The Third Sunday of Advent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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+