The Adventurous Parson

It grows, we know not how

2009-06-16T08:47:00.004-04:00

Proper 6-B; June 14, 2009
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34

Simon’s 5th grade class had a science fair this week. Two of the children experimented with plants: did a plant grow faster if one played classical music, rock music or rap music next to it?

The children were convinced rap music did the trick. In one boy’s experiment, one plant was kind of shrunk down compared to the others. The other boy said that the rap music one was taller – the classical music one looked vigorous and healthy to me – but the rap music one had broken its stem on the way to school. But I was skeptical. Maybe I had today’s parable in mind: we sow the seed, but it sprouts on its own – it grows tall – we know not how. It grows to tall, ripe grain, or to become a shrub so mighty that the birds nest in its branches. Even controlling for variables in a scientific experiment, it is still God’s seed, God’s mystery, God’s power, God’s time.

That is kind of what is meant by “the kingdom of God.” That kingdom is not necessarily a place, with border guards and boundaries, but a sense of God’s power. God’s dominion. God rules here. God’s rules rule here. The seeds sprout and grow into plants. The sun rises and sets. We work, we sleep, we rise. We see God’s kingdom at work in the world around us.

Following the rules of God’s kingdom is a balancing act between the work God calls us to do, and an utter detachment from the results of that work. In every way, God wants us, I think, to participate in the work of that kingdom: to plant seeds. What are the seeds God has given you in your life? How do you think God wants you to participate in the kingdom of God?

What was God looking for when he chose David out of all the warriors offered to him, David, the youngest, to be the one chosen and beloved of God? What could David have possibly done to deserve such a blessing?

In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul encourages the believers. “The love of Christ urges us on,” Paul says. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away.”

There are moments in our lives when we just can’t make things fit. Try as hard as we can, something just doesn’t work. A relationship, a task, a problem to be solved. Aren’t we just prone to worry ourselves sick? Don’t we just want to get this right, that perfect, to please ourselves, to please God? Is this what God would want? How do we know what is the right thing to do? What if we just worked a little harder, fixed this thing a little better, dug a little deeper, stayed up a little later? Wouldn’t there be more justice in the world? Wouldn’t there be more mercy? Wouldn’t things be RIGHT?

One of my favorite summer stories is set in New York City, in an indeterminate decade sometime in the middle of the 20th century. It’s a story of boys playing marbles on the street, in the deepening dusk. The narrator is Buddy, shooting marbles with his friend, Ira. Buddy’s brother, Seymour, comes up to them.

One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on - some on, some still off- I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to - his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's - and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of our house. Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from - well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. 'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.' *

There are no accidents in the kingdom of God. We sow the seed, we shoot the marble, we reach out to the friend in need. The seeds sprout, we know not how, and when we turn around, a great tree has grown up in our midst, and the kingdom of God is here.

* J.D. Salinger, from "Seymour, an Introduction" in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction (New York: Little, Brown, 1963)

Jan Juan Jean Joao Yohana 3:16

2009-06-08T17:37:00.008-04:00

Trinity-B; June 7, 2009
Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

How many of you have been to the southern United States? Not just Florida, but the deep south? The real south where the culture really is different?

Across the deep south – the “bible belt” of America – you can see billboards that read “John 3:16.” Nothing more. If you were a native speaker of the “deep south” you would know what that meant. But like with any culture that is not originally our own, such signs can be mystifying. The “in crowd” knows the cues; the rest of us are standing on the sidelines, scratching our heads.

That’s one of the problems with short-hand religion: since we don’t get the cultural cues, we think it must not apply to us. If Southerners put John 3:16 up on billboard, well, that might mean it’s not so good. Hold on, here: let’s not throw the baby out with the fundamentalist bath water. John 3:16 actually says some pretty good things. Let’s hear it in some other languages, languages that some of us here speak, languages that some of us here originally heard God speak to us:

Jan 3:16 (Haitian Creole Version)
Paske, Bondye sitèlman renmen lèzòm li bay sèl Pitit li a pou yo. Tout moun ki va mete konfyans yo nan li p'ap pedi lavi yo. Okontrè y'a gen lavi ki p'ap janm fini an.

Juan 3:16 (Nueva Versión Internacional)
Porque tanto amó Dios al mundo, que dio a su Hijo unigénito, para que todo el que cree en él no se pierda, sino que tenga vida eterna.

Jean 3:16 (Louis Segond)
Car Dieu a tant aimé le monde qu'il a donné son Fils unique, afin que quiconque croit en lui ne périsse point, mais qu'il ait la vie éternelle.

João 3:16 (O Livro)
Deus amou tanto o mundo que deu o seu único Filho para que todo aquele que nele crê não se perca espiritualmente, mas tenha a vida eterna.

Yohana 3:16 (Swahili New Testament)
Kwa maana Mungu aliupenda ulimwengu kiasi cha kumtoa Mwanae pekee, ili kila mtu amwaminiye asipotee, bali awe na uzima wa milele.

All these languages say the same thing: “For God so loved the world …” – not just the Spanish-speakers, or the Cape Verdeans, or the English, or the Trinidadians, or those white Southern Protestants who put up those billboards. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

There is an author from this world of the deep Southern Bible belt, Flannery O’Connor. She was actually an Irish Catholic, but she grew up privileged, and white, and in the deep south of Georgia, and her novels and short stories took a long, hard look at this really quite distinctive culture. For sure it is a very religious culture, and a culture that can be seen as odd by some other Americans, and certainly by some others. Out of a lifetime of living in this deeply religious, deeply southern culture, this is how Flannery O’Connor reinterprets John 3:16:

… life “has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for."

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son …” It’s the essence of the Good News in just a few words. The world, in all of its complications and troubles, is what God loves, and cares for. God wants to be here, in the middle of it all, begging, cajoling, pleading, instructing, working with us to make this world a better place – to make this world the place God intended it to be. We aren’t there yet, but that is the intention of God with us.

Our reading from Isaiah comes from a very different kind of literature: it’s spooky and mysterious and mythic. It’s an image of the Ancient of Days, and at first glance you might think, what has this to do with us? This image of the remote and all-powerful glory of God?

But look at the last lines: “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” God is asking: who will tell God’s story? Who will bring God’s message to a world that very much needs it? How we will answer that? In our neighborhood, our community, our city, among our family and friends? That indeed is the central question of evangelism, the one that the short-hand version, of putting “John 3:16” up on billboards and hand-painted sign posts, addresses. Who will go for God into this world? Who will tell God’s story, of how much God loves this world and all of us in it?

All of us are in church today because SOMEONE bothered to tell us that story, and so I think you will know the answer to that question when God asks you: Who will go for us? Here am I; send me.

The Spirit of truth speaks

2009-06-01T12:33:00.001-04:00

Pentecost/B; May 31, 2009
Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104
Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through me to others. Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through others to me.

That old prayer is a form of Evangelism -- perfectly appropriate for Pentecost, the feast when we celebrate the Spirit of God speaking in many languages to the very new church gathered Jerusalem.

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through me to others. Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through others to me.

This day is also known as the birthday of the church. The ecstatic spirit of the church is described in Acts. In John's gospel, Jesus breathes the spirit on the disciples and gives them their marching orders -- their authority: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

So Jesus can speak to us and through us in a variety of ways, and the Holy Spirit speaks the truth to us and through us in a variety of ways, through what may appear to an outsider as drunken, crazy behavior. Paul, of course, says it better than anyone: "The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."

Jesus can speak through us and to us in ways that make us happy, and that's what Pentecost is usually about. It's the day when people who speak in tongues can really shine. But Jesus' words are sometimes more ambiguous than we would like. We're left hanging, with questions in our mind, conflicts not quite resolved, solutions not yet formed.

The Pentecost experience happens, as you will recall, after the Ascension – after Jesus has left his disciples for the last time. Remember the words Jesus spoke to them, during one of his appearances to them after the resurrection: “Peace be with you.”

The disciples were probably not in a very peaceful place just then. John reveals none of the disciples' emotions other than they were glad to see him. Surely they were in turmoil: their friend and leader had just been killed, they were in hiding, grieving and mourning, and then he appears. Surely they were astonished, stunned, shocked. Neither the "before" or "after" of this scene can be described as peaceful, but that is what Jesus says to them, twice: "Peace be with you."

Our passage today comes from when Jesus teaches his disciples what to in these days – these post-resurrection, post-Ascension days: Be strong. The Spirit will come, and will direct you in all truth.

With these with these words of encouragement, Jesus is sending the disciples, and, by extension, us, out into the world. We are not allowed to indulge in a spirit-filled peace for very long. We cannot linger with the mountaintop experience, for Jesus is calling us into the world, the world that longs for and desperately needs peace. Jesus breathes his spirit upon us -- speaks his peace -- and then sends us out into the world where people hurt and get sick and go hungry, and expects us to speak peace to them, to speak truth to them, to bring hope to this broken world that does not know what to expect next. The Pentecost story reminds us that the Spirit makes up for our deficiencies – in sighs deeper than the words we cannot find, and in the words of all the languages we cannot speak.

St. Paul’s Church is at an exciting moment in its life. We are making a name in this community, a name that speaks the truth that the Spirit has told us: that God wants a community of faith on this corner. That God wants us to make this corner a beautiful part of God’s blessed creation. We are engaging in a great deal of listening, of trying out new things, of being willing to make mistakes, of risking that something wonderful and new might indeed emerge from what seems an unsettled present.

This is a moment of great hope, and in the words of our patron saint, “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

On this day of Pentecost, the Spirit speaks the truth to us: God is calling us to be here, now. On this day of Pentecost, we hope for what we do not yet see. On this day of Pentecost, we persevere, with patience.

Now we are with God

2009-05-26T16:07:00.008-04:00

Easter 7-B May 24, 2009

Acts 1:15-26; Ps. 1

1 John 5:9-15; John 17:6-19

This 7th Sunday of Easter is the Sunday after the Ascension: we remember this time, 40 days after the resurrection, as the first time Jesus is not around his disciples. Jesus will no longer just pop in unexpectedly. Jesus will deliver no more new sermons, heal no more sick people, teach us any more new lessons – Jesus in the flesh, that is. What the church, and what our lessons today tell us, though, is the miraculous truth: Jesus still has power in our lives, to comfort, to inspire, to bless, to protect. That’s what this passage from the Gospel of John reminds us. Jesus prays for his disciples – for us – that we might be close to God.

During the Easter season we celebrate Christ's victory over death and in the Ascension we celebrate his entering into heaven; the two are not identical.

The Ascension is the taking of our human nature into the territory where we were never allowed to go. Our created nature -- our kind of people -- were cast out of paradise, and God posted cherubim at the gates to keep us out. Now, with Christ, our status is raised higher than the angels.

Celebrating Ascensiontide was important to early Christians, celebrating this new reality of not only God with us, but us with God. In the 5th century, times were tough: plagues, pestilence, economic uncertainty – sound familiar? A devastating earthquake struck Vienna. The Bishop got active. On Ascension Day in 470, he sent the clergy and people out into the streets, into the fields, to offer prayers for God’s grace, for relief from these bad events, for abundant crops and a return to prosperity. As the years went by, this custom of processing around the town and countryside became very popular – by the 8th century it was the practice in England, and the association of the ascension of Jesus with springtime prayers for deliverance from pestilence and abundance in the fields was set. In England, the Ascension procession became known as the beating of the bounds – the people of the community would walk the boundaries of the parish, and boys would be bumped, or beaten, at markers along the way so they would into their old age remember the boundaries of the common lands. At the end of the procession, there would be community party, with lots to eat and drink, to make sure everyone, poor and not-so-poor alike, would remember the occasion as one of community spirit and abundance.

We, too, are going to have one of those parties next Saturday. We’re going to walk the boundaries of our PleasantGreen neighborhood, pray to God for abundance, give thanks for the service of our local councilor, Mike Brady, and end with a good party. It is important for every one of us to be there.

These sorts of community events

are sort of archaic – this one has these old, English ro

ots, kind of quaint and kind of quirky. When I was reading up on them, several of them would end with the disclaimer, “This kind of thing isn’t needed any more. It comes from the days when people could not read, when maps were not accurate, when boundaries would be frequently in dispute.”

But I think “beating the bounds” is a very important custom for a community, today, especially a community like this one – a poor, not very well developed community, a community whose landowners neglect their property, who provide poor housing for their tenants and who allow trash and blight to collect. Communities like ours forget where our boundaries lie at our peril.

I went to college in Washington, DC, where massive sections of the city were devastated by riot and fire after the assassination of Martin Luther King. For decades those neighborhoods, and others, were left to languish, and decay. Middle class people moved out; poor people moved in. The other day on the radio I heard people talking, not too happily, about “the Plan” for redevelopment of parts of the District of Columbia. “Things happen without our even knowing about them,” one woman said. She named several elementary schools. “They closed them for renovation, they told us, but then they were opened up as expensive condos. Of course there are no children left. They moved us out, and moved in rich people. That’s the Plan.” A neighborhood loses its memories of its boundaries, of its heart and soul, at its peril.

On this Sunday after the Ascension we remember that not only is God among us, in the person of Jesus, but through the ascension of Jesus into heaven, WE are now among God. Jesus, who has walked these very neighborhood streets – Pleasant Street and Green Street, Warren Avenue and Main Street – has now taken all of this reality with him. Through Jesus, this is now God’s reality, too. God KNOWS PleasantGreen, just as God knows you, and you, and you, and you and me.

Love and Baptism

2009-05-19T12:48:00.006-04:00

Easter 6-B;May 17, 2009
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Welcome, to the family and friends of Olivia Jayla! Thank you, Olivia, for bringing them with you today!

How many of you are new to the Episcopal Church, or to Episcopal baptisms? You know what everybody says: Those Episcopalians are so sweet. When they baptize you, they do it in a Jacuzzi.

The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.
Just stand up and kneel down and say what the others do.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.*

Well, all church jokes aside, isn’t that what has brought us here? Love? “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” Love is laying down one’s life for one’s friends. On this 6th Sunday in Easter, it is all about love.

I think that each child, to the proud parents and grandparents, is the Baby Jesus, and each child is an embodiment of love, just as Jesus was an embodiment of God’s love for all humanity.

Such love of God for the world is often described as sacrificial; God sacrifices everything for us. Well, is it a sacrifice? I mean, when you love someone so much, as a parent loves a child, as love between spouses, wouldn’t you do anything for that person? And could anything you do for a person you love be a sacrifice? Perhaps we humans are not called upon to express our deepest love in that way, but wouldn’t we give all that we are, and all that we have, for someone we love, and not even care? Not even think about it as a sacrifice, as something we are giving up. Love is all there is.

Love can be a worry; maybe those of us who are older siblings maybe once upon a time felt like when a baby was born into our families that there would not be enough love to go around. How many of us can resonate with the honesty of the older brother discussing with his father his new baby sister: “But you’ll still love me more, won’t you, Dad?”

In a world of zero sum games, of collapsing economies and falling values, where mortgages can’t be re-negotiated and wages drop and prices rise, why wouldn’t we think that love is just one more limited commodity? There doesn’t seem to be enough of other things to go around; it stands to reason that love is the same. Could it be that every human being is born with, say, a Cup of Love, and that if you spill any of it along the way, there might come a day when you won’t have any of it left?
That is the trick the world tries to play on us, that there is not enough love, or that we are not worthy of love, or that no one will ever love us.

But what we are doing here today – what God tells us here today, and everyday – is proof that, contrary to all those forces that try to tell us otherwise, we know we are loved, we know how to love, because we have been loved first, and you, who have brought Olivia here today, have wrapped her in that love.

When we baptize Olivia, we incorporate her into an understanding of the world that is contrary to that of the zero sum game. We baptize Olivia into the confidence that God continues to love the world God created – and that means God loves all of the world -- all of the world – the lovely bits, the confusing bits, the forgotten bits, the dark bits – all those bits together, for only a God who loved all of this world, and all of us in it, would throw himself into our lives with the passion and compassion of Jesus.

* Thanks to Garrison Keillor, for this commentary on church life.

Learning from strangers

2009-05-19T12:31:00.002-04:00

Easter 5-b
May 10, 2009
Acts 8:26-40
Ps. 66:1--8
1 John 4:7-21
John 14:15-21

This Ethiopian eunuch is a man of the world. He is a well-to-do fellow, high up in the court of the queen. He’s like the secretary of the treasury, the chancellor of the exchequer, the chief financial officer of the corporation. He’s a success in the eyes of the world. But there is something missing. He’s on a religious quest. Perhaps he is seeking some ultimate meaning in his life, perhaps he wants to believe there is more than taking care of the queen’s treasury -- whatever the reason, he has come to worship with the Jews in Jerusalem.

In the world, he is a success; in Jerusalem, he is a second-class citizen. As an Ethiopian, he could never really be a Jew; plus, as a eunuch, he was castrated, unable to have children -- and for Jews, a sign of God’s blessing was children, to carry on the relationship with God, to be inheritors of God’s promise. This Ethiopian would have had to sit in the Court of the Gentiles, outside the main part of the temple; he could not worship God in the same place as the Jews could. In just about every way, the official religion of Judaism said no to this unnamed seeker, and yet he still sought the blessings that the law and the prophets held out -- a religion that, in comparison to the power, glitz and glitter of his imperial world, was marginal and second-rate.

There’s a little Star Trek technology in this passage about which we will suspend disbelief. Let it suffice that the apostle Philip gets to this Ethiopian fellow and has this conversation -- the conversation that changes both of their lives. This passage is one of the early references to the “mission to the Gentiles,” one of the proofs that God wanted Christianity to move beyond its confines within Judaism to preach the gospel in the whole known world. As a religion of really outside outsiders, Christians created an entirely alternative culture: alternative to Judaism, alternative to the cult of the Roman emperor, and certainly alternative to whatever gods the Ethiopians worshiped. The Christian community was based on love, on compassion, on service to the needy within the community, and believed that God had walked among them and had showed them how to love one another. The Christian community included all who believed, whether or not they were born to a Jewish family, circumcised or not, apparently castrated or not. Poor people were included along with rich. Women were accepted with a radical equality. People from all races, all nations, could hear the call and say, like the Ethiopian eunuch, You’re telling me something I have heard nowhere else. I want to know more. I want to be baptized.

Presumably, the Ethiopian took his faith, his baptism, his God, back to court with him, back to his work. He still had his money, his position, his worldly responsibilities, but his life would never more be the same. He had been given a sign and a promise that God loved him, all of him, even the parts that did not fit in the two cultures he embraced. The true communion and fellowship to which he now belonged both encompassed and transcended those cultures, and he, too, could show the sign and promise he had been given: he could practice the gospel of love and compassion, he could hear the Hebrew prophets call for God’s justice and mercy, he could know that his life had been brought back to life by the death and resurrection of Jesus, God who became human, like him.

Like the Ethiopian, we have only heard tell of Jesus, and we have those who told us the story to thank for our faith. Like the Ethiopian, our faith does not have to be confined to one place or time, to one culture. Like the Ethiopian we live in more than one culture at once; we have complicated loyalties to where we live, or where we work, to our countries of origin, to our communities and neighborhoods. Like the Ethiopian, sometimes those cultures we inhabit clash, sometimes they cooperate, but always, always, what God is calling us to become cannot fit in those confines.

The Ethiopian got the message from Philip, and then he went on his way. Presumably he took that experience back and began living it out in his daily life. That is where we live out our faith: here, in the middle of the complicated world we inhabit, a world of competing interests and cultures and loyalties, a world where it does not always feel so easy to be a Christian. Our faith can be, and needs to be, part of our everyday lives -- for it is in our everyday lives, as we work and play, as we live and move and have our being, that God sends messengers to tell us the good news in the words that we can understand. Pray, then, that we can be like Philip to other people around us, living in between cultures, and seeking God, nonetheless. Pray that we can tell the story to them as it was told to us, as they go back into their own world, rejoicing, strengthened, beloved and free.

STONE Soup

2009-05-19T12:04:00.005-04:00

Easter 4-b; May 3, 2009
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Jesus has set the bar pretty high. How can we possibly live up to such a standard?

I heard a business school professor this week talk about the effect of the economic downturn on philanthropic giving. The very wealthy, he said, are still wealthy, but they feel poor. The middle-wealthy, well, they have lost a good deal of money; they have cut back in their giving. And the ones who didn’t have much money to begin with, now fear they don’t have even a safety net under them to cushion their very real losses. Overall, in America, this professor said, there has been a 30 percent loss in real wealth. In terms of the world’s goods, there is apparently less to go around.

The world “philanthropy” means, after all, “love of humanity,” but I don’t think Jesus is talking about philanthropy. Jesus is talking about love: not in word or speech, but in truth and action. Jesus is talking about us. All of us can give. All of us, no matter how little we have in terms of “the world’s goods,” have, sometimes, more than our sisters and brothers around us who may be in need. All of us can give. But remember: Jesus is not talking here about mere philanthropy; Jesus is talking about love. Jesus is talking about not the scarcity of resources, nor the loss of wealth in a time of economic downturn, nor having merely enough to go around; Jesus is saying there is always enough to give away. Love is more than words; love is giving things away to people in need.

Do you remember that old story of the Stone Soup? About the man who came to a village, hungry after a long journey, and no one was able to offer him anything to eat. I guess they were in the middle of an economic downturn, and didn’t think there was enough to go around. I guess they had lost 30 percent of their real wealth. But the traveler was undaunted. He came to the center of the town and announced that he would make soup out of a stone. A stone! The people’s interest was piqued. They came closer. “This soup would really be good,” he said, “if we had some spices.” A woman brought spices. Another contributed an onion. A farmer brought celery and carrots. And you know what happened next: everyone contributed something to the soup, and there was more than enough to go around. “Amazing!” the villagers said after all had eaten. “To think that he made such a delicious soup from a stone!”

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

On the face of it, that is a tall order. How can we, who think we have so little, possibly live up to those standards that Jesus has set? How can we act in love and generosity, to those around us who are in need?

The only place we can start is with what we have, and no, we don’t have much.

My shepherd will supply my need,
Jehovah is his name;
in pastures fresh he makes me feed
beside the living stream.
He brings my wandering spirit back
when I forsake his ways,
and leads me, for his mercy's sake,
in paths of truth and grace.

No, we don’t have much, but as this hymn tells us, we have what we need. We have food, we have water, we have a friend who guides us. We are not alone.

When I walk through the shades of death,
thy presence is my stay;
one word of thy supporting breath
drives all my fears away.
Thy hand, in sight of all my foes,
doth still my table spread;
my cup with blessings overflows,
thy oil anoints my head.

Not only do we have what we need, we have more than enough. What Jesus promises us is abundance, blessings overflowing. We have enough – and that “enough-ness” is more than enough. What we have we can share. Life with Jesus is not a zero-sum game. If you need something that I have, you can have it and I still have enough – there is enough to go around.

Now what about those wolves? Those false leaders, like the hired hands who don’t take care of us well? Those thieves who would lead us astray? Who would break in and steal? Yes, they are there; no doubt about it. So how do we know the true shepherd? The Good Shepherd? He is the one who does not hold anything back, who does not hoard his goods, or his protection, or his love. He is the one who has laid down even his life for the life of this world. It is his voice we hear, it is his example we follow, and it is he who brings us home.

The sure provisions of my God
attend me all my days;
oh, may thy house be mine abode
and all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest,
while others go and come;
no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.*

* Hymn 664, The Hymnnal 1982

God owns heaven, but craves the earth

2009-04-26T20:50:00.010-04:00

Easter 3-B
April 26, 2009
Acts 3:12-19;
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

Easter changes everything.

We are transformed. God is transformed. We usually think of Easter as about, well, us: Jesus has come to us, if Jesus is raised from the dead, so will we be. Any of those death-dealing forces that we face in our lives – running out of money, people bossing us around, worry about the future, about losing our homes or our livelihood – all of us have a list of fears that overwhelm us – Easter means that none of those things can threaten us now. Jesus is risen from the dead – death has done its worst and still Jesus rises, AND SO WILL WE. Death can try to do its worst to us, and still we will live – still we will love; still people will love us; still life will be worth living.

But think about what Easter has done to God. Listen to this bit from a poem by Anne Sexton:

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers digging into their souls with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life, even the ocean with its cupful of students,
but most of all He envies the bodies,
He who has no body.

After Easter, God will never be the same. What it means to be human has now become part of what it means to be God. And if the poet Anne Sexton is right, and I think she is, God had long yearned to know what it meant to be human. God had long yearned to be so close to us that God, in all of God’s utter all-knowing and all-powerful self, actually became one of us. “God owns heaven,” the poet writes, “but God craves the earth.”

Easter changes everything.

God has ushered us in to a new reality – a new reality so rooted in this world that the whole world itself is changed.

Look at this gospel story again: Jesus appears. Dead, and yet alive. Fully alive. The disciples knew that he had been killed, that there was no hope, and yet here is the proof: he walks, he talks, and in the most mundane, most ordinary and most wonderful of things, Jesus says, “Have you anything here to eat?”

I have a friend who once served in a parish in a poor neighborhood. He was up in his study, preparing a sermon on this text, where Jesus walks into the midst of his friends and says, “Have you anything here to eat?” and as he was writing his sermon, under his window, in a poor, city neighborhood, a man cried out, “I am hungry!”

Can you imagine: God, walking in here, among us, crying out, “I am hungry! Have you anything here to eat?”

Easter changes everything.

We are transformed, God is transformed. And here, in this place, where we offer food and drink, bread and wine, where people walk in off the street and say, “Have you got anything here to eat?” Here in this place, where we and God meet, this very place is the beginning of the transformation of the world.

This world, this very neighborhood, cries out to us, “Have you anything here to eat?”

Practice Resurrection

2009-04-16T20:11:00.003-04:00

Easter
April 12, 2009
Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
John 20:1-18

It’s kind of thrilling to see the bulbs I planted last fall peeking out of the soil. The perennials I received from Joanne’s stepmother’s beautiful garden are also beginning to show a little life. I was amazed that the vinca vine in the pot outside the chapel door is still green and alive. And the daffodils, kind of haphazardly growing out of the edge of the foundation, kind of hidden away in the front of the church, are showing their bright, yellow faces.

It’s spring. Alleluia! After such a long, dreary winter, it’s very surprising that spring comes around again – well, we say that. But really, we are expecting it. Spring is natural. It is built into the very DNA of all plants to stretch their limbs and get their sap moving in the spring.

Easter is the only Christian holiday based on nature – or rather, the date of Easter is based on nature. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. And did you see that moon the other night? Huge, and full, and early in the evening, rich and yellow. The full moon is always a surprise, a remarkable exciting event. But really, we are expecting it. The full moon is natural. The earth and the moon, held in place by the sun, travel their orderly courses day after day, year after year. It is part of the nature of the universe.

What is NOT part of the nature of the universe is resurrection. On this day, we are asked to suspend disbelief. The stone has been rolled away from the tomb. The body is gone. Angels appear with strange messages, and gardeners are mistaken for Jesus.

No, this is not natural. A man who suffered a terrible death should not come back to life.

Mary Magdalene and the other disciples do not know quite what to do with this good news, either. There is some confusion, running back and forth from the burial ground with conflicting stories. Mary is frightened half out of her mind, by this mysterious stranger that familiar Jesus has turned into. The natural order of things has been reversed.

These stories of the resurrection never seem like the “and they all lived happily ever after” stories we sometimes think they should be. We all know that life after Easter is not perfect – no more perfect for the disciples 2000 years ago than it is for us. We are Christians – we live in the light of the resurrection, so how come, sometimes, life is so hard?

What it means to be a Christian, a lot of people say, is practicing discipleship. Like the disciples long ago, like Mary Magadalene and the rest of them, we follow Jesus. We listen carefully. We are disciplined, we pray, we study, we think, we care for people in need, we love our enemies. Following Jesus, being a disciple, takes a lot of practice.

It’s the same way with life after Easter. We have to practice – but now we have to practice resurrection. Practice the improbable. Live as though we knew what it meant: resurrection. Life after death. Life in spite of death. Life that spits in the face of death. Life that cannot be contained in a tomb, that cannot be held back by a stone door. It’s a promise: no matter how hard life gets, there’s more to it than this – there is more to it than suffering and death. Practice resurrection.

Very few people actually saw the risen Jesus. But their witness has been enough to go on. From one frightened woman, to a small group of disciples. People who on the day after the resurrection still got up, still had their problems to face, but people who knew that everything had changed. They knew the natural order of things had been turned upside down. They began to practice resurrection.

This sentence is the beginning of the church:

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

And then they went out, and the practice of the resurrected life began.

“I have seen the Lord,” Mary Magdalene tells us, too, calling us, too, to practice resurrection.

Stations of the City

2009-04-12T08:13:00.000-04:00

God matters

2009-04-09T20:36:00.005-04:00

Maundy Thursday Apr. 9, 2009
Exodus 12:1-14a; Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor. 11:23-26; John 13:1-15

Jews all over the world tonight are sitting down to seder dinners, to recall how God acted mightily in history, how God saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, how God intervened against an oppressive human leader and set the people he loved free.

Jews all over the world tonight are reminding us that God matters.
And it is definitely a time to remember that God matters.

The news reports are full of stories of people beginning to crack under the strain of this economic depression. I heard today of a young woman, straight, and off drugs for 10 years, who fell into a relapse. Oh, it was the stress of worrying about finances, oh, it was an old back injury acting up, oh, just a little percoset, oh, just a little heroin.

There is a sense that people everywhere feel like we have been hit by a truck. Everything we had counted on seems to have slipped away – retirement accounts, housing values, steady paychecks. My brother works for Chrysler Corporation, and my mother is the widow of a retiree: will the assets they built over a lifetime be there for them when they need them?
Nonetheless, Jews all over the world tonight are sitting down to seder dinners, to recall how God acts mightily in history – thousands of years ago, and even today. This very day, God is acting.

On Maundy Thursday, it is hard to see how God is acting. Is tonight a beginning, or the end? It is the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, of his teaching, his miraculous healings, his easy friendships, his confrontations with the people who didn’t get it.

If tonight is an ending, then we indeed have been hit by a truck. Why not despair, give up, hunker down, turn on, drop out? If tonight is an ending, then everything we had hoped and planned for is coming crashing down on top of us.

But if tonight is a beginning, and the Jews are right, then God does act in history, in our history, mightily in our history. God is here, among us, and the world around us is about to be made new.

What can it mean to follow such a Jesus?

2009-04-06T21:47:00.004-04:00

Palm Sunday, Year B April 5, 2009

If Christ is where God and the world meet, if indeed if Christ is the point where the encounter between God and the World is the most intimate, then the story we have just read is a tale of a relationship fraught with as much violence as love, as much terror as compassion, as much selfishness as generosity.

Mark tells us the story of a world we know very well. It’s a world of terror where thugs come in the night: the death squads in Central America, the Tonton Macoute in Haiti, the Nazis rounding up Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s. It’s a world of the banal, the numb, death and conflict are commonplace, swirling around us, as they swirled around the disciples during that long, dark night. A friend of mine, near despair, once remarked on “how battered and stressed and desperate people like you and me tend to be these days It has something to do with the fact that everything’s up for grabs, politically, economically, morally, and religiously in our world.”

The Jesus we meet in Mark seems to be giving up. “Are you the king of the Jews,” his accusers ask him. “You say so,” he almost shrugs. Surely he feels all the dread and fear that we would feel; he longs for God to change the divine mind; he sweats tears of blood, and at the end cries out lonely and abandoned. Mark never lets us think that the Romans are to blame for Jesus’ death. It’s the Jews who got out of control. Pilate appears to want to let Jesus go; it is the crowd who demands the release of the criminal Barabbas rather than Jesus.

What can it mean to us to follow such a Jesus? Will we meet an end of such loneliness and abandonment? Is this the cost of discipleship? In the 1930s a young German theologian wrote a book called, The Cost of Discipleship. Many of the Lutherans in the Germany of the day were willing followers of Hitler, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his community resisted: they wrestled with what it meant to be a Christian in a society of monstrous and growing militarism and oppression. In the 1930s, he thought, it could work out, step by step. “I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life,” Bonhoeffer wrote, much later, when he began to question his attempt to learn faith, as though by following a manual.

It is very tempting to read the passion story hoping that it will all “blow over.” I very much want to make sense of the Passion, to make it into a tidy story with an ending, a lesson which I can learn and then come out the other side a good disciple, full of the fruits of the spirit and the joy of the resurrection.

Sixty-four years ago Thursday Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in a German prison, for the crime of plotting to kill Hitler. His resistance to the slaughter of the Jews began by preaching against anti-Semitism, fueled by accusations against "the Jews" like that found in today's Passion Gospel. Then he banded with other Christians against the German churches which collaborated with the Nazis, and then joined a conspiracy to fight the powers of death. It was during his years in prison that he began to question some of what he had written earlier about faith as learned (and controlled) and began to embrace an understanding of faith as “profound this-worldliness:

"... it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself ... By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world ..."

This is a different way of looking at the “battered and stressed” aspects of life: not to tidy them up, give them meaning, as I would like to do, but to embrace them, to throw ourselves into the arms of God -- yet the arms of a God on a cross cannot embrace, nurture or offer us much comfort.

We are Christians, so we know this: the day of resurrection will come, but we cannot leave the here and now to get to it. To be a Christian is to hold both together, all of the time, to live a faith of profound this-worldliness; as Bonhoeffer wrote, “Characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.” It means to live that ordinary life facing death, not expecting the triumphant outcome but knowing it just the same.

2009-03-31T21:41:00.023-04:00

Lent 5-B; March 29, 2009
Jeremiah 31:31-34;Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like the tree standing by the water
We shall not be moved.

How many of you remember that as a civil rights anthem? The civil rights movement was, of course, one of the great turning points of human history, when people dug in their heels and said, here we are; we shall not be moved. Ordinary people, poor people, people who had been turned away from the corridors of power, from all rights and privileges: ordinary people stood their ground, would not be moved, would not take the easy way out. It would not be an easy fight, they knew, but they would not take the easy way out.

In this passage we read today from the Gospel of John, people called “the Greeks” come to Jesus to offer him an easy way out of what is beginning to seem to be an inevitable and dangerous confrontation. The “Greeks” are the pagans, the non-Jews. Even they had heard of Jesus’ remarkable teachings, and their presence there, at that festival in Jerusalem, is a sign that Jesus has an out. People other than the Jews would embrace him as their teacher – he could leave this dangerous place, Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee even, and go back with them.

And what is Jesus’ answer? He sings a version of “We shall not be moved.” No, Jesus says. This is the hour, this is the moment: it is only when the grain falls to earth and dies that it grows to bear fruit. It is only when people give up their lives that they find them for eternal life. It is only this moment when the end is so apparently near that is the moment of glory.

We know the civil rights movement was full of religion. People knew they were led by the spirit, that they were walking the way Jesus walked. Bayard Rustin was one of the leaders of that movement, one of Martin Luther King’s closest associates. In 1952, he sent these words in an Easter greeting* to his friends:

Easter in every age . . . recalls the imminence of the impossible victory,
the power of the impotent weak.

From all those years back, Rustin reminds us, followers of Jesus, that we

need to be reminded that Easter is the reality, and that the awesome structures of pomp and power are in the process of disintegration at the moment of their greatest strength.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth … those who love their life lose it … Now is the judgment of this world, now the ruler of this world will be driven out. Think of the circumstances when Jesus said this: he is surrounded by enemies, powerful enemies. His friends are poor peasants and outsiders, the cast-offs of society. NOW is the judgment of this world? The rulers of THIS world will be driven out?

Bayard Rustin knew this, even if it would take more than a decade after he wrote that Easter letter for “the awesome structures of pomp and power” to begin to disintegrate.

Today, on the 5th Sunday of Lent, we are still on this side of Easter; we don’t yet know the ending of the story. Jesus’ words seem mysterious and inexplicable to some, as preposterous bluster to others. How can a world be put back together after its destruction?

Jeremiah, writing hundreds of years earlier, writes to the people of Israel in just such a situation. They are in captivity in Babylon, their city and nation destroyed, and God sends Jeremiah to them in exile. Yes, you broke that covenant – you broke my heart, God says – but I am still with you. I love you, I will be with you. My law will no longer be something external, something you can break or change at will. Now I will be in your hearts, God says. Not out there; in here. Wondrous, wondrous love.

The worst can happen, Jeremiah says to the people, but God is still there. The world can be dark and discouraging, but God is still there. God’s judgment will prevail, God’s glory will shine. What is hard, today, is to hear Jeremiah’s good news next to what Jesus says.

What is hard, today, is that mostly we hear all too clearly the words of death and judgment; we don’t yet know what Jesus means by bearing fruit or eternal life or glory out of thunder.

We may not yet, but we will.

* I thank my friend Gale Kenny for calling my attention to these words of Bayard Rustin, quoted by David L. Chappell in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 56

House of Prayer, House of Bread

2009-03-22T08:09:00.002-04:00

Lent 3-B
March 12, 2009
Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

I’m going to start this week’s sermon where I left off last week:

Most people in the world have the deck stacked against them. This is not news to us here in Brockton. Many people in the world don’t get enough to eat, don’t have a decent place to live, don’t have good medical care, don’t have the opportunity to earn a living. What does that have to do with us?

What does it mean, then, to be a follower of Jesus?

Let’s look again at these Millennium Development Goals:

End Poverty and Hunger
Universal Education
Gender Equality
Child Health
Maternal Health
Combat HIV/AIDS
Environmental Sustainability
Global Partnership

This is what I said about them last week:

These were set by the United Nations, and have become a benchmark for relief and development workers the world over. My problem with them is that they have been used by all sorts of people – especially church people – to focus our attention and efforts on the suffering of our neighbors far away, at the expense, I believe, of our attempts to create a just society here, to change the structures of our neighborhood, to improve the lives of our neighbors.

Yet look again at this list: what would it mean to work toward the millennium development goals here, in Brockton, in this neighborhood we so hopefully call “PleasantGreen?” Read this list again, think of Brockton. Take up your cross, Jesus said, and follow me.

It does not always happen that my sermons are on the cutting edge of “what’s happening now” in the Episcopal Church, but this week I was very surprised to read these words from the Presiding Bishop:

The Episcopal Church focus on the Millennium Development Goals has raised consciousness in our own faith communities and the broader culture about the need to address abject poverty in developing nations. This work has increased mission fervor and deepened spirituality. We need to bring the same passion, organization, and accountability to our work on domestic poverty – in the poorest regions of the United States. Social statistics and the conditions of life are quite similar in the poorest areas, both in the U.S. and abroad, but the MDGs are addressed solely to poverty in the developing world. We need to use both lenses (international and domestic; distance and near vision) to see the least among us and around us.

On Friday, the Presiding Bishop released a report on how the Episcopal Church can take seriously – and seriously support – the kind of work we are doing right here in Brockton.

The group that met to develop this report came up with another list, the Eleven Essentials of Justice:

Affordable food
Employment
Affordable quality childcare
Education
Healthcare
A just immigration policy
Cultural affirmation
Equal protection under the law
Economic opportunity
A healthy environment
Housing

It also seems like the Episcopal Church is getting ready to re-organize its institutional life to make some changes in who we are as the people of God, living and working in communities like this – who we are as the people of God, as agents of social transformation – who we are as the people of God who can make a difference in communities like this and in the lives of the people – us -- who live here.

… the Episcopal Church commits to participating in combating domestic poverty by revitalizing our often under-utilized buildings in rural, suburban and urban areas so that we may minister with the marginalized and become transformational communities working to eradicate domestic poverty.

… In addition to the demographic tools used currently for church growth and outreach, we will commit to partnering with local groups working to alleviate poverty.

We ask a reassessment of our budgets to be aligned with the gospel mandate of addressing domestic poverty.

Domestic poverty is multifaceted … We are called as Christians to stand with the poor and fight for the dignity of all people. Our presence in many poor communities is predicted by the existence of Episcopal Church buildings, many in a state of disrepair or indebtedness. We believe that these buildings are a blessing to be used for the people of the community.

Which brings us to our gospel for today: Jesus threw the money changers out of the Temple because they were not living up to the way God said people should live. They were selling short. They were squandering the resources of God’s creation, resources that were intended to be open and free for everyone. The money changers were trying to fulfill the law by getting around a difficult situation: no one wanted to use dirty Roman money to buy the animals they would sacrifice in the Temple – sacrifices they piously wanted to make to repent for their sins and ask God’s forgiveness. So the money changers took dirty Roman money and gave them Temple money, so the people could buy their sacrificial offerings.

What angered Jesus was how people could take the great, powerful, comprehensive understanding of the law as the way to live out love of God and love of neighbor – to take the law based on those 10 commandments Moses received – and reduce it to an exchange rate. Jesus is going to Wall Street, and pulling the power cords on the trading floor, exposing sub-prime mortgage rates as crimes not only against the poor people who were stuck with them but as crimes against God.

What we are doing here is what Jesus would have us do. This house of prayer is also a house of bread. A house of hope. A house of community and friendship. How timely that the rest of the Episcopal Church is catching up with what God has been calling us to do and to be.

What do the Millennium Development Goals have to do with Brockton?

2009-03-15T22:11:00.004-04:00

Lent 2-B March 8, 2009
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16;Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

When do we get to the good parts? To the easy stuff? To the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It seems like we spend all our time struggling, working through difficult times, keeping our chins up. When do we get a break? When does our ship come in?

Getting to Easter is not, as one preacher I know said, the next stop after our spring tune-up at the spa or wardrobe refresher at the shopping mall.[i] We are invited instead into this close examination of our relationship with God, and here, in the midst of all that examination, well, we come upon some difficult texts.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if the Bible were fully of easy stories. How useful would those be during these days, of economic hardship, of people losing their jobs, of services being cut, of homes lost to bad bank loans.

Let’s cut dear old St. Peter some slack: we don’t like hearing the tough news any more than he does. Peter does not want to hear what Jesus tells him, that suffering and death will come, are inevitable. Jesus’ words are not welcome ones; let’s not kid ourselves.

The Bible is not full of easy stories, but it is full of God – of God wanting to be in relationship with us, with us human beings. If God is the center of the universe, the all-important creator, then the Bible is the story of how much this God want us close. The Bible is the story of how God keeps trying, even though we fail, drift away, deny, wander, pay attention to other things.

The story of Abraham and Sarah is the story of God’s third big try in getting us humans into a loving relationship with God. The first – creation. Adam and Eve pulled away from God, and God got angry and threw them out of the garden. The second – the flood and the rainbow. We read this last week. God was angry, so angry, with us human beings that he killed all of us except one family, who floated in a boat, on a destroyed earth, for 40 days. I think that experience terrified God – God repented of that anger-filled destruction, and said no more.

Today, what do we have in the story of Abraham and Sarah? God tries again. Here, God says. We are bound together – me to you, you to me, together. As a sign of this love I hold for you, I promise you this: you will have a future. You will have a child, and that child will give you as many descendents as there are stars in the sky. You who are wandering in the wilderness: you will have a home. You who do not know what to believe in: you will have a God.

We are followers of God – all of us. That is why we are here. At some point in our lives someone assured us that God loves us. Someone told us some version of this Abraham and Sarah story, and for us, it took. We believed it. Now it is up to us: how can we make other people believe this Good News of God on our side, people who may not have heard it before? People who may not think it applies to them? People who are caught up in some very non-God-like things?

Most people in the world have the deck stacked against them. This is not news to us here in Brockton. Many people in the world don’t get enough to eat, don’t have a decent place to live, don’t have good medical care, don’t have the opportunity to earn a living. What does that have to do with us?

What does it mean, then, to be a follower of Jesus?

God likes to talk about a covenant: I will love you, God says, and because I love you, I want you to do some things for me, and for each other. Love me, love your neighbor as yourself. I will keep my side of the covenant; it is up to you to keep yours. Being a follower of Jesus means keeping our side of the covenant. It means loving our neighbors as our selves.

We have close-in neighbors: our literal next-door neighbors, wherever we live. The neighbors of this church. The people who come to lunch, who are finding more community and recreation in our modest afternoon programs. Being a follower of Jesus means doing what we can to make our neighborhood a better place to live.

We also have far away neighbors, and yes, there is a connection between needs of the far-off and the right-next-door.

Look at this list of the Millennium Development Goals.

End Poverty and Hunger

Universal Education

Gender Equality

Child Health

Maternal Health

Combat HIV/AIDS

Environmental Sustainability

Global Partnership

These were set by the United Nations, and have become a benchmark for relief and development workers the world over. My problem with them is that they have been used by all sorts of people – especially church people – to focus our attention and efforts on the suffering of our neighbors far away, at the expense, I believe, of our attempts to create a just society here, to change the structures of our neighborhood, to improve the lives of our neighbors.

Yet look again at this list: what would it mean to work toward the millennium development goals here, in Brockton, in this neighborhood we so hopefully call “PleasantGreen?” Read this list again, think of Brockton. Take up your cross, Jesus said, and follow me.

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Late Bloomer”

Has God had it?

2009-03-06T18:29:00.001-05:00

Lent 1-B March 1, 2009
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

God is going to have to have a word with Barack Obama, because God has had enough of the war in Iraq. The President’s “revised” timetable is, I am afraid, not fast enough for God.
For God has had enough: not only of the war in Iraq but of what’s going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan, too. God has had enough of Al Qaeda’s sneaky bomb tricks and the Taliban’s violence. God has had enough of Robert Mugabe’s running Zimbabwe into the ground. God has had enough of those drug and gun gangsters in Mexico, of the kidnappers in Columbia, of the Crips and Bloods and of their buddies, the Green Street Gang right here in Brockton. God has had enough.
God had had enough of everybody, except Noah. God was sick of the whole violent lot, so God flooded the earth and got rid of everybody, except Noah and his family – and of course, the animals. All those animals on that ark. That was a long 40 days.
God had had enough of those evil-doers, and saved the good, yes, but I think our reading today shows us that God’s mind had changed. Today’s reading shows that God repented of that terrible, awful wrath, of that flood of death and destruction. God had a taste of that violence and retribution that humans love so much, and God repented. God realized that violence and retribution were not the way to go. No more, God said. I won’t do this any more. I won’t be the one who causes the violence. Let’s stop it now. I will be the first one to offer a sign of peace.
God has not gone back on God’s promise but I think we humans have not kept up our part of the bargain. Some of that all too human virus of violence and destruction snuck on board and hid on the ark. It spread out into the world just as it was drying up from the flood, and we know all too well what has happened ever since.
Fast forward a few hundred years to Jesus, standing in the rushing waters of the River Jordan. Jesus, thrown by the spirit into the wilderness, like Noah on the flooded seas, for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus, tempted by Satan and all those all-too-human sins of violence and retribution, of death and destruction, of envy, greed, oppression, cruelty.
But like the rainbow in the clouds, the angels came to Jesus, feeding him, taking care of him, supporting him in the struggle against sin and temptation. There in that desert Jesus faced death and destruction – the dark side of human experience – and came out on the other side. With the angels on his side and the rainbow over head, he realized that despite all its power to strike terror into the human, death was not the final answer. Death would not win. Death would not define what it meant to be human. Sin would not rule the day.
We here at the corner of Not-so-Pleasant and Warren know what it is like to look death in the face. Like Jesus, we also know what it is to be down and out, exhausted on the desert floor, and look up to see a rainbow in the sky. We know what it means to have angels look after us. We know what it is like to have a God who has had enough with the bad stuff, and who is here with us, now, in the middle of everything. We know what it is like to have a God who stands with us, who send angels into our very midst.
I was talking with a parishioner this week, who said, “I really like our little congregation.” She could have said, our little congregation of misfits and oddballs, of people who would not feel comfortable in other churches, of people who are honest about how Satan comes to tempt us with anger or violence or loneliness or drug abuse. She could have said, our little congregation of angels, who help each other out in times of need, who hold rainbows over each other’s heads, who are carriers of the promise that God gave us so many thousands of years ago, that God will be with us, that God is with us, that God is always with us.
Amen.

Listen up, people!

2009-03-06T18:13:00.003-05:00

Last Epiphany B Feb. 22, 2009

2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

“This is my son, the Beloved. Listen to him!”

What does it mean to listen – truly listen? To listen to God? To another person?

To list

en to what is going on in the world around us?

To listen means more than mere hearing, the mere physical sensation of sound waves hitting the ear drum. The old English roots of “to listen” are “to pay attention.” When we truly listen we lean in toward the person who commands our attention.

These past weeks we have been listening to stories of Jesus healing people. If we really paid attention to those stories, we would see that they are not about the mere physical healing, but about restoration – the person is brought back into community, into wholeness, in her family, into his society.

It is easy to be dazzled by God – to see so much glory or majesty or distance or power that we, perhaps, miss the point. In this story where Jesus and his disciples climb the mountain, something astounding happens – so astounding that the disciples do not know what to make of it. Jesus is transfigured – changed – morphed – yet all that dazzling glory gets in the way. The disciples are afraid – who wouldn’t be? Rather than leaning in, paying attention to what is going on on that blazing mountain, they step back. They want to contain the experience, by building shelters, erecting tents, hiding away this thing so glorious that they can barely stand it. They are so missing the point that God has to shout out from the cloud, Hey you! Stop running around! THIS is my Son, the one I love. Listen to him!

Jesus stands there with Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. Both Moses and Elijah acted for God when things were bad for the people – Moses was the liberator who brought the people out of Egypt, the one who put up with their grumbling in the wilderness, the one who told them how God wanted them to live. Elijah, the man of God, lived when the people were ruled by corrupt kings and were tempted to worship other gods. Both Moses and Elijah are massive figures in Jewish memory and imagination. Jesus is standing on that mountaintop with the A Team, definitely.

But think on this: neither Moses nor Elijah got to the finish line. Moses died, having seen the Promised Land to which he was leading the people, but not able to cross over. Our story today, about Elijah leaving earth in the chariot of fire, is a story also of not being finished. There is more work to do, and Elisha, Elijah’s successor, feels unready to take up the task. What does is say that Jesus stands there with these two mighty ones?

This story is smack dab in the middle of the Gospel of Mark. From this point onward, Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem. Soon after these verses, Jesus tells the disciples the hard news of what they will face: the confrontations with the powers, the heavy burden of the cross, the inevitable suffering and death.

The disciples no more want to listen to this hard news than they can comprehend the dazzling glory of the mountain. Listening to Jesus now involves much more than they counted on when they became his disciples.

We are about to enter Lent; the church has always put this lesson of Jesus on the mountaintop, of God shouting out, “Listen to him,” on this Sunday before the beginning of Lent.

Lent is the time, then, when we are to be listening to God. When we are supposed to be paying attention to what God is doing in the world. In that sense, then, Lent is the season of solidarity. It is the season when we pay attention to what is going on – when we notice who is sick and in need of healing. When we notice what is out of whack in the world, what needs to be restored. When we listen to the cries and whispers, the hopes and dreams, of God’s people, the people God has put in our care.

Lent is the time we listen to Jesus. We try out that heavy cross a little bit. We pay attention to that dazzling glory. And we wait, in the days of lengthening daylight, for the great time of trial that lies ahead. Listen.

2009-02-17T22:22:00.007-05:00

Epiphany 6-B
February 15, 2009
2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; I Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

Leprosy, which today we call Hansen’s Disease, is treatable. So treatable that it can be considered curable. People with leprosy can live normal lives, if the disease is caught and treated on time.

But when the Bible says someone has leprosy, think of if as something really, really bad. It is nearly a death sentence. The person with leprosy moves to the margins of society, not only shunned but feared; not merely sick, but unclean, untouchable, unfit for human companionship.

Naaman was a really powerful man. He was the general of a conquering army. The Bible says that even God thought well enough of Naaman and his skill as a general that God gave victory to this enemy of Israel. It would be like Syria marching in and taking over Israel – as earth-shattering today as it was thousands of years ago. Naaman was the conqueror. The Spanish conquistadores to the Aztecs. The U.S. Cavalry to the Plains Indians. The Roman legions dividing Gaul into three parts.

Astounding, but Naaman has a flaw, which could be fatal. He has leprosy. This apparently not a secret; even the conquered slaves knew this, and one of them, this unnamed girl, dares to speak up and offer a solution. Naaman could be cured, she says, by a prophet in conquered Israel.

So look what Naaman does: the powerful King of Aram sends a negotiator to the King of Israel, to plead for his friend. This approach of power-broker to power-broker does not work. The king of Israel does not trust this request to help his enemy.

Like the unnamed captive girl, who offers her solution through the back door, Elisha, the man of God – not the man of “the king” – similarly breaks through the official denials. “Let him in,” he says. “Let him learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

So with his display of power and privilege and wealth and pride, Naaman marches over to Elisha. What happens then? So what do we learn from this story about how God works? Who has power? Who heals? And how? Who makes a difference – who changes the world? Who are we in this story?

Think of who we are, in this church, in this community, at St. Paul’s Table, on Pleasant and Green streets? Where are we in this story of Naaman the Syrian? What needs healing?

The Gospel gives us another story about Jesus healing someone – this time, a leper, like Naaman the Syrian. Jesus says that curious thing: don’t talk about this, he tells the former leper. It’s very curious, isn’t it: why would Jesus want to keep all this good news, these healings and restorations and wonderful things, secret? I think Jesus realizes that there is something about the power of healing that upsets the apple cart – it upsets the balance of power. Jesus knows the power of healing. Some people like things the way they are: some people on top, some people sick, some people on the inside track, some people marginal outsiders. For some people this is OK.

Listen to these verses from the 4th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus had just taught a lesson from the Torah in his hometown synagogue. All were astounded at his wisdom – “at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Acknowledging their praise, Jesus then said, "‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. …There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way."

Like it or not, God worms God’s way into our midst. Captive girls speak words of wisdom. Oddball prophets say, sure, let in your enemy; give him a chance. When we ask God to heal us, we have no idea what to expect. We might think things will be the way they used to be, and all of a sudden we are in completely new territory. Someone is healed, someone else is threatened, and all of a sudden the whole world changes before our very eyes.

What will it take to be healed? What will it take for this community to be restored and whole? I think these lessons tell us that that healing will never happen if we wait for the people in power. Look at how God works: from beneath, below, around the corner, from the outside, from the place that surprises us. We may be like that girl who whispers in Naaman’s wife’s ear, or like Elisha who says, sure, let the enemy leader in. We too might be like that former leper, befriended by Jesus along the road, who, despite the risks that somebody powerful might be unhappy, finds it impossible to keep all this good news to ourselves.

Restored to wholeness

2009-02-17T22:06:00.003-05:00

Epiphany 5-B

February 8, 2008

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

When I was in seminary, I had a professor who had no arms. He had been born with a birth defect, and over the course of his life had learned to do with his feet many of the things that the rest of us do with our hands. After a while you didn’t notice much different about him, even when he’d sit at the lunch table and pick up his fork with his toes.

I went to seminary in New York City. There was a woman who used to stand on the sidewalk in front of Bloomingdale’s, a rather fancy department story, and shout, “Help me. I’ve got cerebral palsy. Help me. I’ve got cerebral palsy,” over and over again. I think she was asking for money, but since I never stopped to ask her what kind of help she wanted, I don’t really know.

Also, when I was in seminary, I went to a service commemorating “disability awareness week” or something like that. It was at the Chapel of the Church Center for All Nations – an expansive place, which welcomes all kinds of worshippers. The celebrant was an Episcopal priest who served the deaf community. One young man stands out in my memory – he was the preacher, I think, a disability rights advocate. He was an amputee, I think. I know he refused to wear prosthesis – artificial limbs – because he had no interest in making those of us who were “fully abled” feel more comfortable with his disability. He also refused to use those metal crutches with arm holders that many people use – again on the grounds that they served to make “able-bodied” people feel more comfortable because they could categorize him as “disabled.” He preferred using wooden crutches, like anyone would use.

All these stories, along with today’s Gospel story of the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, raise these questions: what is sickness? What is health? What does it mean to be healed?

Last week, we read of how Jesus cast the demons out of a man possessed by what we today might call mental illness. In the words of the old hymn, Jesus “reclothed him in his rightful mind.” He restored him to wholeness. He cast out those outside forces which had invaded the man, and gave him back himself. No longer was he possessed by those alien forces; he could return to the rest of society, to his community and his family, as himself, restored, healed.

Whatever fever Simon’s mother-in-law has, it must be serious. The normal remedies must not be working. They way she is isolated and alone, even in the house, makes us think that perhaps they had given her up for dead. When Jesus touches her, healing happens, but not healing like we would think of a doctor making a house call. Jesus doesn’t administer an antibiotic, or apply leeches, or mix a poultice, or shake a magic rattle. Jesus touches her, and yes, she is relieved of the fever, but look what happens then: she is restored to her family. She joins the party. She gets up and helps serve. She regains her place of honor and dignity. She is no longer a patient; she is a person. She is restored, healed.

In those three stories of my seminary days, I think I learned that “healing” is not just about an individual who “gets better.” I don’t think there is a “cure” for cerebral palsy, nor can someone without limbs grow them back. Healing, for those people, challenges our definitions – OUR definitions – of wholeness. Wholeness is not perfection. Wholeness is not some idealized state of no flaws. Wholeness is about being human, fully human, being a full member of the human race. The sick person is isolated; the healed person, no matter what his or her state of disability may be, is restored from that isolation to wholeness, to community, to family and friends. The healed person is a productive and needed and loved member of society. This is what Jesus means by healing: those who were outcast, who were suffering and alone, are brought back inside the fold. Healing is not just “fixing an illness;” it is restoring a person to being, once again, a whole human being who has meaning and value and a place in the community.

Many of us wonder, and I know I have felt this way, when we are sick or in trouble, why me, why I am sick? What have I done to deserve this? Why can’t Jesus help me? Where is the healing in my life?

It is hard to climb out of those pits; no doubt about it, and there certainly are some things about our lives – all of our lives – that we don’t like, and like it or not, that will never change. We can stay there, carrying all those grudges, nursing all those hurts. We can perpetuate our isolation, thinking we are all alone in our troubles, and no, Jesus isn’t going to walk through that door and make everything better – or at least “better” in the way we think “better” ought to be defined.

But listen to this: we have what Jesus had. We have the promise from God that things will be better, that they are better. “Have you not known,” Isaiah writes. “Has it not been told you from the beginning?” We have the same promise from God that Jesus knew, that God gives power to the faint, and strength to the powerless – that God calls all – all of us – by name, and not one is missing: not the woman with cerebral palsy, shouting outside of Bloomingdale’s, not my professor who ate with his feet, not the disability activist who refused to hide his amputated limbs. Simon’s mother-in-law is there, and the man possessed by demons, and you, and, you and you, and you, and me. Everybody who is home sick today; everybody who is just too tired to get out of bed. We’re all there, called by God, called by hope, pulled out of our isolation and aloneness. This is what God promises us: with wings like eagles, we shall run and not be weary; we shall walk, every one of us, we shall walk and never grow faint.

The Pleasant and Green Neighborhood

2009-02-08T16:51:00.009-05:00

Epiphany 4b February 1, 2009

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1: 21-28

I know you won’t believe this, but church sometimes brings out the crazy in people.

Do religious institutions attract crazy people, or does just something happen to us once we get in here? Is it because places like these hold all our hopes and dreams? Because they speak of promises of a better life for the world God has created? Do we get angry because these are promises denied, or delayed?

Do these places make us crazy because our hopes are so high for them, and then so frequently dashed to the ground? Or are these places of safety, of refuge, where the troubled and angry and possessed know that they can come and be allowed to vent and rage and fume and act out. Quiet havens, broken dreams, unfulfilled promises: why do you come to this sacred space?

The Gospel of Mark tells us nothing about the neighborhood around the synagogue in today’s story. It’s in Capernaum, which was a city in Galilee – not a fancy town, but a town of fishermen, of traders, of people from all across the Roman Empire. A hardscrabble town.

It would not be a stretch to imagine the neighborhood around that synagogue to be something like the neighborhood around here. And it is not any kind of a stretch to imagine someone walking in here, as angry and as loud and as possessed by any number of demons as the man in today’s story.

A couple of hundred years ago another crazy man walked into a church. The demons that haunted this man were, it can be said, coming at him from the outside. He lived in England during the early industrial revolution. He saw all the dark sides of those days – the ruined country-sides, the overcrowded cities, the soot-filled air, the overworked children, the lavish homes and lives of the rich. This is not what God intended for England, ranted William Blake:

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

New England as well as Old England knows what happened to those false promises of the industrial revolution. This church now owns a parsonage in what used to be a shoe factory. This city is now no closer to the centers of power – to Beacon Hill, say – than rough andtumble Capernaum, in hardscrabble Galilee, was from Jerusalem. Promises were made when this church was built, promises to be here, in this place, in this community, for a long, long time.

This community has changed – changed enough to make some people really, really crazy – and this church is still here, still opening our doors for whoever comes in, happy, sad, troubled, young, old, clothed and in their right minds, or ripping their shirts off and possessed by demons. This church is still here.

What makes us crazy, here between Pleasant and Green Streets? What gives us hope, here between Pleasant and Green, or should we call them, “not-so-pleasant” and “anything-but-green”?

Long ago, in that far-away synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus stopped the demon in his tracks. When we read in the Gospel of Mark about “demonic possession,” it is a metaphor for alien ownership. The person who is possessed by the unclean spirit is owned by someone other than God, just as Galilee and Judea were owned by the Roman Empire and not by the people who actually lived there, just as the very earth under the disciples feet and the sea in which they fished were owned by interests which put their profit ahead of people’s lives.

So much of Brockton is owned by somebody else. It’s enough to make you crazy. We are third in the state in the number of foreclosed homes. If you’ve lost your home, or can’t afford a home, or don’t live in MainSpring, then you rent: your home is owned by somebody else, and if it’s not heated, or maintained, or safe – well, it’s enough to make you crazy.

This church is still here. Can we live up to the promises we made over 100 years ago? Can we be the church God is calling us to be?

William Blake’s response to what he saw as the broken promises of England was to shake his fist in anger:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

And so what about Brockton’s green and pleasant streets? Some remarkable things have happened this year – we have made great strides toward that mission to which God calls us, to be the church – the place of safety, refuge, hospitality, hope, transformation – in this place and at this time.

Can anything good come out of Brockton?

2009-01-18T22:30:00.013-05:00

Compare and contrast the two sermons I preached on these same texts, three years apart.

In 2009, the excitement of the pending inauguration was on my mind; in 2006, the urgency of discerning the mission of St. Paul's Church: What was God calling this little church to be and to do in Brockton. Read on ...

Epiphany 2-B

January 18, 2009

Samuel 3:1-10

Psalm 139: 1-5-12-17

1 Corinthians 6: 12-20

John 1:43-51

Our Old Testament lesson, from the First Book of Samuel, is about a change in leadership. An old regime has proved to be corrupt and inept and has lost its connection with God, who calls out to a newcomer, a young boy who does not even know what he is hearing, for the next generation of leadership in hard times.

Sound familiar?

It’s an exciting week in America, and I’ve been watching a lot of the pre-inauguration coverage. I’ve been re-reading President-elect Obama’s speeches, especially his important speech on race and his election night speech. Believe me: I am not going to equate Obama with Samuel, or the Democratic Party’s victory with the divine hand of God at work in the election booth. I am not going to re-open the old talk of America being the “city on the hill,” the placed founded by the Puritans to be the embodiment of the kingdom of God on earth. No, there is no way we can equate our history, our politics, with the will of God – that is our national temptation, though, from the beginning of our history – to think that America is special in the eyes of God, that we are chosen, elect, better than everyone else.

I was reminded of Mr. Obama’s remarks at the Saddleback Church in California last summer, during the early days of the campaign, when the pastor, Rick Warren, asked both Obama and McCain:

“Does evil exist?” he asked each candidate, and if so, “Should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it or defeat it?”

“Evil does exist,” Mr. Obama began. “I mean, I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. And I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. And one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it. Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil because, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.”

And when Mr. Warren interjected, “In the name of good,” Mr. Obama agreed, saying, “Just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always means that we’re going to be doing good.”[1]

“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

That’s what Eli told the young Samuel to say to the voice that woke him in the night. Eli himself had lost the connection with God – prophecies were few and far between in those days; Eli’s own sons were greedy and ambitious and faithless, and the news that comes to the young Samuel from God spells the beginning of the end for Eli and his descendents. Yet there is enough wisdom in old Eli yet to know that this young boy is the future, and that God will act through surprising and new agents to pursue the divine agenda.

“Come and see.”

That’s what the disciple Philip said to the skeptical Nathanael, who wondered what all the fuss was about. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he had snorted. Yet, when he meets Jesus, and has the conversation where Jesus reveals that he knows Nathanael, deeply, Jesus begins to reveal the mighty acts that God has in store. When you listen, truly listen, you never know where it will lead you, what new news it will bring, what mysterious wisdom will be imparted.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama, we are on the edge of momentous change in our nation. This is a moment of hope and promise, and given the very real dangers of the world today, a moment of risk and challenge as well. We do not know the direction God’s hand is taking us. We can only, as Obama himself implied, listen humbly, carefully, modestly, and know that, at best, “we can [only] be soldiers in that process” of the working out of what God has in store for the world. The best our nation has to offer – the best any nation has to offer – can only act in service to those purposes. We know God wants justice and mercy and compassion. God wants attention paid to widows and orphans and poor people. We know God’s standards, and if we know anything about where our nation is headed, our progress can be measured by how closely we hew to those standards.

But back to Samuel and Nathanael – Samuel the innocent and Nathanael the skeptical. What lessons do we take away from their stories for this moment in history?

They are both open. They tell the truth, and they know the truth when they hear it. When they don’t understand what is going on, they are not afraid to say so. Both of them receive challenging invitations to come closer to God, to listen more closely to look more closely. Neither know what will come of these closer encounters. When we listen for God, God invites us into a larger world than we had imagined before.

If they took those risks, we can, too. We can listen for God’s voice, in our nation in our community and in our own lives. Can we? As Barack Obama has been reminding us lately, Yes, we can!

Epiphany 2-B

January 15, 2006

Samuel 3:1-10

Psalm 139: 1-5-12-17

1 Corinthians 6: 12-20

John 1:43-51

Come and see.

By all reports, you – meaning you, people in the pews – rarely ask people to join you here in church. You don’t often say to your friends, “Come and see.” According to a recent survey, “Adults are lukewarm about God.” In a survey of Protestant church-goers, “not quite one out of every four named their faith in God as their top priority in life.”[2]

Stewardship, evangelism and service to needy people outside the church doors: in this same survey, Protestant pew-sitters admitted they weren’t doing much. “Church budgets are typically set based on the assumption that the average congregant will give two to three percent of their income to the ministry.” Even among those fervent born-agains: only six percent tithe, or give ten percent of their income to the church. “Most churched adults do not verbally share the gospel in a given year …” “For every two churches that consider the congregation’s breadth of ministry to people not connected to the church to be an indicator of spiritual health, there are five churches that focus on the amount of ‘in-reach’ activity undertaken [to people within the church].”

And yet what does Philip say in the Gospel? “Come and see.”

Philip said this to a very skeptical person, Nathanael, the faithful Jew, who spoke the truth: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He was skeptical indeed at the message of Philip, that this Jesus was the one prophesied by Moses and the prophets, the one who was the Good News embodied. Nazareth, in grubby Galilee, was a nothing town, scorned by people in the know. Nathanael might even say, Can anything good come out of Brockton?

But I have a feeling, after a few weeks here, that all of you indeed know what you come here to see, and to feel, and to do.

Come and see.

Think for minute: what is it that you come here to see?

Add it up. It’s worth asking others to come and see it, too, is it not? You are not alone in not inviting folks in – all the surveys tell us that is what most Protestants just don’t do very often. You could do it. There is something for others to come and see. Tell them why you are here.

Listen to Jesus’ reply to Nathanael, who finally recognizes that Jesus is the Son of God. “Do you believe, Nathanael, that I am some sort of conjurer or fortune teller? That because I remembered you under the fig tree, I am the King of Israel? Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

When people say to you, Come and see what is happening at St. Paul’s in Brockton? You can say to them, you haven’t seen anything yet.

This is what Jesus told Nathanael he would see: “the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

“For us, this image of angel traffic between heaven and earth might at first seem pleasant, perhaps a little sweet. But it probably at once meant something deeper to Nathanael. He’d know well the Old Testament story of Jacob’s dream, where Jacob saw a ladder reaching to heaven with angels going up and down. Nathanael might also have noticed the difference in the image Jesus used. Jesus said the angels were going up and down not on a ladder, but on the Son of Man -- a subtle, but very important, difference. In both instances, the image of angelic traffic points to the connection between heaven and earth, the connection between God and God’s creatures. But in the image Jesus used, that connection between God and us resides in the person of Jesus. Jacob’s dream becomes very personal for us all.”[3]

For Nathanael, the faithful Jew who has studied and lived with the Torah, Jesus issues an invitation: there is more. You can connect with God, not just through that story of the ladder to heaven, but here, with me , with the person of Jesus. The connection with God that has always been there is renewed, with a new and shocking image. It’s like Jesus is saying to Nathanael, wake up. See something new in the old story. Something new is coming out of that old, forlorn city of Nazareth.

There is more, much more, to Brockton, and to St. Paul’s. Can any good come out of Brockton? Out of St. Paul’s? You can answer that question; come and see.

In the Old Testament lesson, we read of the young boy, Samuel, sent by his mother to serve God along with the old prophet Eli. Samuel is awakened in the night, and the aged Eli sends the boy back to bed. But the voices persist, and Eli realizes there is more to this disturbed sleep than a small boy’s dream. “Go and lie down,” Eli said to Samuel, “and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place, [and] the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’”

For what are we listening? You know the answer. You know why you are here. Come and see. Go and tell.

[1] From “Beliefs: Invoking a Presidential Revelatory Moment” by Peter Steinfels (New York Times, Jan. 16, 2009)

[2] All quotes from Surveys Show Pastors Claim Congregants are Deeply Committed to God but Congregants Deny it!, Barna Update, Jan. 9, 2006 – The Barna Group, Ltd.

[3] Sermons that Work by the Rev. Dr. Susanna Metz

Christmas: Change is here to stay

2009-01-18T21:57:00.006-05:00

Christmas Eve 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7
Ps. 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve is a time to tell old stories --- to thrill at the hearing of the things we know and have heard many times, to recreate in our imagination the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the last-minute accommodations in the stable, the ordinary birth as miraculous as all ordinary births, the angels, the shepherds, the wise men from the east. In my mind, no matter what translation is read, the pictures are the same ones I formed as a child -- the dark, cold night, the brightness of the star, the shepherds on a hill illuminated by the glow of the angels, the little barn full of straw and animals.

The Gospel of Luke is precise in what is described; it seems almost like fact. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria….” Are we not reading a history text here?

Well, yes and no. Scholars tell us there is “no evidence of one census under Augustus that covered the whole Empire, nor of a …requirement that people be registered in their own cities….” But Caesar Augustus was the emperor, and we do know that the empire wanted its taxes, and to get an accurate accounting for tax purposes, these people had to be counted. If we were hearing this story 2000 years ago, we’d know that that part of the story is true.

I also love this part: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” We know what they angel says – aren’t we amazed that this great good news comes first to the poorest of the poor, the hard-working shepherds who never get a day off?

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host …” “The heavenly host.” If we were hearing this in its original language, we would have heard it like this: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army …” Just what kind of a history are we reading here? This isn’t just a sweet, romantic story; it’s a story told with power – a story of how God acts in history, on behalf of poor people like shepherds, a story of how God takes on big, oppressive political powers like the Roman Empire, how God’s army swoops down among us bringing real peace, real good tidings, real good news for all people – not just the people who would benefit from those taxes levied on the people being counted in that census.

The Christian story is rooted in the life of the body. Christmas is a celebration of the Incarnation of Jesus as God made human, and so this story of God’s interaction with us is inseparable from all of the joyful, painful, and even political experiences of human life.

The truth of this story is found in the ordinary and extraordinary birth of a baby boy, and in these miraculous appearances of angels and shepherds and wise men from the East. No matter how or how often we tell it, the truth lies in trusting the body: For God has trusted the cosmic disclosure of God’s self to a mere human form; with the birth of this babe, the human condition IS God’s condition. And so if God has “trusted the body” to that extent, so may we – trust in the body of the faithful that the stories we continue to tell to each other about God are true. Tonight we tell the true story of the Coming Day of Peace. We tell the true story that Jesus, true God and true man is born. We who are fully aware of what it means to be human, in all or our weakness and vulnerability, hear this story of ultimate vulnerability and weakness in the birth of the Savior, this little babe, who is Christ the Lord.

Christmas 2-B
January 4, 2009
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Did you read the story in yesterday’s Enterprise? “New survey reveals changes in churches.” It was on page 15, the first page of the “Lifestyle” section.

Just about all of us could read that article and say, hah. So what’s the new news here? We know churches have been changing dramatically over our lifetimes.

How many of you were raised in a different church than this one – than St. Paul’s Church? How many of you were raised in a church different from the Episcopal Church? Or, were you raised in the Anglican Communion but in another country? Were you raised learning the Lord’s Prayer in a language other than English? How many of you, when you were 10 years old, knew that women could be ministers?

That article in yesterday’s Enterprise talked about some of those changes. Religion, one of those things we thought were unchanging, seems to have thrown all the pieces on the game board up in the air, and I don’t think we know exactly where they will be coming down – or if they will ever come down again to anything resembling the stability and security we think “religion” ought to have.

You know, we were wrong in the ‘60s when we thought that it was just the young people, or the Jesus freaks, drifting away from church – that the cultural changes would shake out and when all those hippies and evangelicals would “get it out of their system” and come back to church once they got married and had children. I think any of us who moved from one culture to another, from a different continent or island to this great, huge United States would know how wrong that idea is. Once a culture changes, it changes; in many profound ways, none of us can go home again. Believe me: no matter what kind of church – or no church – you grew up in, no matter where in the world, or in the U.S., you grew up, this church here today is very different from the church or 30, or 20, or even 10 years ago. Check out the article during coffee hour. As a former teacher of mine, who in her young adulthood fled Nazi Germany, said, “Change is here to stay.” Imagine, then, what impact the visit of the young Jesus to the Temple had on … his parents? On the Temple leaders and teachers? On the people who first heard this story, this biographical snippet from the young life of the man people had come to know as Teacher, as Leader, as the Crucified one, as the Risen Lord?

On every score, what Jesus does in this story upsets the status quo. This little story, coming at the end of Chapter 2 in the Gospel of Luke, is the last of the “infancy narratives” –the last bit of evidence that Luke puts out that this Jesus, this baby boy born in a stable to a poor mother, whose birth was announced by an army of angels to poor shepherds in the fields that he would be the true king, the true bringer of peace, the true one to ensure the prosperity of humankind, was the real thing. His birth heralded the new age, the new world order, the end of the empire of violence and military might and over-taxed exploitation.

This little story is also the first time we read of Jesus’ public ministry. He is a teacher, a proclaimer of the true word of God. Even at age 12 – he is the one who knows that he is to do what God would have him do – that he is both a profound and complete break with the past as well as the fulfillment of what God has been trying to get across to humanity since the beginning of time. When he leaves the Temple with his parents, he will not return until a few days before his death on the cross, when he denounces the Temple leaders for their corrupt rule and the cruel taxes the poor cannot pay.

We might want religion to be something comfortable and stable and never-changing. We might want choirs of angels to lull us to sleep. But a fierce, hot wind is blowing, like the one that blew Jesus from Nazareth to Jerusalem thousands of years ago. The wind is that Spirit of God, restless and powerful, blowing in this new world, forcing us to pay attention to what God is calling us to be and to do now, here, in this place, with these people. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus asked his bewildered parents. Don’t we sympathize with them? How can things change so quickly?

For the people who first read the Gospel of Luke, that change was long overdue. At the beginning of Chapter 2, this boy was born under the thumb of the brutal Roman Empire, yet heralded by an army mightier than all their legions. Now, here, at the end of the same chapter, he is wise enough to tell the teachers in the Temple what the ancient texts mean. At the end of these two chapters, in which Luke tells us just where this Jesus came from, it’s like he is saying to us, hold on to your seats. The best is yet to come. Change is here to stay.

Advent - at last!

2009-01-18T20:18:00.016-05:00

Advent 1-B/Nov. 30, 2008

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Mark 13:24-37

Fear.

If popular culture is any measure, we love to indulge in fear.

How many of you ever watch those ghastly made-for-TV dramas about child murderers and avenging mothers, or those real-life video drug busts, or any number of those truly psychotic and violent fantasies that can be found on network television on any night of the week? Apparently a lot of us do, or TV networks wouldn't be able to sell advertising time to air them.

We spin a web of fear around us, and in so doing we create monsters. We become like Frankenstein: we have created something out of the imagination and skill and power of our own culture that terrifies us, and we cannot pull ourselves out of that terror.

We fear what we cannot control; ultimately, of course, we fear death: as the Gospel for today says, we do not know when the time will come. We do not know what to expect or when to expect it. When we fear death, we fear everything that reminds us of it: we fear loss and clutch at the familiar for security; we fear change and throw all our energy into keeping things the same.

Our thoughts in Advent are guided by lessons from the Bible that focus on the End Times. Today’s lessons are full of scary thoughts about the End of Days. A thousand years ago, at the end of the first millennium, as well as just a few years ago, at the end of the second millennium, the air was full of such talk.

As the year 200 approached, people flocked to Jerusalem convinced that they were characters from the Bible, and that God had called them there to witness these End Times. Even in normal times, like this year, there may be 150 cases a year of what is called the Jerusalem syndrome. Some tourists arrive mentally disturbed and become convinced that they are biblical figures, King David, or Jesus, or John the Baptist or the Virgin Mary. They might think they are in a living version of the “Jesse Tree” that is depicted on our leaflet – that they themselves are related to this holy family of Jesse, David, Mary and Jesus. Others come to Jerusalem with visions of the end of the world. Not all the victims of this identified syndrome arrive in a disturbed state but they feel compelled to don bed sheets from their hotels and take to the street to preach rambling sermons. Word has it that Jerusalem is bracing in this season of Advent for a “Sudden surge of Saviors. “ ‘Tis the season of anticipation, the season of fear, change is ever upon us.

What goes on in far-off Jerusalem may not seem relevant to us here, but think of

this: we saw splashed across our televisions this week the most horrific scenes and sounds coming from Mumbai, India. Terrorists broke into hotels and killed people who were Americans or Westerners or rich or Jewish. This was a terrible version of the end of times – only this time with no righteous ruler came down from the heavens. Something terrible, but something far away.

What brought the fear home to me was the image of a two-year-old boy, in the arms of his caregiver, fleeing his home where his parents, a Jewish rabbi and his wife, were being held hostage. The child is now in Jerusalem, with his grandparents. The terrible scene from the other side of the world was brought home to them, the fear of the end times made immediate. In this world of instant communication, of pictures sent round the world in a flash, we are never far from images that disturb or frighten us. The world is moving too fast.

Change is profoundly difficult to deal with. We are caught off guard, and confronted with the possibility of loss and even death, and that is where Advent comes in. Jesus in today's gospel talks about the most horrible things: about the explosion of the universe, about suffering, about anxiety and sleeplessness. The community to whom Mark addressed these words of Jesus was a community who saw their friends and families persecuted and killed by Roman authorities. Paul's letter to the Corinthians was addressed to people who were struggling with the cost of what it meant to be Christian, with giving up the pleasures and conveniences of pagan society to be ostracized and possibly killed for this new gospel.

Advent is about not putting faith in the things we have created, no matter how beautiful or comforting or technologically superior. Advent is not about security in this world. Advent is about putting faith in the one thing that will never change: God.

During Advent we focus on Emmanuel, God with us. God has been with us throughout history, throughout times of more disturbing and violent change than even this one.

God is with us today, speaking to us through the things that challenge us and discomfort us.

God is with us as the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick, as last week's gospel told us.

And God is with us into the future, giving us hope that even these things which we fear the most are in God's hands.

O come, Emmanuel.

Visit us during this season of deepening darkness,

and shed enough light to scatter our fears.

Advent 2-B/Dec. 7, 2008

Isaiah 40:1-11

Psalm 85

2 Peter 3 : 8-15a,18

Mark 1:1-8

We wait for a new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

I’m going to take a risk here, to talk about something we all may not share: parenthood. I’m hoping, though, that even if you are not a mother or a father, that you can resonate with the hopes I had – that I think many parents have – at the birth of their children.

The hopes I had were hopes that the world my child would grow up in would be a wonderful place. I hoped my child would not be terrified by war, famine or disaster. I hoped my child could run and play in green fields and breathe clean air. I hoped for a world where there was enough of everything to go around. On a more mundane level, I hoped for a world free from junk food and commercial television. Whatever I hoped for – and I imagine you have a list of your own hopes, as well – it was a version of the new heavens and the new earth. And in a way, the experience of life now, in the world as it is, is the experience of the exile. With my hopes for that new heavens and that new earth, living in this earth seems kind of like a displacement. There is a loss, when life does not turn out the way I thought it would.

The prophet Isaiah was speaking to people in exile – the people of Israel living in captivity in Babylon. How could they worship God in that foreign land? How could they know who they were as God’s people when the Babylonian powers defined them as slaves, as captives, as homeless, as poor, as non-citizens, as “less than”? So look at what the prophet Isaiah says to these displaced, grieving persons. The prophet Isaiah speaks God’s words of comfort to them in the middle of their deep dis-comfort. In their current experience of wilderness, God reminds them of their first highway in the wilderness, when God led them out of Egypt into the Promised Land, the journey of God’s chosen people. God agrees with them that the reality of life may not change – “the people are grass, the grass withers, the flower fades” – but God brings something more: a herald of hope. The exiles are defined not by the Babylonians who bad-mouth them, but by God who stands up for them, God who rules with a mighty arm – but who then embraces them like a tender shepherd.

What can we learn from these people in their long-ago exile? We who may feel a little displaced and out of step in the world we live in?

We can know that this ragged space of our lives is where God meets us. Here. Now. The world may not make sense at times, but that craziness does not define us; God does. Because we know we are God’s, we can resist the things that make us mad, things that we know are out of whack, things that are unjust and cruel and crazy.

Because we know we are God’s and we know that God meets us here, in this place, we know that whatever we do to make this world a better place, the place we know God would want it to be, will not be in vain. Jeremiah, the other prophet of Israel’s exile, put it this way: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile … for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Here. Now. In this world that does not live up to our expectations. In this place where we feel out of place. This is where God speaks to us, and this is where God expects us to flourish.

When Mark the gospeller told this story of John the Baptist, he knew these themes would resonate with his audience. He knew that they would understand what it meant to be called by God out of the wilderness. He knew they would be familiar with the strange messages prophets would bring. He knew they were people who felt out of place in their own world, people who knew the world was out of whack and unjust, people longing for a new heavens and a new earth. John the Baptist came out of the wilderness to people who felt exiled in their own countryside and said, like Isaiah, Here is your God!

What do we make of John the Baptist? Does that wilderness from which he hails make any sense to us today? I think John’s message, which is unsettling and disconcerting, may not make sense to people who are satisfied with the status quo of this world. It may not be a message of hope to people who like the world the way it is. But to those of us who have higher hopes, who seek a new heavens and a new earth, this stranger with his rough clothes and his peculiar diet, brings very good news indeed.

Jesus' bottom line

2008-11-23T17:38:00.003-05:00

Proper 29-A;Nov. 23, 2008

St. Paul’s

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24;Psalm 95:1-7a

Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Next Sunday is the First Sunday in Advent. This is Thanksgiving week. Christmas decorations are being hawked – rather frenetically – in the stores. No matter how old we are or how many times we pass through the seasons, it is always a surprise and a mark of how time itself seems to accelerate year by year. We close down yet another year in the church cycle. This is the Sunday of Christ the King. This is a Sunday of apocalypse, of mystery, of judgment.

Jesus completes his big trilogy today. Two weeks ago, with the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, we were warned to be ready, to keep alert, to keep our wicks trimmed and our lamps full. Last week we were warned to invest – that the master would come to us demanding an accounting of what we had done with what we had been given. Both of those stories took us off guard a bit – ready for what? Invest – how? What an appropriate story last week’s was for today’s economic market: just what is a prudent investment in volatile times? Just what does the master expect from us? Today we find out.

Today we complete our year’s readings of the Gospel of Matthew and Jesus tells of the final judgment. This is Jesus’ last teaching story before he is crucified. This is the story of the King, Christ the King returning to earth. This Shepherd divides the sheep from the goats, the ones who got it from the ones who didn’t, the ones who invested wisely from the ones who just buried their treasure, and their hearts and their heads, in the sand. This is Jesus’ story of the Last Judgment, and we are held accountable.

So what is it that Jesus wants us, his followers, to do? Are we supposed to say the Lord's Prayer every morning when we get up? Read the Bible cover to cover every three years? Go to church every week, take communion, teach, preach, evangelize? Bring people to church? Increase our faith or increase our pledge? What does it mean to act like Jesus? To set ourselves up as the judge of what is Christian and what is not Christian for other people?

I was told a story about a group of Christians who had come to the final judgment, they were gathered as a great crowd outside the gates of Heaven. They were joyful in their praise of the mighty God they serve. The air was full of loud alleluias, shouts of praise, Praise the Lord! The joy was intoxicating and growing louder and louder as the gatekeeper came down to the gate directed by the King of Heaven himself, King Jesus. As the Gate keeper approached in one direction a group of known sinners came in from behind and were first to come through the gate and then the shouts of joy suddenly and joltingly stopped and from somewhere within the crowd of the joyous good and pious alleluia-shouting people came a loud protest. "Who do they think they are? Coming in here like that!" The Gate of Heaven slammed shut with a mighty crash leaving the crowd on the outside.

That is what this last and final story that Jesus tells is about. Have you fed the hungry? Have you given water to the thirsty? Have you given shelter to the homeless, clothing to the needy? Have you visited the sick? the prisoner? Just what have you done?

This is what the story of the bridesmaids is pointing to – we are supposed to be ready when someone comes to us needing something important. This is how we are to invest – and not merely to invest in a modest way – giving a little here, a little there, skimming off the top so our own pot is not diminished. The master expects us to take all the abundance we have been given and to take big risks: to give profusely, abundantly, extravagantly to those in need.

The king who comes on this day isn’t interested in the niceties of social behavior, is not interested in how well we provide for ourselves, take care of ourselves, feel sorry for ourselves. The king cares only about the bottom line, and this is it: the hungry, the thirsty, the needy, the imprisoned, the sick. What have we done for them, with what we have been given?

Look: God has been good to us. We have blessings in abundance, and at the last judgment we will be called to account for how we have invested these blessings. Were you ready, Jesus will ask. What risks have you taken?

Risk-taking in; prudence out

2008-11-17T07:32:00.004-05:00

Proper 28 A; Nov. 16, 2008

St. Paul’s

Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

Times are bad.

Times are bad in ancient Israel. The people are living in the Promised Land, delivered there by Moses and Joshua, brought there by God, but the people are not living up to the promise. They can’t get it together. Enemies are attacking. Leaders falter and fail. The people live in hardship and difficulty.

Sound familiar? Times are bad these days, too, even for us living in our own nation blessed with abundant resources – our own “Promised Land.” With mortgages failing, banks closing, jobs ending, drug deals and shootings outside our homes – times are bad. We have elected leaders, who we hope will get us out of this morass – I was thrilled to hear the cheer go up in the dining room the day after the election. By all measures, everyone who comes to eat at St. Paul’s Table is at the bottom of society, working hard in a difficult world just to make ends meet, and for the cheer to erupt there – terrific! That is a sign of real hope.

But you know what? Times are still bad. When will they ever end? What is the way out?

I’m going to let you in on a secret: God has other ideas about how the world is supposed to work. That is a secret, because it gets so covered up by so much other stuff: by greed, violence, power, exploitation, lies, jealousy, selfishness. Deep down in yourself, you know this secret, and you know what covers it up in your life, too. You know what darkness prevents you from seeing what God intends for you and for our world.

Paul does not have to remind the people in Thessalonica that times are bad. “You do not need to have anything written to you,” he writes. The people in Thessalonica know the precariousness of existence, how they delude themselves that they live in peace and security, when the all too real fear is of sudden destruction, of a thief in the night, of no escape. The people of Thessalonica know that the world they live in is dark indeed.

So what do we make of this parable from the 25th chapter of Matthew? This strange and difficult parable where God seems to be playing the part of a cruel and dictatorial tyrant, seemingly as unforgiving of poor financial management as any banker coming down hard on someone who cannot pay her mortgage?

As we try to make sense of this complicated and weird story, let us remember that the gospels, although accounts of the life of Jesus, were written down by people some time after Jesus’ death and resurrection. They were written down by people living in the joy and knowledge and reality of Easter – they are people of the resurrection, for sure. But they were living in bad times. The community who put together the Gospel of Matthew were city dwellers, probably from Antioch, a densely populated city, full of poor people; a cosmopolitan and diverse city, full of people from across the world – people of different cultures and languages, people crowded into a city where there is not enough good housing, not enough work to keep enough food on the table. The current reality of the world does NOT work for them. Why, then, do they still believe in Jesus? In the resurrection? In the Good News? Why do the people Paul writes to in Thessalonica, whom he rightly describes as knowing they have darkness all around them, believe him when he calls them children of the light, children of the day, people who are encouraged and hopeful and alert?

The Bible is written by and for people for whom times are as bad as can be imagined; why, then, are they people of hope?

The Bible is written by and for people who know that if they play the game by the rules the world sets down, they will lose, big time. That’s what this strange parable is about. The slaves do the bidding of the master, and they invest his money by the ways of the world. Some of the slaves are better investors than others; one is extraordinarily prudent, and just buries the money, keeps it just safe enough to return it to the master in tact. This cautious slave even has the courage to confront the master, to call this cruel system for the harsh and fear-mongering system it is. Yet the prudent slave, the one we think did safe thing with the master’s money, the one who took no risks, is called worthless and thrown into the outer darkness. What did the prudent slave forget? What did the prudent slave do wrong?

The prudent slave believed the world. The prudent slave believed he had to hide the money, to hoard it in darkness. The prudent slave believed there was no risk worth taking, that the best he could do was come out even. The prudent slave got caught up in the status quo; the prudent slave followed the rules of the world of scarcity and fear. The prudent slave forgot that God was the God of abundance. Like the bridesmaids in last week’s reading, who forgot to get the oil from the overflowing, never-ending source, the prudent slave thought there was only so much and no more. The prudent slave didn’t get the memo. Wake up. Come out of the darkness. Be alert.

This church, this tiny community, is a place of light. Just by being here we resist the darkness around us, protected, like St. Paul says, by the breastplate of faith and love. We wear our helmet of hope proudly. God has given us a treasure that we are investing boldly, in contrast to the rest of the world that tells us we should move. We should not be here, they say. We should forget the corner of Warren and Pleasant. We should have a church where the nice people live in a nice neighborhood.

But no: like the people who first heard the Gospel of Matthew, here we are, in the only place where that Gospel makes sense. It is only when we risk all that we have, when we invest all that we have, when we become who God truly wants us to be, that we know God’s abundance. This place, which the “powers that be” have abandoned and buried and forgotten, is where God’s light shines. Well done, God says, to us; well done. Now, do more.