Cory, and I met with our interim rector, Mother Alison, on several different occasions to talk through what this sacrament meant in our commitment to love the world and to love Jesus. It was a lot like how I do baptismal prep now… Anyway, while I remember feeling SO grown up when the big day came – The Feast of Epiphany. I also remember what happened after the service. The mother of one of the other girls, Rebecca, made each of us a red, hooded cape – just like the kind our Felicity American Girl dolls had. After the service, most of the congregation left quickly to get home before the snow started, but Rebecca, Cory and I ran around the empty church JOYOUSLY in our white dresses and white shoes with our red capes trailing behind us. Our families had to drag us home.

I’m grateful for that memory in my life with Christ – that pure, innocent joy of childhood. As we grow up and take on more responsibility and acquire more knowledge, life gets more complicated. The questions we ask and the answers we seek get more complicated.

We all have deep yearnings that change through the different seasons of our lives. We struggle with not enough time in our days. We need more space in our heads to remember thing. We all have unique and profound burning questions that we don’t yet have the answers to. Some seasons find us yearning for deeper connections with another human being, or sometimes, the void we’re struggling with is one we don’t yet know how to fill.

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he is the living bread that came down from heaven. We talk about Easter and the promise of eternal life, but the bread that sustains us in our earthly life lives too. What all is Jesus getting at in today’s gospel when he tells us that he is the bread of life for the world?

We break bread together every Sunday. We gather around that table and praise God for the salvation of the world through Christ our savior, retelling the narrative of the Last Supper in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward, spiritual grace, given by Christ. In Holy Eucharist, the grace is found in the bread and wine that also become the body and blood of Christ. Grace is that unearned, undeserved, unconditional love from God that forgives us of our since and draws us closer to God and to each other.

The bread of life for the world is that grace: love that redeems, love that sustains, love that breaks down barriers and bridge chasms, love that connects us more deeply, love that abides and abides. In today’s gospel, Christ tells us that when we receive the sacrament of communion with open hearts, we’re taking Christ into ourselves. When we receive the bread and the wine, we’re choosing to abide in Christ and to trust in God’s grace – and when we invite God in like that, God lives in us.

That what Christ is trying to teach his listeners today. That’s what he’s trying to teach us today. Communion. The bread of life. This encounter we have with Christ deepens our relationship with the God who promises us eternal life. I know my heart hungers for that, but what about all of the other things we’re hungering for? We have questions about ourselves and the world; we struggle for more balance, greater clarity, deeper understanding and stronger love. And what about those seasons where it feels like our hearts have a hole in them?

Lord, give us this day our daily bread. We say these words in the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, after the eucharistic prayer, and they’re about more than eucharist. Daily bread is sustenance; daily bread is not a meal with a dessert cart. When we follow Jesus’ teaching and pray for daily bread, we’re praying for sustenance. We’re praying for what our bodies, minds and spirits NEED to get through the day. The answer we want is not always the one we get, but if we keep our hearts open to God, we’ll have just enough of whatever it is we need to get us through. In all of the seasons of uncertainty that we encounter in our lives, what better sustenance could we ask for than the bread of life?
The Grace of God surpasses all understanding in its ability to redeem and heal and transform and connect us more deeply to God and each other. Come to the table and receive life. Come to the table and be fed. Go out into the world and proclaim that message with every little kind word you say and deed you do and truth you proclaim. Then, come back and be fed again, so as to keep your heart full – so you can keep passing that grace on!

Be the truth.

Mark, Sermons, Year B

Year B Proper 10
Mark 6:14-29

Sunday Sermon – July 15, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

In today’s gospel, we hear about John the Baptist and how his head ended up on a platter. When we first meet John the Baptist in the gospels, he’s described as wearing clothes of camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey, which isn’t the most relatable first impression. We soon learn him to be a a prophet, and the Bible is full of prophets who are given a hard time for all their truth-telling! He is best known as the baptizer of Jesus, although he had been performing this Jewish ritual of cleansing for quite awhile leading up to that moment. When we meet him today, we hear the story of his death, resulting from his regular daily prophetic duty of speaking the truth, even when not in the position of power. And while his death may seem like the end of everything, the Gospel is not a story about the end.

Although, our lives do seem full of endings, don’t they? We’ve all had experiences that brought us to our knees and made us feel like our heads – or perhaps even more often our hearts – were about to be served on a platter. I managed to make it partway through college before I had my heart truly broken for the first time. After hearing our relationship was over, I remember being so hurt and sad and angry. Hadn’t I been loyal and honorable? What did I do to deserve such heartache? Looking back on the resulting prolific journaling, I have to confess: I remember comparing myself to the dog Old Yeller, blindly led to his execution by his loyal companion.

The words we speak have power. In Creation, God speaks as God calls the world into being – and calls it good. Prophetic voices, like John the Baptist’s, gain their power from their fearless – yet loving – speaking of truth, at all times and to all people – and disregarding any earthly power structure that we believe divides us. This is how Jesus spoke to us, modeling for us how we are called to speak to each other. Today’s gospel passage and story about John the Baptist tells us everything we need to know about truth. Truth requires courage to speak, and it cannot be unheard. Truth forces us to face difficult things that we may not always want to hear. Truth transforms our world whether we choose to listen or not.

John the Baptist may have made a strange first impression on us, but you gotta admire the fearlessness with which he speaks the truth to King Herod, telling Herod that marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias, was wrong. It’s easy to speak truth from a position of authority, when people have to listen to us. Among equals, it’s more challenging, (although looking back on how difficult it was for me to be broken-up with definitely made me more compassionate in all the times since that I’ve been the bearer of such a pain-inflicting truth)…. However, to cry out for justice from a position of vulnerability takes great courage. Truth-telling is essential for justice. In our Baptism, we promise to seek justice for all people. In our judicial system, courts of law seek the truth in order to enact justice; distorting one distorts the other.

One of the easiest ways we distort truths is when we’re not ready to hear them; this is true both for truths others speak to us as well as those we are reckoning with with ourselves in our own stories. Herodias, Herod’s new bride, was livid when John the Baptist declared her marriage was unlawful. She would not hear that he was right. She was not prepared to accept that John’s words were true, so she chose to hold onto her anger and wait for an opportunity for revenge, rather than open herself up to accepting the world to be a more challenging and complicated place than she was prepared to accept. When I remember the raw, shocking, pain of my first broken heart, I was angry, too. I was in denial, too. John’s violent death is not a consequence of Herodias getting angry; John’s violent death is because Herodias chose to stay angry. John’s violent death came from Herodias’ refusal to reconcile herself to a difficult truth about her life. But Herodias couldn’t do it all on her own, she needed both her daughter’s and husband’s complicity; Herod clearly has agency, too.

While we’re quick to read Herod’s execution of John the Baptist as simply fulfilling a promise, but Herod’s relationship with John the Baptist is far more complicated. While Herod probably didn’t appreciate being called out about his unlawful marriage, today’s gospel also says that Herod knew John was righteous and holy. Furthermore, Herod enjoyed listening to John but found him confusing. Another sign of truth can be feeling the transformative power of something, even when we don’t’ yet comprehend what that power means. Because of this, Herod feared John and protected him. Herod feared the truth he did not understand. When I moved past the anger of my broken heart, I still had to navigate the fear of moving forward living by a different set of rules than the ones I’d become accustomed too. When Herod told his daughter that she could ask anything of him, he chose to behead John the Baptist, rather than risk his position of earthly power by breaking his oath to her in front of all his honored guests. It’s a lot like that time – much later in Mark’s gospel – when Pontius Pilate leaves the decision to the people and believes moving forward is as simple as washing his hands. When we’re outnumbered, it’s tempting to look for security in any earthly power we have, just as Herod and Pilate do, forsaking what we know is true for what we believe is security. Herodias’ role in the violence of this passage came from anger; Herod’s role in John’s violent death came from fear. How we respond to truth doesn’t change how true it is but it does affect our relationship with God.

After John’s gruesome death, his body is brought to the tomb by his disciples; an act that mirrors what Jesus’ disciples will later do for Jesus. Both men cautioned us to resist temptation with their honesty about its perils. Both died violently when humanity failed to resist temptation and chose an easier path. John practiced the cleansing ritual of baptizing. The most important truth of all is: Jesus, in his death, cleansed us from all our sin and promises us eternal life in the resurrection the ultimate transformative act in which God takes death and gives us eternal life.

Shortly after that first heartbreak, shortly after that season of anger and fear but still in the stage of comparing myself to Old Yeller, a priest friend of mine posted a picture of himself blessing a beautiful, Yeller-like Golden Retriever. The caption read “This is Yeller. He’s a cancer survivor of 16 years with a lot of wisdom in his eyes.” Apparently, I was a different kind of Yeller than I thought. In that moment, I learned that when we have the courage to hear and accept the life-changing truths that we all must to face, we are also accepting how we are transformed by them and with them and in them. In our transformation, we actively participate in the resurrection and affirm our faith in God’s ability to breath new life into any death, any heartbreak, any supposed ending that comes our way.

One of my favorite quotes is Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Today’s gospel passage teaches us that, in order to do that, we have to be the kind of truth we wish to see in the world.

 

Today, I am a Mustard Seed.

Mark, Year B, , ,

Year B Proper 6
Mark 4:26-34
Preached on June 17, 2018 at Christ Church Christiana Hundred

 

Sunday Sermon – June 17, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

I’ve been at Christ Church for just over fifteen months now, but as many of you know, this isn’t my first time living in Delaware. I went to college just down the road at UD, so my first move to Delaware was when I was nineteen.What you probably don’t know is that it was a move I didn’t want to make. I enjoyed high school; I had it down. I was never super popular but I was involved in a variety of student groups and had a great circle of friends, many of whom I still consider my soul sisters. Also, I’ve always been close to my family and many of them lived nearby. I had a good thing going. Going off to college would mean a new chapter, a new beginning. Sometimes, now, when I’m driving south on turnpike I can still remember the day I moved into the dorm, riding in the backseat of my Dad’s silver suburban, with my one-third of a dorm room in back. I wanted that car ride to last forever.

(I imagine right now some of you are thinking “Why did this girl come back to Delaware?”)

How I felt about UD transformed in my time there because I transformed too. In college, I made new friends, lived into my passions, found a voice I didn’t know I had and discerned my vocation. I was like the sower in the first parable in today’s gospel lesson, sleeping and waking and going about my daily business…. But all around me seeds were sprouting and growing in ways I didn’t know or expect.

We get a lot of seed imagery today as Jesus tells us about the kingdom of God, because seeds are beginnings – awaiting growth and transformation. Today, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God gives us life when we’re surrounded by darkness, breaks us open to new possibility, and invites us into a new way of being full of endless opportunities for growth.

The mustard seed is so small when it starts out but like all other seeds, it has to be buried to grow. When a seed is planted to awaken its new beginning, it is surrounded by darkness under the earth. Riding in that backseat of my Dad’s suburban that day, all I could see awaiting me in this new beginning I’d chosen was the darkness of the unknown. Every time we move, start a new job or school, embark on a new relationship, we’re sowing ourselves into unknown territory. We’re planting ourselves like seeds and praying for new life. Sometimes, that darkness is not expected. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming. Often, it’s completely unpredictable and we have no idea how long it will last. But next time you have one of those days where you just want to stay in bed, pull the blankets over your head, and hide: remember how Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to a seed and the precursor to all of that transformation is total darkness. God is nurturing us in that darkness, even when we can’t see God there.

In order to get out of that dark place, a seed has to not only break open to the unknown but it has to sprout. It has to reach out overcoming any fear and temptation to stay in its safe and secure shell and pull its little mustard seed down comforter over its head. At the end of my first day of classes, I joined my first student group. I looked up where it met, walked across campus by myself, and entered a room filled with strangers, who would become some of my first and closest friends. It was one more strange new thing in a season of strange new things, but it was the beginning of what would become a weekly ritual that would shape my college career and help me discover my voice. Whether the darkness around us is heavy or light, isn’t it always those little moments of reaching out that lead us to something great – like the first time you shook your spouse’s hand or the first time you did the thing that became your greatest passion? All of those moments began with a seed, something impossibly small but that God was surrounding the whole time. All of these moments began with one brave decision to reach out into the unknown and have faith that God is there. The Holy Spirit is always waiting to surprise us.

Any seed brave enough to break open and sprout is always always going to find its way out of the darkness and reach the warmth of God’s life-giving light, where it will continue to transform, blooming into blossoms like the ones on our altar or growing tall like the magnolia tree on Buck Road or becoming the greatest of all shrubs like the mustard seed. In Christ, the possibilities for growth are endless. That place I went to on that very first night of classes – where I found some of my dearest friends and began my journey to finding my voice? It’s the same place where I met the people who connected me to Christ Church. By likening the Kingdom of God to a seed that springs life, Christ is reminding that the Kingdom of God is alive – alive and the source of all life and transformations, just like how Christ tells us that mustard seed that grows so big that it comforts the birds. We’re called to invite each other into God’s transformation.

Just like how every seed grows up differently, the Kingdom of God always has room for new possibility – and new transformation that continues throughout our lives. Over and over again, just as we pray that “Thy Kingdom come” over and over again in the Lord’s Prayer.

After I graduated from UD, I loaded the last of my dorm room into my beautiful Ford Taurus and as I drove across the Delaware Memorial Bridge towards the entrance to the New Jersey turnpike, I cried that that beautiful chapter of my life had come to an end, even though I knew I was just a summer away from my move to South Africa….and you know, when that time came, I remember wishing that plane ride would last forever.

We’ve always been told that we should have faith like a mustard seed – faith that grows bigger and bigger. But more than that, this gospel is calling us to be the mustard seed:
To have faith in God’s transformation spirit all around us when we are buried by dark unknown soil!
To break open and welcome God’s life-giving call, every time God presents Godself!
To grow in the life-giving light of God, fearless and ever-changing as we become what we cannot predict!
God’s transforming power is already in progress. Are you ready to be planted? b

An Invitation to Grow

Acts, Baptismal Covenant, Easter, Year B, , , , ,

Year B Easter 6
Acts 10:44-8

Sunday Sermon – May 6, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

When was the last time someone made a comment on your listening skills? Was it on a report card? Was during an argument with someone dear? To hear how God is calling us to grow, we must be good listeners: ready to hear the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the radically new, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. The diversity in God’s Creation isn’t there to fuel one versus another; our differences are invitations to each other to grow closer to God by seeing the diversity of God.

We’re in our fifth week of our series Witness, as we work our way through the Acts of the Apostles, the band formerly known as the disciples. We’ve been following the apostles on their journey in the years following the resurrection as they spread the Good News and sow the seeds to start the Church. We are called just as they were called to witness – to proclaim our faith. When we follow their example, we know that this is not just about our words; it’s about action. In this season of Easter, we’ve heard about answering God’s call – even when it brings us back to the place of conflict, resisting temptation – especially the temptations to fear and worry, and moving forward in our call as adventurers – even when we like staying settled in one place. Our testimony of our faith to others is not just what we say to them; it’s how we live.

Our life in the Episcopal Church is shaped by two primary sacraments: Holy Eucharist, the bread we break and the cup we share around God’ table, and Holy Baptism, in which we become members of Christ’s Body, the Church and inheritors of the kingdom of God. The promises we make at our baptism govern our life together. One of these promises is “to seek and serve Christ in all people.”[1] The Main Event at the heart of today’s passage from Acts is a baptism – on an occasion where Peter is able to serve Christ in an unexpected way.

One of the great, unexpected joys of my ministry, was my year as an Episcopal missionary after college. When I was at training for my journey, one of the priests I was working with tried to teach my classmates and I about comfort; It’s a lesson that’s useful every day of our lives, and I’m really glad I listened to it. He drew an oval on the board and said, “This is your comfort zone: everything you know, everywhere you feel safe.” Then, he drew an “X” 5 inches from the oval and said; “This is one of the many experiences you’ll have when you move outside the country. Your comfort zone is going to have to grow to encompass this new item, and there will be nothing comfortable or expected about that, but you know what?” He drew a new oval on the board; once that encompassed the previous oval and the X he’d drawn. “Once your comfort zone expands, your perspective will always be bigger and what you’re capable of will be permanently altered.” It’s astounding.

At the beginning of today’s passage from Acts, Peter is preaching, something well within his comfort zone. While he knows he’s connecting with people and he can see the Holy Spirit moving through them, the people he’s connecting with are the people he’s used to connecting with, the people he expects to reach: the Jews. Peter’s seeking and serving the Christ is people who are familiar to him, whose way of life he already knows that he understands.  Suddenly, amid all this familiarity, something happens that astounds Peter: he finds his preaching is reaching people he did not expect to reach – people outside his comfort zone. Suddenly, he’s seeing that the Gentiles, too, are filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter’s suddenly found an opportunity to serve Christ in people he hadn’t even been seeking it in.

Peter had this oval that encompassed where he was comfortable seeing God, and in that moment from today’s passage from Act – that moment when we hear that he is astounded – Peter’s oval has an unexpected growth spurt, and his faith grows to encompass an unexpected way of seeing the Holy Spirit work through people. His perspective was permanently altered; his faith is permanently bigger. Because he opened himself up to listen for God in an unexpected place, in unfamiliar faces.

I’ve come to believe in my heart of hearts that the reason we’re all made so differently is because learning to understand each other helps us grow. To overcome the barriers of speaking different languages or coming from vastly distinct cultural backgrounds, we must slow down, really listen to each other, and make the effort to understand how someone who sees the world very differently than we do. This is why the experience of traveling is so important and enriching! Every new person, place, way of life, we take time to understand along our early pilgrimage brings us closer to God by helping us see Christ in our fellow humans, especially the ones most different from us. We get to know God better by exploring a new corner of God’s Creation. Whether we’re going just around a river bend like Lewis and Clark or growing deeper in relationship with another human, the richness of God’s Creation is astounding!

What Peter thought was a world of one versus another – Jew versus Gentile – was really a reminder that we’re all in this together. Encountering Christ in another person looks like a moment of tender vulnerability, a deep belly laugh, something powerful and new yet familiar, common ground: this is holy, indeed. This is living into our promise to seek and serve Christ in all people. How could Peter withhold the waters of baptism from a brother or sister after seeing Christ in them? How could we withhold that piece of the divine in each of our hearts from a neighbor, when we made a promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, no matter how short, tall, culturally foreign, politically opposing, or geographically distant?

Seeking and serving Christ is an opportunity to grow and be astounded as Peter was astounded. Don’t you just love that for all the wild and crazy places Peter’s followed God’s call we still get to Peter surprised by the Holy Spirit? It happens to all of us; it’s how comfort zones – and our faith – grow.

The Main Event in today’s sermon about Witness is our call to be good listeners, who are unafraid to be a little uncomfortable because we know that every new experience is an invitation to grow our faith comfort zone, to know God’s diversity from a grander perspective, and to be astounded at this richness of God’s Creation into which God has called us all into being and continues to call us to grow. So, slow down… and listen up!

[1] BCP 305

Lead us not into temptation… especially fear…

Acts, Easter, It, Movie references, Year B

Year B Easter 4
Acts 4:4-12
(John 10:11-18)

What is your most irresistible temptation? That thing you want to indulge in so much that you can almost convince yourself there’s no harm in it. Is it watching that speed needle on your car hit a certain number? Is it that extra pair of shoes that match your new outfit perfectly but that you absolutely cannot afford? Is it a phrase that comes out of your mouth that you know is over the line – but will certainly ruffle someone’s feathers or the will turn the head of someone whose attention it’s not appropriate for us to vy for We can pick on Eve all we want, but we all know what it’s like to have our mouths water for a certain piece of forbidden fruit, to have days where we give into that temptation and take that luscious bite, and then feel our hearts race with fear when we suddenly realize we have to face the consequences of what we’ve just done. Temptation and fear have an interesting relationship, don’t they?

When it comes to fear, I’ve never been any kind of adrenaline junkie, but I do have quite an affinity for scary movies. When I was a little girl, one of the things my father wanted to teach me about the world was what makes a good horror movie. We watched Alien, Halloween, Fright Night, An American Werewolf in London. When I say little girl, we’re talking single digit age. By the time I was nine, I was such a big fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street that I was Freddie Krueger for Halloween. But my all-time favorite has always been Stephen King’s It. I know not everyone is a movie buff and the horror genre in particular is one many have strong feeling for or against, but I’m going to tell you why this story encapsulates both the power of love and the true nature of evil. The story centers around 7 kids – seven best friends, who are also self-proclaimed losers. The story’s monster, Pennywise the clown, wakes up every thirty years and terrorizes a small town by feeding on its children, but in order to feed, It has to scare. Pennywise takes the form of whatever each intended victim fears most: werewolves, fire, bullies, disease, blood, or even parents. It can even work through – and find allies in – adults who live in fear.  It embodies fear. Only when the children start to share their experiences with each other do they start to be able to fight It by working together. By being less afraid together. Sounds a whole lot like Christian community, don’t you think? As for Pennywise, one of the most powerful moments of the 2017 movie is a shot of Pennywise drooling over, as he puts it, “tasty, tasty, beautiful, fear” in the face of one of his intended victims. The kind of evil Pennywise is gains power Its power from fear, and the children’s fear weakens, when they are together.

The situation Peter and John find themselves in in today’s passage from Acts is scary, too. I imagine the Annas, Caiaphas, and the other high priests assembled with the rulers, scribes, and elders; they must’ve known having so many present made their proceedings extra-intimidating for prisoners, and even more, for Peter and John. This was the kind of gathering – in this same city – that had condemned their friend and savior Jesus to death on the cross. I imagine that they were tempted to be silent and believe that their silence was harmless. I imagine they were tempted to evade punishment by ling, so they could get back to spreading the gospel throughout the land, although that would be rather counter-productive to a savior who’s the Way, the Truth, and the Life wouldn’t it? Peter’s already learned that lesson in Gethsemane, anyway. Instead, Peter does the most radical thing of all: he speaks the truth in love – that he is here in the name of Jesus, the stone that they – rulers, scribes, elders, and high priests – rejected yet that has become the chief cornerstone and surest foundation

Last week, we heard about Peter and John healing a lame man. After that encounter and immediately before their arrest, do you know what they were doing? They were “teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is resurrection of the dead.”[1] Peter’s faith is so certain that even when he’s arrested for proclaiming the gospel, he continues to proclaim it. This is the Peter who asked for Jesus love. This is the Peter who raced to be the first to Jesus, when he was walking on water. This is the Peter who is showing us what it means to have Jesus as your cornerstone by modeling for us that even when you have every reason to be afraid, you should proclaim Jesus and the power of resurrection. What we don’t see in today’s passage is that the rulers, elders, scribes, and high priests are unable to convict Peter and John since the people of Jerusalem have already seen the healing power of Christ that they’re proclaiming!

In today’s lesson from Acts, the forbidden fruit that Peter is tempted by is fear – tasty, tasty, beautiful fear that would make him deny Jesus either by his words or his silence. Now, some of you may remember Peter’s key moment in the Story of the Passion we heard on Palm Sunday and how in one night, on the eve of the crucifixion, Peter denied Jesus three times. What’s changed?

In today’s gospel from John we hear Jesus foretell his death and resurrection, as “the good shepherd [who] lays down his life for the sheep…[he] lay[s] down [his] life in order to take it up again”[2] The Peter who chooses to proclaim in love rather than to deny in fear is a Peter who has journeyed through Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension and is therefore grounded more deeply than ever before in his faith. Peter and John saw Jesus hand over his life and defeat death. They saw Jesus risk it all, so Peter, with John at his side, and Peter having Christ as his sure foundation, as his head and his cornerstone, he had the courage to risk it all, too. Christ’s resurrection defeated death and transformed Peter and it can transform each of us, should we be bold enough to ground ourselves in it.

The reason It is one of my favorite books and movies – horror or otherwise – is because the friendship formed by these seven children – the sure foundation of the love they share – strengthens them to be able to conquer the evil monster who preys on their tasty, tasty, beautiful, fears. When the children set out together to defeat the monster, It is weakened when It realizes that together they are far less afraid.

Temptation in the shape of a gas pedal, an irresponsible purchase, or a dishonorable word can be pretty easy to recognize, no matter how succulent each appears to be. Simple shapes like these quick to come to mind, when we pray “Lead us not into temptation.” But fear – fear of truth or of silence, fear of action of inaction – fear can sneak up on us. We can find ourselves tasting fear before we even realize we’ve bitten forbidden fruit, a taste designed to lure us away from God’s love. To choose Christ as our sure foundation means to choose love instead, to choose hope whether or not we can see it, to remember that whatever death is in front of us can be transformed by resurrection, should we be bold and keep the resurrection love of Christ as our cornerstone, Should we keep a sure foundation in love that conquers all.

Lead us not into temptation nor fear, O Lord. Deliver us from these evil.

[1] Act 4:2 NRSV

[2] John 10:11,17 NRSV

Palm Sunday 2018: Looking Back on to the Moment of Triumph

Eucharist, Holy Week, Lent, Palm Sunday, Sermons, Year B

Year B Palm Sunday
Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem
The Teaching of Jesus in the Temple (adaptation of Mark 12)
Preach at Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Wilmington, Delaware

Three years ago, I spent Holy Week as a seminary intern at a small church plant in Brooklyn. I processed with palms through Bushwick, prayed through the night after Maundy Thursday, walked the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, and embraced the joy of Easter. Being too far away to make it home to my family, I met up with some friends, lay leaders and clergy alike, for a festive Easter feast, full of exhausted laughter than rang out into the streets of Chelsea late into the night. The next morning, our Easter Monday sabbath, I embraced the resurrection triumph by sleeping in and then started to play on my phone to procrastinate getting out of bed. And I got a message. A picture popped up of one of my dear friends and housemates during my year in South Africa, someone I’d shared many laughs with, crowded around our kitchen table. My friend, my sister in Christ, Tylenia had died, suddenly, at 23 in some senseless car accident. I dropped my phone onto my chest, and it felt like a punch. All the glory of Easter vanished and suddenly I felt like I was back walking the stations of the cross. It was finished. Again.

The most important thing to remember about the gospel stories we’ve just heard is that these are the lessons that Jesus wanted to focus on conveying before his arrest and crucifixion; in these teachings, we hear what Christ knew was most important for us to remember as we begin our journey into Holy Week. Jesus’ knew that there were dark times ahead for the disciples and for all of his followers; he knew his death was coming even though they did not. Jesus called them – and still calls us – to do our part to stay in right relationship with God, so we’re prepared for whatever life throws our way. We’re beginning our journey through Holy Week and Christ is giving us a roadmap to follow. The story of Jesus’ teaching in the temple and the story of the Last Supper follow Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem but foreshadow the journey we’re embarking on as we begin Holy Week, and the story of the Passion that we’ll hear later in the service.

First, when we hear the summary from Mark 12 of Jesus’ teachings in the temple, we hear several rapid-fire stories of different teachings, with one common thread: to draw us closer to the kingdom of God. Jesus tells us which commandment is the greatest: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and with all our mind, and all our strength. And to love our neighbors as ourselves. Then, Jesus praised the widow for giving all the had to God. God isn’t after the contents of our pockets: Chap Stick and credit cards. God wants us to offer up our whole hearts, our whole selves. Our Heavenly Father wants our whole trust. To love God with our whole hearts – to give all that we have like the widow did – we don’t only have to focus on God, we have to focus on loving each other, too. In real love, we let our guard down, which is why when we lose someone we love, we grieve. When I lost Ty, I remembered our laughs at the kitchen table in our home, our first University of Cape Town rugby game, our adventures traveling around the city. All the times we shared in joy and commiserated with each other in sadness. Grief longs for the community of shared joy as well as shared support in times of sorrow.

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In the second part of Mark 12, we hear the story of the Passover meal: the narrative of the bread and wine that the disciples shared at the Last Supper and that we retell every Sunday. When we share the bread and the wine – Christ’s body and blood – we take in his life so that we can live in him. Part of the Eucharistic prayer is the retelling of the story. We say together: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” (Book of Common Prayer, 363). In our prayer together, the bread and the wine become the body & blood of Christ. They become a sacrament, a vessel of God’s Grace. For there to be a sacrament – any sacrament – the faith of the people is required. A priest alone in a room cannot consecrate bread and wine. Just like in the first half of Mark’s gospel: we love God better by loving each other. We’re all in this together

When I was on pilgrimage to Jerusalem last month, one of the great joys of my time there was the people, both my fellow pilgrims as well as the people we met along the way. On our last day in Jerusalem, we visited the site where the procession of palms began. Then, we made our way to Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus and the disciples went on the night before his arrest and crucifixion. There is a beautiful church where we prayed, and outside is a beautiful garden of olive trees. But if it weren’t for the evangelizing of one of my dear fellow pilgrims, I would’ve missed the very best part. If you stand in just the right spot, in the middle of all of those twisted trees, where Jesus prayed, awaiting the grief he knew was coming. If you stand in just the right spot, you can look through the trees, towards the walls around Jerusalem and see the Messiah’s Gate, the gate Jesus rode through in the triumphant entry we just read about at the beginning of the service. You can see the glorious gate framed by the knotty olive trees of Gethsemane.
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Isn’t always just so that you can see the place of triumph so clearly – and yet just out of reach – from the place of grief? It’s a summary of the full spectrum of human emotion that we go through during Holy Week. Between the triumphant entry of Palm Sunday and the joy of the resurrection at Easter, we have the grief of Holy Week, the grief of Jesus’ passion and death. What makes the griefs we experience in lives so powerful – what made my grief for my friend so powerful – is that amid the darkness of grief like twisted olive trees, we can see – just out of reach – our own Messiah’s gate – our own place of great triumph, and – more importantly – great love. In Holy Week, we experience the ways God is with us through all of that – which makes coming out the other side in Easter even more powerful! The people I’ve grieved live on in me, Jesus’ teachings live on in us.

One of the hardest parts about grieving Ty from so far away was that there was no one around me who knew her, nevertheless loved her. I don’t think I was able to completely accept losing my friend until 10 months later, when I went to South Africa and had lunch with two of our other housemates, who could sit in Gethsemane with me and acknowledge how much we still miss her, and look back longingly at the Messiah’s gate, our glory days just out of reach. To fully appreciate the joy of the resurrection, we have to acknowledge the grief of the passion and crucifixion. I invite you to join us this week on that journey, for our Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services. Jesus’ glorious entry into Jerusalem led into the teachings we heard today in the summary of Mark 12. Part of loving God with our whole hearts is loving each other with our whole hearts, and sharing in the sacramental life together. And we need all the connection points to God – all the love and glory and laud and honor – we can get when the moments of triumph in our lives give way to experiences of grief and hardship. So, let us live that teaching and sow love with each other as we gather around the table today, and sacrifice our praise and thanksgiving to God, having faith in that love to be our daily bread, next time we get caught spending a long night in Gethsemane, with our glory days just out of reach, we can endure because of the love that keeps watch with us.