The 3rd Sunday of Pentecost

The Ven. Richard I Cluett

June 21, 2009

It is my observation that one of the favorite occupations of human beings is to think back fondly on the “good old days”, those days way back when, when things seemed so much better. To remember things that way, especially when we get to a certain age and are confirmed in our certainty that things were really so much, much better “way back when…”

This week I was reminding myself of how it really was “back then” in the good old 1900’s. I remembered there was the First World War, followed by the Great Depression, followed by the Second World War, followed by the Korean War, followed by the Vietnam War, which was followed immediately by a deep, deep recession, followed by a period of extraordinary greed, consumption, experimentation and personal excess, and then finally we moved into the 21^st century.

People were so beaten down or exhausted or confused or anxious that a new theology arose in the second half of the last century. The main tenet of this theology was that God was so fed up with us and the life, the world, we had made for ourselves; fed up with what we hade done with the goodness of creation; so fed up with us, that God had left.

The evidence was clear that God was bored, absent, asleep, or dead. The theology became known was “the Death of God” movement. And make no mistake, it was a very serious attempt to understand what was going on in the world, to understand why things were the way they were.

The power of God, the presence of God, the security of God, the comfort of God were nowhere to be found. So, God was nowhere to be found.

Very many folks, I think, feel some of that today. Things are so bad, so bad with wars and recession, so bad with the greed of individuals and corporations and institutions, so bad with man’s inhumanity to man, so bad with the demands and stresses of daily living, things are so bad that the question begs to be asked, “Where is God in all this?” Where are the signs of God’s presence, power, purpose, design?

An ancient theolog­ical term might be useful here. The term is Tohu Bohu, which means topsy-turvy or Chaos. It was out of the tohu bohu, out of chaos, that God created.

It may also be helpful to remember that the nature of the kingdom of God is that it is up side down from what the world, what we would normally expect. Jesus turned the na­ture of reality up side down.

And so we come to today’s gospel story. In a time of extreme, poverty, brutality, oppression and chaos comes Jesus of Nazareth proclaiming the presence of God, the reign of God, the power of God in the world and in the lives God’s people. And not only did he proclaim, but he also demonstrated the presence of God and the power of God in the here and now of people’s lives.

When Jesus quiets the forces that threaten chaos, when he makes the unclean clean, and when he restores the unacceptable to wholeness, these acts upend our cherished assumptions about order, security, autonomy, and fairness.

Jesus shows God at work in the world and in the lives of people, and he says over and over again, “Do not be afraid.” But the disciples were, and we are, too, so often afraid.

This story that was important enough to be included in all four Gospels is at the heart of the Good News for us, today and every day, and in every storm that makes us anxious.

One writer put it this way: “Time and time again in Scripture the word is, 'Do not be afraid.' It is, you might say, the first and the last word of the gospel. It is the word the angels speak to the terrified shepherds and the word spoken at the tomb when the women discover it empty: ‘Do not be afraid.’

Do not be afraid, “not because there are not fearsome things on the sea of our days, not because there are no storms, fierce winds, or waves, but rather, (do not be afraid) because God is with us… even though there are real and fearsome things in this life, they need not paralyze us; they need not have dominion over us; they need not own us, because we are not alone in the boat.”

A small boat in a stormy sea is a good metaphor for life, a good metaphor for faith. There’s nothing like a good, perfect storm to put our personal and human power into perspective. Perhaps I should say, to put the puny nature of our personal and human power into perspective.

I have been on a lake about the size of the Sea of Galilee when a storm came up with a mighty and erratic wind and capsized my small sailing boat and threw me into the chaotic, raging waters more than a mile from shore.

There is good reason for the Sailor’s Prayer to be, “O Lord, watch over me for the sea is so great and my boat is so small.

Frederick Buechner writes, “Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us, and we can call on him, as the fishermen did in their boat, to come awake within us and to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us our way through. May he be with us especially when the winds go mad and the waves run wild, as they will for all of us before we're done, so that even in their midst we may find peace, we may find him.”

The mysterious reality is that God’s love and presence and power are with us in every circumstance of life. We can have faith that this power at the heart of the universe, at the heart of all reality, at the very heart of creation, this power that dwells within each of us, in the end will allow all things to unfold in justice and in peace, making all things right, including our own small, but, in the eyes of God, immeasurably precious lives.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

The 2nd Sunday of Pentecost

The Rev. Mariclair Partee

I have planted a small vegetable garden this year. After three years of city life and two years after that with no yard to speak of, I was very excited when I found my house here in Bethlehem with its small backyard, and started planning out my beds and flowers in January, all on paper since I wasn’t even sure exactly what my yard would look like once the snow melted!

I joined the throngs of folks nationwide, inspired by the gardening efforts of our first lady, and bought all sorts of seeds. Heirloom, Old fashioned, hybrid- you name it, I bought it, even some seeds for vegetables I’d never seen before, like neon colored swiss chard, and radishes that were purple on the inside and white on the outside. I started clearing a patch of grass as soon as I moved in in late-March, and chomping at the bit I started seeds in baking dishes inside, so I could plant them as soon as the last frost passed (around late-May in these parts). Patience isn’t a virtue I was blessed with.

Finally the time came to plant seedlings and some seeds in the actual ground, and now, a month or so later, I have a pleasant little patch of sunflowers and green beans and tomatoes and those inside-out radishes and lots of other things, all squeezed into a corner of my yard. I’ve even started thinking about what I’m going to do with my bounty when it comes, and have been watching instructional videos on canning and pickling on YouTube, though I guess I shouldn’t count my green beans before they have hatched, as it were.

Gardening for me is more than a hobby and a fun way to put food on my table. It is a way of encountering Do in my life. When I was growing up, every year I would help my mom dig her big garden. She always had a large garden and grew corn and squash, peas, and zuchinni, and she actually made it to the canning and freezing part, so that my family would eat green beans and stuffed peppers all winter that Mom and Dad had harvested from our own backyard. When I was 5 or 6 years old, I got to grow my own little row of crops. I was given cherry tomatoes to plant.

My mom knew that it is almost impossible to fail with cherry tomatoes, and so she shook out the shrivelled tiny seeds into my hands, helped me space them evenly in my row, and patted the dirt back over them. Within a week or two, tiny sprouts appeared, and after that the sprouts developed ragged leaves, and in the blink of an eye, it seemed, those tiny seeds had turned into bushes, absolutely covered in small round red fruit. I did not know how this was possible, but I knew God was present in the miracle of growing things, and I felt joy in him.

My cherry tomato bounty of that summer is a family legend, as there are only so many things one can do with these tiny tomatoes, and after a few weeks we were giving them away by the bucketful to neighbors and relatives and anyone who would have them. It actually took me about ten years to eat tomatoes again, but the lesson that I learned was that, from the tiniest, least likely beginning, God brings forth miracles. Now, as I remember digging my bare toes into the rich dirt of that garden, looking on the wonders God had created with my help, “[my] Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul”, to borrow the words of Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and poet.


All of the readings today seem to share in this experience, as they are filled with images of growing things, cedars and mustard plants, things green and succulent, cradling birds and all manner of living things in wide branches, offering shelter and shade to the world.

Is it any wonder that the writers of these texts, trying thousands of years ago to explain the mystery of God’s relationship with each one of us, could only use language of the mightiness of nature?

A cedar tree was not only a source of wood and fuel in ancient times, but the tallest thing most people would encounter in their lives, reaching far into the sky, beyond a person’s imagining- mighty, like our God.

And grain or seed, scattered on the ground, became wheat- a staple of a family’s diet, and the mystery of its growth was a sort of magic that kept that family alive, secure in its daily bread, for one more season- sustaining, like our God.

And a mustard seed, like my cherry tomato seeds, grew from a tiny speck into a giant shrub, offering a bounty so out of scale with its beginnings and what is put into it thatit confounds reason- transforming, like Jesus Christ.

And so, we are told, these wonders of the created world were given to us as a gift, by God, so that we might delight in God’s love for us, and in creation. For we can always find shelter in God’s expansive embrace, and solace in God’s branches. Comfort is offered to us, and delight, from a tiny speck of a mustard seed, which can grow into a whole world.

Trinity Sunday

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

There is a standing “inside skinny” to days such as these, that is days in which we celebrate Trinity. Trinity Sunday is the day that senior pastors or rectors often invite a guest to preach, perhaps someone with more academic acumen, or if such a person cannot be secured, a guest preacher from another discipline or even denomination. If this fails, perhaps the newest minted priest would be in line, or if one is fortunate enough to grab one, how about a seminarian? This, of course, is more in the camp of tongue and cheek humor about a day on the church calendar when we explore the fullness of God’s expression in that very familiar, but often confounding, concept of the Trinity.

Today I promise I won’t try to deliver an exposition on an ancient doctrine agreed upon some 300 or more years ago into the experience of the Christian church, an agreement of faith, if you will, designed for proclamation and unity of communities of faith scattered around the Roman World, a world of varied cultures, tongues, practices, and experiences. Instead perhaps you and I can explore the path of our delightful invitation to discover the fullness of God’s presence in our lives, as we explore a bit of the tangled dance of Nicodemus.

We stand today in the shadow of the Pentecost experience, the experience of varied tongues and cultures gathered in a holy waiting as the promised ADVOCATE of power came rushing like wind and fire. A holy moment was fashioned when lives were lit up and languages and cultures joined in one perfect union with God, each understanding fully those they could not understand before.

When I was young, my cousin and I played together daily. We were fortunate to have joined each others’ families for vacations or trips. We especially enjoyed trips to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. On those trips to more metropolitan areas we discovered that people were diverse in colors, creeds, and languages. We took to making adventures of our own, pretending we were from other places, countries, pretending to speak a foreign language with one another so that others would think we were different. One day, while strolling through the Smithsonian Institution, we were speaking our made-up tongue, of course not understanding a bit of what we were saying to each other, but giving one another direction. When in the fluid tongue my cousin responded to a direction and leaned over into an exhibit, touching a piece of it, an alarm suddenly sounded. We looked at each other surprised, confounded, and suddenly realized it was us – the alarm was about us. Our dialogue of misunderstanding had led us into unchartered waters.

Nicodemus stands today in an engagement of opportunity to explore and experience the fullness of what is standing before him which is God’s fullness of love and mercy. The problem in this interaction, of course, is that he and Jesus are speaking different languages. The educated “professor” and teacher of holy things has come near to try to grasp who and what this Jesus person is, and he seems to be struggling. Jesus tells this curious professor that to grasp the fullness of God’s revelation, one must be “born from above.” This is a metaphor for an invitation into the deep mystery of God’s person, the mystery that changes human lives, that shows old men and women they can still dance and dream, that invites beings whose eyes have grown tired and dark that new possibilities for sight are at the end of their noses. The mystery of God’s person that invites the human heart to change in such a powerful way that prisoners, repentant and changed, are teaching Sunday school, alcoholics and drug-addicted humans are extending a hand of hope for sobriety to others, warriors are sitting at tables of peace. All of this is because their being has entered into the fullness of God’s hopeful experience for their lives.

Instead of hearing a metaphor of invitation into this mystery, Nicodemus hears an improbable mechanism of biology. The Greek translation “one must be born from above” also translates “one must be born again.” For Nicodemus, an old man who has seen much, to be born again, to be born over again, just doesn’t make sense and it just can’t happen. Nicodemus cannot proof text what it is that Jesus invites him into; it just doesn’t add up. But the truth of the matter for Nicodemus and for you and me is that WE are invited into the fullness of God.

We are invited to dance as the music calls us together to dance. We are invited to speak a language of love that unites us in our understanding of one another. We are invited to know a God who creates us to delight in us, who desires to live with us in a way that touches us, heals us, redeems us, who desires to live in us a life force that brings light to the dimmest of eyes and bounce to the slowest of steps.

This Trinity Sunday we join to speak the truth of the fullness of God in whom we live and move and have our being, as the Prayer Book is want to say. We speak a truth that is not a proof text of something that exists or a formula of something that “works,” but rather an experience of authenticity. God is speaking authentically to our lives, and our lives are answering back to one another in the same. It is a truth called “holy authenticity.” Born from above, we are one with the fullness of God and we dare to let our life speak! If our life oozes compassion, then compassion is the truth we speak. If our lives ooze justice, then justice is the truth we speak. If our lives ooze forgiveness, then forgiveness is the truth we speak. If gentleness, then we cannot help but live gently authentically. If healing, we cannot help but live authentically as a person of healing.

To enter the Kingdom of God, one must be born from above. Amen.