March 8, 2015, Lent III


Kristin White

The Third Sunday of Lent

John 2:13-22

 

         This is the prayer we prayed just after the Confession and Absolution this morning, the Collect of the Day:

         Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

         Now, theologically, there is much in that prayer that I would let go of. But this one line sticks in my head: Keep us, we prayed, outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls. Keep us in our bodies. Keep us in our souls.

         We’re a heady bunch, we Episcopalians. Among other revelations, the most recent Pew research showed that of all denominations in the United States, Episcopalians are the most highly-educated. It makes me think of an Episcopal friend’s tee shirt from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago: “That’s great in practice, but how does it work in theory?” We parse meaning and play with concept and argue interpretation. We have a history of loving words and using lots of them. And both of those things go back to the DNA of our denomination, back before the split from England to Elizabeth the First, who did two things: made sure that the words of our worship were the words of our daily lives (sure, made more shiny and maybe multi-syllabic, but still, a fancy version of the vernacular); and she gave us the inheritance of free thought: “I desire not a window into men’s souls,” we know her to have said. “Believe what you will. And come to church.”

         Keep us in our bodies. Keep us in our souls.

         Even in talking about bodies, we know how to remain in our heads. I remember defending the position I had taken on the theological argument on “incarnational Christology” in seminary, and being pretty proud of it. Extra syllables and all. (Incarnational Christology Meaning: Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. Meaning: Jesus is God, and Jesus has a body.)

         Conversely, we gasp at the frailty of our human bodies. We gasp the vulnerability of a newborn’s immune system in light of a measles outbreak in Palatine. We gasp at the anticipation of a diagnosis. We gasp at the danger and at all the implications in an elderly person’s fall.

         John’s gospel gives us a word about bodies in today’s passage. But even before we get to it, the poetry of that otherworldly, ethereal, evangelist echoes into the conversation. “And the word became flesh and lived among us,” John says. “Full of grace and truth.” And there’s some kind of irony in that, because this otherworldly, ethereal account describes the very concrete and earthy fact of God taking up space in this world with flesh and blood and bone. God is Word and God is more than Word. Because in the person of Jesus, God has a body. Fully human. Fully divine.

         Two chapters past that point lands us at today’s gospel. In an argument with the authorities, Jesus says that if they destroy this temple, he will raise it up. They are confused, those poor authorities. This is not a concept that is part of their vernacular. But Jesus isn’t talking about the temple of marble and gold that has been under construction in Jerusalem for 46 years. Jesus is talking about the temple of flesh and blood that is his body; the temple that for 33 years, right here on this earth, showed us what God looks like.

         And this is what that temple has revealed, this is what God looks like, right here: like walking alongside people who don’t know exactly where they are going, and are a little confused about what they’re going to do when they get there; like picking up children, when others want those kids to stay away; like feeding folks who are hungry, even when you never asked them to come along on what you thought was going to be a silent retreat; like trusting that what you need to eat and drink will be provided; like putting your hands on people who are sick; like “loving the bodies of other people who, like you, one day will die; like touching human flesh as if it is holy instead of worrying that it is unclean;”[1] like taking and blessing and breaking and giving bread to everybody who is hungry, and sharing a cup with those who thirst.

         These are the ways that the Body of Christ has shown us what God looks like. And you are that Body. You are that temple.

         Earlier this week, as he has before and will again, Bishop Lee told a group of people that the Church is not a Building. The church, the ecclesia, is the body of people assembled. The Church, the Body, is You. You are the temple that shows the world what God looks like.

         Keep us in our bodies, we pray.

         This church has known frailty and vulnerability and loss in these past months. I was interviewed a few days ago about the gathering we had last November, on All Saints’ Night. I told my interviewer about our comfort food potluck (mac and cheese, chicken potpie) and hymn sing, our conversations about what it means to die a holy death, our funeral planning time that evening. It was impossible to talk about it, though, without telling about the many people who had died from this church in the months before and since that night. “It feels like body blows,” I found myself saying. “We carry those losses as a Body.”

         As he has before and as he will again, Bishop Lee recently told a group of people that their minds will not save them. Their words, their checkbooks, their retirement accounts, their exercise regimes, their healthy eating practices, their education…all of them helpful, and none of them will save. But the Body will.

Christ was speaking of the temple of his body. Which is us. Which is you.

         And this is how we show the world that temple; this is how we show the world what God looks like, here on earth: we walk alongside people who don’t necessarily know exactly where they’re going, as they stumble and lose their way; we pick up children who want to be held; we feed people who are hungry; we put our hands around the hands of those who are sick, and dying; we take and bless and break and give bread, and we share the cup we have to share.

Because the word became flesh and lived among us.     

Because he was speaking of the temple of his body.

         This is what Lent brings us: “a body anointed, a body beaten, a body on a cross, a body laid in a tomb.”[2] Through it all, and through the 33 years that his body was a temple of flesh and blood in this world, and beyond, Jesus tells us that his body is what God looks like. And yours is too.

         The word becomes flesh and lives among us…full of grace and truth. “We are baptized into that word made flesh, (so) that we might become the flesh made word,”[3] that we might embody the truth of the gospel, become agents of the fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.

         So yes, keep us, we pray.

         Keep us in our bodies.

         Amen.

 

 

[1] http://www.nadiabolzweber.com/uncategorized/in-the-beginning-a-sermon-on-the-occasion-of-paulas-baptism.htm

[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3547

[3] http://www.nadiabolzweber.com/uncategorized/in-the-beginning-a-sermon-on-the-occasion-of-paulas-baptism.htm

March 1, Second Sunday in Lent

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16Mark 8:31-38

Does anyone ever try to make “deals” with their parents? Like: If I do my homework, I get an hour of time of Facebook or Xbox or Minecraft? Or: If I eat two-thirds of my vegetables, I can have all the ice cream I want? Or: If I go to church, you take me out for breakfast?

When I was a kid, and first learning my negotiating skills, I used to try to make these kinds of deals with my dad. But he was pretty shrewd: If I proposed a deal in which I cleaned my room, in return for some new toy or a trip to McDonald’s he always countered with something like:  If you clean your room, I’ll feed you dinner. Or: If you mow the yard, I'll pay the heat bill. It was pretty hard to negotiate a deal with my dad.

But I can say for my dad, whether I lived up to my end of the bargain or not, he, along with my mom, always kept the heat bill paid and dinner on the table. I have been lucky and blessed in my parents. I hope most of us have been, too, because not everyone has been.

I’ve also sometimes made deals with God. Has anyone else ever tried to make a deal with God? Maybe especially when times were hard, or maybe when I had made a mistake, and needed some divine assistance to get out of the mess I was in, I made a deal with God.

I have found my deals with God to be kind of like my deals with my dad: I’ll do what I’m really supposed to do anyway if God will rescue me from whatever mess that at least sometimes was a result of me not doing what I was supposed to do anyway. Fortunately, God always keeps up God’s end of the deal, whether I do or not: always loving me, always forgiving me, always helping me to start over. We are lucky and blessed in the God we have.

And, actually, God is pretty much always offering good deals. Take today’s first reading: God offers Abraham a pretty sweet deal: Leave your homeland and follow me, and live according to my ways, and I will give you a family so large that you can’t count them, even though you are already 99 years old, and so is your wife, and you don’t have any children yet.

I think the reason Abraham fell on his face was because it was such a ridiculously good deal, too good to be true. When Sarah hears about it later, she laughs out loud, too.

Our first readings this Lent are all about God’s good deals; in the Bible they are called covenants: Last week it was Noah, when God promised not to destroy the earth with a flood again,  no matter how bad people were. This week, it’s Abraham and Sarah, whom God promises a multitude of nations. Next week, a ragtag bunch of slaves and outcasts from Egypt get the offer of having God as their ruler, and their own country, if they will only live in the ways of fairness and peace God gives them, those “Ten Best Ways” or Ten Commandments. Then, even when that deal gets complicated by the fact the people can never quite live up to the covenant, God promises to renew that deal again and again, over and over.

Which brings us to Jesus, whose deal doesn’t seem quite so good. Jesus offers a deal where, if we follow him as he carries his cross, we will get crosses of our very own. That sounds like a bad deal. Can I get in on that deal God offered Abraham? I think Peter was feeling the same way,  which is why he got up in Jesus’ face about having to die.

Jesus is pretty straightforward about the deal he is offering: Here’s what it means to be God’s beloved ones: We get to call God our Abba—just like our dad or mom or the person in our life we can always rely on. That’s how God will be with us.

And we get to be part of God’s household, workers and servants and partners and friends in God’s plan. We get to be part of God’s adventure in creation, to bring about with God what God dreams for the world.

Unfortunately, there are powers in the world opposed to God’s dream, and they will oppose us just as they opposed Jesus. That’s where the cross comes in. As many Christians have learned, and as Jesus learned, those forces can be very powerful, and they can be very mean. The good news is, they can’t stop God’s dream from happening; the bad news is, it won’t be easy. But what adventure is easy?

We Episcopalians have boiled down our side of our deal with God in Jesus into our baptismal covenant, which our confirmation candidates are reflecting on this Lent, and hopefully the rest of us are along with them. We promise in it to keep following Jesus and coming to church, to seek forgiveness and try again when we fail, to live in justice, fairness and peace with all people, and to see Christ in everyone and to serve him in them.

That deal has its own unique shape for each of us: Just like Abraham and Sarah, Noah and his family, the people of Israel, Jesus and Peter and Mary Magdalene and all those who followed Jesus, God is offering us a deal, a real adventure with God: a life that matters, even a death that matters, a dream worth living for, and dying for, and rising again for.

So perhaps we may ask ourselves this Lent: What kind of deal do you want to make with God? Or maybe: What kind of adventure do you want to have with God?

February 22, 2015, Lent I

 

Kristin White

The First Sunday of Lent – February 22, 2015

 

         Two of the great fears we have lived with since ancient times: the fear of flood – of the water rising up to our necks, and still farther, until there is no place to go, no place to take refuge above that which would drown us; and the fear of wilderness – of being lost and unprotected, exposed to the elements, the wild beasts, to whatever is out there.

         Think of the tone of those news reports during Hurricane Katrina, and more recently, Hurricane Sandy. The chaos, as the waves hit the shoreline and destroyed it. I still remember, this many years later, the front-page photo of a section of highway outside of Slidell, Louisiana, that I had driven less than a year before. The highway was still there, but in pieces – broken apart, in segments.

         And think of the news stories of all those children and teenagers last summer, who had fled their lives in Honduras and other countries, walking through the desert to get to the United States. Think of those stories of their being lost, of being exposed to coyotes who would do them harm, of being thirsty, and hungry, of not knowing where to go, or where they would go once they made it – if they made it – across the border, to what they hoped was safety.

         These two great fears find a foothold in the stories from our scripture today. In Genesis, the flood has already happened. God, the powerful creator of all that exists, is fed up with all that exists. So he destroys it. Almost. And this is totally in keeping with ancient understandings of who and what God is. The people who would have set these texts down were inheritors of the belief that God is both just and all-powerful. So when creation disappoints the divine heart, “the one who created all things and stands as judge over all things, is entitled to destroy all things.”[1] The unusual thing here is the “almost” – and what comes next. Because God does not destroy all creation. Instead, God practices restraint rather than annihilation, places limits on the divine power. Noah and his family and all those two by two by two by two of the species they have collected – they live. Not only that, but God makes a promise with all those people and all the creation that lives, and all those who will come after, that God will not destroy again.

         In Mark’s gospel, just as soon as Jesus comes up out of the waters (which have not drowned him), the heavens split open, and a dove descends, and a voice says, “You are my son, the beloved.” And then immediately the Spirit (the Spirit?) pushes Jesus out into the wilderness, the desert, for forty days. There, Jesus is tempted by the devil. And, it says, there are wild beasts.

         These are two fearful moments, carved into our memory as a people: the chaos, as those waters rise; the vulnerability of exposure in the wild.

         And two promises, as well: not that there wouldn’t be chaos or exposure in our lives and in the life we share (spoiler alert: there have been, and there will be). But instead the promise that God would not destroy us; and the promise that there is no place where we will go – not desert, not wilderness – where God has not already gone, and goes with us still.

         Today we welcome six confirmands, together with your mentors, to step forward and receive the prayers of this community, and to receive the inherited prayers of who we are as Church. It’s fitting that these are the stories and the promises we hear today: that chaos will come, and that God will not destroy; that we will wander in desert places, and that God travels with us there.

         Today and in these months ahead we will ask you to remember who you are as baptized people, and to remind us as well. We will ask you to continue the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers, which, as Bp. Lee says, really means we will ask you to come to church; because none of us can do this on our own. We will ask you to join us in lives of service, remembering Jesus’ call to feed people who are hungry, to shelter people who don’t have homes to live in. And we will ask you to wonder about and explore the gifts that God has given you as the unique people God has created you to be, asking how you will use those gifts generously to make this world more loving and kind.

         In the Episcopal Church and in other traditions, confirmation has sometimes been treated as graduation from church. I ask you to look at it a different way. I ask you to see this process as something much more than a rite of passage. Instead, I charge you to take your place in this church you belong to, this church that belongs to you. Because, as I say from time to time, life is short, and we do not have too much time. Because there’s too much at stake in your life, in the life we share, and in the life of this world we inherit.

         Because God’s promises are steadfast – that God will not destroy, that God is present when we feel lost. And still, the chaos is real; still, the wilderness is dangerous. Our President met this week with leaders from around the world. They’re floundering as they try to stop terrorists who want to destroy, who want to bring about the end of this world. The chaos is real. And our news is filled to the point we almost don’t notice it anymore with stories of refugees who are wandering in desert wilderness toward what they hope but don’t know will be safety – in the US, in Italy, in Germany, in Turkey, in Jordan…in so many other places that I can’t keep track. That wilderness is dangerous.

And we need you. We need us. We need faithful people who come together and pray for a world that knows chaos and danger, and trusts in a God whose promise is bigger than those, and steadfast. We need faithful people who feed each other, who offer shelter and refuge. We need faithful people with the muscle and grit and resilience and practice to share their gifts generously, making this world something more than it would be without us.

This is the promise of your baptism. Not that you or we would be insulated in some kind of divine bubble wrap that protects us from chaos and danger. We haven’t been, you won’t be. The promise of baptism is that God is bigger. The promise is that we have each other, and that we will lean in, together. The promise is that God is faithful to the covenant God has established with us, and with those who came before, and with all those who will follow – that finally, God will not destroy…that there is no place, finally, where God is not.

        

        

 

[1] David Lose. “Genesis 9: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2, David Brown and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 29.

Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Today's first reader and I were discussing last night today’s reading from Isaiah: Its tone is harsh, God is sarcastic, specifically about the religious behaviors of the people, lying down in sackcloth and ashes. God is basically accusing the people of merely playing at living the covenant, of pretending righteousness, while they oppress their workers and ignore the starving. In other, more strident places in this prophet and others, God says when he smells the burnt sacrifices of the Israelites, their injustice makes him want to throw up.

Jesus today is equally straightforward about “piety”: Don’t pray where others can see you. Don’t fast in ways that others know it. Don’t give money in a way that draws attention to yourself. All of which must seem like the most ignored advice Jesus ever gave, since today we will put ashes on our faces, and gather to pray together in public (as we often do). And as for money, well, not only do we take a public collection, our church is literally covered with the names of people who have given money to the church, as is every university campus, hospital, and most other charitable institutions.

So if both the God of Israel and Jesus are telling us not to do these things, why are we doing them? Wouldn’t it be better if we started Ash Wednesday searching out the homeless, or agitating with the Fight for Fifteen workers, or for that matter, spending every Sunday morning in the soup kitchen, instead of in church?

Oddly enough, we do these things because God has asked us to: After all, the same covenant that demands justice for immigrants and widows and orphans also is heavy on descriptions of how to eat with God, how to do penance for failure to live up to the covenant, and how to do all that stuff in public, in community. All those sacrifices were the outward signs, communal acknowledgments, of every Israelite’s and of all Israel’s dependence on God.

And Jesus never says that we shouldn’t fast, or give alms, or pray— in fact we need to do them to be shaped in the ways of justice and mercy. None of them is optional. The issue is that they must be done with integrity.

Integrity—there’s the rub—and it’s opposite, hypocrisy. And the difference between them is simply whether our religious practices have their intended effect: whether both our insides —our spirits, our minds, our wills— and our outsides —both our own behaviors and the society they create and shape— are transformed by the religion we practice.

And I think that makes Lent really hard, because it is a 40-day-long invitation to examine ourselves for integrity as people of faith. And that kind of examination is bound to turn up problems.

We celebrate Eucharist every Sunday, for example, a ritual meal that enacts what God intends for food, and by extension what God intends for all the material things that sustain life. Every Sunday we enact in ritual God’s vision of the world, in which everyone has enough, even the same amount, with some left over, all fed from the same table as one family.

How is that Sunday-by-Sunday celebration transforming our attitudes about food, how it is produced and allocated, about how it is shared and not? How is that Sunday-by-Sunday celebration changing how we actually share food? How does it change the way we interact with those around us about food, or about any of the created goods that God intends for us all to share? I imagine if Isaiah were around today, he might have something to say about the integrity of the church’s, and this church’s, celebration of the Eucharist.

We celebrate baptism to initiate new members, and we routinely renew our baptismal covenant of commitment to the life of faith and works of justice. And every time we do so we affirm the goodness and belovedness of every human being and of all creation.

How is that celebration of baptism shaping our hearts to see in every person the image of Christ, and to serve Christ in every person. How is the celebration of that sacrament healing us of the prejudice, the racism, the sexism, all those attitudes baked into our culture, that thwart the full expression of God’s image in so many? And how is that celebration of baptism shaping our response to the world around us, whether our society’s use and consumption of the earth, or the violence and poverty and prejudice that continue to disfigure the image of Christ? I think the prophet Isaiah might have something to say to us about baptism, too.

The long and short of it, I guess, is that Lent, taken seriously, is not an easy journey. It definitely shouldn’t be attempted alone, which I imagine is one reason why gather together, in public, despite Jesus’ warnings, to pray, and to fast, and to put ash on our foreheads. And for me those ashes, accepted in public, as part of a community, help make this Lenten journey both easier and harder to bear.

They make it easier because they help me remember that I am dust: fallible, fragile, limited, mortal. There’s no way I’m ever going to “achieve” perfect integrity, and no one knows that better than God. I will always be on the way, and eventually, my time will be up. God has other partners who can take up where I left off, or make up for my limits. That’s one reason is why I am glad we are doing this together, because it reminds me that none of this depends on me alone.

And as for the harder part of these Lenten ashes, well, as Kristin points out often, life is short, and we have only so much time to try to live with integrity. And it’s worth trying, because it matters to God, evidently a great deal, and it matters to the world God loves, evidently a great deal. To receive these ashes with you is to commit myself with you to keep trying, in Lent and outside it. How grateful I am not to have to bear this burden alone.

February 14, 2015, Bill McCluskey Funeral

Kristin White

Bill McCluskey Funeral – February 14, 2015

 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes:[1]

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

            When I put out to sea,

---

A dear friend took me sailing the summer before last. As we navigated our way through the harbor and out into the wideness of Lake Michigan, what I noticed most of all was this friend’s familiarity with everything about that boat. I was still figuring out port and starboard, trying to remember to duck my head as the boom came across. But this was my friend’s very favorite habitat in the world. Not only did she know exactly what needed to happen with the tiller and the sail, she knew everything she needed to watch for on the lake. And the water was choppy, another thing for this novice to adjust to. But my friend took it all in: the wind and its direction, the other boats on the water, the wakes they left behind them.

I imagine Bill must have had that same kind of awareness, that sense of familiarity so deep in his bones that he maybe didn’t even have to call it to mind. I envision him out on Lake Michigan, part of “A Mackinack crew doing its best,” as he writes in the poem you hold in your hands. I can see the sun shining on his face, the wind in the sail.

---

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

            Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

            Turns again home.

In the gospel passage Bill’s family chose for this day, Jesus says this to the people who are listening to him: “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.”

Bill was a familiar kind of person. He was at ease in himself, both knowing and known. And that sense of his own awareness also offered him a level of easy hospitality. He had a friendly sort of humor that came through in his stories, his jokes, his limericks. He was familiar in his relationships with his family, his friends.

In my mind I see Bill, at the McCluskeys' long-familiar home on Walnut Street just a little way from here, or at church as Bill and Mary Jane and often Donna or Tom or Matt helped them to their pew, or on Monday mornings when he gathered with St. A’s parishioner friends to count the church’s offerings from the day before and then drink coffee and enjoy the treats Mary Jane brought from Lawrence Dean Bakery. Each time I saw him, he had a joke or a story or a little poem to share, something to draw me into the conversation, help me feel at ease, at home. Maybe you felt that too when you talked with him.

“I know my own and my own know me,” Jesus says. Bill took the time to know and to be known. There was a kinship there, and a kindness…a long and steady trust, well-worn and tempered by sun and wind and waves.

---

Twilight and evening bell,

            And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

            When I embark;

He grew weaker in those last months, more frail in his familiar self. Bill’s family surrounded him in the final days of this life. They sat at his bedside, and now it was their turn to tell the stories and the jokes, recall his poems. “I know my own and my own know me,” Jesus says. “Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” Now it was their turn – his wife, his children, his grandchildren – now it was their turn to be aware, to be familiar, allowing Bill to turn in that twilight, to turn again to the home that was his before this world was prepared, before God separated the waters from the waters. No sadness or farewell? I don’t know about that. Perhaps instead, a kind of ease in the midst of the grief that comes, a deep faith found in knowing, in being known.

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

            The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

            When I have crost the bar.

May it be so, Bill McCluskey. May you cross that bar. And may you see the One you know, the One who knows you in that truest sense, and always has. May you see God face to face…the sun on your face, the wind at your sail.

 

[1] http://allpoetry.com/Crossing-the-Bar

February 8, 2015, Epiphany V

Kristin White

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany – February 8, 2015

 

You know the image. Maybe you’ve seen it with your own eyes in the Sistine Chapel…surely you’ve seen reproductions of this most-copied work of art ever…

It’s that moment. Michelangelo calls it The Creation of Adam. God surrounded by angels, carried on a cloud with a big white flowy beard, reaches down from the heavens, extending his hand, pointing his finger. And Adam, naked as the day he was…created…reaches up toward God, extends his own hand, points his own finger. And their fingers almost touch.

I hold that image together with the refrain from the communion hymn we’ll sing today: “There is a longing in our hearts O God, for you to reveal yourself to us. There is a longing in our hearts for love we only find in you, our God.”

I am no expert in art. (I will say that 3:00 on a Friday afternoon was an unfortunate time for Art History class…in the basement of our library…in the dark…looking at slides as we listened to lectures…) But one concept that has stuck with me since the fall that I was seventeen and a freshman in college, is the idea of negative space. It’s the space around and between the thing, the subject, in a piece of art. And that is what fascinates me about this painting of Michelangelo’s. Not Adam’s finger, or God’s, but the space between them. I want something to happen there. Perhaps it’s theologically problematic, but I want one of those chubby angels on the cloud to nudge God just a little bit, to jostle him enough to move his elbow, his arm, his hand, his finger…just enough to close that gap. Just enough to eliminate that negative space. Because what might happen? What miracle might ensue? That’s the longing in my heart when I see Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. I want God to close the gap.

In Jesus’ time, as in our own, illness causes people to live on the periphery of who they are. In this gospel passage, a woman’s son-in-law, Simon Peter, and his brother, and two other men she presumably doesn’t know, and one other man she almost certainly doesn’t know, all come into the house where she lives. She has a fever serious enough that she can’t get out of bed. So she can’t do the thousand little things that add up to hospitality in her time, or in ours. Is she sick to the point of death? We don’t know. Is she living fully as the person she was created to be? I think it’s safe to say no.

In that spare and economical way that Mark tells the story in this gospel, Jesus closes the gap. He eliminates the negative space. The disciples tell Jesus about Simon’s mother-in-law, about her fever. He goes to her, takes her by the hand, lifts her up, the fever leaves her, and she begins to serve them.

Now, this might sound like a small story. Certainly it’s concise in the telling. But imagine yourself into it for a moment. Imagine yourself with an illness that you don’t know the cause of, or the cure for. Imagine yourself so sick that you can’t get out of bed. And now imagine five people coming into your house, several of them probably strangers to you…and your skin burns and your head hurts and your hands shake, and you can’t even get up to greet them at the door and welcome them inside to your home, much less prepare the meal you otherwise would. And imagine, perhaps, even maybe wishing that they weren’t there, that they hadn’t come at all…or at least that they didn’t know that you were there, and would just leave you alone in the dark to whatever this thing was going to be. Imagine the knock at your door that exacerbates the knocking inside your head. And a stranger coming into your room, putting his hand on yours, taking hold, lifting you up. Now imagine the fever gone, the shaking gone, the headache gone…the fear…gone.

Archbishop Rowan Williams refers to “God’s insistent generosity,” which we see here at work. In the person of Jesus, God closes the gap between earth and heaven, between sickness and healing, between periphery and center. This is no God in the cloud, just beyond our grasp, but instead a God who responds to the longing of our hearts by becoming like us in order to be with us. Jesus comes into our most fearful and vulnerable space, takes us by the hand, and restores us to who we are.

Several bible commentaries refer to the fact that Simon’s mother-in-law (I really wish she had a name given in the text…), upon being healed, begins to serve Jesus and Simon and the others. Scholars point out that fact as problematic. They draw attention to the fact that when Lazarus is raised from the dead, he doesn’t get up and make dinner. Instead he reclines on a couch and eats food, prepared…by his sisters. I’ll confess to rolling my eyes at the thought of this poor woman being raised up from her illness just in time to do the dishes. But two things give me pause.

The first is found the Greek word diakonei used in reference to what the woman does after Jesus heals her. It can be defined as it is here, as “to serve”. It can also be translated as “ministering to.” The word deacon clearly shares the same root (and again, we welcome our own deacon, the Rev. Sue Nebel, as she ministers among us now). That word, diakonei, was last used in Mark’s gospel as the angels ministered to Jesus after his temptation in the wilderness. And that word diakonei will be used next by Jesus himself, as an example of how he calls the disciples to lead: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve,” he will say to them. I think we’re talking about more than washing dishes here. Or if washing dishes is the vocation, then Jesus calls his disciples to do that with sacred purpose.

And a second reason for pause is that, with her intentional service, or ministry, Simon’s mother-in-law becomes the first person in Mark’s gospel to demonstrate active discipleship. Yes, Simon and Andrew and James and John have dropped their nets to follow him. Simon’s mother-in-law has served. She has ministered to them.

Afterwards, people get wind of what Jesus has done. They bring him their sick, their demon-possessed. The whole city shows up at Simon and Andrew’s doorstep. And Jesus heals them, restores them to who they are.

The next morning he goes out by himself to pray. The disciples seek him, find him. “Let’s keep going,” Jesus says. “Because this is what I came here to do.” And they go. And he teaches. And he heals.

Maybe, finally, that is what Jesus came to do – to answer the longing in our hearts by closing the gap, by eliminating the negative space. Maybe he came to find us in our most vulnerable and fearful moments, to take us by the hand, and lift us up, and restore us to ourselves; so that then we can go, too…and minister to the others.

 

February 1, 2015, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

1 Corinthians 8:1-13Mark 1:21-28

Bryan Cones

Does anyone else find it odd that Jesus, when someone first recognizes who he really is, responds by telling him to be quiet? And he doesn’t just say, “Shhh… Don’t tell anyone.” He says something we’re not allowed to say in my house: He tells that evil spirit: “Shut up!” or more literally, “Muzzle it!”—like a dog. (We have to be careful about being too Jesus-like sometimes; he could be pretty rude!)

But why didn’t he want that unclean spirit running around telling everyone that he was God’s Holy One? Wasn’t it good to get the word out—even if it’s from an unclean spirit?

I wonder if Jesus, instead of telling everyone who he was, or having an unclean spirit do it, wanted to show everyone what it means to be God’s Holy One. Unlike some of the religious leaders of his time, in particular some of them who were know-it-alls, telling people all the time what God wanted, but not really doing it, Jesus was showing people what God wanted. So instead of letting that evil spirit tell everyone who he was, he showed who he was as God’s Holy One, by healing the man who was in the power of that evil spirit.

Showing, not telling, is what Jesus wanted to do. Jesus wanted to show us God’s power to heal, not shine the spotlight on himself. And I’ll bet that’s what he would want us to do, too: Show that we are his followers by doing the work of healing God gives us to do, instead of telling everyone that we go to church. That sounds easy enough, right?

Well, maybe not—and it wasn’t easy from the very beginning. In that first reading, St. Paul is having an argument with some people in his church. They think that they are showing how much they believe in Jesus by eating meat sacrificed to the Greek and Roman gods. Since they don’t believe in those “idols,” they eat that food and they don’t worry about it, even though what they are doing is upsetting some other people in the church. They have been telling the more scrupulous people to get over it.

But Paul tells the meat-eaters that they are wrong: They aren’t showing what it means to follow Jesus; they are just “showing off,” being the same kind of religious know-it-alls that made Jesus mad. Paul says that their showing off is actually the opposite of showing that they follow Jesus, because what they are doing isn’t loving to their fellow Christians. Paul says he’d rather be a vegetarian than make it harder for people who are struggling in their faith. The difference between showing that we follow Jesus and showing off is how we are loving one another.

So how to do we show that we follow Jesus, without showing off? How do we know we are on the right track? I think Jesus and Paul both give us something to go on.

First, if we want to show the work that God is doing in Jesus, we will be taking part in the healing work that he did. After all, the religious word “salvation” means “health,” and “Savior” is a word for Jesus that means “healer.” If what we do helps people get better, and helps us get better, if it feeds hungry people and helps them get a fair share, if it heals sick people and helps them be well, if it makes our school or our workplace safer for everyone, if it helps cast out the evil spirits of racism and bullying and other kinds meanness to and fear of people, then we are probably on the right track.

And second, whatever we do, however we show that we follow Jesus, we must work always to be loving: patient and kind, not puffed up, not know-it-alls, always ready to listen, and always concerned about the people who struggle, always careful not to make things harder for anyone.

And if we do all that healing, loving work, we won’t really need to tell anyone that we follow Jesus, because we’ll be showing them. Maybe if we do it really well, people might ask us why we do it. And then we could tell them that it’s because we follow Jesus, and this is how we show it. And then maybe they would want to follow Jesus, too.

January 25, Epiphany III

Kristin White

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany and Annual Meeting – January 25, 2015

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

 

Life is short. And we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind.[1]

If there’s a watchword for the Gospel of Mark, it’s “immediately.”

By Mark’s telling, Jesus’ story begins with John baptizing him in the Jordan River. As Jesus comes up out of the waters, immediately the heavens are torn open and the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. Immediately after that, the Spirit takes Jesus out into the wilderness, where he stays for 40 days and is tempted by the devil. When Jesus returns from that trial, he calls two sets of brothers: Andrew and Simon, James and John, all of them fishermen on the shore. “Follow me,” Jesus says. And, you guessed it, immediately they drop their nets and follow him.

They go to Capernaum, where Jesus teaches in the synagogue, and immediately he is confronted with an unclean spirit that needs some rebuking. Immediately after that, Jesus leaves the synagogue with his new disciples, enters the new disciples’ home to find their mother ill, and immediately he heals her.

You get the idea. And I promise I’m not exaggerating. All those “immediately” quotes are really actually there. And we haven’t even made it to the second chapter yet.

Mark’s gospel is the earliest of the four evangelists’ telling about the life and ministry of Jesus, written most closely to the time when he lived. It’s also the shortest, and the most urgent. You can read Mark’s whole gospel account aloud, start to finish, in about an hour and a half. It might leave you breathless, with all that “immediately” business, but it is possible. Everything feels like it’s right here in front of your face – like there are no extra words and there is no extra time that might provide cover or insulation from what’s going on in the story.

If “immediately” is the essential word for Mark’s gospel, then Mark is the essential gospel account for the season of Epiphany. Because that’s kind of how and what Epiphany is: right here, without extra words or extra time that might provide insulation from what’s going on. There isn’t much chance to think, before immediately something happens and we need to respond. A baby is born. The heavens are torn open. We find ourselves in the wilderness. Someone we love becomes very sick, very fast.

I think this parish has experienced the yearlong extended version of the season of Epiphany over this past year. It has felt like Epiphany as told by Mark the Evangelist: immediately and immediately and immediately. As a parish, we have received profound blessings and sustained devastating losses, all at about the same pace as that gospel, all about right here, in rapid succession, without the luxury of extra time or extra words that might provide insulation or protection from all that is taking place.

Karoline Lewis is a preaching professor who says this about Epiphany: “Maybe a life of faith can only happen in immediately, in the surprising, sudden, profound epiphany of God at work, God revealed in our lives. Because if we think that we can prepare for God’s epiphanies, that we can be fully ready for what we will see, well, then, God might be less than epiphanous.”[2]

The texts in today’s liturgy support this immediately mindset that marks both this season and this gospel passage. God calls Jonah, tells him to get up and go to Nineveh and share a message of repentance. Jonah has learned that God will not be easily avoided (read: big storm, belly of a fish), so he goes to that city expecting that the people will continue on their path of destruction. But they don’t. The people believe him (and it doesn’t say immediately, but it might as well). No delay, no extra words, no extra time in this moment. They declare a fast. Everybody puts on the clothes of mourning. And (again, maybe immediately?) God changes the divine mind. God does not destroy the city, as Jonah anticipates. (And if you continue reading past today’s lesson, you’ll see that immediately Jonah is annoyed with God to the point of disgust…but that’s another story, a different sermon.)

Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth shares this level of urgency. He opens by saying “the appointed time has grown short.” (An echo of our blessing from the first?) So, he says, this is how you’re supposed to live. The world is changing. What you have known is passing away. And so put all your energy, all your focus, on how God is calling you to live right now. The peculiar details of Paul’s direction about those who are married and those who are mourning and those who are rejoicing and those who are buying bears its own conversation, and probably some disagreement. What I take from this lesson, though, is Paul saying that what we do right now, how we live right now, in these immediate moments, matters.

And again, we return to Mark’s gospel, his text of immediacy. “This is the fullness of time,” Jesus says. “The kingdom of God has come near.”

We’ve learned over and over again throughout this year of Epiphany at St. Augustine’s, that life is short, that we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. Like Mark’s gospel, so much has happened immediately.

And as Dr. Lewis says about God’s epiphanies, we have been changed. Without benefit of the extra words or extra time for preparation or self-protection, we have been called into those moments of life and death, of joy and grief. And in those painful and profound moments, as we have faced into them together, I believe that God has revealed God’s own self to us. In the warmth of a welcome. In the grief of a goodbye, and another, and still another. In the discovery and claiming of the stories we tell ourselves. In the comfort of a prayer shawl. In the celebration of a new priest among us. In the feast, together with everybody.

The fullness of time is a weighty thing. The kingdom of God come near will change us. And it does. And it has. And it will. And you, the people of St. Augustine’s Church, have borne this season of Epiphany with grace and steadfast love. And with a strong sadness, at moments. And in joy for the great gifts God has given us.

It will not always be Epiphany. We will not always tell time in Mark’s terms, immediately and immediately. Because, thank God, there are other seasons, too. Lent offers space to turn around, time for contemplation. Easter gives us resurrection and rejoicing. And the others…imagine the respite of marking our days in Ordinary Time.

There will be other seasons for us at St. Augustine’s. But what a gift; what a heavy and rich and full gift, to live this truth among all of you, that life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So thank you, for being swift to love. Thank you, for making haste to be kind.

May God’s blessing be with you all, right now; immediately, and always.

 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Amiel

[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3500