Nativity Cathedral : Sermons & Such

2011-12-18T21:07:00.001-05:00

The Cathedral Church of the Nativity
IV Advent
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
December 18th, 2011

Have you noticed? Have you noticed that we just don’t wait so well? I suppose it makes sense when we think of the conditioning we have bought into, the conditioning to expect things so immediately. You know, 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 4 G that connection so much quicker. Marketing genious has taught us carefully to find value in immediacy, the silver club gets us immediate check in at the hotel of our choice, the green mile club assures us our rental car will be waiting for us and we Not waiting for our rental car, Miracle of all Miracle’s Even the Government will eliminate your waiting time to process your passport, if your willing to pay the price! Indeed it seems we have been conditioned to expect NOT to Wait.

This struck home the other night when I attended my daughter’s orchestra concert. I confess, my internal voice questioned, I wonder how long this will be? The ego-centric me should have been delighted when it seemed clear those who put the program together were concerned about the attention span of the audience. The program was short. No time for an intermission, hard working middle schoolers cleared the stage between acts as we were “entertained” with background piano designed to distract us and try to keep our attention as the stage was furiously cleared…….as if we wouldn’t wait, and equally important, as if what was being presented wasn’t worth waiting for. I mean after all, ALL of us were there to capture the moment of our offspring offering their best!

We are not good at waiting, as a matter a fact, we’ve become so good at not waiting, we tend to expect to move from one thing to the next with such immediacy it is as if we have bought into the belief that we must do so for fear that we might just miss something if we don’t get there quicker. This I submit to you in God’s economy is as they say bass ackwards!

Advent is a time that’s calls us to wait. It is a time to wait expectantly and expectantly wait. In a culture that conditions us to not only expect immediacy but has convinced us its worth paying NOT to wait, hear clearly this spiritual message of waiting expectantly and expectantly waiting is in direct conflict with our culture. Once again, the Gospel is countercultural.

It is this Gospel that leads us to explore what it is we can expect to find if we are patient enough to find it? It seems what we can expect is the unexpected.

We consider Mary in today’s gospel. This young woman--most likely a teenager at the time of the Annunciation--Mary, living out in small town Nazareth, betrothed (engaged) to Joseph the carpenter; is totally taken by surprise, as God’s messenger Gabriel speaks directly to her one day. The messenger shocks her nearly to death by telling her that she is God’s favoured one; she is going to give birth to the Messiah; she is going to name him Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua or Jeshua, meaning “God will save”)! Surely, if we were to talk with Mary today, and ask her whether this was part of her plan; whether she was EXPECTING such a visitor, with such a message, OR that this message was what she was waiting for all of her young life, my guess is she would be hard pressed to answer Yes.

It seems for sure when it comes to Godly things; one of the things we can expect is the unexpected! Maybe even the unwanted advances of God on our lives. At first blush in this story one would perhaps want to tell Mary, perhaps you shouldn’t have waited around Mary.

If Mary had not waited around, and if we do not wait so we just might miss it. We just might miss God’s opportunity in our lives. The opportunity even to be shocked by God; the opportunity to learn that we ourselves, each of us, are favoured ones of God, that we too have something Godly begging to be born into the world; that we ourselves are called to take part in God’s plan of salvation.

God calls the strangest people; speaks the most surprising messages to them; and asks them to do the most unexpected things. At first, we, like Mary, tend to respond by being perplexed; by becoming overwhelmed or afraid. We, like Mary, may also be sceptical: “How can this be, since I’m a virgin?” Or we, again perhaps like Mary, may wish God would not choose us for such an unplanned, surprising future. After all, we are “creatures of habit,” some of us schedule our lives to the nth degree, We gotta get to the next thing, and some of us may not feel the unplanned or suprising is something worth our waiting. In a world that extols the virtues of planned, ordered living; of living for the immediate, where we seem to have lost the “art of waiting”, moving from one thing to the next for fear that we might be missing something; the message of today’s gospel says to us that which is not to be missed IS Worth waiting for AND we should NOT be afraid of God’s unexpected, surprising plans for our lives.

DO NOT BE Afraid are the words of the interruptor, God’s very Angel. God’s future for our lives can be unexpected and even surprising.

In a world where we have much cause to be afraid; where human life seems all too cheap and even at times disposable. God’s word speaks to us, “Do not be afraid.” As we look at our own personal lives or the lives of loved ones; we may respond with fear for the future and ask questions like: “Am I going to get sick? Am I going to recover from my illness? Am I ready to face and accept the worst? God answers: “Do not be afraid.” Or maybe we fear our future as a congregation: what are God’s future for this Cathedral? Will we live and grow, prosper and flourish / will we wither and die? God answers us: “Do not be afraid.”
So I ask you, when it comes to your relationship with the God who made you…….What do you expectantly Wait For And What are you Waiting for Expectantly? What is it that you feel is worth waiting for?

Third Sunday of Advent 2011

2011-12-13T14:47:00.000-05:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

I want to tell you about my first time. I was four years old when my parents took me on my first real family vacation. We went to a hotel on the beach on Cape Cod. It was gorgeous, beautiful, sand, water, fancy. The best thing that happened was that my dad gave me a silver dollar to use on anything I wanted. It wasn’t for saving. It was for using. After a couple of days he suggested that maybe I would want to use it at the ice cream stand down the beach the next day – on anything I wanted. Anything!

So my dad and I went the next day. We walked down the beach to the stand. And we walked and walked and walked. And then I slipped on the deep stand and fell. Actually I sprawled, flat out, hands flailing and my silver dollar flew – away. And I did not know where and I couldn’t find it. I was destroyed. I was desolate. Dad picked me up and dusted me off and dried me up and said, “Let’s go get our ice cream. You can have anything in the stand.” And we did – but it wasn’t the same.

That was my first time. The first time I knew loss, disappointment, a dream unfulfilled, a hope denied. It was the first time. Only the first one. There have been others.

And how about you? Just when was it that you began to realize that not all your hopes and desires and expectations and dreams were going to be met?

The lessons today point to the future, but they point to the future for a people who had learned not to expect what they hoped for to come true. The history of this people, their own personal history meant that they would be disappointed.

The reading from Isaiah today comes from the time when Israel had returned from exile in Babylon. Cyrus had released them to return to the promised land and promised time that had been prophesied when they were a captive people. They had returned to the promised land. They had returned to the Holy City. They had gone to rebuild the temple, their towns, their homes, their lives. But it was still all dust. The Land was dust. The city was dust. The temple was a rubble heap of dust. The prophecy was dust. The promise had turned to dust.

Into their lives comes the voice of the prophet Isaiah reminding them of God’s promise. Telling them that God’s salvation is available to them, even now. God’s salvation is meant to transform the world here and now, not just later at the end. The Israelites were, we are, invited to participate in this salvation, redeeming work of the world now. If salvation is not another place and time but the reality of this world as it should be, then Isaiah asks us to think about how we might participate in ushering in what is meant by God to be the real world, now.

Centuries later along comes John. John, who says he is but a voice crying in the wilderness, testifying to the redeeming of the world that is to come, pointing to what God is doing in the world to make things right. Yes, it was a desert wilderness; but also a human and political wilderness, too.

"O come, O come, Emmanuel!" It wasn’t then a hymn, nor is it just a hymn now. It was a prayer. It was a plea. It was a hope. It was an expectation that God would deliver Israel, one more time out of all her trouble. Foreign domination would end. There would be peace and harmony, and the kingdom of God would be the kingdom of this earth. The Lion would lie down with lamb.

John pointed to the future. To the Messiah. To the One who would bring God's kingdom into being. And no one listened. Well, almost no one. Very few listened... at least in a way that led them to believe one more time in the promises of God. In the future. In the kingdom. In the Messiah.

Today so many of our people are returning from the exile of wars in foreign lands to their families, towns and and churches as those first exiles must have returned to a homeland and a temple in ruins. The home they had expected often turns out to be a place filled with disappointment, disillusionment, and division.

Too many people are living today with loss; loss of a loved one, loss of work, loss of homes; loss of pride; loss of one’s very self by disease or trauma. Alongside the backdrop of war, injustice, poverty, and greed, the word of the prophet still haunts a nation that has grown rich in things but poor in soul.

Yet Isaiah reminds us again today that the God who can build up ancient ruins is also the God who can redeem the ruin of a prodigal life; the God who shall raise up the former devastations is also the God who means to make whole a broken heart; the God who shall repair the ruined cities and the Temple is also the God who can repair even the nation that has forgotten its way in the world.

Each of today's readings tells of God’s prophetic promise and the need to hold fast to faith during times of darkness and anticipation. Advent begins in the dark. For some of us it feels like that’s all there is. There was a flash of light we call Jesus. But now it is pretty dark again, and the future for so many looks as dark as now.

In this late Advent time, when we are getting ready to celebrate the Incarnation, we are reminded that God did send the Messiah, that God did redeem the world, that God is faithful.

The spirit of the Lord GOD was upon him,

because the LORD had anointed him;

he came to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,

and the day of vengeance of our God;

to comfort all who mourn…

As we walk through the last days of Advent, we remember not just that Jesus came but that he came and will come again for this – to bring all of us, to bring each of us, into a time of the Lord’s favor. Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us – again.

2011-10-27T16:47:00.002-04:00

Pentecost 19
October 23, 2011
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

On a Tuesday before Thanksgiving, writes Mitch Albom, the author of “Tuesdays with Morrie” and his own memoir, “Have A Little Faith.” On a Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I came by the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry to see firsthand the homeless program that it operated. I still wasn’t totally at ease with Pastor Henry. Everything about his church was different. At least it was different to me. But, what the Rev had said resonated. That you can embrace your own faith’s authenticity and still accept that others believe in something else. Besides there was that whole community thing—well Detroit was my city. So I put my toe in the water. I helped Henry purchase a blue tarp for his ceiling which stretched over the leaky section so at least the sanctuary would not be flooded. Fixing the roof was a much bigger job--maybe $80,000 according to the contractor. “Oooou,” Henry gushed when he heard that estimate. $80,000 was more than this church has seen in years. Mitch Album wrote, “I felt badly for him. But that would have to come from some more committed source. A tarp. A toe in the water was enough for me.” Later that morning in the middle of the floor, there was Henry in a blue sweat shirt and a heavy coat moving between the tables, shifting his feet and his weight from one foot to the next, standing in the midst of parishioners there to serve and the homeless there to be served. “I am somebody” he yelled. “I am somebody,” the crowd replied. I am somebody he yelled again. I am somebody they repeated in kind. Then together they said in a loud voice. “Because God loves me because God loves me I am somebody,” a few people clapped. Henry exhaled and nodded. And, one by one many of the homeless stood up, came into a circle and held hands. And, a prayer was said. And then as if on cue, the circle broke and the line formed parishioners headed to the kitchen and their homeless guests headed to line to get something hot to eat. Thirty minutes later, up in his office, Henry and I sat huddled by a space heater. Similar to the one you probably wished you had this morning. I myself am quite comfortable. Someone came in and offered us a paper plate with some cornbread. “What happened Henry,” I asked. And Henry sighed, “Well it turns out we owe $37,000 to the gas company.” “What?!” I said. “Well I knew we were running behind but it was a small amount. We always manage to pay something--something to keep the heat on. But then this Fall, it got cold so fast, and we started heating the sanctuary for services and Bible study and we didn’t realize the size of that hole in the roof.”
Mitch Album interjects, “It was sucking the heat up.” “Up and out,” Henry said. “And we just kept heating it more and it kept disappearing out the roof,” Mitch Album interjected. “Disappearing,” Henry nodded, “that’s the word.” “What do you do now,” Mitch Album asked. “Well we got these blowers but at first they shut off our electricity too but I called and begged them to leave us something. “I couldn’t believe it,” Mitch Album writes, “a church doing so much good. A church in the cold in America in the 21st century.” “How do you explain that with your faith?” Mitch Album asked Henry. “I ask Jesus that a lot.” Henry said. “I say Jesus – is there something going on with us? Is it like the book of Deuteronomy, the 28th Chapter, you will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country for living in disobedience. “And what does Jesus answer you, Henry?” “I’m still praying, I say God, we need to see you?” and he sighed, and he paused, and he looked at me. That’s why the tarp you helped me with was so important, Mitch. Our people needed a glimmer of hope. Last week it rained and water gushed in the sanctuary. This week it rained and it didn’t. To the people who come here, Mitch, that’s a sign. A sign of hope.” I squirmed, Mitch Album writes. “I didn’t want to be part of any sign. Not in a church. It was just a tarp—a sheet of blue plastic.”
It seems as if Mitch Album stumbled into holiness on that cold November day. He only wanted to stick his toe in the water he said. But he found himself surrounded by a holiness of a people who were down and out but who understood at the core of their being, that they were somebody. Not because of what the world said who they were because God knows by the world’s standards, the opposite message was sent daily. They were somebody because God made them and God loved them. They gathered every day, where someone looked at them and reminded them of that, and, they looked at one another and reminded each other. They WERE Somebody!
Interesting thing for Mitch Album is that he himself, even though he wanted to only to stick his toe in the water, was left with some terribly good news. Whether he liked it or not, he and his blue tarp seemed to be part of Holiness. Mitch Album himself was a holy SOMEBODY.
This is the day when you typically get the Dean’s stewardship message. I’m not going to talk to you about money, Congratulations! I’m not even going to talk to you about giving a little bit more of your time. I’m not even going to talk to you about sharing a little bit more of your talent. I’m just here to share with you some Terribly Good News! That news is that YOU ARE SOMEBODY! You are somebody because the God who made you loves you! The Old Testament lesson tells of Moses speaking to the people of Israel and we hear it ourselves today, that the one who made us is Holy, and, therefore, we are ourselves Holy. So stick a toe in if you’d like, or stick your ear in if you like, or stick your elbow in if you like. (Mine hurts today.) Or jump into the deep end of the pool and put your whole self in it. It doesn’t matter because whatever part you put in is HOlY because YOU ARE SOMEBODY! The God who made you says you are somebody. The God who made you says you are holy.
Fred Beuchner suggests that holiness comes directly from God of course. He suggests that to speak of anything of holiness is to say that God’s mark is upon it. He reminds us that holiness is the space for one who has an eye and a heart for it. It’s a space through which God chooses to send his love.

2011-09-12T13:12:00.001-04:00

Pentecost 13
September 11, 2011
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
Such a time we have been having these past few months. Do you realize that we have lived through an earthquake, that we have experienced a hurricane, and now a tropical storm has left some of our brothers and sisters, particularly here in Pennsylvania and in our Diocese to the north, sitting in flood waters. It has really been quite some time these last few weeks and months. It has led Mariclair to declare in the office that when she sees frogs start dropping from the sky that she is out of here. And, I am going to follow. I have to admit this is a strange time. And yet I know today, as we gather, that what is most on your mind today is, of course, the happenings of September 11, 2001. This, strange as it sounds, the tenth anniversary of those events.
Anniversaries are times to remember. They are a time to reflect, And I believe they are our opportunity to decide. Because the human experience is a complex one, anniversaries can be quite interesting. There are, of course, those happier anniversaries. Those birthdays still with plenty of complex things to reflect on, wedding anniversaries. Perhaps the anniversary of our graduation from high school or college or graduate school, or whatever trade program we may be proud of having attended and remembering what we achieved there. Perhaps an anniversary of our ordination for some of us. These tend to be the happier times or the more poignant remembering or the more joyful or uplifting occasions to remember. We also know , however, that anniversaries can also bring difficult and challenging things. The anniversary of a death of a loved one for example. The anniversary of an end of a war that, an event that makes us reflect, remember the difficulty and the tragedy and the horror of such a happening. The anniversary perhaps of a suicide of a loved one. The anniversary perhaps of our divorce. These types of anniversaries bring much more complexity to our remembering. I submit to you today that anniversaries are a time to remember, a time to reflect and I believe a time to decide.
This is the very day, the tenth anniversary of 9 11 01. A most tragic day in our history as an American people and in the world. For all of us here, and I think all of us here or most of us here, with the exception of one or two, actually have memory of it. You remember where you were. Like Dr. Joseph Indano, our Forum speaker today invited us to remember, you probably remember who you reached out to that day; Or you remember who called you first. In my case, my brother making sure that I wasn’t on an airplane somewhere that day. Perhaps you’re like me and you remember staring at the television, if that’s where you happened to be, really not believing what was happening. Perhaps you remember the horror that you felt; the anger. the pain, and of course, the sorrow. Without a doubt, this anniversary is a day of remembering a happening that has changed our lives forever. There’s not one of us that would disagree with that statement.
What we remember today or at least what I remember today most importantly is the loss of innocent life. In remembering, the sadness I felt that day that returns in a powerful way. In the remembering however, I also recall the heroism of so many who were the first responders that day and the days and weeks that followed. I also in my remembering reflect on the heroism of those who have survived. The heroism of those who lost loved ones, or were injured, or who are sick now because of just being there, who make decisions daily to continue on with life. Anniversaries are about remembering. They are about reflecting. And, they are about deciding.
Of all that there is on the television this weekend and this week, I’ve only given myself permission, good or ill, to watch the stories of human resiliency. The stories of those who in the darkest of hours and the darkest of days and in the midst of experiencing the greatest loss of their lives, seemed to have made a decision to plot a path forward, rather than giving in and calling life quits. These stories are compelling, courageous, heart wrenching and real and you see, these are the stories about those who have made a decision. The decision of course is to live. Not easily, I do not pretend to believe easily, but in the midst of it all, they have made a decision to live.
Anniversaries are a time to remember. They are time to reflect and they are a time to decide. There are decisions to be made always in life, and those who make decision in the midst of tragedy to bravely fight on is worthy of our remembering and reflecting. I realize that because I am a person of faith, I choose to look through the eyes of faith, and when I do so at the lives of these resilient people, I silmutaneously know it is not easy, And I see grace. I know that even in this place there are those of us who were there, or who lost loved ones close to them. I know none of this is easy, especially today, but I also know without exception that those I speak of here have made a decision, to live. To chart a path forward. This is courage, this is resiliency, this is faith, this is grace
As people of faith, we look today at the Exodus story. We recognize that the Exodus story is the story of the people of God. The people of God, the people of Israel, reading and hearing the story of Exodus were experiencing the reality of having lived in oppression and in slavery and remembering a new day, a new hope, a new life. Remember the big picture story of the people of Israel after being delivered from Egypt. The people land in the dessert where they doubt everything. The truth of the matter is that the people of God from generation to generation will find themselves at various times in despair and in oppression. One can understand the need for a story of freedom and deliverance to be spoken, heard, and believed in. We know today we yearn for such stories. The people of Israel, the people of God yearn for this Exodus story and the own this exodus story because it is a story of hope and freedom in the midst of trouble. Their remembering and reflecting on this story bring them (and us) to a decision point. Will the story of our people be a story defined only by trouble and oppression, OR, will the story of our people be the story of hope and freedom in the face of trouble? The question for them? How will we live? A script of oppression or a script of Freedom!
We look also at the gospel story today and there we find Jesus teaching the ethic of forgiveness. I find myself saying to Jesus as he teaches this ethic, “here you go again Jesus, asking difficult things.” The ethic of forgiveness unfolds in this story as Peter asks the question. “How many times do I forgive? Seven times?” This I am sure seemed generous to Peter given the understood norms of the day in terms of dealing with those who offend. Jesus said, “No, if you’re going to understand the ethic of the heart of the kingdom of God, you’re going to need to discover the ability and the willingness to forgive seventy times seven.” This teaching for those who would hear it would be a mindbender, it is for us I know. Seventy times Seven means just about every chance you get, you need to discover a path to forgiveness. That is to say, even in the midst of what seems unjust, has hurt or offended us gravely, Jesus in the ethic of forgiveness says, seventy times seven, or all the time. Why Jesus? What is so important about being able to forgive?
You see this is Jesus Exodus story for us. Jesus knows that if we cannot come to the place within ourselves to make sense, make peace, to let go of anger, and resentment, even in the face of the most horrific of circumstances, it is we, ourselves, who will be held prisoner. Where does this leave us on an occasion like this where we remember and reflect on a most horrible of circumstance as 9/11. Let me be clear about what I am saying. I understand that the people with hate in their hearts, who got into an airplane and flew it in and killed innocent people are not asking for our forgiveness. What I’m suggesting is, our response to such horror cannot be hate. It cannot even be vengeance. And this is one of the hardest teachings that Jesus puts before us. But it is a teaching of liberation. For if we respond in hate then we ourselves are held in bondage by hate. If we cannot find a path to finding a forgiveness of the event itself somewhere deep inside of us, we are held hostage.
Anniversaries are times to remember, to reflect, and to decide. How should we live? As people in fear? As people held captive by hate? Or shall we seek the much harder road—and decide to live in freedom and in faith?
Today we remember. Especially today we remember those who died. We remember those whose lives were impacted by horrendous loss and challenges because of this loss. We remember those heroic responders, who didn’t run the other way but ran toward danger for the sake of the other. Today we remember rightfully with sorrow in our hearts. And, we reflect. We reflect on the horror and power of hate and prejudice that leads human kind to acts of terror. We reflect on the pain of loss, the anger in response to the ultimate offense, the sadness and the helplessness. Finally we remember and reflect on the resiliency and courage of faithful and good people who in the face of the most profound of challenges seek a path forward. This anniversary we remember, we reflect, and I pray we decide to join the courageous, the faithful, and the peaceful in heart in choosing Life.

Amen.

The Twelfth Sunday of Pentecost

2011-09-04T13:51:00.002-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

What I get from these two lessons this morning is a reminder that the Passover was a once and done event. It was a unique, seminal, transformative and divine intervention into the affairs of humankind to bring salvation. God is not going to come down again and wipe away the problems that lay behind us, before us, and upon us and set us free.

And Jesus tells us through Matthew’s gospel that there are ways to get through these times, any times, all times, if we are willing to do the relational work with one another that is required to live together in community with any hope at all of living with integrity, grace, peace, power, or, might I say, success.

Here on this Labor Day weekend of 2011, 14 million Americans are counted as unemployed. Add to that an additional 6 million who have been out of work for so long that they are no longer.

Most Americans have gotten up every morning of the past two decades and found themselves running harder and harder just to keep up. The wealthiest 1% have 25% of the income. While families in the middle are stagnating, those at the bottom are losing ground. After adjusting for inflation, low-income families lost more than 10 percent of their income in those 20 years.

For so many people life seems to be coming apart. Do you remember this description from Thoreau? Leading lives of quiet desperation. Is anyone here today blind, fooled by the relative comfort and ease of those lives which look economically secure, but may be emotionally fragile and relationally fractured? Living on the edge used to be a phrase applied to those on the edge of society, on the edge of town, on the side of the road. Now it includes those who live on the edge of bankruptcy, on the edge of emotional stability, on the edge of human isolation.

In our time, dreams, values, structures, systems that held us together in a commonwealth for the common good have disintegrated into a chaotic maelstrom of competing self interest. There's a sense of everything being out of control – spending, emotions, lives, the world. People are worried about their lives, their children, their futures, and the world. There is a confusion of needs and wants, which has created a culture that values making a killing more than making a living.

What happened to our dreams? For so many they have been drowned by the struggle to live day to day, week to week, month to month, paycheck to paycheck in safety and security.

And instead of coming together to solve these problems in good faith, we are driving each other farther and farther apart. Region against region. USA against the world. Labor against management. Political Right against Political Left. Republican against Democrat. Good faith, indeed!

We can’t even have a civil discussion about what night of the week to meet together to discuss the big issues of the day that affect the quality of life for the entire citizenry of our country. How pathetic is that?

These are the issues of our society and world, these are the issues of people's lives, these are the issues before the Church. These are your issues. Your life and mine, the lives of those around us and those far away; life shapes the agenda for the Church.

We, the Church, have something to bring to this unhappy world. We have something to inform the tenor, quality and content of the debate about which direction to go, what to do, how to live. Most of all we bring hope and a way forward.

While we know that the Passover was once and done, while we know that there are no free passes through this life, while we know that the road ahead is difficult, we also know that there is a way and a truth shown to us by Jesus Christ.

“Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

“Where two or three are gathered …” We will only go forward together.

I have learned in my three score and nearly 10 years of life that God has built into human DNA is the primal urge… I know that born into every human being is the Need (with a capital N) to be in relationship with another – to be with others. I have also learned that life can beat that urge down.

But People know this, it does not ever die, because by God we are made for one another. We are created for community. The nature of God’s self is community: Father , Son, and Holy Spirit. Our salvation as a person, our salvation as a people is dependent upon our common well-being – even when it is hard.

We are fast approaching the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. One of the enduring images for me, one of the iconic images for me, comes from the film and photos of the all those police officers and firefighters and others, too, running toward the twin towers at the same time people were running away from the towers in fear for their lives.

Now where does that come from? What moved those people to do that? One could say, “Their duty to protect…” But where does that idea of Duty come from? I think they ran toward the towers because they knew in their very being, they knew in their heart of hearts what was most important – those people, saving those other people – no matter who they were, what they believed, or how they looked. The well being of those people was a priority, and so those men and women ran into the towers. The need, the urge to “go toward” was born in them and nurtured in them by family and others along the way. As it is in us.

Many of you know that for the past three years I have been working with some dioceses around the church to assist them in rebuilding after bishops and other leaders and members left the Episcopal Church. When people left, they left behind members who stayed who were hurt and angry at how the leaving was accomplished.

Today, as some of the ones who left are returning, those who remained in the Episcopal Church are coming face to face with the gospel imperative of forgiveness and reconciliation. How do they receive these people back into the church and into their lives? Some are still hurt and angry and are struggling mightily to align how they feel with what they know they need to do.

How do we live together as if Jesus really is among us as he says in the gospel? What do we do? How do we treat one another? How do we order our lives? What decisions do we make? What takes priority? How do we live in this new world?

Those are good questions for our prayer work in the week ahead. And the answers we come up with will have consequences, not just for today and tomorrow, but for eternity. Once we decide, we will need the help of one another to go on. The Good News is that Jesus will be among us.

2011-08-22T13:11:00.001-04:00

August 21, 2011
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
Good morning!
Well, I know I’m not the only one who has noticed that the television networks have now picked up on, I think, what is a common interest of many, and that is the study of genealogy. PBS ran a program last year, where they took prominent figures from our culture, and with them provided resources to explore their heritages and genealogy. The networks, not wanting to be out done by PBS, of course, NBC jumped on the theme. Some of you may have seen the program “Who do you think you are?” which similarly takes more popular-culture type of individuals and explores with them their genealogy.
I confess I have peeked in on a few of these episodes. What’s interesting about the exploration of genealogy and particularly in these programs is that as people explore their heritage and peek back in generation from generation to generation, they are, of course, chasing the question, and I do think NBC actually got this right, they’re chasing the question, who are they. Some of these stories are quite moving as these people explore and discover. Some of these people are moved to tears as they realize in their past that their ancestors endured much or triumphed over much to make the way for generations to come. Sometimes too they are moved to places of compelling opportunities for reconciliation when suddenly a piece of their current history makes sense to them, perhaps a piece of distortion or disruption when they discover a distant relative in their past was all too human. It’s quite moving actually. These compelling stories are family stories that when told will hold a variety of vocabulary that often speak to a similar theme. That theme is the discovery of grace.
It seems most of these “family stories” are actually an intentional journey to discover and to listen for grace. As a person of faith I believe this listening for grace is a journey into the very essence of who God is and who we are in relationship with God. I believe this journey is a voyage into the very dream of God for God’s people. I recognize on these programs that all of the individuals participating may not clearly not see it the same way I do, but all of these stories lead individuals on a discovery of Godly things, like an awareness of how they got to where they are physically in the world. They come to realize through the lives of their ancestors that there seemed to be a force, a drive, a tenacity in the ups and downs of life. What it seems to do every time for those whose discoveries are being shared is to reveal a context for the discoverer that lifts them out of themselves, their selfishness, their egocentricity, and into an awareness and appreciation that for generations themes of human life, convictions, struggles, triumphs, and sacrifices have made it possible for them to be where they are, and also who they are. This is a discovery of something bigger than them and an awareness that there is a much bigger dream going on in their lives and it leads them to the question, “What dream is being lived in my life”?
This is the question I ask you to go home with today. “What dream is being lived in my life”?
So today, I invite you to join me in an exploration of our genealogy as a people of God. But, we’re going to explore our genealogy a bit as the people of God.
Imagine if you will, you are a child of God. I hope this is not a new concept for you. You are a child of God and a child of Israel and you are living somewhere in occupation in 721 AD. You have been carried off somewhere in the the Assyrian Empire, maybe Nineveh for example. Or imagine it’s 500’s AD, and this time it’s the Babylonians who have invaded your land carried you away for a life of indentured service in Babylon. How are you making sense of this for your life? What is life like for you? How much do you miss your house, your yard, your friends, your family? How will you make it day by day with these strange people of strange customs in a strange land. You believe in God and you wonder “How can God let this be?” You wonder if this will be your life forever. You find it difficult to even think about the future. This is your story, your fear, your challenge. How do you make sense of it? Who am I now? Where did I come from? How did life get me to this place? What stories of my past might I long for to help me make sense of this?
Look on the family tree. There you’ll find Abraham. Abraham wondering around in the wilderness lost. A nomadic people he represented. Wondering and looking for a place where he could pitch tent. A land which would produce fruit. He carried with him a bit of livestock. Imagine Abraham coming into encounter with God in this wondering around, schlepping around. God says to Abraham, “Look at the stars and count them, this is how how populous your people will be.” God says because you are my people, this is the dream I have for you, Abraham. Imagine Abraham looking around at the desolation around him, at the bit of livestock he’s carrying from place to place and at his very elderly wife, Sarah, clearly past the age of bearing children. God looks at Abraham and says, “I have a dream. You’re going to be part of it.” Quite impossible it seems. Imagine then when Sarah does indeed get pregnant. Imagine the amazement, joy, and wonder when Isaac is born. Imagine how incredible the living and the hearing of this story is.
So, you are sitting in exile searching for a story. I remember the story of Abraham. God has a dream for me and it’s in the person of Abraham, and indeed Isaac is born. Imagine again hearing the story of Isaac, who in his age grew blind and deaf, and when his two sons, Jacob and Esau, came to him seeking his blessing. Blind and deaf he reached out in desperation, trying to feel the backs of their hands so that he can identify by the hair on their knuckles who was who. God looks at Isaac who is blind and deaf and says I have a dream for my people and you are going to be part of it.
Imagine that Jacob, the one I preached about a few weeks ago, the shyster, the crook. Jacob who tricked his father out of the blessing so that he could receive the economic position of the family. A far cry it seem from God’s dream for God’s people. But imagine then, this Jacob, who despite himself wonders away and finds himself with his head on a rock, and God descending upon him in a dream to remind him that even through him God has a dream and he will be part of it.
Imagine then as we land in today’s scriptures with Jacob’s family, the twelve boys, Joseph, the boy who had dreams himself, we remember how that story goes --Jacob’s offspring, Joseph, and his brothers being jealous of his dreams and his fancy clothing. I’m the youngest of four boys, you know this never happens--they were jealous. And so one day, they take the advantage. They’re wondering away, and they take their brother Joseph and they throw him into a pit and they leave him for dead. And they go home, and they tell their father with tears in their eyes that God’s dream is dead. But God looks at Joseph in that pit and says I have a dream for my people and you are going to be part of it. And Joseph gets himself some help out of that pit and finds himself in Egypt and makes his way because of his gift from God to the favor of Pharaoh and becomes a person of prominence. How ironic in God’s world that his brothers come looking one day for a free meal because they’re starving. Once they figure it all out, they are expecting for Joseph to punish them but instead they get God’s grace. God looks at all of them and says I have a dream for my people and you’re going to be part of it. Imagine then as life will have it that a new pharaoh is in town and Joseph is out of favor. But, having served there with his people so well, his offspring themselves, God’s plan and God’s vision and God’s dream of multiplication occurs and the Pharaoh is threatened because these Hebrew people are a threat. Probably more so God’s dream in them is the threat. And there is this baby born and his name is Moses and despite the plea and the orders from Pharaoh for all of the first born male to be killed, it’s Pharaoh’s own daughter who looks in the river that day and sees this baby floating, and with compassion in her heart she plucks it from that water. God looks at Pharaoh’s daughter and says I have a dream for my people and you will be part of it. Pharaoh’s daughter becomes part of God’s salvation. Literally saving that baby from the water. And it will be that baby who will be salvation for the people of Israel.
So imagine again, we are in exile. Life is blows hard and you’re looking at your Assyrian captors or your Babylonian captors and you’re wondering where is God’s dream for me? Look at the family tree and recognize that God is tenacious in his dream for his people. That dream is a dream for freedom. And for generation God’s people would look at God alone in the midst of the powers of the world that would seek to oppress it. And that reliance on God’s dream of freedom would literally become the hope for generations. Hope for generations because God looks at God’s people and says I have a dream. It is a dream of freedom for all of my creation and you will be part of it. God has a dream for you and for me because we too are children of God and in all our family tree is Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and his brothers, and Moses, and the prophets and Jesus Christ his son. And all the faithful servants who throughout time and from place to place regardless of how hard the winds of life would blow, asked the question—what is God’s dream for me?
Isn’t it interesting how the eyes of faith can change the whole picture? Putting on the eyes of faith when you are wondering around a desolate country and doubting God’s promise. Whether you’re Isaac who has grown and blind and deaf. Or, whether you’re Jacob who lays your head hard on a pillow at night only for God to descend upon him with his angels. Whether you run far far away from all of whom you love and all that is promised, or whether you’re like Joseph who’s thrown into a pit, or whether you’re like Pharaoh’s daughter and sit in a place of honor. The eyes of faith lead us to God’s dream of freedom for God’s people and this gives birth to hope and possibility for our lives.
A story, if you will. A true story about a man who shared his life of challenge and faith and doubt, of serendipity and of a discovery of who he was and what God’s dream was for his life. When serving on the staff of the Diocese of Virginia I visited a small mountain parish. And going there to meet with a group of people, we began as we always did with studying the scripture. And, at this time of Bible study, the scripture and the discipline asked, how it is that we discover God in our lives. And this very humble gentleman, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, he said I have a story if you’re willing to listen to it. And we said of course. He said that when he was an infant, toward the end of World War II, he was one of seven. In growing up in rural and poor Oklahoma, his mother could not afford to keep all seven children at home. So the seven children were dispersed among family members throughout the country and he went off to Virginia to live with a distant relative. Shortly after he was dispersed, his father was killed in action. And so the story goes that his mother did the best she could. She saw the children when she could. When he was a young man, in the earliest parts of the Vietnam War was called to serve. When he was getting ready to ship out, his mother contacted him and said I want to give you something from your father. It was his military chest. She dug it out of the attic and she sent it to her son with a note that said I never opened it when it was returned to me so you’ll have to clean it out and put your own things in there. He said he let the chest sit there for a few days and when it became time that he was going to ship out he opened up the chest and began to clean it out. In it he found his father’s Bible. He said I pulled out the Bible and I began to leaf through it and out of the Bible fell an envelope. I opened the envelope and it was a letter written to me from my father. And in the letter he said my father told me that he doubted he would see me again because the place in which he served was very violent. But he wanted me to know how much he loved me and he wanted me to know that he read his Bible every night and that he was certain that God had great plans for his life. This humble gentleman looked across the room at all of us who were now dumbfounded and he said that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m part of this community of faith. That’s how I discovered God’s dream for me because my father shared with me his faith. God has a dream for God’s people. God has a dream for you and I and we will be part of it.
Amen.

The Third Sunday of Pentecost

2011-07-03T15:05:00.003-04:00

The Rev'd Canon Mariclair Partee

Song of Solomon 2:8-13 + Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

The last portion of the gospel reading for today is, I would wager, the second most recognizable piece of scripture after John 3:16. As with most of the classics of the New Testament, it sounds best in the King James Version:

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

It doesn’t lend itself to banners at the super bowl or a nascar race like John 3:16 does, or enormous billboards on the side of a highway like some other verses, but it has a gravity and a sense of comfort that has emblazoned it on our collective mind and that has linked it, inextricably, to our national identity.

I was raised as a summer vacation bible school only kid for most of my childhood (mainly to give my folks a break for a week), so was basically a heathen, but it is telling that I was around 10 years old before I could be convinced that this verse was from the Bible, and not part of the Emma Lazarus poem found on the pedestal of the statue of liberty (Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free- that one).

This wasn’t just a rookie mistake- in Matthew’s words of shared burdens, I think, we identify a sense of our selves, our country as a beacon of open armed welcome, of refuge for the homeless and rescue of the tempest-tost from teeming foreign shores, though we don’t seem to want to live into this so much as of late.

In one commentary* I read in preparing for this morning it was pointed out that this passage from Matthew was viewed by many as a rebuke of the 613 laws that observant Jews were required to follow in their daily lives, kept most publicly by the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Some have proposed that Jesus was offering a simpler way of being faithful that did not involve complicated purity or dietary laws, and this makes sense when the passage is taken on its own, but when read in the context of the wider gospel, this explanation doesn’t hold up. It becomes clear that the life of faith that Jesus sets out for his disciples, for instance in the Sermon on the Mount, is more rigorous than the piety of the day, not less, and Jesus makes strenuous demands of his disciples in previous chapters, going to great length to impress upon them the rejection and persecution they should expect to face as a result of following him.

Christian life should not be viewed simply as doing good. If that were the case, we could join any of a number of public service organizations doing all kinds of good both in the local community and the wider world, feeding the hungry, eradicating polio or malaria- and often with much more calculable results. Doing good is certainly a part of a Christian life, but isn't all-we are called as followers of Christ not only to live a life of loving our neighbors as ourselves, but to live a life defined by a blinding sense of God’s love, a life lived as a way to give glory to that almighty love that created us and gave us our being, redeemed us, and supports us still.

This is much more complex than adhering to laws- it means changing our entire orientation, moving the center of our lives from our own interests to God’s.

Loving God means respecting the dignity of every human being, really, even in the little things (and believe me I have struggled mightily with this part, particularly since that construction started outside of our parking lot on Wyandotte St!).

Loving Gods means forgiving those who have hurt you, and accepting the forgiveness of those you have mistreated. Loving God means putting aside fear and embracing this life that has been given to us as a gift, and it doesn't happen just once, it is a lifetime of turning our faces toward God, breaking open our stone hearts again and again and again and allowing them to be replaced with hearts of flesh.

Is there a more passionate, a more palpable description of that love we share with God than in the Song of Solomon? There is some confusion among biblical scholars about why this book was included in our scriptural canon; it is beautiful but there is no mention of God in it, no mention of heaven or hell, and in many ways it looks more like a popular song from tavern life, circa 1000 years before the birth of our Christ, sung from one lover to another.

Ultimately, this is why many think it was included in the Bible- as a love letter in which God worships us, worships the perfection of our being created by God’s own hands, assuring us of our worth by our precious value to the one who created us.

And so- we are not being let off the hook today, we are not being offered an easier way to live a life of faith. Instead, we are being offered a purpose, a future, one that demands everything of us and summons our best parts.

We are being called in the gospel today to open ourselves up to God’s love, to help make all of God’s dreams for us come true.

We are being called to accept the yoke of our gentle and humble Lord, and in accepting it to embrace a worthy life that puts our souls at ease.

AMEN

*Lance Pape in Feasting on the Word, Year A Vol. 3

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

2011-05-29T15:29:00.016-04:00

The Rev'd Canon Mariclair Partee

John 14:15-21

The idea of a tripartite God is often the hardest for kids, also for adults, to grasp in catechism. Our church spent its first thousand years or so trying out different explanations for how our God could be three but one, and many lost their lives as heretics in the mean time. This is one of the reasons that we don’t hear many sermons about the Holy Trinity to this day, and we hear perhaps less concerned solely with the Holy Spirit, but that is what we have in our Gospel today, so let’s jump right in.

I think the best description of the Trinity that I ever heard was of Dad, his Son, and their pet bird. We’ve struggled with the Holy Spirit the most, I think, because we don’t get a whole lot of scriptural discussion like we do with Jesus, with God the Father. Some identify the Holy Spirit with Sophia, the Greek personification of Holy Wisdom, and having a feminine member of the Trinity is a comfort to some, gives a feeling of inclusion in this holy mystery. Others recall the Holy Spirit present at Creation, traveling over the waters like a wind. In the gospel today quite technically the Holy Spirit is called the paraklete, a Greek word meaning something like counselor, comforter, advocate, or quite literally “someone called to your side”. Jesus in this passage form John is describing this advocate, this paraklete, as solace and companionship for the disciples after his own death, a means of ensuring that they are not left orphans when Jesus departs his earthly ministry. Throughout time and church history this advocate has taken on more and more of a lawyerly form, pleading our case in God’s court. This of course requires an angry God, one who must be dissuaded from damning us for eternity, and I don’t think that is an image of God that most of us identify with. I was discussing this notion of the Holy Spirit as divine attorney with a friend over email and his reply was so perfect that I have to share it with you:

“So, what do we do with this idea of the Spirit being an Advocate, or Counselor? Well, let’s try looking at it from a different perspective. What if Jesus is sending the Advocate to make his case to us? What if the Paraklete comes to us to make God’s case against our judging hearts? What if, as Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” And notice he says, “another Advocate?” Seems that maybe Jesus is the first Advocate, doesn’t it? As if Jesus came to make the case, to show us the love of God in his words and deeds, and now another Advocate will come to continue to make the case to us. But, “the case” seems the wrong term, really.

Have you ever read the play, Cyrano de Bergerac? Or, seen the movie? Or the Steve Martin version, Roxanne? Even if you haven’t, you kind of know the plot, I’m sure. Cyrano loves Roxanne, but ends up putting words into the mouth of Christian, and captures Roxanne’s heart through a messenger, or advocate . . . and it’s hard to tell which one is the advocate for the other, in this play. Now, you never want to press an analogy like this too far, but since we’re dealing with John’s gospel (where Jesus is called the Word), maybe it’s more apt than it seems at first. The great lengths that Christian and Cyrano go to in order to win Roxanne’s heart are perhaps a good glimpse at the effort that God goes through to win our hearts. It’s not a court of law, you see? It’s a romance!

What if the Advocate is not coming to be our helper in the courtroom? What if instead the Advocate is sent by God in order to win our hearts? What if God so loved the world that he sent his only son? Doesn’t Jesus show the ultimate depths of God’s love for you, in that he is willing to lay down his life proclaiming the love of God? Jesus walks among us, preaches the Good News to us, and then . . . well, we have to kill him. We don’t want to hear it.

But God does not give up. Here comes the Advocate to deliver the same message. The Spirit knocks on your heart’s door with the message of God’s love, and will continue to do so forever, because forever is how long God’s love for you lasts. Well beyond the grave, I might add.

And I will tell you the most important part of the message. Jesus says it himself in today’s Gospel: Because I live, you also will live.

There’s a lot more to the message, of course, but it all grows out of that main point: Because I live, you also will live.”

This is what the Holy spirit is, this is what God is trying to tell us, over and over, if only we can listen: the Holy Spirit is God’s love, working in our midst, singing the love songs of the Holy, calling us always back to the care of Him who made us.

“We cannot come to Jesus unless the Father draws us. And the Father draws us by sending the Advocate to plead with our hearts. And the Father and the Spirit together draw us to this altar today, where with the saints of every time and every place…with all of them, we meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread.”

(Quoted correspondence is between the author and The Rev'd George Baum)

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

2011-05-22T09:49:00.002-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

1Peter 2:2-10 + John 14:1-14

Today’s Gospel speaks of some things of great importance. Most of us are familiar with the gospel scripture in the context of the burial of someone we love or have known. It is good to remember, though that Jesus was speaking to the disciples he was about to leave behind. He speaks about their life ahead and the way forward.

He speaks of fidelity and commitment and trust. In the midst of his disciples’ feelings of abandonment, betrayal, grief, and fear, Jesus speaks a word of comfort, “Do not let your hears be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.” The Greek word could as easily be, trust. “Trust in God, trust also in me.”

The opportunity to fall into despair is regularly presented to us by the happenstance of life, by the action of others, by the frailty of our own selves. The tendency to despair lies not far below the surface of any one of us.

Barbara Crafton once wrote, Life is hard. For some, hunger and thirst, the grinding daily experience of poverty and want, from birth to death. For some, lifelong physical pain, or terrible terminal illness. And for those whose physical needs are easily and consistently met, other things: the loss of love, the crippling inability to give oneself completely and its corresponding loneliness, the paralyzing presence of chronic anger. War, and the fear of war. Disappointment. Betrayal. -- For everyone, something.

We share a common human experience of being – in our hearts, in our minds, in our behaviors – at some times, the most wretched of sinners, at other times just ground down by life and circumstance, and at the same time we are people who have known, received, and experienced mercy, the amazing grace of an infinitely loving God.

Everyone, without exception, either has stood or will stand before God at sometime in his or her life hoping against hope that the Good News is really true and discovering that it is true, and then being washed new and clean and being freed and empowered for a new-born life.

The lesson of today’s scripture lessons is Don’t give in, don’t give up. Believe in all I have taught you, believe in all I have shown you. Believe in me as I do in you. Trust in me, as I trust in you. If you have trouble believing my words, then believe what you see. “Believe me because of the works themselves.”

In my life I have believed at times, but I have also doubted. I have trusted at times, but I have also been afraid, not trusted. And then I catch a glimpse of what happens when people believe, when people trust, when people don’t give in, when people don’t give up, when people don’t walk away, when people believe and carry on, when people trust and plow ahead. When I see others, then I find I can believe, I can trust – again.

Jesus is speaking about a new-born life, one that lives in hope, believes in salvation, finds power in fellowship with other believers and strugglers, knows purpose in being God’s people – not only comfort, but purpose; a reason to be, a reason get up, a reason to go on, a reason to go out, a reason to seek and finally to find. It is amazing what happens, when we believe, when we trust.

In my national work for the church, I have seen the dead raised. I didn’t believe it possible at first, but I have seen the lame walk and begin to run. I have seen hope triumph over despair.

For those who may not know, I have been privileged for the past 3 years to work with dioceses that had been abandoned by leaders and members seeking, what they would call, a greater and more fundamental orthodoxy than they found in the Episcopal Church.

In a sense not one stone was left upon another stone in these dioceses. In one sense all that was left was the chief cornerstone and a faithful remnant. Church buildings and property were gone, all the holy books, vessels and vestments, leaders, records, funds, trusts, members, history and traditions, friends and even family members. Gone. All that was left in some places were a few people and their faith.

They could have gone to the local Lutheran church or some other congregation. No one would have blamed them. But battered and bruised as they were, they would not let their community die. So they gathered, a faithful few in living rooms and club halls and church basements, and shops, still the Episcopal Church of St. Whomever of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy or San Joaquin or Fort Worth or Pittsburgh. They had their faith and they had each other. Period. They decided not to die, but instead to live, to be reborn, and to grow.

In the Diocese of Quincy all that was left was one full parish and two small congregations with about 1/3 of their original members remaining in their buildings; 2 full-time clergy and two retired, and that was it. No bishop, no diocese, no vestries. That was 3 years ago.

Last weekend I was in the Diocese of Quincy to help lead their first-ever Diocesan Ministry Training Conference. 180 people from nine congregations participated in ministry training workshops, learning about leadership and governance, Eucharistic and pastoral visitors, stewardship, Christian formation, evangelism, community advocacy, and more. The day ended in an extraordinary celebration of life and thanksgiving in the Eucharist, and the commissioning of these faithful people to carry on the mission of the church.

I have seen what was lost, found. I have seen what was dead, come alive. And if that can be true in Illinois and California and Texas and Western Pennsylvania, it is true wherever and whenever life needs a new birth. It is true for a diocese, it is true for a congregation, it is true for the lives of God’s people, and it is true for your life and mine.

For, We are … God's own people, in order that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once we were not a people, but now we are God's people; once we had not received mercy, but now we have received mercy.

Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Maundy Thursday

2011-04-21T22:00:00.004-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

On the night before he was to die, Jesus did what he always did. He asked those around him to come for dinner. He invited those closest to him. He invited even the one who was to betray him. He invited the strong and faithful. He invited those whose faith was weak and full of doubt and fear. Some were wealthy, some were dirt poor. Some were righteous, some were wicked. Some were famous, some were infamous, some were notorious, some remain unknown to this very day.

Jesus did what he always did; normal human acts of kindness, invitations into the warmth of human community and fellowship. He took the stuff of everyday life and gave it new meaning. Bread, wine. He broke the bread and gave it to one and all to share. He blessed the cup of wine and he gave it to one and all to share.

No requirements about who could share the bread and the wine. Just normal everyday folks who believed and wanted to follow in his Way – just folks who were doing their best as best they could, and Jesus welcomed them.

Everyone was welcome at his table, as he knew God welcomes everyone.

He welcomed these everyday folks and gave them one another, and he gave them the gift of his continuing presence with them, even beyond death and the grave. Gave them one another and gave them himself.

¹⁹Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ ²⁰And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

“Jesus… does what he always does: he issues an invitation in the breaking of the bread. On this night, as Jesus invites us to his table, he invites us … to remember him EVERY time we break bread -- at the altar, certainly, but also in the lunchroom and the dorm cafeteria, the family dinner table or the counter at the diner. Whenever we break bread, or draw breath, we are invited to do so in remembrance of Jesus, until he comes to complete the redemption of the world for which God anointed him.” *

After Jesus and the others share in the bread and wine, he tells them the special context of this Passover meal. He is the lamb that will be slain. He will give his life for the world. And when they eat this bread and drink from this cup, they will know him present with them, until the day he returns to complete his work of redemption in the world.

While they wait for that day, he says, “the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. ²⁷For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.”

This self-offering and this servanthood is not what the people of that time - including the disciples - expected from God, from the Messiah of God, or from the man Jesus who has come in the name of the Lord.

It is not what people from this day and time expect, either. People do not expect the power of God to be shown in patient acceptance of this final cost of his discipleship, nor to be shown in servanthood to all sorts and conditions, the lonely, the outcast, the lost, the sick, the alien, “The tired, the poor, Those yearning to breathe free, The homeless, and the tempest-tossed.”

People do not expect power to be patient in suffering for the sake of others. They do not expect power to be an offered love in the service of others. They do not expect power to be willing to endure for the sake of others. But that’s the way it is. That is Jesus, and that is the way of Jesus.

The Jesus we remember this night is the one who offers himself. He is the Jesus who serves others. He is the Jesus who goes to the Cross for the life of the world. He is the truth of God.

And he invites us to join together with him and with one another and to be fed with the bread of life and the cup of salvation. And he asks us to go then and be his body and to serve the world in his name.

* Dylan Breuer

The Fourth Sunday in Lent - John 9:1-41

2011-04-03T11:21:00.002-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

How do you tell the difference between a First Class Miracle and an everyday miracle? That’s a tough question, maybe too tough to start. Let’s start with a more basic question. How do you know when a miracle is a miracle; when something happening is miraculous?

Is it simply something out of the ordinary, an exception to one’s day-in, day-out experience? Something unexpected? Or is it a miracle when something good happens if you have been expecting something bad? Or maybe some thing or some event is a miracle when it aligns with what we believe to be signs of God’s kingdom, signs of God’s presence, signs of God’s action.

That works for me. I think a miracle happens whenever we see a sign of God’s presence, God’s activity, God’s purpose, God’s way, God’s kingdom in the everydayness of our lives.

How do you spot a miracle? We are told in the song that miracles happen every day. Where? When? I don’t see them everyday in my life. How about you? See them every day, do you? Have you seen a miracle any day in your life? What if that is the problem, that we don’t see, we don’t notice, we don’t look, we don’t expect?

Was it a miracle that Samuel found a God-ordained boy named David to be the new king of Israel? In hindsight I think it probably was, but not a first class miracle. (I wasn’t actually present when Samuel found David.)

How about in the gospel lesson from John? Was it a miracle that Jesus healed the blind man? Absolutely it was a miracle, to my mind and my faith. First class? I don’t think so.

Did you think it was a miracle when you heard this in the first verse of the reading? “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.”

When all the others in the story had seen a blind beggar by the side of the road, as they crossed to walk on the other side of the road, when they had only seen a beggar, Jesus saw a man, a man, a man born blind.

I think that is the first class miracle. Jesus saw a man, a man born blind who had been forced to beg by the side of the road in order to live. A man in desperate straits. A man in need. A man. And Jesus healed that man.

Jesus healed all the time. It was pretty ordinary for him, and for other itinerant healers, too. But Jesus first saw this blind beggar as a man, as a man in need, to be sure. But he knew him first as a man, a person, a child of God, a brother, a human being. And only then, as a person in need and then he was moved to act. A first class miracle in my book.

Perhaps the most damning point in this gospel story is that to the others in the story he was only that blind beggar. As I have not seen others from time to time.

I want to tell you another story of a First Class Miracle, told to me by my good friend, Bud Holland. Bud worked for many years at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City. These are his words about another man named Richard.

“I met Richard on my way to the Church Center. Over the years we became good friends and prayer partners. When I met him he said that he was "special." He had two first names: Richard Jeffrey. He and I laughed. I brought people to meet Richard. Initially I said my name was Bud. It is Bud as in Budweiser. He laughed. Later I introduced Jerry Drino to him. He had not heard the name Drino before so he decided to call Jerry "Heineken." Again we laughed.

“I often wondered what he was about on that corner of 38th and 3rd Avenue. He did have a cup to receive money but it was such a passive way of asking for money. He never verbally asked for money. Then over time I realized that he was bartering love and he became for me a prayer partner. He always remembered the people I asked him to pray for. When people passed him on the street they would greet him by saying "hello, Richard." So he was known by so many others. Knowing folks who work on the street by name is unusual to say the least. It bears witness to his witness and faithful friendship over the years.

“When I told him that I was not going to be working in the city and would therefore not be seeing him very often, he rose from where he was sitting, tears filled his eyes, and he uttered these words: ‘It will be all right. God closes the distance between us.’ By the way, I was recently in the city and did not see him at the corner. In a very special way I believe we will always be in each other's prayers.”

In my words, a First Class Miracle.

When we truly see a person we could easily pass by as a neighbor, as a man, as a woman, as a brother or sister in Christ, as a person, with a name and a face which bears the light of God’s presence in our meeting, we will truly see. And we will know at that moment that we have been part of a First Class Miracle. Today, Jesus shows us the way.

Third Sunday in Lent - Samaritan Woman at the Well

2011-03-27T15:05:00.005-04:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Samaritan Woman at the Well

It appeared each morning and evening outside the door of my humble accommodations in the Bishop’s residence in Romogi– a large container or two of water for me to wash each day, on a long journey in a strange land without any of the conveniences of home. A hot sticky, uncomfortable slim bed, food that was difficult for my palate, the only water to drink in bottles, warm, the long days with people speaking a different language– what a gift this water outside my door was as it met my physical need to wash the hot sticky smell of a long day or the sweat of a hot night of difficult sleep.

From the wells of Romogi I came to realize that the women of the village, like generations before them, gathered each day and night at a watering place. But the water, poured on my body, lovingly heated, came from the wells of Romogi–bore holes drilled by prayers and actions of a people here in Bethlehem I had been called to serve. It is a generation of exile giving way to these women gathered at this well, their songs, their children in tow, their disappointments and pain, and now their hope for a future. They go there for their physical need of water, to drink, to cook, to wash, to feed their children, and water their gardens. These are physical needs, yet it is their songs, their community, their smiles, and their hope in a future that seems to transcend. It is their stories of faith in the midst of war, their grace in extending hospitality to me, a stranger, that transform the action at a well in Romogi from meeting a physical need to presenting a spiritual experience of Salvation.

I cannot help but feel I am living in John’s story of the Gospel as I reflect on the wells of Romogi. Like Nicodemus in chapters past, I draw near to Romogi as the learned man of the religious establishment who struggles to understand this simple faith of the people in whose midst I am. The experience and practice of hopefulness, given the grim conditions and oppressive history of these people, seems to have difficulty penetrating my mind and soul and my physical needs in the midst of my discomfort.

Yet like the Samaritan woman at the well who encounters Jesus, I, an “outsider,” seem to have been offered water that will transcend my physical needs and invite me to come alive to the experience that is before me. Like the Samaritan woman, I just have to stay with the experience of those standing before me, listen to them, engage them, and receive their gifts.

I listen to their songs, I delight in worship with them, and I listen to their stories and meet their children. I hear of brave decisions not to flee villages targeted for destruction and I embrace dreams of rebuilding a faith, a church, a village, a country, and then I realize my concerns for my own physical needs have dissipated and I am fully alive in a strange land, with new friends whose stories have gripped my heart and shaken me awake! Like the woman at the well with Jesus, I AM in the presence of Salvation!

Some have written that Salvation is an experience first and a doctrine second. I know this to be true. The experience of Salvation is to lose yourself in a moment only to realize you are more fully yourself than you ever have been before! It is like getting lost in a special moment where a performance transcends the seeming boundary of a theater in which you may be sitting and you suddenly become aware that you have been united with the gifts and spirit of those who are offering their gifts. Suddenly you are lost, but more fully aware of yourself in a way that leads you to want to conquer the world, a performance transformed. It is like losing track of time, commitment, hunger, need, or when standing with a friend whose heart is broken by life and suddenly your heart breaks. You lose yourself, your own needs, and you are one with your friend in their pain—Salvation.

Who knows when and where we will experience Salvation. All of us have stories when we realized we were into the event to the roots of our hair! It might even be the moment we come to fully give thanks for the day we were born, in all understanding, the moments when “I” didn’t matter so much, because of getting lost in the “WE.” In losing the “I,” we discover more of the “who I am”— Salvation.

From the wells of Romogi has come Salvation.

The Second Sunday in Lent

2011-03-20T11:15:00.002-04:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

The passage we read today from John’s gospel is rich in coded language-

The very setting of the scene is cloaked in mystery- Nicodemus, a leader of the Pharisees, comes in the night to praise the work of Jesus, who has been shunned by the religious establishment until now, and will continue to be.

On its face this makes no sense, and only ten or so chapters later, after the crucifixion, when Nicodemus comes forward in the light of day with an extravagant amount of spices and herbs with which to prepare Jesus’ body before it is placed in the tomb, do we understand that he has been a follower of Christ, a secret disciple since this early appearance in John’s gospel.

Our confusion about Jesus’ late night meetings with high placed officials is nothing compared to Nicodemus’ own bewilderment in the conversation that takes place on this night-

He comes to pledge his faith to Jesus and instead is told that in order to truly believe he must be born again from above. A practical man, Nicodemus is completely lost, trying to understand the physical reality of how being born a second time would work- but willing to ponder what would be a ridiculous proposal, and Jesus continues to offer non-explanations- a meditation on the wind, talk of Moses and serpents, even some gentle mocking.

In case you think this is one of those passages in the bible where our unfamiliarity with the context or the culture of the time is to blame for our inability to parse the language, know that what Jesus is saying sounds like nonsense to Nicodemus as well, and we never are told if he gets what Jesus is saying, or if he walks back into the night shaking his head, hoping that everything will eventually come to make sense for him.

Beyond the coded language in the passage between Jesus and Nicodemus, some of the words and phrases used here have come to be code words of their own, to carry their own secret meanings two thousand years after they were spoken that identifies them with particular groups or movements.

In our culture as 21^st century Americans, we are used to seeing John 3:16 in very public places, held aloft on posters and banners at baseball games, and we can probably all recite the verse from memory in a way that we never could, say, Acts 2:12. In preparing for this sermon I considered simply putting on a curly rainbow wig and unfurling a John 3:16 banner from the pulpit. I reconsidered, since I really do love my job here, but a parishioner offered to make the banner for me.

We’ve seen John 3:16 cited on billboards along the highway, Tim Tebow’s grease paint, and other unlikely spots. The numbers of chapter and verse have taken on an evangelical meaning in their own right, and sometimes represent a sort of protest by some Christians who feel marginalized in an ever more secular world.

Whether it is fair or not, “born again” carries even more coded meaning- having been raised as a Baptist in the deep south, for me being “born again” has a very particular meaning. It conjures images of an adult profession of faith resulting in baptism, stadium revivals and emotional altar calls. In a more social sense, being asked whether someone is “born again” can also be a way of figuring out exactly where that person falls on the fundamentalist/evangelical spectrum, whether he or she is “Christian enough,” and sometimes whether his or her politics and social views are “conservative enough.”

I imagine this coded meaning of being born again carries psychological weight for some of you as well. It’s the kind of language that can turn folks off immediately, shut down a conversation, because of the many different meanings it carries. I think that as Episcopalians, too often, we stop short of sharing our faith stories, of engaging in our call to share the good news of Jesus Christ, because we are afraid of being thought of as one of “those people,” the kind that wield Jesus as a weapon, preach a gospel of hate, and picket funerals.

We probably don’t realize that by keeping quiet as progressive Christians, we inadvertently support the belief in the secular world that “those people” represent all Christians. We keep quiet the fact that we too are believers who have been born again in our baptisms, who are born afresh every day as we live out our baptismal covenant, who believe that John 3:17- "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" is just as important as the verse that precedes it.

Most of us no longer spend Lent flagellating ourselves for our sinfulness, abstaining from any pleasure in food or entertainment, and instead take on a discipline of daily prayer, study, mindfulness, or service. I think that we could add becoming more familiar with our baptismal covenant to the list of healthy, meaningful ways to mark these 40 days. Where the Nicene Creed gives us the theology of our faith, the baptismal covenant gives us a plan of action, and the two are equally vital. If you get a chance, grab a Book of Common Prayer, flip to page 304, and read over this pledge that was made on your behalf at your baptism, and that you have renewed at every baptism that we have had here at the cathedral, that we renew periodically throughout our church year even if we have no babies to welcome into the body of Christ with water and the Spirit.

It is hard to read these words, for me, without getting a little excited about this church that we are part of, this life of faith that we are living. I always find myself feeling proud when I read through the phrases, the promises, particularly the pledge to respect the dignity of every human being. It is difficult to meditate on this pledge of faith and action without being reborn a little bit, without becoming refreshed, and shaking off the insecurity, the fear of being pigeon holed as a “crazy Jesus person”, and sharing the message of love of God, and neighbor, and self.

We can reprogram code words; we can make them our own; we can take back their meaning. And each and every day, we can all be born again.

The First Sunday of Lent

2011-03-13T14:14:00.002-04:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Let me begin by acknowledging that I am certain that at least a bit of what is on your hearts and in your minds this morning are the people of Japan. Indeed, we keep the people of Japan in our hearts and in our prayers. In this, in my memory, unprecedented time of natural disaster, we once again rise up with the people of Japan, in this case, as they respond to this disaster. We, in the world community as we respond to this disaster, have yet one more opportunity to discover what we are made of. I will say a bit more about Japan at the offertory, but I want to talk about this discovering what we are made of on this first Sunday of Lent because not only our Lenten journey, but actually our Christian and human journey is about discovering and finding our place in the order of things and discovering what we are made of.

Today we have two very familiar pieces of scripture. First we have the story of the garden. We learn of this story in Sunday school. I still remember sitting in Sunday school, hearing the story for the first time, and beginning my life-long journey of trying to figure out exactly what’s going on here. In the story of the garden and in the story of Jesus’ temptations in today’s Gospel, we have two of the most fundamental stories of our tradition. We find these stories formulating classic Christian theology, the stories that have shaped our existence forever. In fact, since the 300 ADs, one Augustine of Hippo developed for us the doctrine of original sin reflecting on this story of the garden. Indeed, what the story is about is humanity trying to figure out its place in the order of things. Whether you have read Augustine or not, this classical teaching of theology is implanted deep inside of you. It is from the story we get that our nature in Adam and Eve in humanity their inability to live in the simple law of the garden. Basically the law in the garden is do not trespass and, indeed, Adam and Eve just can’t help it. What we draw from this story from classic Christian theology is that we discover the limitations of our human nature, and we recognize that we do rely on God at every stage of our life. This is classic Christian theology.

In Romans today, St. Paul begins to spin out his experience of the risen Jesus, the Christ, who, as we discover in the Gospel lesson, is one who is able to live into who he is, able to withstand temptation, and through it he lives into what he was made of and for. St. Paul reminds us that the new Adam that is in Jesus, we get a breath of hope that through Christ and a relationship with Christ, where we fall short Jesus can redeem and make us new. This is classic Christian theology. Where Adam and Eve could not get it right, Jesus gets it right. Christ is tempted in the wilderness shortly after the Holy Spirit has named him for who he is, the Son of God. He takes his baptismal identity into the wilderness and it will be tested. He spars with Satan who offers him relief of the basic human needs of hunger and the basic human inclination to grab for power and have control. Jesus sticks to who he is, digs deep for what he is made of and, indeed, then lives out his mission as the Son of God, that identity that would lead him with courage to Jerusalem where he would offer himself up, where he would be crucified, and where God would do a mighty thing on behalf of all humanity.

Does all this sound right- classic Christian theology? So we get it. We rely on God and through the person of Jesus, we discover the true nature of God, and we find hope. Today I want you to park just for a few minutes, that life-long piece of your DNA that has taught you this Christian classic theology. Because I think that, as we discussed in Bible study this week with the Bishop, it is easy for us to go on automatic pilot then and say, OK, we’re never going to get it right, Jesus gets it right, and all will be well at the end of the day. But I would submit to you that there is more going on here, that it really is up to us to find ourselves in the story, to bend ourselves into the story, particularly on this Lenten journey, and to ask the same questions that Jesus was being asked in the wilderness which is “what are you made of,” discover what you are made of. That is what this journey is about, and we don’t have to be Adam and Eve and God knows we are not Jesus, but there is something in this for us if we bend ourselves and ask what we are made of.

So I share with you the true story of Ruby Bridges. Some of you may know this story. My daughter has been hounding me for months, because she has studied the story of Ruby Bridges, to sit down with her and actually watch the short Disney video that tells the story of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old little girl in 1960 in New Orleans, Louisiana, who was ushered by federal marshals into the all-white school each day. It was her mother’s dream and hope that she would get a decent education. Some of you may remember well those early days of integration. Ruby Bridges, this six-year-old girl, would discover what she was made of in this experience. Her experience was that of many and in her little school, she was the only black child whose mother insisted that she go, and you know how that story goes. The first day she arrived, ushered and protected by federal marshals, one by one the parents of the young white students came and removed their children from school. Each day, as the day went on, surrounding the outside of the school, Ruby Bridges walked through crowds of people protesting the integration of that school. Day by day, Ruby heard things and witnessed things that she never would have imagined as a six-year-old girl.

As she tells the story, not as Disney tells the story, but if you’d like, Netflix, as she tells the story she says I learned that there were people in the world who hated and there were people in the world who loved, and it didn’t matter what color their skin was. She said that each and every day she would walk to school, and she did what her mother taught her to do, that was pray for God’s protection. Each day she would get up, she would say her prayers and she would ask for God’s protection as she walked through the angry mobs that were there each and every day, all day long. As the story goes, there was a psychiatrist, Dr. Coles, who, knowing the story and being deployed locally in the military, and being concerned for her emotional and mental health came to the family and asked if he could be of support. They finally agreed, and day by day they established a relationship. Working with her each day, he was concerned about what she was doing with all of that which was coming at her. He also witnessed that day by day she was growing less and less verbal. He worked with her and he said you need to bring those feelings to speech. You need to articulate to the people who are shouting hateful things to you. You need to let them know how you feel. Each and every day she walked through those crowds saying her prayers, until one day finally, as she tells the story, “I forgot to pray in the morning, so when I was walking past the angry crowds, I stopped and I turned, and I began to move my lips.” Dr. Coles, who stood in that crowd every morning in support of her, was feeling she was finally going to speak to the crowd, tell them how she felt, but he couldn’t hear her over the shouts of the crowd. All he saw was this little girl’s lips moving. He asked her later, “Ruby, I saw you bring to speech. What were you saying to the crowd?” She said, “I forgot to say my prayers, so I was praying for God’s protection, and I was praying that God might love them, too, and that God might forgive them.”

You see, this is really the stuff that we are made of. A six-year-old girl, discovered in the midst of what the world had to throw at her what she was made of, and she discovered that there are two types of laws that we live with. There is the law that tells us not what to do: Do not trespass, and there is the law of God’s nature, which is like the law of gravity. It just is. It’s a law of grace and love. It’s a law that calls us to discover what we are made of and when we dig deep to discover that law, that love can transform anything. So this is our Lenten journey, to discover that which we are made of, to dig deep as we live in a world that throws things at us, to live into the law, the law of God, which is love and grace, and can transform anything.

“Twenty plus one plus one” is a movement many churches, beginning in Christ Church, Warwick, New York, our brothers and sisters at Trinity, Bethlehem, and now growing among many churches. Twenty plus one plus one: 20 minutes a day in prayer, reflecting on who we are and what we are made of. One hour a week in worship, or a little more, coming together with each other, bringing our differences, bringing our hopes, bringing our prayers, bringing our thanksgivings. One hour a month in service so that others out there might know what we are made of: 20+1+1.

Amen.

The Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-02-27T15:42:00.003-05:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

Today in our readings we have many beautiful images that are being painted with words for us. In Isaiah, we have the image of God as mother and Zion as child. God, in this metaphor, is described like a pregnant woman and creation as her child, moving in the womb. God can no more forget us than a pregnant mother can forget the child that lives within her. Isaiah restates this and said God is like a nursing mother, unable to take her mind off of the child that she must feed every hour or two, her very body protesting if too much time goes by between feedings. A number of my girlfriends have been having children lately, so I know from being around nursing women and any of you who have been a nursing woman, there is a sort of second plane of existence that happens when you are responsible for nourishing another being. You really can’t ever take your focus off of what’s going on with that baby.

This is powerful stuff that we’re getting today. This is beautiful, tender stuff. We are told that not only can God not forget us, but God inscribes our names on the palms of his hands so that we are always comforted and held within him. These beautiful pictures go on into Matthew’s gospel with the lilies and the birds. I can’t read this passage without thinking of a hymn that was sung to me as a child and I think everyone knows it, even if you weren’t Southern Baptist at one time. It’s about how God’s eye is always upon us. “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free. His eyes are on the sparrow, so I know he watches me.” It’s such a beautiful sense and a wonderful sense of how important we are to God.

God’s eye is always upon us. He cares for the birds of the air so how could he possibly forget us? We are told not to worry about what we will eat because God feeds all of his creatures, even those who don’t sow or reap, or store up in barns. We are told also not to worry about how we are clothed and where we will find clothing. We are told to look to the lilies of the field that are clothed in the purest white and cloth of gold, clothed even surpassing the lavishness of Solomon but, like the grasses, they only wither and die. So how much more must God love us, whose lives are longer than a thousand lilies?

We are given all of this beautiful reassurance throughout the readings today and then we are told, don’t be anxious. This is one of those questions or one of those statements that Jesus makes throughout his Gospel that catches us off guard, if we are really listening. This part of Matthew comes right after the Beatitudes, so we are still in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus gives these wonderful comforts and then says, so don’t be anxious. I think for most of us, on one hand we can weigh those beautiful comforts, but on the other hand we can still have a lot of anxiety because everything we see every day is telling us to be anxious. You can’t get on the Internet or open a newspaper or call your mother, in my case, without being reminded of all the things that we should be worrying about.

So how do we live as a non-anxious presence in an anxious world? I don’t think that Jesus is telling us today that we shouldn’t worry about where things come from, that we shouldn’t plan ahead, that we shouldn’t try to make sure that we are covering our future needs, but I think what he is telling us is actually we shouldn’t let that worry become so central to our lives, so much a part of our being, that we are paralyzed by it. We are anxious because we have reason to be anxious. There are many frightening things going on in the world today. We have many more worries – we have to worry about college funds, retirement plans, bank bailouts, all of these things, but all of this anxiety serves to keep our focus on ourselves, and ultimately to keep our focus off of our neighbor and off of God.

How do we live a non-anxious life? I think the only answer that we have to this question truly is prayer. Prayer is the only real balm that we have. There is a school of thought that defines sin as distance from God, and I think that anxiety can fall under the same definition. When we are so anxious that we can only focus inward, we can only focus on our own immediate needs, we can’t focus outward. We can’t make room for God to come in and hold us with the palms of his hands, and comfort us, and give us his strength. So how do we pray? I think ultimately prayer, at its essence, is learning to be comfortable with our silent selves and in that way, becoming comfortable with God. I think this can only be achieved through constant steady conversation with God. If we have a prayer life, then we have a foundation for an examined and non-anxious life, and a life that can then be turned over to the work of God rather than anxiety.

How do we pray? We pray in many ways. As Episcopalians, obviously we come together corporately on Sunday mornings, on Wednesday mornings, on Saturday evenings, and we pray together. We know that we can find God and hear God in the midst of our community. We also pray individually. For me, silence is key in this. Now you can pray on your knees, you can pray on a walk, you can pray on a comfortable chair, looking out the window or sort of sitting in that place that’s in between waking and sleeping, but I think the important aspect is that it is intentional. We intentionally give ourselves a moment to stop, lay aside the worries of the day, clear our heads, clear our minds, give ourselves over to God, and give God the opportunity to be present in our lives, to be present in us. We must empty ourselves so that we can be filled with God’s love.

So prayer is intentional and prayer is self-examining, but ultimately, I think, if we keep at it, we will find ourselves in a place where we will know with certainty that, just as God’s eye is on the sparrow, he is always watching us, and our anxieties will leave us at last as we remember that we are inscribed on the palms of God’s hands always, and he can never forget us.

Amen.

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-02-13T10:06:00.003-05:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Stephen Bayne, a wise bishop and saint of this church, wrote many years ago: God put freedom into his created universe in order that the universe could respond to his love with an answering love of its own – given out of its freedom. That’s Life.

The scripture appointed for this day lays before us a stark and clear presentation of a choice. “… today I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him…”

The choice is to align one’s life according to God’s way and know the blessings that will come in the doing or to follow in some other way and reap what is sown down that path.

As I was driving around the Lehigh Valley the other day, I saw a church sign that read, “God’s message doesn’t change”. I believe that to be true. The core truth is the core truth. But who hears it changes. The era in which it is heard changes. The culture through which it is heard changes. The time in the life of the person who hears it changes.

One time I heard God’s message was as a newly ordained person Then I drove around in a car left over from a more frivolous time of my life. It was a hot, little orange/red Fiat convertible sport car that wore a bumper sticker that declared, “Choose Life!” (Actually it is kind of fun to remember those days when “father” would drive up in it to parishioners’ homes.)

But this was not some adolescent hippie exclamation, nor was it an anti-abortion slogan. It was more basic than that. It was more of a primal shout! What I wanted to say to the world in my youthful enthusiasm was “Choose LIFE”. Choose a way of life that leads to joy and exuberance and love, and provides a pathway through the tough times of life that come to one and all regardless of stature or status. Choose life that ultimately leads to living in God’s blessing and returns to God and the people among whom we live a love that answers God’s love given in our creation.

It is, I believe, the deep desire of God’s heart that we make the choice for Life. It is as we pray in the Eucharistic prayer, Again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace. Claiming God’s love, receiving God’s love, and living in God’s love is the “way of freedom and peace.”

It is not the way to a problem-free life, it is not a way to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it is not a way to dodge all the stuff that life throws at us, it is not the way to skip the pains of aging or adolescence or sexuality or any kind of hard time. But it is a way through them.

Those times are part of life, but they don’t define our lives. They are part of us, but they don’t define us. We have been created for freedom, and peace, and love and if we are faithful in our living, steadfast in our doing, then we will know freedom, we will know peace, we will abide in love.

There are forces that would draw us away from these, take us down other paths, seduce us into other ways, try to make us a different person – some of those forces come from outside of us and some come from within ourselves.

But we know, too, that within us and within all of humankind there are stronger powers drawing us toward the love of God and toward the God given right of freedom and peace and life lived in tranquility with family and neighbor alike.

Our nation is based on this belief, is based on these truths. Our Declaration of Independence boldly states what could not be seen and was not known in the lives of the people at that time in this place, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And to bring those things that are ours by divine right into being, we ordered ourselves as a nation. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A people claimed their heritage as God’s creation and wanted the ability for themselves and their children to live in peace, justice, and freedom. That’s what God intended in the beginning and that’s what our forebears brought into being. They chose Life.

And it is amazing to me that in my adult life I have seen the same choice made by the people of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Latvia and Estonia, and East Germany and in each of the countries of the Soviet Union. The choice for Life was made by the people of South Africa, the choice for Life was made by the people of Southern Sudan, the choice for Life was made by the people of Tunisia, and in these last days the choice for Life was made by the people of Egypt.

The people claim the promise that predates even God’s Covenant with Moses. “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

Our president declared on Friday, “This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have … (put) the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence -- not terrorism, not mindless killing -- but nonviolence (the) moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.

“And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can't help but hear the echoes of history -- echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice.

“The word Tahrir means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people -- of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.”

We stand in awe and we kneel to give thanks to God that “we have seen the hand of God at work in the world around us” once again when God’s people have chosen LIFE. It is the deep desire at the heart of God that we Choose Life.

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-02-06T14:37:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

In the world of Biblical criticism and scholarship, there is a constant tension between two ways of approaching scripture.

These are Exegesis v. eisegesis.

Exegesis (from the Greek meaning “to lead out”) is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The goal of Biblical exegesis is to explore the meaning of the text which then leads to discovering its significance or relevance.

Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself. Most modern, or post-modern, commentaries on the Bible take exactly this approach, and you will find endless footnotes telling you the subtleties of the translation or giving you historical context so that one can better wrap one’s mind around the words on the page.

Eisegesis (from the Greek meaning “into”) is the process of misinterpreting a text in such a way that it introduces one's own ideas, reading into the text. While exegesis draws out the meaning from the text, eisegesis occurs when a reader reads his/her interpretation into the text. As a result, exegesis tends to be objective when employed effectively while eisegesis is regarded as highly subjective.

This sounds pretty black and white- but anyone who has ever translated something from one language to another knows that it is very much a grey area, words in one do not have exact correlatives in the other, choices are made that result in one shade of meaning over another, and the end result is always somewhat subjective, which is exactly why we have the practice of exegesis in the first place.

I mention all of this because the Gospel passage we heard today is probably one of the most exegeted, and most eisegeted, in our canon. We’ve read this passage as a formula for getting into God’s grace, a set of instructions for how to become a child of God, instead of an affirmation of our belovedness from before we were formed in the womb.

The phrase “salt of the earth” has come to mean something quite different than what it would have meant to the Gospel writers- where we hear it as meaning good, simple, and honest, two thousand years ago, when salt was the only spice widely available and was used not only for preserving foods but also for enhancing their flavors, it would have meant something special, something that made common things greater.

In the same way, the strength of light in a world before electricity is perhaps something we can’t wrap our minds around- it is hard now to get away from light, one must go far from populated areas to see the night sky without ambient brightness from streetlights, cars, humanity. So the power and promise of a single lamp doesn’t quite impact us, I think, with the weight it is meant to have.

Fred Craddock, writing in the Christian Century, says this about today’s Gospel: “For the first context, Jesus offers affirmation, warning and instruction. The affirmation is in two vivid images, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world.” Notice “You are” not “You ought to be or should try to be.” Both salt and light are so basic and essential to human life that Jesus felt no need to spell out what this meant. However, having introduced the existence of hostility toward the gospel, Jesus does elaborate on what can happen to God’s people under persecution and sustained opposition. Salt can lose its integrity, its identifying quality as salt. This does not occur suddenly, of course, but so gradually that those to whom it happens do not perceive themselves as changing and cannot identify later a single time or place when their faith ceased. Certainly the loss was not intentional; it was more a matter of drifting away…

“Or, says Jesus, how easy it is to lose initiative in mission and take up a posture of protection and defense after one suffers verbal, physical, social or economic abuse for one’s faith. For example, building a city on a hill is sound strategy for self-defense, but the increased visibility attracts even more hostility. Or again, putting a lamp under a bushel certainly reduces the chance of having it blown out, but the price for such protection is darkness. In other words, the way of Christ is mission: witnessing and benevolent intrusion into the life of the world.

There is no way that Christ’s cause can be converted into an individual or community lifestyle of self-interest, self-protection and defense against vulnerability. To do so is not to interpret Christ differently, but to abandon him. The way of Christ is to take the initiative and rather than hide from the world, let the light shine in the hopeful trust that the praise of God will be increased.

This is perhaps easy to hear but more difficult to live. We are constantly assailed by messages that we could be better, do more, work harder. Instead, Jesus is telling us, we should strive to be faithful above all else.

This is a tough message to hear, particularly for us, right? As Americans, as a country of folks founded on the notion that, like a character out of a Horatio Alger story, anyone being able to pull themselves up by the boot straps and become wildly successful with enough hard work, and for us as Protestant, Reformation Christians, who have heard these passages used for generations to reinforce the notion of righteousness by works, that if we just work hard enough, pray correctly, God will admit us to his love.

The message today is radical- our place in the kingdom is assured, has been since our creation, and our responsibility is to live out the power of that assurance, the confidence that is only possible through God's wide embrace. This isn’t something we can do. This is something we have to be.

Jesus said he came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, to complete it- and by living into the spirit of the covenant God made with us In our births, into the gifts that God has given us, we spread the light of God’s love in the dark places we encounter, we spread our saltiness in all that we undertake, and finally we rest in the knowledge that if all that we do is grounded in Christ, it will have been well done.

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-01-30T14:22:00.003-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Matthew 5:1-12

There is chaos and violence in the streets of Egypt. The ancient city of Carthage, known to us today as Tunisia, has seen similar oppressive violence as a response to voices protesting for democracy, equality, and economic opportunity. In Uganda, political tensions are rising, and recent attacks on activists for the rights of gays and on humanitarian workers seem to be an outgrowth of highly-charged political diatribe. In Sudan, the people of the south remain hopeful that voting for secession from the north will hold peacefully, yet violence has erupted and lives lost near the north/south border. Voices in the south clamor for peace and freedom, and in the north, carefully measured statements about a new Sudan are heard. In our own country, a new year brings again the voices of a path continuing forward in difficult times as we continue to struggle economically, and continue to live in a time where our country is at war.

In all of it, one can wonder and be lost, or even overwhelmed, in the dynamics of an unsettled time and unsettled world. In the midst of it all, we can respond to events as they impact our own lives and we can rightly wonder—what voices might we find clarity and action in following. One might also wonder, it all seems so big and we are just regular folk, what is my place in it?

This is the set-up I ask for us to live into this morning as we consider our Gospel today. In a world just as disrupted and challenged, I might suggest that common folk may have been asking the same questions. I am just a regular folk; what is my place in all this mess? Among the many voices crying out in this world, in which one might I find some clarity and action following?

Today we have the Beatitudes. Familiar to all of us, most scholars agree the beatitudes are the platform speech on which Jesus builds, inspires, challenges, and equips his followers to live into a new ideal for their lives and the world that is the Kingdom he has come to usher in. The symbolism in Matthew’s gospel is worth noting. Just as Moses ascended that holy mount to discover and deliver the law for the people of God, so Jesus sits on the mount to deliver the good news that God’s dream is actualized in Jesus, and to those who listen and believe in what he says, they must actualize his teachings in their behavior. In this way, God’s dream comes alive! “Blessed” is the English word we use to translate from the Greek “marikiori” which, more closely translated, may be “how fortunate” or “how fulfilled,” or in that sense, “happy.” “Blessed” are the ones who hear, believe, and live out this path that is not easy of bringing God’s dream to life in their lives and in the world.

This is a large and demanding voice with a call to big things. Who, then, is worthy of such a commendation? Who is there on that hillside? What about you? Can you imagine yourself on that hillside today? What is it that is being asked of them, of us? Surely those sitting there that day must have been spiritual heroes to actualize such behavior; surely this message today must be for the heroes among us.

Hear the words of Fred Beuchner as he responds to the questions, “What voices do I pay attention to, and how is it that a common folk like me fits into this? I paraphrase from his work on the Beatitudes found in his book, Wishful Thinking.

“We might be tempted to guess one sort or another of spiritual hero, (might be picked out to hear this special commendation that is beatitudes), men and women of impeccable credentials morally, spiritually, humanly, BUT we would be wrong.

“Jesus did not pick out the spiritual giants (to follow, listen, and to actualize) but the “poor in spirit,” the ones who spiritually speaking have nothing to give but everything to receive.”

“Not the champions of faith who can rejoice even in the midst of their own suffering, but the ones who mourn over suffering, and have the ability to mourn over the suffering of others.”

(Jesus did not choose) the strong ones but the meek ones, in the sense of the gentle ones, i.e., not like Caspar Milquetoast but like Charlie Chaplain, the little tramp who was stamped on by the world, yet is dapper and undaunted to the end, and somehow makes the world more human in the process.

(Jesus did not choose) the ones who are righteous but the ones who hope they will be some day and in the meantime, are well aware that the distance they have to go is still greater than the distance they have come.

(Jesus did not choose) the winners of great victories over evil in the world, but the ones who, seeing it in themselves every time they comb hair in the mirror, are merciful when they find it in others, and in being merciful maybe win the greater victory.

(Jesus did not choose) the totally pure, but the “pure in heart,” the ones who are as shop-worn and clay-footed as the next, but who somehow have kept some inner freshness and innocence intact.

(Jesus did not choose) necessarily the ones who have found peace in its fullness but the ones who, just for that reason, try to bring it about wherever and however they can, be it peace with their neighbors and God, peace and themselves.

Jesus saved for last the ones who side with heaven (on his account) even when any fool can see it seems to be a losing side in worldly terms. Looking into their faces he says, “Blessed are you.” “How fortunate you will be.” “Happy are you.”

Imagine them looking back at him. Now imagine yourself looking back at him. They are not a high-class crowd, peasants and fisher folk, on the shabby side, some of them, not that bright. It doesn’t look like there is a hero among them, Buechner reminds us. How about among us?

They are blessed—and they must know it as they go forward. It is not his hard times ahead he is concerned with but theirs. It is his own meekness, his own mercy, his own peaceful heart from which he speaks. It is their meekness, their mercy, their own peaceful hearts (and ours) that he seeks.

A final word on this day: If the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus delivering the platform of God’s dream and the opportunity is to hear the beatitudes as a commendation to actualize principles of mercy, meekness, peacefulness, and sacrifice, then we give thanks for Joel Atkinson’s ministry and person, for he is indeed “blessed.”

Amen.

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-01-23T14:13:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go on pilgrimage to Israel, and I found that if you go on pilgrimage to Israel with a certain kind of company, you will have all sorts of Biblical experiences. You can step into the Jordan River and re-experience baptism, not exactly where Jesus did it because that’s in the middle of the desert and doesn’t make for a good photo, but in a more picturesque area where there are thousand year old olive trees. You can cruise in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. You can see something called the Jesus boat which is a 2,000-year-old fishing boat, dredged up from the lake floor, that could possibly have been the sort used by Jesus and his disciples. You can even stop in at one of the numerous restaurants on the shore and eat Peter’s fish, a particular sort of fish that the owners assure you was the kind that Simon Peter was catching that day when Jesus called out to follow him. It’s all very authentic, assuming Jesus and the disciples had their own deep fryer.

A biblical experience that has authentically survived the millennia is the one we hear described in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today. The newborn Christian church at Corinth is divided. Factions are forming around different individuals, and power struggles are emerging. Paul begins his letter by summoning the Corinthians to live up to their identity in Christ. In particular, Paul calls them to unity. He appeals to them in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and, as New Testament scholar, J. R. Kirk, points out, we must not skip over this too quickly. The name of Jesus is not only the authority by which Paul calls this church to account, it is the name that makes the Corinthians one church. When Paul later asks, “Were you baptized into the name of Paul?” the obvious answer is no. We were baptized into the name of Jesus. Accordingly, the very basis of his admonition, the name of the Lord Jesus carries with it the diagnosis of their problem and its solution.

The problem is that they are claiming other peoples’ names as their identity markers. The solution is to be united in their common identity in Christ. To put it in another term, the Corinthians are plagued by party spirit. We get a hint at the divisions, even in the fact that one group is reporting to Paul about everyone else. Chloe’s people, who are, perhaps, Chloe’s household, or maybe those who meet for worship in Chloe’s house, bring word to Paul that the church is fracturing. Each group has rallied through a particular leader, and the debate in Corinth revolves around the knowledge and power that each of these teachers embodies. One group in Corinth has rallied to Apollos, an early leader under Paul and the Corinthian church. Elsewhere in the scriptures, Apollos is described as an eloquent man who is powerful in public debate, and such rhetorical force might have formed the rallying point for the Apollos party. It seems to lie behind Paul’s insistence that true proclamation of the Gospel does not require eloquence.

Then we have the place of Cephas, who is traditionally understood to be the apostle Peter, and his position is a bit murkier. It may be that Cephas or his followers introduced theological tensions in Corinth by bringing a sort of law-focused Christianity closer to its Jewish roots. The Corinthians, then, were flocking to smooth rhetoric that lived up to the days’ worldly display of wisdom and Apollos to a Jewish theology proclaimed by Cephas that seemed to have a stronger biblical pedigree, and to their own history, roots, and founder in Paul.

In response to this partisan bickering, Paul brings them back to the story that defines us all as the people of God, the crucifixion of Christ. Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized into the name of Paul? The answer is no, of course not. We are the people of Christ. Kirk reminds us that the cross transforms the value of our actions and our status. Because of the cross, we must learn to view the world differently. And so, as we start reading about the problems confronting the church in ancient Corinth, we will find ourselves invited to a conversion of the imagination, what Paul himself speaks of as being transformed by the renewing of our minds. Paul invites his readers to participate in the story of the cross, a narrative in which all that we think we know about the world, its values, its knowledge, its wisdom, its virtue, is reconfigured by God’s great act of salvation in Christ. The message of the cross, he is saying, is not something that only applies to becoming the people of God, something that can be compartmentalized and referred to only on questions of faith, or on Sunday mornings. It gives shape to the entirety of our lives and the entirety of our life together.

Now it was hard for me to read about the goings on at Corinth without immediately thinking of the state of affairs in our country and of the horrible events that occurred just over a week ago now in Arizona. Of course, no single public figure can be held responsible for the actions of an obviously troubled individual, but I think that there is something to the immediate blame that was placed on the tenor of our national debates. Every day, we are pulled in different directions by voices clamoring for our attention, claiming to represent the right beliefs, the correct way, the only truth. As divisions emerge in our political landscape, the rhetoric grows more passionate, more bombastic, and sometimes violent. Those who don’t agree with us are painted as lesser than us. Their humanity is stripped from them and they become a faceless enemy. It is any wonder, then, that this dis-incarnation can be taken to dangerous extremes, can provide a sense of justification for those who would inflict violence on those they despise.

As we are pulled in increasingly polarized directions by the voices of our politicians and commentators and critics and people in power, let our touchstone be the voice of Jesus in the Gospel today, calling out to us to follow him. Jesus did not eloquently call his disciples, nor did he promise them power or membership in an elite group. He simply invited these young fishermen to follow him, to pattern their lives on his commandments, to love God, and love neighbor, to have a conversion of the imagination, to be renewed. I think that invitation is before us again today. So let us follow him.

Amen.

Second Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-01-16T11:46:00.008-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Surely you have heard that the entire world is off balance. You’ve heard that? As a matter of fact, folks are making lots of money right now writing books speaking to the reality that, at least on the level of the cosmos, we are in an unprecedented paradigm shift. Folks in church circles are also making lots of money writing books talking about what that means for the church. The truth of the matter is it is connected to the hole we have seen in the world in which we live to be living through a time of shift. This has never come so more evident than reading the front page of The Morning Call.

My element is the earth. My ruling planet is Saturn. The symbol of my life for 46 years has been the goat. My stone is garnet. As a good, old-fashioned Capricorn, my life pursuit has been to be proud of my achievements. My vibrant energy coming from the cosmos is powerful and resilient. My secret Capricorn desire is to be admired by family and friends, but who needed astrology to know that?

It seems that everything is off balance now. It seems my whole understanding of who I am, the signs that I look for in the sky, seem now to be pointing to a new truth. I am a Sagittarius, for God’s sake. I am not so sure about my element, the fire. I am so fond of Saturn as my guiding planet that I don’t know if I can give my allegiance to Jupiter. I have to tell you, there are some advantages to the archer as opposed to a goat, but my stone – I’ll never go turquoise. My life pursuit is to live the good life. I am not sure what that means, but it sounds good. The vibration for my new Sagittarian existence coming from the cosmos is overly expressive, leading to frequent burnouts. I have no interest in that. Ah, but my secret Sagittarian desire is to make a difference in the world. Maybe I’ll take that one.

OK, I’m making fun. For one thing, isn’t it amazing what one person in one small part of the world might decide on our behalf? That is that the cosmos has shifted and the paper publishes it all over, whatever. This is really a cheap way of taking astrology, that for which many look to the sky—you know what astrology is about. Astrology is about trying to find the signs that point to some piece of meaning in life. That is astrology. For some of us, it is frivolous and fun. For others, it is a bit more serious. For me, it’s frivolous and fun. My point, however, is that in all of humanity, we do share one thing. That is that we are all trying to make sense, find purpose, and find things with which we can align ourselves. We are often looking in places for the signs that will reveal these truths to us. This, I think, we all can agree on.

That is a long way of getting into John’s Gospel which, if you have ever studied John’s Gospel to understand what John is trying to tell us, revealed to us the truth that John is trying to convey to us. You have to understand that John is about signs. John’s entire Gospel is filled with signs. Signs, you know, are those things that point to something we cannot necessarily see or put our hands our hands on, but signs that point us to a truth about something. In today’s Gospel, we engage John’s first sign. That, of course, comes after his setting the stage, the theological and poetic stage. In those first 18 verses of the first chapter where John, in that beautiful poetry, tells us about God acting not only in the lives of individuals, but even more so, acting to come to redeem the entire creation, the entire cosmos. In John’s Gospel, God is hitting the “justify” button on the computer, resetting the stage. In today’s portion of that Gospel, John now translates that setting and begins to tell the real life historical story of how, indeed, God is pushing the justify button.

The sign that John gives us is, of course, in the person of John the Baptist. John makes the move to begin to tell the story of how the Word became flesh, it being rooted in the historical event in the person of one named Jesus, who one day walked across the wilderness and walked toward this figure, John. It is John the Baptist who John, the gospeler, chooses to tell us and point to the truth of what is happening. For John the Baptist, he will be the first signpost. You remember his words, not all that long ago in Advent and, of course, in Christmastide, when John says “I am not the light, but I have come to point to the light.” Well, today is the day. The light has walked into John the Baptizer’s presence, and he becomes the first witness in John’s Gospel because he sees the Holy Spirit descending and resting on Jesus like a dove. John points to the truth, he witnesses to it, and he announces to all who will hear it. What is this truth? This person is the Son of God. This person is the Lamb of God. John the Baptizer will be a witness and an announcer to a truth that is to be revealed, that God has come in time and in history, not only to redeem the cosmos, but also to deliver those who would hear him and receive him, and become children of God like him.

John’s Gospel announces to us today the code of discipleship that is to follow and bear witness to this Son of God, to this Lamb of God. To John’s audience, Son of God would have been a familiar term that they were expecting to hear and to see. It is one that they would hear, and know that God was acting in a particular way to bring a message of hope and freedom to a particular people. The Lamb of God, to an audience filled with Jews, certainly would have conjured up their knowledge and expectations that in that person, the way to freedom would be through sacrifice. This is the Son of God. This is the Lamb of God, and the entire rest of John’s Gospel would be about Jesus performing those signs, pointing to redemption. All those who would hear it would need to do is follow, and then witness to what they saw. So today in John’s Gospel, the sign points to that code of discipleship, to follow in witness the Son of God, the Lamb of God.

Here are the three things that I really want you to leave here with today. What does it mean to encounter this Lamb of God, this Son of God? These are the three things that I think it means that we are called to follow and then witness. Number one: All of us are in need of redeeming. All of us are in need of redeeming. Number two: We can’t do the redeeming. We just can’t pull off the redeeming. Have you noticed? Somehow, as hard as we might try, whatever program or campaign or statement or ideology we seem to come up with, we human beings, not just now in our time but forever historically, we can’t seem to get it all right. We can’t do the redeeming. Number one is admitting that we are in need of redeeming. Number two is that we can’t do the redeeming ourselves. The third thing is that once we encounter the one who redeems us, we must be a witness to that redemption.

Case in point: I was fortunate enough some years ago to spend a couple of days in study with Rabbi Ed Friedman, who was the incarnation of Family Systems Theory. (Actually he was the second generation of Family Systems Theory, but he is the one whom we knelt before to learn about Family Systems Theory.) In the class I attended, someone innocently asked Ed Friedman, “Rabbi Friedman, why do you think people come to church or to temple?” He said people come to church and to temple to show their home movies. Do you get that? What he is saying is that all of us take our humanity, we take our brokenness, we take our dysfunction, we take our sin, we take our failure, we take our hope, we take our joys, and we bring them to a safe place, and we show those movies on one another and on God. Sometimes that’s not so pretty. Sometimes it’s absolutely beautiful. You get it?

It’s been interesting to me to reflect again and to watch, which is what I do, reflect and watch our common response to the shootings in Arizona. If you pay attention to our national tragedies, if you pay attention to the home movies that are shown, isn’t the dialog that rises up around such events interesting? This isn’t the first time we have had a tragedy – it’s an awful tragedy, but it’s not the first time. If you pay attention at any tragedy, our response to it is to bring our home movies. That’s why, pastorally, when there are difficult things going on in our own personal lives, it is such emotional labor because all of our home movies come to be shown. Are you getting this yet? Isn’t it interesting that the dialog that occurs in the midst of a national tragedy raises things to which, perhaps, we need to pay attention? It’s not about what points people are making. It’s about what movies they are showing.

David Brooks, writing in his op ed piece in The New York Times in response to the shooting, showing his own home movies, perhaps offers us what I am really trying to get at. Making a statement about our common place that perhaps as a common group in our nation today, he is suggesting that perhaps what we need is to come to terms with our human limitations. Perhaps we are trying so hard to figure things out for ourselves that we are getting lost in our rhetoric and in our ideologies. Failing to name the reality, which is my point, a theological reality, we need redemption. All of us need redemption. We need to admit that we need redemption. We need to admit that we can’t do that redeeming on our own. We have tried, historically, and we have failed. When we come, you and I, into the realization that we hand our failure and our weakness and our sin over to a greater power than ours, then and only then, can we meet redemption. When we meet redemption, we need to witness to it.

David Brooks writes this about coming to that place of understanding our need for redemption: “Redemption is a tree with deep roots and without the roots, it can’t last.” So what are those roots? They are failure and sin and weakness and ignorance. I know it’s not Lent yet, but it seemed like today would be a good day to have it. We need redemption.

Tomorrow we will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in our country. Tomorrow, in Sayre Hall, there will be a group from the Lehigh Valley who will gather in celebration, and I have been asked to say a few words at that celebration. The words that I have been asked to reflect on are about the progress of race relations in our country. I am not sure why I agreed to that, and I don’t know what I’m going to say yet, to be honest, other than we need redemption. All of us need a little redemption. We can’t do that redeeming by ourselves. For those of us who are people of faith, we must come to that place where we recognize the waters of baptism in which we have been baptized and know there is one who promises us redemption, and that admitting our weaknesses and our sin can only lead us to that place of redemption.

I tell this anecdote. As a young priest in Virginia in charge of my first congregation, somewhere in the mid to late ‘90s, you will remember that there was a rash of church burnings in the south, African-American congregations’ buildings being burned. I received a telephone call from an 80-some-year-old woman who was a member of the Presbyterian congregation down the road. I didn’t know her from Adam, but she invited me to a meeting at her house. Someone in my congregation advised me that this would be a good invitation to accept. So I went to the meeting and there I found myself sitting with three other clergy, me and this 80-year-old woman and three other clergy—myself, the Presbyterian pastor, the Methodist pastor, and the pastors and the deacons of the black Baptist church down the road. She looked at us and she said, “I have lived here all my life and I’ve lived in the south, and I’ve lived through much, and I’ve seen this movie before. They’re burning churches again. What are you all going to do about it?”

You see, we are in need of redeeming. We can’t do that redeeming by ourselves. When we come together, which is what we did, to name again before one another and God that we are in need of redeeming, that we can’t do that redeeming ourselves, and we invite the Lamb of God, the Son of God, to come with us and be with us, and to hand over our weakness and vulnerability, our prejudices and our sins, and ask for them to be redeemed. We are met there, by that Lamb of God, and then we are called to witness to it. In this scripture today, Jesus says to those who would listen, “Come and see,” just come and see. So I leave you with these words from Reinhold Niebuhr, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Amen.

1 Christmas

2010-12-26T13:56:00.002-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

John 1:1-18

Love Came Down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, love divine;

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,

Love incarnate, love divine;

Worship we our Jesus:

But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,

Love be yours and love be mine,

Love to God and all men,

Love for plea and gift and sign.

The hymnal 1982 is in possession of two beautiful Christmas hymns that are music put to the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Christmas Carol” put to music is known to us as hymn 112 or “in the bleak midwinter.” Her poem, which I just read, entitled “Christmastide” put to music is our hymn 84, of course, or best known to us as “Love came down at Christmas.”

Christina Rossetti’s life was not an easy or simple one. She was born in London in 1830, the daughter of an Italian poet, her brother Dante Gabriel a renowned pre-Raphaelite painter and poet. Christina grew herself in the shadow of her famous family but was no slouch when it came to poetry. What makes Christina Rossetti an inspiration to us today, is her spiritual faith. She, a devout Anglo-Catholic who embraced deeply the spirituality and practice of the Oxford movement in the mid 1800’s, was known to have been committed in prayer and practice. Her faith and devotion were most impressive because of the challenges of her life. Most of her life she struggled not only against the alleged abuses of her father, but also from disfiguring effects of Graves disease and eventually a number of years struggle with cancer.

It is true that her life was not easy or simple, and at the same time remarkable and renewing to receive the simply the beauty of her faith in this lovely hymn where she expresses an experience Jesus as the gift of love capable of transcending the challenges of her life. It is this very transcendence we celebrate in the mystery of the Incarnation, that is, God is with us.

St. John’s poetry rises up this day and meets Christina Rossetti’s. St. John tell us,

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'") From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”

We have received grace upon grace John tells us, in this “Word that has become flesh”. A grace perhaps that can transcend even the most challenging things of the human experience, illness and abuse in Christina Rossetti’s circumstance, seem to be transcended and beauty emerges from the core of that being, and she calls that grace…“LOVE.” Love came down at Christmas.

If we say we allow Christina Rossetti’s words then to bring song to our lips and we join her in saying that we believe that love came down at Christmas, then what are we really saying?

I suggest that we are saying that each day we choose to believe in that which the world would sometimes have us not. Believing is about giving our heart to something. That something may not ever be discovered in an evidentiary proceeding but in a much more powerful realm. The word belief is derived from the word Credo or Creed. The meaning of which is more powerfully discovered in the notion of “giving our hearts” to something, rather than fully understanding something. I give my heart to the mystery that are the loves of my life. When I say I give my heart to my spouse, my children, my family, my friends, my fellow congregants, my fellow citizens; I do so never fully agreeing with or sometimes even coming close to understanding them. Yet I do say I believe in them, that is, I give my heart to them. When I say I believe that love came down at Christmas, I do so never fully comprehending or understanding how it this world sometimes fails to embrace justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and peace. My “belief” however, is that God’s very heart longs for these things for his creation. God leans heavily on the side of these things hoping to pull us along.

Everyday we have a choice of “belief,” a choice as to where we will “give our hearts.” Where will we lean? For me, I’ll “give my heart” to the side of justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and peace. Can you imagine a world where there was no “belief” that love came down at Christmas? this world sometimes fails to embrace justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and peace. My “belief,” however, is that God’s very heart longs for these things for his creation. God leans heavily on the side of these things, hoping to pull us along. Every day we have a choice of “belief,” a choice as to where we will “give our hearts.” Where will we lean? For me, I’ll “give my heart” to the side of justice, mercy, compassion

Christmas Day 2010

2010-12-25T13:53:00.002-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

One of the things I love about this Cathedral’s Sanctuary is the splendid mix of light and colors that shine through the stained glass at various times of the year and the day. This is most noticeable if you can sit with lights down or off. You may not notice if you are not looking at how the hewed colors shine through that magnificent Rose window of ours, slowly making their way throughout the day toward the altar as the day progresses. Hues of green, blue, yellow, paint the pews and aisles with gentle strokes of color. From the original entrance, this side of the Baptistry, the light in the late afternoon sneaks in and shines off of the pulpit, making the brass “face” of the pulpit literally become translucent. If you look at it with a fixed gaze, it really does come to life.

It’s hard to say this was done by design, but nonetheless it happens that as the day wears on, the light from rear and side do meet near the steps that lead to the chancel. It is the intersection of this light that in the right frame invites us to consider a deeper sense beyond our intellect of a mysterious and holy intersection.

This Christmas morning you and I are invited into a mysterious and holy intersection. The feast of the Incarnation is what we call this celebration and it is the bringing to “light,” if you will, the intersection of the human and the divine! We make a theological and a life statement in our prayers and in our songs this day that God brings to us in the person of Jesus, one who will become our Christ. God is acting in an intentional intertwining of the human and the divine. This mystery we celebrate invites us to consider that God’s love, hope, and presence intersect with our human limitation: our fears, our despairs, our sin. This intersection gives birth, not to a passive response, but to an action, that is to place our hearts in trust that the babe in the manger grows into full stature, and through his life, teaching, and sacrifice, reveals to us a righteous life-giving path to follow!

In his Gospel, John brings speech to this mysterious intersection in poetry. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.

Children of God we are indeed. We stand this day in an intersection of light and hope. How shall we follow?

Perhaps we follow the words of a then young preacher who, during the very years that this wonderful structure was being built to house a vibrant congregation in South Bethlehem, was coming into his own as Rector of Trinity Church Philadelphia. The young Philips Brooks, best known as Rector of Trinity Church Copley Square Boston, and then Bishop of Massachusetts, is the author of the text of one of our most beloved hymns, O Little Town of Bethlehem. First his words invite us to sing out an invitation to this holy child to be made manifest in us.

O holy Child of Bethlehem!

Descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin and enter in,

Be born in us to-day.

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell;

O come to us, abide with us,

Our Lord Emmanuel!

Second, in a short exhortation from a sermon, to have our lives reflect the divine in our human existence: "Do not pray for easy lives, but pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, but pray for power equal to your tasks. Then the accomplishing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself and the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God."

Merry Christmas. Amen.

IV Sunday of Advent

2010-12-19T10:54:00.002-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Matthew 1:18-25

Come thou long expected Jesus, born to set they people free,

from our fears and sins release us,

let us find our rest in thee.

These are the words of the hymn we sing in the season of Advent, the bringing of our hopes to the lips of our song. Come thou long EXPECTED Jesus. Set us free from fear and sin so that we might find our rest in thee.

Have you been pondering Archdeacon Cluett’s words of last week? If you missed his sermon from last week, his words challenged us to think about what exactly it is we EXPECT of this Jesus our voices raised in song and longing for. He reminded us that when it comes to God’s story, we best be careful about our expectations.

It is the unexpected things of Jesus I want to explore with you today. I’d like to open them with you like gifts that have been left for us under a tree. As we open these gifts of the unexpected Jesus, I would like to invite you to join me in examining the mantra of small children all over the world and see if the same spirit rises up in you when you open these unexpected gifts.

You know the mantra I speak of. It goes like this; “Oh, oh, oh, oh, look, look, look. I got it, I got it, I got it. I got just what I wanted! Thank you, thank you, thank you. How could he have known?”

We turn to the story in the gospel according to Matthew to discover these unexpected gifts. I don’t believe it takes great scholarly surveillance of this scripture to understand that Joseph’s initial response to the news that a child is about to be gifted leads to the “Oh, look, look, look, look; goody, goody, goody, goody; I got it, I got it, I got it. It’s just what I wanted. How could he have known?”

Instead, what we glean from the story today are the unexpected gifts that are all wrapped up in this story of this God event. It is no stretch, whatsoever, to say that this is not the way Joseph had imagined things going. It is safe to say the same is true for Mary.

I believe the unexpected gifts that are present for them and for us in this story are a loss of control and a loss of power. Let us further unwrap this idea to explore just how I might suggest a loss of control and a loss of power could, indeed, be spiritual gifts.

Whatever plans Joseph may have made in his engagement with Mary, whatever expectations they may have shared about their life together, certainly had been dashed. We can say for certain this is not the way he had planned it. If this story is going to be more than just a story of humble beginnings for a young Jewish family and become instead a profound act of God in a specific time in history, then Joseph would need to yield whatever control he had left in this situation. This yielding of control would be most important. Joseph has a choice to make in this story. Joseph easily could have been within his rights to exercise the control given him under the law and separated himself from Mary without any obligation. His instinct, of course, was to exercise that control and walk away from Mary. This, it seems again, was his plan until, with a little visit from a friendly angel in a dream, he yields his control and instead chooses to follow an uncertain, but Godly path. This yielding would lead him to be there as a helpmate on this journey of God’s salvation. This important yielding would have Joseph then present, leading Mary to safe harbor where God’s promise would take on flesh, born humbly on a cold night in a stable, or perhaps even a cave. This important yielding would keep Joseph by Mary’s side and following his prompter, the angel, he would usher his new family to Egypt, to safe harbor from the evil intentions of Herod. Though the scriptures do not give us great detail from this point forward, we believe, of course, that Joseph would continue to be present, raising this child, nurturing him with his mother, and teaching him the family trade.

I contend the gift delivered to Joseph by an angel of the Lord is permission to “lose control.” Might there also be a gift for you and me here? The human instinct, of course, is to be in control, to plan life, execute life, and be masters of our destiny. It seems this God thing unexpectedly asks us to let go at times. I might suggest that it is in those particular times, when our instinct is begging us to swim harder against the current, that we might be missing the gift to “lose control,” that is to let go and let the current take us. Certainly Joseph’s intuition strongly encouraged him to exercise control, divorce Mary, and move on with his life. Instead, he yielded, and teaches us how to follow.

It is worthy, then, for us to consider the unexpected things in life that might offer us a gift of “losing control” and an opportunity to explore how it is we follow God. How is that mantra feeling to you right now? If the gift of losing control is about our learning how to follow God, then the gift of “loss of power” is about learning how God follows us. This is the next unexpected gift I would like to explore with you.

What do we expect of power? We are powerful, educated, self-sufficient, and competent. We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, economically, politically, militarily. I offer this with no judgment, no good, no bad, just as a statement of fact. Certainly our living with this reality informs the way we expect to experience power! Certainly what we do not expect of power is to lose it.

Joseph and Mary, in their time, certainly had a different expectation of power. Being of a challenged economic class, they understood who had the power – Rome and the religious establishment of the day. They, themselves, may not have been powerful citizens economically, politically, and certainly not militarily. However, Joseph understood the power of the law and the promises of the prophets. Their expectation of power from the God they followed could also have been consistent with the hope of a powerful messiah who would set them free militarily, economically, and politically.

What we learn from the story, however, is that what God is up to in this drama is something they never could have expected in a million years. God would reveal power in a new way, humbly wrapped in swaddling clothes, the hope of the world enfleshed in a babe would begin from that day forward to reveal a power of God’s advocacy that would give birth to the most transformative movement in history. The name of this advocate is Emmanuel, God is with us!

So, let us open our gifts: loss of control and loss of power, and see how it is these things can be for us a gift of opportunity to follow and be followed so near with God.

Many among us know an experience of being completely at the mercy of circumstances that seemingly render us without control or power. Some of us may not have had an experience like this yet. In fact, some of us may fear it greatly because we are conditioned by the culture that helplessness may come because of our lack of effort. The truth of the matter is that there comes a time for all of us when we are without control and power. There is no employment coming quickly, no matter how hard we try. There is no cure for a disease from which we may suffer. There is no crop that can come from a dry or barren land. There is no control over the minds and actions of dictators or leaders of countries where a lasting peace seems to be their last desire. There is no control over an addiction that has gripped us. There will always be a time when our organs will stop working and death will be ours. There is no bringing back to life one whom we loved and have lost in death. There are times when we are truly without control or power.

It is then, in that very moment or circumstance, that perhaps we can unexpectedly begin to understand Emmanuel as an advocate. That is when someone or something bigger than us stands with us profoundly in our brokenness. That is when someone or something bigger than us cries out on our behalf when life has muted our hope, and will pick us up and carry us when our legs and feet succumb. That is when someone or something bigger than us will hold onto our faith until we can hold it again for ourselves. Powerless and without control, when we know we cannot go it alone, we may find new ways to follow and be followed.

Come thou long expected Jesus,

from our fears and sins release us,

let us find our rest in thee.

Amen.

The Third Sunday of Advent

2010-12-12T10:30:00.002-05:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Those of you who are of a certain age may remember one of my all-time favorite authors, Loren Eisley. For those who have not read him, he was an anthropologist, a naturalist, scholar, poet, teacher, and a wonderful storyteller. He is most remembered for his books The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe.

A fundamental learning from nature for him was: What happens is not always what we expect. Pretty simple, right? But hard for humans to remember. He writes that we thought we had wrapped up the universe in a neat package of law and order. Scientists understood most things, and they were rational and dependable. The universe was governed by Law, not by chance, and the Law was unchangeable, immutable.

He wrote, in the 1960’s, that we were beginning to discover surprises in the universe, things we had not expected, things we could not possibly have foreseen. (What would Eisley be saying, do you think, if he knew about today’s New Physics and such things as Quantum Theory, and Chaos theory, and the ultimate Theory of Everything).

There is something about our universe, our life, he says, “that slips through the fingers of the mind.” There is something beyond the rational, the thinkable, that points toward the unexpected, to an unforeseeable future. He was saying to scientists, and to all of us, “don't be to sure; keep looking, but don’t be too sure; we don't know exactly what is going to happen.” Eisley quotes Heraclitus, "If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult."

Was there ever a better theme for Advent than that? "Come thou long expected Jesus..." Was anyone more expected than the Messiah? A whole nation, a whole people were expecting him. They had been waiting for hundreds of years for his coming.

They were looking everywhere for him. And every time that they saw someone like John the Baptist they wondered whether he might be the One, the Messiah. The hope of his coming kept them going through the humiliation and the indignity of their exile and then living as a conquered people under the Babylonians and then the Romans. They certainly did expect a Messiah.

And yet when he did come, they didn't know it because he wasn't the Messiah they were expecting. Not even John the Baptist recognized him. They expected him to come with a fanfare, to cause a big stir. But he didn't. He came quietly. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, “probably no child born into the world that day seemed to have poorer prospects than did Christ.”

Some few did recognize him - but a precious few. Most people expected a Messiah who would liberate them from Rome. He didn't. He liberated them from sin and guilt. They expected a Messiah who would dazzle them with special feats. He didn't. He healed the sick, fed the hungry and ministered to people according to their need.

They expected a Messiah who would reaffirm the Law; instead he talked about love.

They expected a Messiah who would make life easier: reduce the taxes, increase employment, bring down prices. He didn't. He talked about crosses, not crowns. He talked about changing oneself, as a first step in changing the situation in which one lives.

They expected a Messiah who would be theirs alone. He wasn't. He came for all. But most of all they expected a Messiah who would be a smashing success. He wasn't.

People just weren't ready for this unexpected Christ. The Scholars of the Jesus Seminar give this warning in their introduction to The Five Gospels: "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you"

Now we approach another Christmas, the middle of another season of Advent... a season of preparing and expecting. We know that Christmas will come. The calendar always, eventually, gets around to December 25th, and if we are patient we will enjoy another Christmas celebration. We know that.

And we also know that Christ will come -- and instinctively, we look for him to come in certain ways, and we feel certain he will come in just that way. He will break through, here and there, the crust of our fierce and competitive world. He will soften a hard heart here and there. He will heal an open wound. Miracle of miracles, he will be the occasion for the exchange of love and affectionate greetings and gifts.

But there is also the sense that he is always the unexpected Christ. We expect him to come in the usual place, like in Church. But for many of us, he will come in the street or an office or a factory or a laboratory or the unemployment office or the playing field or in the market or classroom. We expect him to come in the music of the carols we sing and have loved all our lives. He will, but for many others he will come through the driving beat of a rock band or in the rhyming of a rap song.

We expect him to come in our liturgy. He will. But he will also come to those who don't worship at all, ever. We expect him to come in the structure of our comfortable lives. He will. But he will also come to some little shed far removed from our lives which has no comfort at all.

Just as he comes from the mud of a stable, he comes to muddy the waters of our expectations, almost as if he were saying, “When I come, I come as I am. If you don't expect me, you will not find me. If you do expect me, don't be surprised if I am not the one you expected.”

So who is it you expect this Advent? Do you expect this one or another? “Is he the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” We join with the crowd around Jesus to hear his answer. And we hear words of promise, words that hold the past and the future together in a present hope: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

So are you waiting for this Messiah, the One who will be the sign of God's mercy and steadfastness and loving-kindness and salvation; or for some other one? Where would we find such a One? Perhaps sitting next to you, or across the living room or in the next office or across the sales counter or just around the next corner. What do you expect?

The kingdom is present, Jesus is present whenever there is witness and proclamation, healing and reconciliation, feeding and housing, holding and caring offered by those who live in his hope. We are witnesses to this kingdom and to this Christ. We need to bring the Good News of this Christ; we need to make this Messiah known.

Please pray with me. Sharpen our minds, 0 Lord, humble our spirits, and open our hearts to take in the love that once became flesh, that comes among us again and again. Help us, not only, to take him in, but to let others see him in us. We ask in his name, by his power, and for his sake; for he is the one who comes to set us free. Amen.

Second Sunday of Advent 2010

2010-12-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

Today in our readings we have dueling images, and at first it might seem that they are meant to contradict each other. I think instead they are meant to be parallels, across the millennia between the writing of the Old Testament and the New, and between the times of Jesus and the times we live in, today, now, in this Advent. In the midst of this time and space travel from prophet to prophet we find hope, and we find encouragement.

Isaiah gives us the literal family tree of the Messiah- an almost cinematic picture of a slender green shoot emerging from a dried brown tree stump, a sign of life and strength from a thing thought long dead and gone. We know that this bit of green hope is King David, and the branch that springs from the roots will grow broad to support a series of limbs linking him to Solomon to Jehosaphat to Uzziah to Amon to Zerubbabel and all the patriarchs and matriarchs in between and eventually to Jesus, with some variation depending on which of the numerous genealogies one finds in the scriptures is used.

So there we have an earthly sign of the groundwork being laid for the coming of the Lord, but then we get into the more supernatural, though still of the earth. Isaiah lays out for us a scene of the world righting itself back to Eden, the enmity of nature that started at the fall disappearing, and a scene worthy of a Christmas card taking its place- fierce beasts and gentle lambs existing peacefully, side by side, the vulnerable interacting with the predator with impunity, the small child subverting the normal way of things and ruling from a place of gentleness. This small child has come to represent Jesus for us Christians as we read this Old Testament prophet, and the picture created is a comforting one, a warming one- all the instinctual feelings a baby brings about in us, plus the knowledge that this child will grow into the one we follow to this day.

It is a soul-warming image and one that gives sustenance during the bitter cold of winter, but it can be almost too sweet, too simple, and to counteract any chance of us sentimentalizing the life that Jesus lived by reducing him to just that babe in a manger so many years ago, we have the gospel, and we have John.

We have John, scary John, with his camel hair and locusts and honey, John who really doesn’t fit in anywhere, who is an outsider and antisocial and has claimed the wasteland of the desert as his own, is in our readings today, I believe, to remind us of that other side of Jesus, the one who drove out the moneychangers from the temple with a lash made of ropes, the one who spoke truth to power, the one who is coming again with a winnowing fork to separate the wheat from the chaff, who will tear down the trees that bear no fruit, who can purify all of us with the waters of baptism and with the unquenchable fire of the Holy Spirit.

This is not the Jesus of the Christmas card, unless you send very bizarre Christmas cards.

In talking to other sermon-writing friends this week, I found that we all struggled with talking about this triumphant, apocalyptic Jesus, and instead were all hedging our bets with the little child who led from Isaiah. It felt almost rude, one fellow priest said, to spoil the party and the fun of Advent and the celebration of Christmas with the dread of judgment, that was what Lent was for, and though he was only half joking, the temptation is very strong to worship the baby and neglect the reality of the man. These images are dueling and difficult sometimes, but complementary.

Isn’t that the great miracle we await in Advent, that we celebrate on Christmas day, the birth of a homeless child to a family of immigrants, a child both fully human and fully divine?

We see in the biblical life stories of Jesus, before he becomes the Christ at Easter, a very human person, struggling against injustice, trying to teach his followers, trying to get this thing he was born to do right before the death he knows is coming. This is a struggle we can all identify with, I think. And then we also have Jesus, the fully divine, who can see history spreading out behind him and the future before, and holds us, lovingly, in the tension of the present- we can identify with this as well, having turned to this Jesus once and again for comfort, for strength.

And so this, I think, is why we have John the Baptist in our readings today. He is sent in all his locusty fearsomeness to make straight the path, to prepare, truly, the way for the Lord, who will come to us in a few short weeks, but also to remind us, along with Isaiah, that our Lord is not one dimensional. Just as Jesus shares our humanity, he shares our human condition.

We all have in ourselves bits of power and powerlessness, and at one point or another we have all taken advantage of our positions of power in a way that we knew we should not have. In a way this is the most basic definition of sin- we’ve acted in a way that has separated us from God, and from each other. Luckily, as Christians, we are able to confess our sins, to beg forgiveness of our community and our Lord, and return to God, again and again.

This, I think, is why John was castigating the Pharisees and Sadducees, the ones who went out from the city and the temple into the desert to be washed in the waters of baptism by him. He thought they were there as a precautionary measure, covering all their bases without really believing, just in case this John guy was right about the coming Lord. The Greek used in the gospel doesn’t shed much light on why the Pharisees and Sadducees were out in the desert in the first place. It could be read that they came to be baptized, or to protest against the baptizing going on. Either constructs a narrative that is believable, preachable, but I think it was the former, that they came to be baptized by John. I’ll even go a step beyond John himself, I think they truly wanted the life that he offered, truly wanted to be free of the burdens and postures of their lives, and saw that chance in the purification that he offered them. They understood that in every one of us there is good and bad, and even through the hyperbole of John’s preaching in the wilderness, they saw a chance for unification of those sides, for salvation and wholeness in God.

First Sunday of Advent 2010

2010-11-28T10:41:00.000-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

Some years ago, we experienced our first ever hurricane. Hurricane Isabella, a name I shan’t forget, as it is shared with my daughter who broke her arm in the aftermath of this hurricane. My memory of this hurricane is one of living in the uncertainty of expecting something of which I had no expectations. Having never been through a hurricane before, I gathered some candles, a few flashlights, put our kids to bed, and took on the normal routine of the evening, reading, checking emails, and watching some evening TV. When the winds came with ferocity, the lights went out, and there we sat in darkness as the night grew longer and more anxious. However, my expectation was that it would pass, that the darkness would yield to light, and our lives would go on the next day. Indeed, we would spend the night in darkness, listening to ferocious winds, and we did wake to the morning’s light, a new day. Life would go on; in fact, we would go to clear the few limbs that had fallen in the driveway and me to the store to get some coffee. (No power, you see). It was then I realized how unprepared I really was for this event. There would be no coffee, no quick return to the daily routine, for outside of my little driveway lay the chaos of the night before: downed trees, power lines, and surely NO Coffee–no one had power. It would only dawn on me hours later, in the afternoon as dusk promised, that there would be more nights in darkness to come, how many I had no idea; but almost three weeks I never imagined. To say I was unprepared is an understatement, and indeed for days to come, I would come to a deep appreciation of the dance between the light and the dark.

Advent I, and today our Collect of the Day captures the great paradoxical themes of Advent: darkness and light, fear and hope, anxiety and promise. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, implores early followers of the message of Jesus that it’s time to wake up and put on the armor of light. There is a dance between the darkness and the light, between fear and hope, between anxiety and promise. These are the great paradoxes of faith and life, and I suspect all of us live in these paradoxes.

Most of us, I suspect, dance the dance between light and the dark in our lives and, in fact, I would say, in many cases, we may feel unprepared for the fact of darkness in our lives and in the world, and equally unprepared for the hope of the light.

For people of faith, Advent is the hanging on to the reality of life (found in the real life), living in the tension between the darkness and the light, between the fears of our lives and the hopes of them, between the anxieties found in uncertainty and the promise of a peace that passes all understanding.

“Advent” means “coming,” and the themes found today in the Gospel is what Jesus seems to be describing as an “invasion.” "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father…Keep awake therefore, for you do not know the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.”

The invasion, of course, is what Fred Buechner describes as “an invasion of holiness.” This is what advent is about: an invasion of holiness smack down in the midst of that space between darkness and light, fear and hope, anxiety and promise. Advent is “coming.”

Buechner writes, “What is coming into the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not yet come in fullness. Only the hope of it has come, only the longing for it has come. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows is also in us. We watch and wait for holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark.”

The eye of the storm, by the way, came in the midst of the darkest part of the night. It was marked by calm in such stark contrast to the ferocity of the winds we had heard before. The quiet was almost poetry. The candle lit across the room spread light on the beauty of the quiet, and I was filled with a sense of awe, even in this between time of the certainty of the darkness and anticipation of what would come next. It was a moment of holiness. In that moment of peace, I poignantly knew this truth. It was the Light I longed and hoped for. I think this is the Advent Truth. Brothers and sisters, put on the armor of Light.

Christ the King

2010-11-21T16:51:00.001-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

There have been and are all types of rulers or kings throughout history. The American experience of Kings, of course, is painted with a despotic king who taxed and answered push back to that tax with an authority in the form of troops. Most images of kings or rulers we conjure from history paint pictures, at the least, of wealth and stature, a hope for reason and a spirit of common good; but in many cases examples of tyranny, triumphalism, and an authority ensured by military dominance. In mythology or story, the human experience of hopes of “good” or “evil” take their shape in the portraits of kings….the “good king” or the “evil king.”

Today, as we end another liturgical season and prepare to enter into the shadows of the season of Advent, with our eyes fixed on the light that will lead us to God’s hope in the world in the flesh of incarnation, we end our liturgical season with the Feast day of Christ the King. Whether historical or mythological, the chords of our impressions of kingship are at play today.

I suggest to you, whether historical or mythological, the theme of kingship we explore is the authority, the principles, and the proclamation of the Kingdom ushered in by the selfless giving of Jesus on the cross. A quick history lesson may orient us toward our invitation to again be “subjects” of this Kingship.

Pope Pius XI established the great feast of Christ, the King of the Universe, through the encyclical “Quas Primas.” The encyclical was released on December 11, 1925, in the fourth year of Pius’ papacy.

The feast was established in response to a historical time that saw a world coming out of a world war, great political and civil unrest throughout Europe, a rise in the number of dictatorships throughout Europe, and the rise of secularism. Pope Pius’ experience of this time was that many were putting their faith and trust in the promises of secular leaders, the authority of the teachings of the Church were being compromised, the result was war, unrest, triumphalism, and injustice.

The call to the authority of the Kingdom and Kingship of the teachings of Jesus reads like this: “(Christ) must reign in our minds, which should assent with perfect submission and firm belief to revealed truths and to the doctrines of Christ. He must reign in our wills, which should obey the laws and precepts of God. He must reign in our hearts, which should spurn natural desires and love God above all things, and cleave to him alone. He must reign in our bodies and in our members, which should serve as instruments for the interior sanctification of our souls, or to use the words of the Apostle Paul, as instruments of justice unto God (Romans 6:13).”

Jesus was no stranger to the injustices of a political system built on aggression, oppression, and dictatorship. Today, in the Gospel, we find him hanging on the cross, sentenced to capital punishment by an unjust system in response to a man and his followers’ campaign of peaceful advocacy to ignite in people the love God had for them, to invite them to a place of understanding where the challenges of downtrodden lives would be transformed by a spiritual renewal that transcend the literal poverty of their lives. Jesus, mistaken by many as an authority whose “Kingship and Kingdom” might be defined in power, war and aggressive takeover, was instead delivered more powerfully in an act of “sacrifice,” so far opposite violence and terror that the only response an oppressive system of government could imagine was to try to “kill it.” Especially on the cross, the power of the message of transformation through peace and forgiveness is made manifest by Jesus’ handing himself over and, even in his suffering, inviting a repentant sinner into the Kingdom Jesus lords over.

Of course, you and I are then invited to this peaceable Kingdom, to yield to the authority of it, and to take on the noble and difficult task to live in the world the way in which he invites us. This Kingdom asks us to respond to violence, not with swords or weapons, but with prayer and forgiveness, where things are broken we respond with an expectation that it will be made whole, where things are not “right” or “just” we respond with certainty and action to make “it so.” We do so as we stare down the season of Advent because our King is coming, and we behave and believe in the certainty of that coming!

King Jesus, we offer ourselves to you, all our churches to you, as you offer them to us. Make yourself known in them. Make your will done in them. Make our stone hearts cry out for your Kingship. Make us holy and human at the last that we may do the work of Love.

The 25th Sunday after Pentecost

2010-11-14T15:06:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

How about these readings today, hmm? If you came to church bright and early this morning in the hopes of something cheerful and inspiring, you may be rethinking that plan about right now!

In today’s Gospel we hear of the coming destruction of the Temple, false prophets proclaiming a gospel of death, widespread persecution and trials. Theologian Neta Pringle says that there are three signs of the end times:

-impostors will mislead the faithful

-war and conflict will break out, seemingly endless

-natural disasters: famine, plagues, pestilence.

We have all three in this passage from Luke today. It is easy to pity the disciples- they, like many of their contemporaries, are wowed by the splendor and beauty of the Temple in Jerusalem, and are maybe living a little vicariously through its lavishness, taking some pride in its adornments and grandeur, praising their own culture that could come up with something so over the top.

They are simply doing what so many of us do- have you ever paged through an issue of Architectural Digest or some other home design magazine, admiring the luxury, reveling a little in the richness of a home you don’t posses, but would like to? For me it is Dwell magazine, I guess my fantasy home is sleek and modern and free of clutter and dog toys.

But so here are the disciples, hanging out in Jerusalem, admiring the sights, and Jesus turns their world upside down-

“This edifice, this temple that is probably the biggest man-made thing that you have ever seen, which is a wonder of our modern technology? Soon it will be stripped stone from stone, the glory of it will be ground into the dust of the street,” Jesus says.

The disciples immediately ask, when will this happen? Tell us so that we can escape such violence and destruction!

“Well, some other really bad things will happen first, “Jesus replies, “and basically you will think that the world is ending, but it won’t be. Yet.”

What? The disciples would have been amazed, incredulous, frightened, even- they thought they were taking the ancient version of a house tour of the fancy parts of Jerusalem, and now their leader is telling them that their world will end.

“There will be false prophets,” Jesus tells them, “who will claim to speak for me but who will lead you astray. Also, war will break out every where you have ever heard of, but that will just be the beginning. Kingdoms will turn against kingdoms and nations will turn against nations, and then there will be earthquakes, and famines, and plagues- but I forgot to mention that before any of this happens, you personally will be arrested and imprisoned and beaten and some of you killed, all for following me.”

I imagine that the disciples were speechless at this point, shocked into silence- Jesus was telling them that the world would end, soon: false prophets, war, natural disasters- all those signs of the end times, were coming, and I suspect that the disciples were terrified.

False prophets, war, natural disasters- is any of this starting to sound familiar? Add in record unemployment rates and an increasingly alienating political system and potential economic collapse, and Jesus could be talking to us, here, today. Like the disciples, we are finding ourselves in a time when all the things that once were our security are becoming uncertain. Investments that we have always believed to be reliable have failed us, employment opportunities that once seemed endless are now scarce, retirement are postponed, homes are lost, and opportunities to get ahead or even to just keep our heads above water seem nonexistent. It can feel like the ground has fallen out from under our feet.

So what hope does Jesus offer us in the midst of all this darkness?

He does not soothe us with false platitudes, he does not tell us that everything will be alright, that we will be saved- instead he changes the game entirely.

You will suffer, Jesus says, you will be betrayed by those you trusted and some of you will die, but in all this you will keep your faith, and by your endurance you will gain that most precious of possessions- your own soul.

Jesus is not offering us easy comfort; he is offering a radical culture change, a reprioritization that is a gift, though a painful one. We will be stripped of the things that have taken the place of God in our lives- our richly adorned temples, our earthly treasures, we will die to our old lives of getting and buying and having and status, and we will begin to prize those things we took for granted, those things that are priceless- the love of our spouses and partners, our families, our communities, our faith.

In return we will get our souls.

The image Jesus paints for us is one of a phoenix, that mythological bird that, at the peak of its life, bursts into flame and burns into nothing. Our souls, our selves, will rise from the smoldering ashes of our former selves, and we will have been refined by our suffering, empowered by our endurance.

A spiritual director once told me that when we find ourselves in a dry period in our spiritual journey, when we feel distant from God, alone, this is often the precursor to a time of great spiritual development, as if there must be a firm foundation of loss laid down, so that when God breaks open our world and shows us a new way of being in him, we can withstand it, as if we must be emptied so that we can contain the magnificence of the new world God is showing us, one of life and hope.

All Saints' Day

2010-11-07T12:56:00.003-05:00

The Very Rev. Anthony Pompa

Good morning, and on this occasion, we are up to much. On this occasion we gather together to celebrate the feast of All Saints. This is what happens when All Saints’ Day falls on a Monday–we move it to the following Sunday. This is also a day when we welcome new members into the communion of saints as we gather around the baptismal font, as so many before us, and we baptize these three beautiful children in thanksgiving. This is also the day in our common life together when we gather our gifts in thanksgiving to God, that is, our first fruits, the gifts of our time and talent and, particularly on this day, our financial treasure. We gather our estimate of giving cards, that which supports our common mission in ministry. We are up to a lot on this day.

Over the past few weeks, we have heard from various members of this community of faith as they have talked about their spiritual journeys, living life as stewards of God’s great abundance. You probably have been as encouraged and lifted up, as I have, as these reflections were shared. Those who responded in reflection were asked to reply to a series of simple questions as a way to focus their witness. The questions were: Who are you and how long have you been part of the Cathedral? (That was the easiest one.) What ministry or ministries do you participate in? What motivates you to give of your time, talent and treasure to these ministries? Where do you find God in these ministries? We also asked them to thank you, us, each other, this community of faith, for the giving of your time and your talent and your treasure in support of our common mission.

Turn around is fair play is what I have decided, so what I ask of others should also be asked of me, if you don’t mind my walking, as the preacher, the fine line between telling you a little bit about myself and my journey with God. I hope that you will hear it in the spirit in which it is offered, that this story is about God, not so much about me. The Collect of the Day reminds us that we are knit together, saints of God, both the living and those living in the nearer presence of God, those who have died and live in hope of the resurrection, that we are knit together in a mystical communion that is called the body of Christ. I hope you don’t mind my sharing my witness through this lens of All Saints.

I want to first tell you about Rae Bartelt. Rae Bartelt was my kindergarten age Sunday school teacher at St. Mark’s Church in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Rae made her living by working at the county unemployment office. She was a life-long faithful Episcopalian, and she taught that particular grade of Sunday school for over 30 years. As she gathered us, many like me, around, she taught me things that I will never forget–songs, for example, that still, to this day, stick in my head. “A helper kind and good, a helper kind and good, a fireman is a helper, he’s a helper, kind and good.” Anybody know that one? You just kind of insert whoever. And then another one. I’ll do it in King James since we’re reading in King James’ version today. “Praise ye, praise ye, all the little children, God is love, God is love. Praise ye, praise ye, all you little children, God is love, God is love.” Ruth Paul knows that one. These are the things that stick.

In Rae Bartelt’s classroom, in the little chapel to the side where there was a cross and two candles, there was also a multi-colored wooden chair. It was the birthday chair. Of course, we all couldn’t wait until it was our turn to sit in the birthday chair where, in our morning devotions, we would light our candles and for whoever’s birthday it was, special prayers were said and happy birthday would be sung. In one of my very first stewardship lessons, Rae Bartelt would have the birthday boy, in this case, me, bring a gift for God in thanksgiving for the gift of life that God had given me. Ah, this is a stewardship lesson. The lesson was that God was interested in me, that my life was the gift and the appropriate response to that gift was me, all of me, in that chair, being nurtured in that communion and community of saints.

As I grew a little bit, I decided that I wanted to be an acolyte, that I wanted to serve. I wanted to do that because my three brothers were acolytes and I wanted to do what they were doing. That’s not necessarily true anymore. But, believe it or not, there was a time when I was known as Tiny Tony, and I was a little bit too young for the acolyte corp. Though I expressed my desire to serve on the altar, I was told “you’re just a little too tiny, Tony.” (I’ve not heard that too much recently.) I went to John Diehl, who was our interim rector. I think some of you might have known John Diehl who now lives in the nearer presence of God. I begged him, could I please acolyte? He said, “Tony, you’re just a little too tiny.” But my uncle, Bill, who was really my great uncle who served a long life and was retired, (he was a military captain and we sometimes called him Captain Bill), was the acolyte master. I threw myself on his mercy and he advocated for me. So the rule was waived and I was trained as an acolyte. Tiny Tony took his place, reaching to light the candles. Uncle Bill was one of those people who faithfully served his community of faith. It was a time in the church when he, quite literally, went and recruited the acolytes. He would get in his car on a Sunday morning and he would drive around town. He would pick up the acolytes in his car, making sure they were there, and he would drive us home. On one particular grey November day, I remember Uncle Bill driving us home and my sitting in the back of his old blue Chevy. As he drove along the Lehigh River that day, I can remember being a nine- or ten-year-old and looking out at the Lehigh River, where I heard a still, small voice, literally speaking to my heart. The voice was not that of my Uncle Bill. It was a still, small voice that spoke from inside my heart, and it said “I love you. I love you.”

When I was 13, my father made the difficult and painful decision to divorce my mother. Life as I had known it would change dramatically. Everything I knew and trusted and believed in was crumbling around me as my father left. I would lean on that still, small voice of love harder than I ever had before. As a 13-year-old in the midst of that chaos, I threw myself, with faith and with doubt, into the one place of mercy that I believed would be constant, and that was in my relationship with God and in my church community. I leaned on God big time, and I leaned on my brothers and sisters in church big time. Suddenly, my definition of family was redefined and expanded. I relied on the youth group that met every Sunday. I took to them the disruption of my life, the pain, and the grief. I threw my confidences on my parish priest, as did my family. People like Betty Benscoter, Charlie and Sarah McGhee, Peter Pocalycko, Hilda Burnhauser, Sylvia Redline, and the list goes on and on and on, of those fellow parishioners who, joining together, knew of the circumstances of my family. They not only bound together and supported us, leading us through rough times, but became that holy fabric that would lift me up and offer me in thanksgiving.

In that experience, my spirituality grew and I decided that I wanted to be a lay reader. That still, small voice was speaking louder and louder at that time in my life. Maybe I wanted to be a priest, I said. I was 15 or so at that time. I became a lay reader and I read in church. I went to my sophomore year in high school where I met John Lutinsky, who was my math teacher. The beautiful part about my relationship with John Lutinsky was that I was horrible at math; I still am. I struggled in math; I still do. But John Lutinsky and I had something in common. We were both lay readers in our churches, he being a lay reader in his Methodist church in Freeland, Pennsylvania, and I being a lay reader in my church in Jim Thorpe. Somehow, in the dealings of our math, he discovered we had that in common. In that time—I’m not sure it would happen today—he shared his faith with me. He shared with me why he read, how active he was in his congregation, and what relationship he had with God in his life. Our relationship grew and it was good. It was John Lutinsky, who along with another teacher from high school and another student–this would never happen today–with my mother’s permission, took me and the fellow student to Penn State University for a weekend where we experienced our first football weekend. The rest is written in history, 400-some wins of history.(Oh, I couldn’t help that, sorry.) It was being there, through that relationship with John Lutinsky, who shared his faith with me, who invested who he was, who understood himself to be a child of God, and invested in his students in ways that maybe others would not have, that I was introduced to a place and a space where God would continue to nurture and grow in my life.

That was true in my college years at Penn State. On one of the weekends visiting home, I visited John Lutinsky, and it was then that he shared with me that he was diagnosed with leukemia. At that time he shared with me his wonderment and his fear, his doubts and his trust, his trying to discern where God was in the midst of his struggles, but his firm, firm foundation in placing all of his trust in that God. He died six months later. But again, like sitting in that birthday chair, I learned a stewardship lesson from one of the saints of God. He had given his life, all of his life, in thankfulness to the God who had made him, and it made him who he was—in this case, to my benefit.

As I told the eight o’clock congregation, I won’t give you all 45 years (oh, I’m supposed to lie, all 35 years) of my life. But you know how it goes, that still, small voice grows and speaks, and where it all ends up is in the birthday chair. Back in the birthday chair, giving my life as an expression of thanksgiving, knit together in a communion so mystical and beautiful that in all of life’s circumstances, there is a depth of grace that transforms all things. There were commissions on ministries, there were discernment groups in my home parish, and there were standing committees. There were archdeacons across the parking lot, one named Rick Cluett and, indeed, as the church would have it, that still, small voice speaking in me led to ordination. Now the ministry that I share, the time and the talent and the treasures that I give, is a ministry of priesthood.

For those of you who have memorized the examination of the priesthood found in the Book of Common Prayer, it goes like this: You are to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ, and to fashion your life in accordance with its precepts. You are to love and serve the people with whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. You are to preach and declare God’s forgiveness, to pronounce God’s blessings, and to share in the administration of Holy Baptism and in the celebration of the mysteries of the body and blood, and to perform other ministrations entrusted to you. Even in the ordination examination, there is the clause and other duties as assigned. That examination concludes: In all things, you are to nourish Christ’s people from the riches of his grace, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come…nourishing Christ’s people from the riches of grace, and strengthening them to glorify God in this life and the next.

So how is it that I find that place of giving time and talent and treasure? Why do it? It starts in the birthday chair, where all of our lives, yours and mine, are offered in thanksgiving for the gift of life that God gives us. I could list for you the number of ministries here that motivate me for wanting to give my time and my talent and my treasure. There are 67-some ministries that take place because of you being the hands and heart of God in the world. I could list all those, but I will not. Instead I will say to you that the giving of time and talent and treasure as a priest is because I am graced to live in a fabric that is knit together, this mystical and mysterious body of faithful and ordinary people who are nourished from the riches of grace and give God honor by the honesty of their lives, and enrich my life and others with the honor of knowing and serving them. As we lift one another up, we are the very hands and heart of God in the world. Giving time and talent and treasure is easy for me because, when we meet at that table or at that baptismal font as we will shortly, and we share in the communion, I know that you are reaching out your hands to meet the mystery of holiness when you are seeking consolation and comfort because your heart is aching with grief or doubt or fear. I know there are times when you reach out at that altar table, when you reach out your hands to meet the holy because you are seeking forgiveness and healing for hurt and woundedness and transgression. I know that there are times when you reach out your hands to meet the mystery of holiness with certainty and joy, with hope and with passion, because you know, in your heart of hearts, that there is an abundance of grace that passes all understanding. It is as if Henry Heneghan, son of Julie and Ron Heneghan, who have recently moved to Maryland, had it right when he visited his new parish for the first time. As his mother tells the story, he went before the altar, reached out his hands and as the priest came by with the host, he looked up and said, “I’ll take two.”

We do this together, the giving of our time and our talent and our treasure, because it is an abundant grace that nourishes us greatly, and motivates us, and moves us to glorify God at all times as we nourish one another. Thank you for sharing in the ministry of giving ourselves to God, of giving our time, our talent, and our treasure. Amen.

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-31T08:12:00.002-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Luke 19:1-10

Why might this passage be of any interest to you? What in the world could you possibly have in common with Zacchaeus? Is your life anything like that of this first century Jewish tax collector? Is there anything for you to learn here that could possibly be of use to you?

Well, to begin with I want to dispel a view of Zacchaeus that has gained quite a bit of traction over the centuries, particularly in the last few decades. It may seem like a picky point, but I believe it is an important one. It is this; the scripture does not tell us that Zacchaeus is the worst of the worst of sinners. We have come to believe that not only was he a representative of an unpopular government (that being Rome), but that he also took advantage of his position as tax collector to line his own pockets at the expense of his fellow citizens. The take on Zacchaeus is that he was “the worst of the worst”. One of “those people”.

The translation of the scripture that we heard this morning points us in that direction. We heard, “When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house…”

The King James Version and the Greek read a bit differently. “And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, that he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, this day is salvation come to this house…”

So, it is not I will restore, but I restore. Not I will give to the poor, but I give to the poor. It is my practice to do these things. This is how I live my life. This is how I try to be fair in my work and to do what is good and right in my life.

He is not somebody who routinely rips off people. He is not someone who neglects the poor. He tries to live a righteous and just and fair life – even while being an agent of a repressive government. And Jesus says that he will come to his house – even before Zacchaeus has told him about himself, he says he will come to him.

Zacchaeus is not “the worst of the worst” of sinners. I think he is just an average Joe in many ways. He tries to do what is right. And Jesus comes to his house. Jesus enters, not just his house, but also his life, because even an average Joe or Jane loses the way from time to time – lost to him- or her- self and needs to experience the Good News that Jesus brings.

Now that, I believe, puts Zacchaeus pretty much in the same category of sinner that you and I inhabit. Not that any of us is the agent of a repressive government, at least to my knowledge.

What we have here is a cathedral full of people, who try to do their best. Try to be fair in their dealings with others. Try to remember and respond to the needs of those who are poor and in need. Try to live according to a code that honors our selves, our families, our community, our faith, and our God. We try to base who we are and what we do on what we have heard, and learned, and known, and believed about God’s way and God’s will for us.

But if we didn’t need to meet Jesus again and again and again to help us find and keep on the good path, the right way – what are we doing here this morning? Why would we be here?

I think we are here because we want to be visited by Jesus, to experience the Good News of Jesus in our lives. We are here because life is so hard at times, because life is so uncertain at times, because life is so chaotic at times, because life is so frightening at times, because life is so depressing at times, because life comes at us like water from a fire hose that beats us down, rather than gives us a refreshing drink.

A beloved dies. A job is lost. A marriage ends. Life seems to have lost all options but one. A child turns away. Sickness, disease and disability strike. The money’s gone. We have lost God.

Who has not been so hungry for what we have heard about Jesus, who has not been in such need of what Jesus has to offer that we would not extend ourselves, even to the point of climbing into a tree to get a better glimpse of that goodness? If there is such a person here this morning that has not been there, then I say to you, “Just wait. Give it time. The world, life, circumstance, bad luck, fate, karma, call it what you will, it will at some point bring you to a time and place when you will do almost anything to have Jesus come to you, come into your life, to receive what Jesus has to offer.”

There are times when wanting to do and to be good are not enough. We just don’t hack it. They are not enough. And the good news of today’s’ gospel is that Jesus is seeking us, even before we know we are seeking him.

How do I know this? My name is Zacchaeus. I am Zacchaeus. I try to do and to be good. If I wrong someone, I try to make it right. I remember and respond to those who are poor and in need – out of a generous heart. But from time to time, I have been lost. From time to time, life has beaten me down. From time to time, I seem to have just run out of resources and I am at my wits end, depleted, empty, and I eagerly seek what Jesus has to offer. I might even climb into a tree to have Jesus come back into my life with healing and strengthening and direction and purpose.

As it was for Zacchaeus, so it is, I believe, also for Rick, and Joe and Jane, and Barbara, and Frank, and fill-in-the-blank with your name. So also to you and to me, Jesus will come and enter where you live, enter into your life.

And he will bring what we need, be it strength, or forgiveness, or healing, or direction, or meaning, or succor, or mercy.

I think we hold the humility of our humanity in common with Zacchaeus of Jericho. And as Habakkuk reminds us, we don’t ever want to lose the vision, the vision of what Jesus will bring when he enters into our life.

Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus. Eagerly I seek you. Enter into my house; come into my life – again. Let me catch a glimpse of your life-giving Spirit. Maranatha! Amen.

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C)

2010-10-24T14:01:00.001-04:00

The Rev. Jerry Keucher

I’m Jerry Keucher, and I’m delighted to be with you today. I’m very grateful to Dean Pompa for inviting to work with the Cathedral this year on the annual giving campaign.

This week you will receive a mailing asking you to reflect on what you plan to contribute to the work of the Cathedral in 2011. Then two weeks from today, on All Saints’ Sunday, there’ll be a big ingathering of all the pledges and estimates that you’ll be making for next year. I’m here today to give you something to reflect on over the next two weeks.

I want to tell you a story about the first house we owned. We had it for three years before selling it for the place we’ve lived in ever since. It happened almost 30 years ago. Long before I was ordained, in June of 1980 we became urban homesteaders. We bought an abandoned house in a very iffy neighborhood on the North Shore of Staten Island. The large Victorian houses in the area had been converted into apartments and rooming houses by slumlords who had milked them dry, left them vacant, and then sold them to other people like us.

“Move-in condition” in the neighborhood meant that you could move in; it did not imply that any plumbing, electrical, or heating systems were operable. The man who sold us our house held a private mortgage because no bank would make loans in that area. The banks calculated that the value of the houses and lots was zero less the costs of demolition. The previous owner thought that the people buying his properties were fools.

By December I was wondering if he had been right because we could not make it. My partner, a priest and an artist, was not working as a priest and made next to nothing from his art. The wind blew against the sheets of plastic we’d stapled to the windows that we couldn’t afford to repair. The oil company demanded cash for its deliveries, so the tank was often dry. My job paid me once a month, so we were broke three weeks out of four.

I had already taken a second job as the organist at a parish in nearby Bayonne, but we still had to borrow money from a friend that month to pay the mortgage. Things were that serious. We were pledging what I thought was a generous amount, but we had fallen behind in our weekly pledge. It was just one more bill that we couldn’t pay. I had done all I could do, and it just wasn’t enough.

At an Advent Evensong at the church in Bayonne the rector took a liberty with the lectionary and preached on Malachi 3, beginning at verse 8, in which the prophet brings God’s accusation of theft against the people. “Will a man rob God?” the old language says, “Yet you are robbing me! But you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings!...You are robbing me…Bring the full tithe into the storehouse…and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts. See if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

I remembered my childhood. My mother had brought us up to tithe. I asked her once through gritted teeth, as I was putting ten percent of my allowance into the envelope for church the next day, “Why are you making me do this?”

“So that when you’re big you’ll tithe on your grownup income,” she said. “How do you know I’ll do that?” I asked, somewhat surprised that she could see the future. “I know you will,” she answered, “because ‘as the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.’”

I’m not sure what I would have done without that sermon at that time and the memory of my upbringing. But that’s the great thing about God’s providence. God gave me the gifts of that sermon and that upbringing, so God gave me a way out of my financial difficulties in December 1980. My prayer is that God might be giving some of you a similar gift this morning.

“OK, God,” I said, “OK. I’ll put you to the test.” For the next few weeks I stopped thinking about the $15 a week that we were pledging. When I got paid at the end of that month, I wrote a check to our parish for ten percent of what I put into the bank. It worked out to more than twice our weekly pledge. I turned in the check and held my breath.

Nothing happened. That is to say, the windows of heaven did not pour money down on us, and our windows were still covered with plastic. However, something else didn’t happen as well. We didn’t go deeper into the hole. We paid back the friend the next month and still met our obligations. We were somehow, and I’m not entirely sure how, better able to make ends meet on 90% of our income that we had been on 100%.

In reality, everything happened, and it happened in us. Writing that check made me know and feel immediately that money is a tool: it’s just a means, not an end. And more or less of necessity, it raised my trust in God to unprecedented levels.

The gifts to the church are always the first ones I enter after the direct deposit hits the bank. (And — though this is just personal preference — our tithe is always on the gross. I figure if we’re not going to rob God, why chisel Him? And then the tax refund is free money that’s already been tithed on. But that’s just my preference. There’s no obligation here, just an invitation.)

I went back to tithing as an adult out of sheer desperation. But even if you’re not as desperate as I was, I think there’s still something you want. You want not to be anxious about the little things. You want a relationship with God. You want an experience of God. You want to get to the place where your will and God’s will are the same — where doing what you really want to do means doing what God wants. I think you want your heart to be with God. Why else would you be here?

So if you want your heart to be with God, here’s a way forward. Put your money where you want your heart to be. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Your heart follows your money, not the other way around. We think it’s the other way around. We think we spend our money on the things that are important to us, but those things are important to us because they’re what we spend our money on. Put your money where you want your heart to rest, and your heart will move there.

So stop thinking about what you give as another bill that has to be paid, or as a tax, or as club dues, and for heaven’s sake, don’t let it be just a tip that’s less than you spend on lunches or your commute.

Make your gift a first-fruits offering. Set a percentage in your heart, and give that percentage off the top whenever you get money. And don’t give at other times. Break the tyranny of the weekly envelope. If you get money once a month, give your percentage once a month, and don’t sweat the other weeks. If you’re self-employed and income is really erratic, then just give back to God when God gives to you. Don’t worry about the weeks in between.

I’ve told you the percentage I give, but I’m convinced that the percentage doesn’t matter. What matters is changing the pattern of how you give. If you give a set weekly or monthly amount, you’ve turned your contribution into a bill. You factor it in with all your other obligations. If you think about your money they way most people do, when you sit down to pay your bills, you add them up and then see if you have enough to pay them. This increases your anxiety about money.

If you give a percentage off the top, the pattern is different. First, you look back and see how much God has given you since the last time you sat down to deal with your money. Then you make a gift to God that is in direct proportion to what God has given you. Then you see how you and God will deal with your obligations.

The point is first, make your gift a percentage of whatever you just received; second, give it off the top before you pay anything else.

This will change your life. Percentage giving off the top means that each time you sit down to pay bills, the first payment you make is a thank offering to God that is in proportion to what God has given you. You may think paying your bills is the least religious thing you do. Percentage giving off the top turns paying your bills into an act of worship because you’re putting your trust in God. It changes how you think about your life and what you have. It’s the most powerful way to use the powerful tool that is your money in the service of your spiritual transformation. I’m quite serious. This changed my life. This will change your life.

Percentage giving off the top: that’s my sermon. Have you noticed what my sermon has not been? I haven’t said a word about how much the parish needs your money. I haven’t mentioned budgets or capital needs. I haven’t browbeat you or played a single guilt card. I haven’t said ‘should’ or ‘ought to’ a single time. Look, you’re all bright people. You know perfectly well that if the Cathedral is going to thrive, it isn’t all going to happen with other people’s money. If you all don’t support your parish, why would anybody else? So I’m not going to dwell on that, because it’s obvious.

My point is rather different. I know that you want this parish to thrive. I know you want it to be here so that future generations can meet God here just as you have. I’ll bet most of you wish that you could do more. Well, I’m here to empower you. I’m here to tell you, and to show you, and to witness to you from my own experience how you can be as generous as you’ve wanted to be. And one of the most powerful tools you can bring to your spiritual transformation is sitting in your bank account.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-17T12:50:00.001-04:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Good morning. I am guessing that you, like me, were entrenched, captivated, and fixated on the story of the rescue of the Chilean miners this week. What a story, and how refreshing for us to focus on good news when we so desperately needed an opportunity to focus on good news. What an amazing story, a real life story–the raising of the human spirit, the persistence of the human spirit, a group of miners trapped, gathering together in communion in desperate times. Once they were discovered, waiting, waiting, seemingly patient and seemingly calm, from this side of the earth. The stories are really quite amazing when you hear them, about how they ordered themselves to stay in communion with one another. Someone rose up and took leadership, they assigned chores, they worked, and they had a daily ritual. They took on roles.

Somewhere along the way after they had been discovered, one of the first things they asked for, it is reported, was a crucifix. Soon after that, they began to ask for statues of Mary and other saints because they had made themselves a chapel underground. Around that chapel, they gathered for corporate and individual prayer. Miner #21, Jose Enriquez, requested that 33 Bibles be sent because he wanted to lead Bible study. What a miraculous, miraculous story, and a miraculous focus on prayer. Some of the quotes as the miners were released, as I am sure that you have read, were quite amazing. One of them was quoted as saying, “I have seen the devil and God down there, and I reached out for the hand of God.” Another miner said, “There were 34 of us down there. God never left us.”

It is surprising to none of us that in difficult times, we tend to turn to God, don’t we? Especially in difficult times, we tend to turn to God. But what a miraculous story, and I am using that word with intention, what a miraculous story of how, worldwide and in that place, under that ground, prayer became part of what would sustain, lift up, and hold up this newly-formed and unintended communion of people.

The scriptures today, particularly the Gospel, do, indeed, focus us on prayer. Particularly the story that Jesus tells, the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, is a message to the disciples that they must be persistent in their prayers, just like the widow who had worn out or was going to wear out the unjust judge. So, too, the disciples must be persistent in their prayers. Jesus knew that his disciples would have difficult times, difficulty being the living community that followed the teachings of Jesus in a hostile environment. Jesus knew that they would need to be persistent in staying connected with the holy.

Today we look at the experience of prayer. What do we say about prayer? Is there really power and purpose in prayer? How do we approach prayer? What is prayer and what isn’t it? Certainly, it seems, we have a modern and living-day example in the Chilean miners who were indeed persistent in their prayers. It is said that in those first 17 days, when they sat in darkness without food, rationing it out by the teaspoon, that it was their prayers and their stories that they told one another that became the communion of power and purpose, that literally kept them alive for 17 days. In the days that followed after they were discovered, it was the rituals that they encountered in community, prayer being part of that ritual, that kept them together and patient and hopeful in their days of waiting. A disciplined ritual of praying in that make-shift chapel, corporately and individually, became the fabric that led them day by day.

St. Augustine says this, “What can be more excellent than prayer? What is more profitable to our life, what sweeter to our souls, what more sublime, in the course of our whole life, than the practice of prayer?” Satchel Paige, who I have to quote in the midst of baseball season (he was a pitcher), “Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.” Abraham Lincoln said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

Prayer…but what will we say, what will we say today about prayer, in our modern-day miraculous example? What will we say today if the miners had not been rescued? It happens, you know. Would they have been any less persistent in their prayers, and would God have been any less present, present to them, and they less present to each other? Would their prayers have been without power? Surely, I am not the only one who asks those questions. This leads us, I think, into what prayer is and what it isn’t.

Prayer…sometimes we approach it as if it is a whim, a whine, or a wish, and I have participated in all three in my life. You know, the prayerful whim: God please don’t let Roy Halladay throw one more pitch down the center of the plate to Cody Ross, whoever he is. You know, the whim prayer, God please let me get an A on my report. Please, God, don’t let me get stuck in this traffic. Prayers of whim.

Prayer of whine, and I don’t use this with any judgment. I am a full supporter of whining in appropriate times and places. Prayers of whine: Why me? Why me, Lord? Why did this have to happen to me? Why am I on such a bad luck streak? Why me? This is also called lament, and the scriptures are full of it. Why, oh, Lord, why? Of course, in an egocentric moment, we have to ask the question, well, why not? Why not me? Why not? It seems sometimes frivolous to say, but it is the truth. It happens to all of us. It is the gift of being human, the gift of having life, its triumphs and its challenges. Why not me?

I think the most difficult and challenging part that we sometimes see in prayer is the wish prayer: God, I wish you could take this away from me. Please take this away from me. Jesus, even in the garden, may have prayed the wish prayer. God, can’t you take this away from me? Can’t you please take away this pain, this loss, and why did it have to be at all? Can’t you please give me back what once was, my life as I knew it, the relationship that I have lost, my father who has died so suddenly? I wish, God, it didn’t have to be.

Our prayers are difficult when we ride the continuum of whim and whine and wish. But what is prayer, then? What is it? And where is its power? Søren Kierkegaard said, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays.” Samuel Shoemaker, Episcopal priest and one of the founders of the AA movement, said that “Prayer does not change things for you, but it, for sure, changes you for things.” How many folks participating in a 12-step program have come to know the power of that statement? Prayer may not change things for you, but it, for sure, changes you for things. Henri Nouwen says that “Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious lives. To pray is to connect these two sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells. Prayer is soul work, because our souls are those sacred centers where all is one and where God is with us in the most intimate way. Prayer is the invitation into sacred intimacy.”

We all know intimacy in that limited human way, but the gift that we get when we experience intimacy, a place of safety, a place of trust, a place of delight and passion, of vulnerability and courage, of a peace that surpasses all understanding, a relationship into sacred intimacy, is where our desperation is met with understanding. Our sadness and despair is met with a lap to put our heads in and a soothing hand running fingers through our hair, a light touch, wiping away our tears. That sacred place of intimacy is where our delight is met with unbridled joy, our courage is lifted up and emboldened, and our imagination is set free, where our deepest wounds and hurts that we often hide from the world are able to be shown, and they are accepted, and they even are embraced. This is where prayer leads us, into an unshakable communion with God.

The Lord be with you. Let us pray.

Listen, O Lord, to my prayers and hear my desire to be with you, to dwell in your house, and to let my whole being be filled with your presence. Let me at least remain open to your invitation to intimacy. Let me wait attentively and patiently for the hour when you will come and break through all the walls that I have erected. Teach me, O Lord, to pray.

By the way, the New York Times talked about the delivery of the miners in this way. “Miracle at the Mine” is what Good Morning, America called it, and said it was a nativity scene witnessed world-wide. We have witnessed a nativity scene, new life born out of deep intimacy with God. Amen.

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-03T12:24:00.001-04:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

If today is the first day I have talked about Pee Wee’s Playhouse in a sermon, it certainly will not be the last. That Saturday morning kid’s show was a defining experience of my youth- it was a riot of color and camp and cartoons and talking furniture, and my brother and I watched it long after we had graduated from its recommended audience age, because it was unlike anything we had ever seen before in our short lives.

There were fancy cowboys and a lady with a big red beehive, a genie, a talking chair, pterodactyls, and in the middle of it all, a man-sized child in too short pants. Our favorite part of each episode was the word of the day- it was disclosed in a whisper at the beginning of the show, and every time it was spoken over the next hour, everyone had to scream as loud as they could.

It was a creative and fun way of building our vocabularies, and also of teaching us about concepts that were a little abstract for our young minds. It was really quite brilliant as a teaching tool.

I will not state outright that the scholars and theologians who devised the Revised Common Lectionary were fans of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but the way a theme is chosen, and stated and restated and stated once again in the selected readings, particularly in these later Sundays in Pentecost, leads me to suspect they have more than a passing familiarity with some of the concepts.

The word for today is faith.

Walter Brueggeman, biblical scholar, tells us that “faith” in these readings has many dimensions and nuances, and cannot be reduced to one thing. It is honest sadness, tenacious remembering, performance of duty, a holy calling, and holding fast to sound teaching.

We begin with two accounts of the faith of the Jews in Exile- first in Lamentations, where in vivid images we are presented with a desolate and destroyed city of Zion, her temple torn stone from stone, her streets empty. For the tribe of Israel, this city was the earthly incarnation of God’s love for them, Jerusalem was the tangible proof of the covenant God made with Moses. Now, in their collective mind, she is like a princess who has been turned into a slave; all who once loved her have turned against her, her friends have become her enemies. The city of God is described as a widow, weeping inconsolably over the loss of all who loved her. Yet her children, from exile, love her still- their faith in God is what sustains them, and keeps them certain that they will one day return to the streets they once walked, the place they called home, that they will rebuild the Temple that was destroyed, even if it is only their children’s children who survive to see that union with God re-established.

In the psalm, one of the most beautiful of the Psalter, I think, but also one in which grief, loss, is most palpable, we hear the displaced people of Zion crying out to God beside the rivers of their land of exile, with the plaintive cry- “by the Babylonian rivers we sat down and wept.”

Their captors, not content with destroying their homeland and moving an entire people to a strange land, now demand that they sing the songs of their faith in this unhappy and brutal place. Despondent, they beg of God to give them the strength of faith and heart to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.

I think of all the readings for today, this is the one that resonates most with the modern reader. We are living in a season of loss, both in our personal lives and in our corporate life as a nation, and much like the exiled Jews, taunted by their captors to sing their hymns in a strange land, it is easy to feel abandoned, outcast, as people of faith in a secular world. We are surrounded by messages that run counter to our Gospel, values are emphasized in our television programs and films and media that are not really our values, we have to work twice as hard to instill our faith in our children, and often find ourselves divided even within our own churches.

Those who do not share our faith in God can sometimes seem aggressive, even combative. Those who claim to speak on behalf of our God can be more so. It is not an easy time in our history to be a Christian of faith and integrity.

But we carry on, we rely on our faith to carry us through the most difficult times, and in times when our faith is perhaps not so strong, we rely on our communities, on our rituals of prayer, our rhythm of worship, to sustain us until we find our footing in God once again.

And so it is up to us. Just as it was for the exiled Jews, to keep strong in our faith, to keep kindness and love in our hearts, even in the face of those who would mock or torment us. It is up to us to kindle the fires of our faith- a faith that is honest sadness, a tenacious remembering, faith that is a performance of duty, a holy calling, faith that holds fast to sound teaching- but in this faith we are never alone, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, but those who have come before us, and by our children’s children, yet to come.

AMEN+

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-09-19T08:25:00.010-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

This is not an easy scripture lesson to hear, and it is not an easy one to get, to understand what it meant to Jesus and what it might mean for us.

Let me start by saying that it is the 4^th in a series of parables placed together in Luke. We have the story of a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son and then this story of a rich man and his manager. But what have they lost?

The rich man has lost his property and the good will of his people, and the manager has lost his own money and the good will of both boss and farmers. The rich man did not have safeguards in place and the manager seems to have squandered the money. It doesn’t say he did anything illegal, by the way. When he realized his plight he went to each of the tenants and gave them a reduced amount to repay, so they could pay it back as soon as possible, so that he could pay the owner. Basically, what was deleted was his commission.

What did each gain? The landowner gained more of what he was owed than he ever received before, he gained the good will of the tenants (which he never had because of what he charged them) for reducing their debt, and he gained a grudging respect for the manager. The manager gained the good will of the farmers and the commendation of his employer.

Does this ring true for the world economy we live in? Does it relate to the economy of God’s kingdom? Luke is unrelenting and adamant throughout his gospel that the kingdom view of property is that it exists for the benefit of all.

Today’s economists tell us that in the world’s economy, money that sits idly by is not a resource at all. Money is useful, they tell us, only when it is in motion. It is the movement of money that brings prosperity to those through whom it moves.

And the divine economists, we call them prophets and saints – and we call one of them by the name of Jesus – they tell us that wealth and property in the economy of God are for the wellbeing of all God’s creation, and when the kingdom is fully realized money and property will not belong to anyone, it will be a resource for all. There will be no debtors.

And if he did nothing else, this manager did relieve people from their debts, and he dedicated his personal profit to that end.

It is significant for us to remember to whom Jesus is giving this teaching. It is not to the tax collectors and other sinners. It is not to white-collar criminals, not to the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Scribes. It is not to the rich merchants of Galilee. He is teaching his disciples. He is preaching to the faithful about their faith and their life. The teaching is about how the faith of the disciples of Jesus, then and now, informs our values, ethics, behavior and relationships with God, people, and money.

Some have said that this parable is not as much about morality as it is about apathy.

“And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”

There's a story about Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile, who was visiting his family's ancestral village in Ireland. Two trustees of the local hospital found out he was there, and managed to get in to see him. They talked Ford into giving the hospital five thousand dollars (this was the 1930's, so five thousand dollars was a great deal of money).

The next morning, at breakfast, he opened his daily newspaper to read the banner headline: "American Millionaire Gives Fifty Thousand to Local Hospital." Ford wasted no time in summoning the two hospital trustees. He waved the newspaper in their faces. "What does this mean?" he demanded. The trustees apologized profusely. "Dreadful error," they said. They promised to get the editor to print a retraction the very next day, declaring that the great Henry Ford had given not fifty thousand, but only five. Hearing this, Ford offered them another forty-five thousand, under one condition: that the trustees would erect a marble arch at the new hospital entrance, and place upon it a plaque that read, "I walked among you and you took me in."

C. S. Lewis wrote about Christians, “Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us…”

So, what is it that the steward has done here?

The steward forgives. The steward forgives debts. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, he forgives for personal gain, he forgives to compensate for past misconduct. It is this decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself to be restored in his relationship with the farmers and with the landlord. He forgives.

So what's the moral of this story, one of the stories unique to Luke’s Gospel? It's a moral of great emphasis for Luke and for Jesus – forgive.

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…" That comes from Luke (11:4-5). Forgive us our debts, forgive us our trespasses, forgive us our sins… as we forgive.

One theologian put it this way: “Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Why forgive the debts of debtor nations… Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet.

We could forgive the other person because of what we pray in Jesus' name every Sunday morning, and because we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because we've experienced what we're like as unforgiving people… We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.

Pick one of the above or pick none of the above. It doesn’t make any difference.”

So, in the words of the Nike ad, why not “Just do it”? And if we do, I believe that you and I will find ourselves living a little more in line with the kingdom way that God showed us in Jesus.

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-09-12T16:36:00.002-04:00

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

This morning I want to tell you about my brother and his wife. They are blessed, or my brother was smart enough to marry who he married, with acres of land just north of that little town we all grew up, in Jim Thorpe, on top of what is called Kattner’s Mountain. My brother was smart enough to marry a Kattner and, therefore, they are blessed. About two miles deep into the woods of the land which is theirs, they built a very humble cabin that has been there for 20-some years. Over the last 20 years or so, for their family, for our family, and for any who they invite, (the key word is invite), this has been a refuge. It has been a place accessible only by terrain vehicles. It is graced with beautiful hills and valleys, deep woods and brush, and two beautiful streams that, for those who fish, are a delight. They, themselves, have a routine, particularly when the weather is nice on Sunday afternoons, of disappearing into the woods, set upon a day to enjoy God’s grace and nature, to build a fire as the darkness comes on, over which to roast marshmallows and whatever might be caught in one of those streams. It is a delight and it is a blessing.

Some 10 years ago or so, when Felicia and I were still living in Virginia, my phone rang one Sunday evening. As the prayer goes, as the darkness of the day was coming upon us and the fever of the world was coming to a hush. My phone rang, and it was my brother on his cell phone asking me to pray because my sister-in-law’s niece, who was down at the cabin with them that day, had violated commandment #1 of going to the cabin. “Do not ever disappear into the woods by yourself.” Well, their niece, Keri, 11 years old, took a familiar path, a path she had been on many, many times as a child. In the delight of what was around her, she lost track of time and lost her way. She could not figure out how to get back.

If you ever visit that land, and it does come by invitation only so chances are slim, you will know that it is filled with laurel and deep brush, particularly around the streams. There are little walking paths that our Native American brothers and sisters once walked. In the midst of the summer, those walking paths become slimmer and darker. Keri kept going up, we learned, different paths, thinking she was on the right path, but then recognizing the path she was on went only into darkness. As the story goes, the search party was called, literally the State Police, the rangers, and any family member or friend who was willing, and they set out about the task to find Keri as darkness set in. We know, because you know how the story ends, from Keri that she became disoriented and the darker that it got, the more panicked she got. The more panicked she got, the more fearful she got. The more fearful she got, the more desperate she got, trying each and every path that she could find. She finally gave up and this young, 11-year-old just sat down next to what was becoming a very cold, cold stream under the darkness of the mountain laurel brush. She sat there, waiting, crying, and wondering, “Is anybody looking for me? Is anybody looking for me?”

Well, we learn from this story a bit about human nature. On Keri’s side, we learn (if we see this a bit as a metaphor), that we do sometimes get off on the wrong path. We do sometimes set forth in our journey in life assured that we know the way back. We do sometimes, on that journey, get confused and misguided, and we lose our way. We do sometimes get filled with anxiety and panic, and in Keri’s case, what sometimes happens to us happens when we violate the law. Don’t ever go off on your own. On the other side, for those who were desperate and filled with anxiety for Keri that day, for those who loved her, who were worried about her, who were angry at her, who were desperate in their anxiety -- we learned about human nature, didn’t we?

This is the context that I lay out as we enter today’s Gospel lesson, a familiar one, I am sure, as Jesus indeed teaches us again and speaks in the midst of our human nature to reveal to us something about God’s divine nature.

There are three things we need to know about our context this day, three dynamics at play in this story. There is grumbling, there is searching and seeking, and there is rejoicing. The context today is that Jesus has been sitting down with tax collectors and sinners, those who, in the eyes of those looking through human nature, particularly the religious authority of the day, those who had broken the law, those who had set themselves apart, and those who had distanced themselves through their beliefs and their behaviors. Those who, at the very best or least, were unworthy of those in authority at this time and certainly, in their limited view of God’s divine nature, unworthy of God’s time. They are grumbling. They are unhappy. Who is this Jesus to sit down with these unworthy tax collectors and sinners? Jesus tells them, teaches them, through parables known to you and to me. Hear them, if you can, with the immediacy of the day.

In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus looks at those in the day, giving them a parable of what they would know. Which one among you, if you were a shepherd, wouldn’t take the time to go and do all that you can to find one lost sheep? Because you know, better than I know, that is what you would do if you were a shepherd. You would go after that one lost sheep. You would take that staff, the tool that you have been given, and you would cut through the woods and the forest and the trees. You would kick out the debris from the roads. You would try to find the path that sheep has taken. Then when you saw that sheep, sitting there waiting, you would take the end of the staff and you would pull it in. You know that because just one of your flock escaped means that your very life, and your very way of life, is threatened.

Which one of you wouldn’t, if you were a woman who is keeping her house, count your pennies to make the mortgage, to pay the rent, to keep the lights lit, and to keep food on the table? Which one of you wouldn’t get the brightest lamp that you could find, put it in the best position in the house, and take the tool of the day – your broom – and sweep away every nook and cranny of dirt and debris so that you might see that shining coin again? Which one of you wouldn’t do that, grumbling, searching and seeking?

Jesus reveals to us, in our human nature, the divine nature. Would not our Father in heaven seek and search that piece that is lost, that piece of us that has wandered away? When he found you, would that not be cause for celebration? Would that not be cause for great celebration? Would that not be just the way our God is – the divine nature? You know the story goes like this. What is God like? God seeks and searches for the very least, seeks and searches for those who have gone astray, seeks and searches for you and me when we are lost, seeks and searches for those who we think are unworthy of our time or God’s time.

What is God’s character like when such a finding has been found? It is like a member of a search party who finds a little girl, sitting along the side of a cold stream, now in the darkness of night, afraid, crying, shivering, and wondering if anybody is looking for her. That’s what it’s like. It is like ushering that young child back up the side of that mountain to safety, to warmth, and to the embrace of her parents and family and friends. Oh, what a celebration! Oh, what a celebration for one who has been lost and now is found. Human and divine intersect.

So our question today, the question we ask as we engage the Gospel – where can I ask God’s grace to help me see past my human nature, to see where I have given up on another who is lost, one who I have judged as unworthy of my time and even God’s, one who I may be grumbling about, even on this very morning, even if it’s I? When I am found by God, or when that person we think of is found by God, can we imagine throwing a party for the sole reason of finding something that had been lost? What would that be, that thing, that person, that dream that had been lost? What would that celebration look like? Certainly, I hope, not a burning of books (couldn’t help that one). Perhaps a fatted calf, the finest wine; a relationship broken is now restored. A dream that has been dashed has been rediscovered and uplifted. A sense of newness in our own spirit and being has been reassured and reclaimed. A new-found hope for a broken world, reaching out across all faiths that might, indeed, build on God’s peaceable kingdom -- something

worth celebration.

Amen.

2010-09-05T14:46:00.002-04:00

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 5, 2010

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

Recently I spent some time at my parents’ house in Marietta, GA. For various reasons this was my first trip “home,” to the house I grew up in, in a little over a year. I think, because of that (for me) unusually long interval, I was able to look at this very familiar place with fresh eyes, and notice things that, though they may have been in place for decades, I simply had been too used to to note. It also helped that my visit, as my mother characterized it, was a lot like that of a college kid home for the summer, meaning most days I slept in, spent hours reading, watched more than my fair share of television, and probably wore pajama pants more than one should. This is my favorite sort of vacation, one with absolutely no schedule.

Anyway, as I was lounging around being lazy, I noticed that the mantel in my parents’ living room displays a series of misshapen, lumpy little bowls, and then I remembered the pottery classes I took as a little kid, of which these fine specimens were the fruit.

Starting at about 8, I was enrolled in a class at our local art museum, down in the basement in a little studio, given by a woman who adored children and was also a bit of a holdover from the late sixties/early seventies arts and crafts movement. She taught us how to use clay to make everything from coil pots to scenes from fairy tales to gifts for our parents. (My mom still has the teapot I made for her in the shape of a pig, despite the fact that it leaks water from the feet and is completely unusable for the purpose for which it was designed.)

Eventually we advanced enough in our clay skills to learn how to use pottery wheels, and I was flooded with these memories in reading the passage from Jeremiah today. I think that I was too young at the time to fully understand it, but I got something special from the experience of starting with a lump of clay and watching as a bowl emerged with the help of my hands and fingers. In that moment of creating something out of nothing, in a way, I was closest perhaps to the feeling God had, when he crafted this world, when he crafted us, at the beginning of time. I was surprised every time I was successful. The key to successfully making a pot is centering the clay exactly on the middle of the spinning pottery wheel, and this was quite a difficult skill to learn. Often it would seem that the clay was centered until the bowl or pot was almost done, its walls brought high and thin, only to see a slight wobble start and then watch as the whole thing spun out of control and destroyed itself. And then you just had to scrape up the scraps and start all over again. It was a little heartbreaking to a young child, to see my work self destruct after such a promising start, an experience that, I think, also brings one close to the mind of God, perhaps, as he watches his creation, his beloved creations, and muddle through, sometimes unsuccessfully.

In the passage we read from Jeremiah today, we see God in one of these moments, when the house of Israel has gained the upper hand in its never-ending struggles against persecution, and has turned into the persecutor. God explains, through the prophet Jeremiah, to the wayward tribe of Israel the fragility of its existence. Like a potter reworking a spoiled vessel, so could God destroy the House of Israel, and start fresh.

“At one moment,” God says, “I may declare concerning a nation or kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation…turns from its evil I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it…And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I intended to do to it…Turn now, all of you from your evil ways, and amend your ways and your doing.” This is a harsh warning from a loving God to a people who had lost their way, once again. Judah and Jerusalem were living in anxious times, uncertain, scared, fearing their neighbors, bracing for invasion or displacement, plagued by famines and economic hardships, looking for someone to blame.

We are living in anxious times, ourselves. Many of us are uncertain economically, with many still worried about keeping themselves housed, employed, fed, clothed. We are at war on many fronts. We are unsure, I think, as a country, of our place in the world, and that uncertainty and confusion can too easily turn into fear.

While home I watched a little more television than I normally do, and was surprised at the panic and the anger and the fear and cynicism I heard trumpeted by commentators of all flavors, from all points along the political spectrum- the language of doom and destruction and apocalypse tossed out easily, and it was terrifying. Historically, during times of economic downturn we as a people, as a human race, have given in to blaming the other, tightening borders and closing ranks in an attempt to create some sense of safety, of control. We have created scapegoats, have vilified members of other races, or religions, or nationalities. Cynicism leads to detachment, which leads the denial of the shared humanity that unites us all which leads to inaction. The bowl of our creation begins to wobble, ever so slightly, threatening to spin out of control.

But all is not lost; the pot can still be saved. We must remind ourselves that God’s hands are embracing us from all sides, continuing our formation even as we try to shake free.

And, we are reminded, if we hold tight to the Gospel, to the good news of Christ and to the new covenant he gave us: if we love our neighbors as ourselves, and above all else, love God- we have nothing to fear.

AMEN.

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-08-15T14:46:00.003-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

My, wasn’t that a comforting Word from the Lord Jesus? I have always wondered what was the origin of that saying about the job of the preacher being “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” I think we have found it in today’s gospel passage.

Wherever happened to the Jesus who said in Matthew; “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Is this the same Jesus? The simple answer is, Yes.

So, what do you think is going on with Jesus here? Did he get out on the wrong side of the bed? Is he just having a bad day? Perhaps his biorhythms are off. Maybe like the flight attendant who jumped down the emergency chute and out of his job, perhaps he had just had enough with how things are, and was ready now for some radical change. Was there some specific event or circumstance around Jesus that occasioned this outburst? Or maybe if not Jesus, then maybe around Luke, that would cause him to highlight this dimension of Jesus and the world?

Do you remember what John the Baptist said about Jesus way back before the beginning of Jesus’ ministry? In Matthew 3:11 we hear John say, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Is it possible that the world is such – that the human condition is such – that the breaking in of the reign of God will cause radical change, will demand radical change? Is it possible that the kingdom of God looks little like the world we inhabit, looks nothing like some of the uglier aspects of the world? Is it possible that the best of human community is but a veiled shadow of what God has in store for creation?

God has declared through his prophet Isaiah that “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

If that is the case, then it would not be surprising that the breaking in of the reign of God will cause some breaking of old habits, some rejection of ingrained patterns of living, some necessity to separate, to divide oneself from the evil powers of the world and from people whose behavior or mission is to hurt or destroy.

We affirm that truth whenever we baptize someone and welcome him or her into the household of God. “Do you renounce the evil powers of the world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?” “I renounce them,” we say. I remove myself from them, we say. I place a divide between who I am and what they do, we say.

We may need to go even further than that. We may need to separate ourselves, to purify ourselves from some dimensions of our selves. What are my behaviors, my habits that are hurtful to others? Can I renounce them? Truly renounce them? What do I do that tears down, rather than builds up? Can I renounce them? What in my life keeps other people at a distance, keeps God at a distance, separates me from knowing the fullness of God’s love, God’s presence in my life, God’s power? Can I renounce them? What lives in the darkness in me that needs to be brought into the light? Can I renounce them?

What are “the false hopes, bad dreams, and reckless lies” that I love to love? Don Clendenin has come up with his partial list.

“* I deserve perfect health and the medicine to get me there, especially given how hard I work out. 

* I'm entitled to all the passionate sex that the tabloids describe and the movies depict. 

* There's a solution to every problem if I pray hard enough. 

* I'd be happier in a bigger house in a better location, or in a smaller house with less upkeep.  

* I'd be happier in a newer house with fewer repairs, or in an older house with more charm. 

* I wouldn't be such a mess if not for my family of origin. 

* I'd find more fulfillment in a different job. 

* My kids deserve straight teeth, the best universities, challenging jobs, financial success, and model marriages. And they should make me proud.  

* I will give a little more when I get a little more. Just a little more, enough to be secure.”

* … I expect "a front row seat in a life of miracles." 

These are his, what might yours be? These are all false prophecies about how life is to be, about what one can expect, about what is of value. Jeremiah calls those who tout these false visions, those who sell these false visions of life, “false prophets”. Their words are not God’s Word. They promise what cannot be delivered. We read in Jeremiah, “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

What the false prophets hold out to the world is gossamer; it blows away in the wind, as in “It ain’t ever going to happen like that for you.” Or sometimes what they hold out can capture us and blind us to any other way of thinking or living or being.

And yet, Jesus tells us that there is another way. In last Sunday’s NY Times Business section there was a column titled, “But will it make you happy?” The opening paragraph went this way: “She had so much. A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people. Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. … she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.” So one day she stepped off.”

She just stepped off. She broke away. That’s something like what Jesus was talking about. Sometimes living fully, living truthfully, living deeply into the reign and life of God requires us to move away from, to break asunder, to be refined in the fire of repentance.

And the good news is that it is possible at any time, it is possible at every time to make the break that is necessary to find healing and wholeness. The human story is the story of God’s redeeming work at any time and every time throughout history, and for each of us that redeeming work will be completed in God’s time.

As Dylan Breuer has written, “(The human story) is a story of pain and tears and brokenness, but it is a story of love, joy, and hope that ends in wholeness, in the world coming to know, and you and I coming to know, just how high and broad and deep God's love and blessings for Creation are,” including the part of creation that bears your name.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

2010-08-08T16:26:00.004-04:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

So- how about these readings today? A little depressing, right? We have vanity (and vanity, and vanity) and greed and dying unaware, all in spades.

We are warned again and again in Ecclesiastes and the psalm of the sin of greed, of the risk of prizing things over relationships with each other and with God. We are shown, in the teacher character form Ecclesiastes, exactly how gloomy and fixated and anxious one can become when getting is all that we think about. Everything else loses meaning, and we find ourselves, bitter and jealous, sitting alone on a pile of money, terrified of who might get it once we die. That, truly, is vanity!

But then in Colossians, we are reminded that behind the sin of greed, there is an even greater sin- the sin of self-sufficiency, of believing that we can ever have so much stuff that we no longer need each other. In Jesus, we are reminded, God offers us another way.

I have a confession to make. I am a saver. For me, saving money is like a sport- when most of my friends were buying their first new cars, I was starting an IRA, I buy things for full price so rarely that I can pretty much remember each occasion in the last five years, and I get a thrill when I find a bargain online. Even as a little girl, when I came into money, whether a dollar from the Tooth Fairy or $5 in a birthday card or a quarter I found in the sofa, I squirreled it away somewhere, and saved it. My mother tells stories of finding little pockets of change and dollar bills folded ever smaller around my room, and my older brother constantly coming to me with “investment opportunities.”

All of that back story is to explain why, when I got a statement from the Social Security office in the mail earlier this week, it had the impact on me that it did. I was pretty excited to find out that I’ve finally worked enough units or whatever they call it to be a part of the program. I felt good about that, I liked the idea of having some security in that murky, hazy future, still so many decades off, when I am told I get to retire.

And then I read the sheet called: What young workers should know about social security. After detailing all the reasons the program will be vital in my eventual old age, it posed the question so many folks in my generation have been asking for a while now: will social security be around when I retire? I don’t think I will spoil it for you when I tell you the official answer was somewhere between probably and maybe.

Anxiety took hold as I looked at the graphs of how saving x amount of dollars now at y % would mean z in savings in forty years, and my chest got a little tight and I eventually had to just go do something else altogether because I was getting a little freaked out.

We all carry our false gods with us in life, and I realized, once again, that I had made something of an idol out of financial security. I know that I am not alone when I identify with the man in today’s Gospel who has worked hard and focused on the future and pinched and planned to insure his comfort and security, and in the process has lost sight, a little, of all those other important aspects of life.

We have felt the false peace of the farmer in Luke, relaxing, finally, with the feeling that we have saved enough, we have done enough, we have made the right decisions, and now we are assured of happiness and security. Except, like the farmer, we can too easily lose sight of the bigger picture. Because just as we say to our souls, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, [now] relax, eat, drink and be merry!”, we realize that life is unpredictable, and none of us knows when its final day might come, and if we’ve staked our entire being on having enough, we have very little support when we find that we are lacking.

To quote Walter Brueggeman, theologian, we have been caught in the foolish destructiveness of self-sufficiency. Luke’s parable, Brueggeman says, portrays a fool who is a great accumulator and who imagines that his vast possessiveness adds to his well being. In the end he is talking only to himself, he is isolated, and his self-satisfaction is interrupted by death.

The message, as always, is that balance is key. Of course we should all live with an eye towards the future, we should all save and practice sound financial stewardship, but we cannot let that future security become an obsession- we must also live in the present moment, not become so attached to things and money that we squirrel them away, like my young self with my tiny folded bills, without enjoying them - we have to come to a place where we recognize that those bills are a means to an end, and that end is a life that includes the joy of charity, the pleasure of pleasures, and keeping ourselves open to the community we live in.

We know that greed is a way of worshipping the wrong gods, but it is easier to forget that security itself can be a false god, an attempt to wrest control from the hands of the God who made us.

To quote Brueggeman once more, this teaching is urgent in our society, not only because of the perennial seduction of greed, but because we live in an era in which credit and tax law and advertisements all seek to make greed into a civic virtue. We know better! We may choose against preoccupation with getting and having, and instead choose a life centered on compassion, on kindness, on humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness- we can choose a life centered on a new self, the one baptized into Christ.

Let us pray:

Lord, help us to relax.
Take from us the tension that makes peace impossible,
Take from us the fears that do not allow us to venture,
Take from us the worries that blind our sight,
Take from us the distress that hides our joy,
Help us to know that we are with you,
That we are in your care,
That we are in your love,
That you and we are one.
AMEN.

The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

2010-07-18T11:00:00.007-04:00

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

In Thanksgiving for The Rev. Cn. Charles Shreve
and "Ralph Davis"

Luke 10:38-42

As Jesus and his disciples went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

On this hot Sunday in late July of the hottest summer on record, I thought I would tell you a couple of parables and along with trying to engage you, at the same time try to entice you into a little personal reflection later on, not about what you do, but about how you do what you do.

The first parable.

Almost 40 years ago, I went to Christ Church, Corning N.Y. as the Associate Rector. Christ Church is a very large church, about like this cathedral in building and in membership. I had a very big job, and I became very busy doing God's work. As clergy do when we come to a new parish, I spent a lot of time visiting with my new parishioners. And I really had to hustle from visit to visit.

Finally I was getting down to the less active members and it came time for me to visit a man I will call Ralph Davis. He was about 85 years old. Been retired from railroading for some 20 years. He lived in the house he grew up in, and it looked as if it hadn't had a coat of paint since the day he was born.

I knocked on his door and the door swung slowly open. I called out, “Hello, Mr. Davis?” A muffled reply came back, “In here.” I proceeded to the parlor. I walked into the darkest, dingiest, dankest, dirtiest, dustiest, disgusting-est living room I had ever seen. And there was Ralph seated in his chair...his foul smelling chair...in the middle of it all.

“Who the (expletive deleted) are you?” “I'm Rick Cluett from Christ Church.” “You must be new. I always get the new one. Well, you needn't bother. I got along fine before you, and I will after you.” A great beginning. I said, “Mr. Davis, I'm very busy. I have people to see, places to go, and work to do, now if you don't want me here, I will be glad to leave.” (Hoping against hope, he would end this unpleasantness.)

“Well, all right you might as well sit down seeing as you’re here, but be quiet so I can finish my show.” Ten minutes of his show, and I was gone. Back to work; on to another parishioner for a visit. I did go back to Ralph, but only on the highest holy days to take him the sacrament, for which I turned off the TV, and immediately afterward turned it back on again, so that I wouldn't have to talk to him and I would leave.

Another parable.

You long time members of Nativity will remember Canon Charles Shreve who served this cathedral faithfully for a number of years, when he and his beloved wife, Patti Pickens, retired to Bethlehem. For those who didn’t know him, Charles’ ministry had taken him into the company of the powerful, the elite, the luminary and famous, corporate and political leaders, talented artists and artisans, and to the great cathedrals in Paris and San Francisco.

One day in this cathedral pulpit many years ago he told this story from his time as canon and bishop’s chaplain, an important and powerful post, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

He was very busy in his office when his secretary called him to come out to help her "deal with" this man who had come to ask for money.

Charles saw a man who was an obvious street drunk – his body was dirty, he was unkempt, wearing filthy clothes. Charles invited him into his office, anyway. The man told him a well-rehearsed story of his descent into his present condition. He just wanted money for food, he said. Charles asked him, "Isn't there anyone in this world who you could look to for help."

He said that there was no one; except his son whom he had not seen for several years, since his graduation from Stanford, and he had no idea where to find him, or even if it was worth finding him, given his present condition. When he mentioned that the son had graduated from Stanford, a possible way to trace the son crossed Charles’ mind. He asked the man the name of his son.

The name he gave was the name of a young man Charles knew. This young man was a kind of golden boy, a rising star in the corporate world, active in cathedral life and ministry. He was young, handsome, well educated, well employed, had a winning personality and made a good buck.

Charles asked the man if he would come back the next day at 12:00 noon, and said he would try to locate his son. Reluctantly he agreed. Charles then called the son and told him the story of his father. The man said that he hadn't seen his father since his graduation. His mother had divorced his father because of his alcoholism. He had lost track of him. But with a rather reluctant “yes”, he said he would come to the cathedral at noon.

The old man arrived first and Charles invited him to wait in his office. Shortly afterward the son came in. Dressed in a beautiful, double-breasted Cashmere overcoat. The old man stood up and said, Hello Son. The young man said, Hello Dad. And he went over to him: this dirty, grubby, disheveled, drunk who was his father. He took off his coat and placed it around the shoulders of his father - wrapped him up in it - and drew him into a warm embrace of love. Tears began streaming from three pairs of eyes. It was a moment of reconciliation and the beginning of the redemption of a human soul.

To finish the first parable.

One day I brought the sacrament to Ralph, and for the first time, somehow it truly became the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Afterward Ralph asked me not to turn the TV on again. Instead, he said, “Sit down,” and asked, “How are things going down at the Church? Where'd you grow up? Tell me about your family.” And so on. He also told me details and anecdotes about his amazing life.

After two years of visiting him in which I never really visited with him, he made me sit down and engage him – relate to him. And he was tenacious. I would get up to go, and he would ask me a new question. I would say what I thought, he would argue, and he would probe, and probe and probe -- deeply. I felt a little like Jacob wrestling with the angel. We wrestled, we wrangled, and in the end we both won.

For when it finally came time for him to go to the hospital for the last time, he told me he wanted me to take him. So I cleaned him up, dressed him, took him to the hospital in my car, sat with him, helped him die, buried him, and mourned his loss ...and gave thanks to God for him and for what he taught me about dignity and courage and faith and patience, and compassion -- and something about what the good part really is, where it is found, and that it is of God.

Now what was it that Jesus was saying in this gospel story of Mary and Martha?

Becoming whole persons, holy persons, depends not so much upon changing what we do but in doing for God and those around us what we ordinarily do for ourselves. This Gospel doesn't deal with competition between action or contemplation, faith or work. It has everything to do with living deliberately, intentionally and attentively in relationship by God's grace.

God didn't create us to fill some role, do some job. God made us for relationship and for love -- to be loved by God, and to express with our life and our welcome of others how we see God loving the world.

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

2010-06-13T10:42:00.001-04:00

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

The dramatic events from today’s Gospel reading have provided material for innumerable artists- a dinner party at the lavish home of a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish upper class, Jesus, and a woman driven by devotion to wash his feet with her tears, anoint them with perfume, and wipe them clean with her hair, all while the host stands over her in judgment. That’s pretty exciting stuff and the paintings that have resulted are equally dynamic. My favorite is “Feast at the House of Simon the Pharisee,” painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1618, now part of the collection of The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I have not seen it in person, but even in reproduction its monumental size and rich colors make quite an impact. The painting is about 9 feet long by 6 feet tall, and is a tight focus on the dinner table at Simon’s house, the people slightly larger than life size. No fewer than fifteen figures crowd the scene, including multiple servants and a snarling dog, searching for crumbs under the corner of the table. The white tablecloth divides the painting into top and bottom halves. Above the horizontal expanse of the cloth one sees the servants at work in the background, passing baskets of food and dishes and bread. Below the line of servants’ faces one finds the various dinner guests, their faces painted to show their reactions to the actions of this unclean woman, in the lower middle of the scene. At Jesus’ left, Simon, the host, covers his face partially with a dinner napkin, presumably appalled at how wrong his party has gone. Next to him a tight group of five men argue, some looking repulsed at this rabbi who allows his feet to be touched by such a woman as this, others simply bewildered. The final two dinner guests, both heavily bearded, are casting their gaze into the lower half of the painting, rapt with judgment or bewilderment it is not clear, watching the woman as she washes the feet of her Lord.

In typical Rubens’ style, she is a large, full-bodied woman, dressed in sumptuous fabrics of plum and silver and peach, in the Renaissance style, and her hair is, for 1st century Palestine, improbably golden blonde. Of all the figures, only she and Jesus are shown in their entirety, not blocked by furniture or other people. Jesus is wearing a blue robe, draped with a red cloak, and he is silhouetted against a dark architectural background. In the midst of the confusion of bodies in this massive painting, Jesus and the woman seem alone in the right half, their skin radiating light. The woman caresses Jesus’ feet, an ointment bottle in the foreground, and seems lost in the actions of physical worship, her eyes half closed, her face transcendent. Jesus looks not at her, but at the group around the table, and gestures to the example she is setting in her willingness to cross lines of social boundary to express her devotion to her Lord. In the background a single servant casts her eyes toward Jesus, as if some new world has been opened for her at that moment.

In my mind, this painting shows the exact instance of Jesus’ telling of the parable we have just heard, the parable of the weight of debts and the relative lightness of those debts forgiven. As understanding dawns on the men at the table of the meaning of his words, the tight group pulls away to argue among themselves about the law and the scriptural basis for forgiveness of debts, the host, Simon, is aghast at his own oversights in hospitality, his failure to provide his guest with the comforts due a stranger and his own sharp judgment when he was so lacking, and the two bearded men at the far end of the table are questioning, perhaps, the social order they have grown old in, and are looking at the woman at Jesus’ feet with wonder and awe.

My eye continues to be drawn back to the servant girl, the fringe figure whose eyes provide a counterpoint to the action of Jesus and the woman, and in her gaze I found my own understanding of the parable Jesus told that day. This parable of forgiven debts and equivalent love seems, at first hearing counter to other parables Jesus has told. In the parable of the vineyard, he chastened the workers who worked a full day and were paid the regular wage for their displeasure that those who came later worked less, were paid the same. Be happy when you have been given what you are due, he seemed to say, and do not worry yourself with the fairness of other’s charity. Does this not then call into question the premise that one who has a greater debt will be more pleased with that debt’s forgiveness than one whose debt was less? Shouldn’t we all be equally pleased that our debts were forgiven at all, love equally, and not cast our thoughts to the debts of others?

But this is not the point- these parables are not an even comparison. The debts forgiven- 500 denarii in one case, 50 in the other- were both crushingly large amounts. We are not told anything about the debtors themselves, but we must assume they were men of little wealth to have borrowed in the first place, and regardless, these sums are large- a single denarius was valued the same as 10 donkeys, and was well over a day’s wage. So for the creditor to have pardoned a debt of 50 denarii was munificent, and saved this man and his family years of saving and scrimping and going without, and for this the debtor was understandably pleased. However, for the man who owed 500 denarii, this was a sum that probably could not have been paid back in his lifetime, and would have weighed upon his family and subsequent generations of his family, perhaps caused one or two of them to be sold into slavery, and so when that debt was forgiven, the entire family was given its freedom.

The correlation of these Biblical sums to modern day equivalence can be misleading, though, in our day when credit is still readily available and relatively cheap, and so I think it makes more sense to think of this parable in terms of the forgiveness rather than the debts. We all have burdens that we carry with us, each day. We know that some are lighter than others, though we only truly know the weight of our own, and perhaps we know from personal experience that some are downright crushing and we aren’t sure we’ll be able to make another day under their weight. Regardless of the weight that we carry, in God we find a set of arms that can hold all we can load upon them, we find forgiveness that goes to our very souls, sees every ugly, embarrassing, shameful bit of us that might exist, and loves us anyway, loves us even more for being so imperfectly human. And so, rather than calculating the modern day value of a denarius, it is more helpful to imagine the burden that you carry suddenly lifted, your shoulders suddenly rising on their own from the lightness, feeling the loving embrace of God wrapped around us and supporting us. This is what we have in Jesus, this is what we were promised on the cross and are promised each time we approach this altar- that we are loved, and worth loving, no matter how great our debts. And in that love there is release, and freedom, and that newfound worth is enough to make a woman, cast out of society for whatever mistakes, fall down at her Savior’s feet, and bathe him with her tears and her kisses, and dry the dust of the road from those feet with her hair.

That forgiveness is enough to tear a hole in the fabric of a society neatly defined by law and power, and rearrange it into a new world where forgiveness is a promise, where there are no strangers but only family, all to be reflected, in a flash of understanding, in the eyes of a servant girl suddenly set free.