June 14, Third Sunday after Pentecost

Ezekiel 17:22-24, Mark 4:26-34

Bryan Cones

When I went on retreat at the end of April, I deliberately chose a place in Georgia, north of Atlanta, knowing that no matter what “spring” was doing in Chicago, they would already have the real thing down there—which we in June just barely seem to have now! And I wasn’t disappointed: all the flowers were in bloom, all the trees were leafed out, and I had even already missed the early flowers, which were just beginning to sprout up here.

 Of all that life, though, what captured my imagination were the oaks: twice as tall as they ever grow here, not nearly as big around, but with huge canopies that filtered the light and the air. Even the smallest breath of wind made a rustling. The trees were so grand that beneath them it seemed they held up the sky; and truly they were holding the ground, with deep roots that held soil on the steep hills. They were for me living signs of the faithfulness of God.

I was thinking of those oaks as I heard today’s first reading, asking myself why the prophet Ezekiel needed to preach to trees: “All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD,” says the prophet, as if they need reminding. In his own time, Ezekiel isn’t talking about trees, of course, but about how God was going restore Israel. And yet, couldn’t God’s word come to the trees? Why wouldn’t God address the trees? They too are God’s creatures, though unlike people, they don’t need to be reminded to be faithful.

I was thinking something similar about the parables in today’s gospel: The first seems straightforward enough: The kingdom of God is something like a rich harvest that grows from a scattering of seeds. That sounds great—plenty of food for people to eat. But that second parable about the mustard seed: Who would want a giant bushy weed, no matter how small the seed? Then again if we look closely at the parable, we see that the mustard bush isn’t really for people at all; it’s for the birds of the air to nest in. In this story, the kingdom of God is literally “for the birds.”

These parables, one about trees, another about plants and birds, have got me wondering about just whom the kingdom of God is for: It might be tempting to allow these just to be analogies, which they are, of course, stories to point us to a lesson for human beings.

But if the kingdom of God is about something bigger than us, if it is about all of creation, then perhaps these stories are really for my oaks, and for the birds. The reign of God is not just about human flourishing, but about the flourishing of all creation, including the trees and the birds, and Lake Michigan, and the Chicago River, and all the other lakes and rivers, and other birds and trees, wherever they are.

It would be tempting now to start moralizing about the environment and about climate change and pollution, all of which are a terrible danger not only to humans but to my oaks in Georgia, which will never survive the heat, and to the birds and other species who are losing habitat, and to the countless living things that will become extinct if we human beings don’t change our ways. And I hope we all agree that Christian faith obliges us to do something about those things.

But before we get there, I wonder how we might first allow these stories to shape our imaginations in ways that might make it clear why we why care so much about creation. I wonder how these stories might help us to be curious about, or to be struck with awe by a vision of the reign of God that is ever so much broader than any human hope or need, so broad that it encompasses the entire Earth and every living thing, the whole creation, all the stars and planets and galaxies, and not because they are useful to us, but because God values them all for their own sake, and they, too, are coming along to the fullness of redemption.

Our privilege as those made in our own particular image of God, is to know in our beings that in every tree, in every bud about to bloom, in every garden, in every bee whose work brings forth fruit, in every wave along the lake, and the fish within it, in every sunrise and star twinkle, God is doing the work of bringing forth kingdom, in hidden ways we cannot know or see, and the fullness of which we can’t really anticipate. It’s going to be a surprise, and not only for us, but for everything God has made and called very good.

June 7, Second Sunday after Pentecost

Kristin White

Second Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 3:8-15

I have a question I hope you will wonder about, together with me. What does God sound like? Really. If you were to say that you were listening for God, what are the sounds you would be listening for, or to? And how would you know? And what do you think you might do, if you heard those sounds?

The first reading today from the book of Genesis says this: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze.” Can you imagine what that would be like? Great big giant stomping foot prints, or just the rustling of leaves, or one regular old person walking barefoot on the grass, and whistling along the way?

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I wonder, also, what it means that God’s very first direct question to those very first people is the one we hear God ask in this passage: “Where are you?”

The faithful response, the one we will hear later through many stories of the bible, from prophets like Samuel and Isaiah, is this: “Here I am, Lord.” That is the call and response. That is the whole. But that is not what humanity sounds like for God today. That is not what Adam says.

“I heard the sound, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and so I hid,” he says to God instead.

Sometimes, things fall apart. And now, all is not as it should be in that Original Garden. With this very first question, this first address, God shows people’s useless effort to hide, while they run away from the consequences of their own actions.[1]

So much is present in this question and response, in this moment: the blame of man to woman and woman to snake; the question of fear versus trust; and those twin factors of sin and shame.

To say it plainly, in the wisdom and words of the Godly Play lesson for this passage, sometimes things fall apart. Adam and Eve are created by God and live in this place of perfection where they have everything they need or want, almost, where God comes and walks around with them every night in the cool of the evening breeze…and there’s just one little caveat. One minor little rule. “This tree here, the one of the knowledge of good and evil? Leave its fruit alone,” God says. “Everything else is yours, just don’t touch this one. Don’t eat this particular fruit.”

Well. I don’t know about you. But when somebody tells me I can do anything I want, except for that one… tiny… little… thing… well, that one thing becomes the thing I very much want to do. In fact, that one little thing might actually become the only thing I want to do, or maybe even to think about.

So in the part of the story that comes before the reading we heard today, Eve looks at the fruit on that tree. She sees that it is beautiful, and she hears from that crafty (and hairless… which also means rather - ahem - naked…) snake, that it will help her know more than she knows right now. She hears that sneaky snake say that she will not die from eating it. So…she picks a piece of the fruit. And she eats it. And Adam does the same thing. And the snake is right: they do not die. And the snake is right about something else: they know something that they didn’t know before they picked and ate that fruit. Adam and Eve know that they are naked.

And things fall apart. God walks in the Garden. They hear God walking there, whatever that sounds like. And they hide. God calls to them: “Where are you?” And Adam and Eve don’t know what to say.

What had been perfect is not perfect anymore. What had been whole is broken. Things are not as they had been, and they never can be that way again.

It would be easy to build a sermon on sin and blame and guilt and shame. It would be easy to use the scriptures today to assign responsibility to gender and species. It’s been done. Whole theologies have been constructed on this particular moment in the biblical story. And honestly, though I don’t buy the whole thing, there are pieces that fit. Our actions have consequences. Once you know something, you can’t not-know it. Once you do something, you can’t not-have-done it. Adam and Eve know now they are naked. And God knows that they acted in ways that broke the sacred trust.  

But what about this? What if Eve had ignored the snake? What if she had followed that one rule, exactly? What if she left that fruit hanging on the tree, obedient and satisfied by all the other fancy fruit hanging on all those other trees God planted for the people, by the sweat of God’s own brow? What if Adam and Eve had behaved themselves, naked and content, walking together with God in the Garden each night, in the cool of the evening breeze?

“Everything hinges on this…and (this) text…deals with the chaos that comes from…her act of courage (or defiance).”[2]

After all, is a perfect place perfect, really? Can it be? In this Original Garden, there are “no differences, no opposites, no innovation, no creativity, no diversity, no rebellion, no need for grace or redemption.”[3]

And so this moment in our story, a story maybe less about our first ancestors and more of what happens to each one of us[4], serves as the hinge. Idyllic versus chaotic, whole versus broken. Eve sees that the fruit is beautiful. She hears that it will bring wisdom. And call it courage or call it defiance, she eats it. And so does Adam, her husband. (That one…tiny…thing…that you’re not supposed to do…)

There is no way to not-know what we know, there is no way to not-do what we have done. So God’s first people learn, as they quiver in the bushes, listening to God in that Original Garden, hearing God’s call to them, “Where are you?”

There is no way to go back to the unbroken and the perfect. All they can do now is go forward, trade their scratchy leaf-clothes for the better ones God will make for their protection and comfort, and walk themselves out into a world they do not know, but will.

And maybe, in all this, they trade what was perfect for what is real. Instead of the idyllic, they will face into chaos and struggle and loss and pain…and with that, moments of real joy and solace and peace borne through it all. They will learn something of hunger and perseverance, because they have to. And they will encounter things they never would have known in that perfect Original Garden: things like difference and opposite and innovation and creativity and diversity and rebellion. They will know their need of grace; they will yearn after redemption.

And since they won’t hear the divine footsteps every night in the Garden at the time of the evening breeze, the people will have to learn to listen for God. They will have to practice recognizing what God sounds like. So that way, when they hear God call to them, “Where are you?” - instead of hiding away to cover themselves, God’s people can respond, together with the faithful of every generation, “Here I am.”

[1] John Rollefson. Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3, Pentecost and the Season after Pentecost 1. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. “Proper 5, Genesis 3:8-15, Pastoral.” 102.

[2] Bert Marshall. Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3, Pentecost and the Season after Pentecost 1. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. “Proper 5, Genesis 3:8-15, Homiletical.” 101.

[3] Ibid, 103.

[4] Ibid, 103.

May 31, Holy Trinity

Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Bryan Cones

Ah, Holy Trinity—I’m sure it’s everyone’s favorite feast, better than Christmas and Easter put together! We will have a Holy Trinity shamrock hunt for the kids after church, and then we will all decorate triangles, God’s favorite shape. No?

Kristin and I were joking that today is the only feast of a “doctrine” in the Episcopal Church, a church not know for being exceedingly doctrinal— what we call an “idea feast.” An “idea feast” sounds terrible, doesn’t it— like celebrating the Feast of the theory of relativity. How can you make church even more boring? Celebrate an “idea feast”! While we are at it, let’s have a Feast of the Nicene Creed— I’m sure it would be very popular.

Now you might think, that, sometimes being a heady crowd, we Episcopalians might like a good “idea feast.” The Trinity is like a theological brainteaser: 3 = 1, 1 = 3 I have a feeling our Zen Buddhist friends would encourage us to meditate on the Trinity as a koan, a paradox or riddle meant to break our categories, and lead us to enlightenment, to help us see that the Trinity is not something meant to be “understood” at all. Our brains may not be very helpful here.

Even the scriptures today seem to invite us to get out of our heads. Isaiah’s vision isn’t rational at all: He responds with absolute terror to his vision of a cartoonishly large God, so big the hem of the holy robe fills the temple. And I don’t think anyone in their right mind would put those creepy six-winged angels on a greeting card.

John’s ever-cryptic Jesus confounds Nicodemus, “a teacher of Israel” who can’t seem to understand that you have to be “born again” to receive Jesus’ wisdom. Nicodemus tries to understand it, literally, and so he misses the point, completely.

Paul, too, when he describes life in the Spirit isn’t talking about something intellectual: The ecstatic cry of “Abba! Father!” is the biblical equivalent of O-M-G—a mind-blowing moment of grace.

All of which suggests to me that on this “idea feast” it would be a good idea to turn off our brains for a minute, to remember that we can experience God not only in our heads, but, even more profoundly in our spirits, our bodies, our guts.

So let’s take a moment to remember your own foundational experiences of God: those experiences of “something more” the ones that keep you coming to church, no matter what you think about the Trinity or the creed.

Maybe it was the first time you felt your child move within you, or that first intake of breath of a newborn followed by that first exhale and cry of life. Maybe it was the last breath of a loved one, when you could almost see their Spirit return from whence it came. How about the time someone told you they loved you, and you believed it, or you told someone else that you loved them, and meant it completely. Or that first time you felt it in their body and in yours, if you know what I mean. Or maybe it was the time you really were “born again” in that evangelical sense— overwhelmed by the saving love of God in Jesus, and yes, even Episcopalians have had that experience.

Or perhaps your experiences of God are more everyday: the wonder of beholding your garden begin to bloom, or the excitement of seeing that first tomato start to form. Maybe you see God every morning in the children you work with at school, or in your own children, or the times you notice the unshakeable faithfulness of your best friend or closest family member. Maybe it’s the sense of pride you feel in knowing that you helped or healed someone today, or that by your work made the world a fairer or safer place. Perhaps there was a moment when you realized that by singing, or playing music, or repairing something, or making something beautiful, or cooking a meal, or serving it, or giving a gift to someone who asked, that you participated in the repair of God’s creation, that you were God’s partner today in bringing forth the reign of God.

Now let’s turn our brains back on: I wonder if you notice what I am noticing about my own experience of God: that my feeling of “something more” that I call “God” involved another person, or another living thing, or some other part of what God has created. My experiences of God have always involved discovering myself  in a relationship of love or joy or wonder or kindness or beauty or peace or justice or freedom, with something or someone else. How about you?

I wonder if that is why our Christian tradition has always insisted that our primary way of talking about God is not as some lone deity ruling over everything, but as a relationship, never one person without the other, and in the biblical tradition, never really God without creation. Even Isaiah’s giant, terrifying God needs a prophet.

Perhaps that is why we Christians at our best are so concerned about those relational values, about love, which the very nature of God, about justice, which is love acting from a distance, about peace, which is the foundation of love and justice, about freedom, which makes possible relationships of love and justice and peace.

We are concerned about those things, not because God from on high has ordered them, but because for us God is that pattern of loving, just, peaceful, free relationships, into which we, the offspring of the Holy Trinity, are invited to take part, so that those divine patterns might be revealed more fully in the world God so loves.

May 24, Pentecost

Bryan Cones

Acts 2:1-21

I grew up in a church named for the Holy Spirit. It was called “Holy Ghost” Catholic Church. You might think because of our name, we were maybe a little more Pentecostal than your average Catholic Church—we were in East Tennessee, after all, and other Christians who invoked the “Holy Ghost” spoke in tongues, said “amen” a lot during the preaching, and their services went on for hours. Up in the hills of Appalachia, some of them even handled snakes.

At Holy Ghost, we didn’t do any of that: Father Henkel, although a good pastor and lovely man, preached more or less the same sermon every Sunday, the choir sang the same anthem after communion, and our services lasted exactly 45 minutes. Even the service times were inscribed on the front of the church, in stone no less. And definitely there were no snakes.

Despite our name, I’m not sure we captured the “spirit” of the Holy Ghost, at least not as the Spirit appears in today’s first reading. The character of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles is disruptive—there’s an uproar whenever the Spirit blows in. The Spirit is not the kind of presence that would encourage carving anything, even service times, in stone.

Today’s reading from Acts starts with disciples in an upper room, retired from public life, scared and still grieving, until they are overwhelmed by this new presence of the Holy Spirit. They are forced to speak out, and speak in tongues that are not their own. This Spirit disrupts their situation, not only the physical boundaries of their room, forcing them outside, but other, even more significant boundaries, boundaries of language and culture every bit as solid then as now. The Spirit insists on leaping over those differences and speaking to everyone. The Spirit even makes Peter—boundary-keeping Peter— her spokesman: If the Spirit gets her way, she’ll possess everybody: everyone will be a prophet, everyone will be a priest, just as the prophet Joel promised.

And this is just the first time the Spirit will do this: The Spirit is constantly speaking up as a character in the Acts of the Apostles, sending the apostles across every border, inspiring the Philip to baptize an Ethiopian eunuch, whose body, by the way it had been changed, excluded him from Judaism; the Spirit then “falls on” Gentiles in the house of Cornelius without the permission of those Jewish Christian apostles, and goes on to lead Paul all over the world to spread the good news. The Spirit of God respects no boundaries. In fact, the Spirit seems to be constantly erasing them.

Being disruptive is so much a part of the Spirit’s character, symbolized in that wind that blows where it wills and the fire that burns where it pleases, that I would hazard that disruptiveness is one of those sure signs of the Spirit’s presence. I remember the first time I experienced something like that in my first year of college: I went to the Catholic student center, where I met a religious sister. She seemed both cool and with it and a faithful Catholic, of course. So I asked her about how she accepted and understood the teaching that women couldn’t be ordained in the Roman Catholic church. She said, “I don’t. It’s sexist.”

I remember my moment of surprise, the feeling of having the set-in-stone religious certainty I had learned at Holy Ghost disrupted. It was initially uncomfortable, and yet it began a long journey of learning to think in new ways. I wonder what other habits of mind, or habits in relationships in our lives or our society that seem so set in stone might be ripe for the disrupting presence of the Holy Spirit, even it can be a little uncomfortable. I wonder how we might keep a lookout for our own moments of discomfort in such situations, and ask what the Spirit might be up to.

I’ve been thinking of all the disruptions we have been experiencing in our society this year, events like the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. I’ve been wondering if those painful, disruptive moments are also a signal from the Spirit? Are they signs of the Spirit’s presence? Is that grief and anger and frustration what the Spirit’s “groaning” looks like in creation? And if so, what is the Spirit calling us to do?

Last Monday I was in downtown Chicago with about 100 other clergy and laypeople from many denominations and religious traditions, who felt moved by the Spirit to disrupt the day and eventually traffic in the Loop. We were there because we wanted to disrupt the story many of our leaders have been telling that because we have money problems in our state and city it is somehow OK for us to abandon our duty to the poor and vulnerable, even though we live with great wealth all around us. And some of our members got arrested to make that point. Is that kind of disruption Spirit-inspired? Can that be what it means to be children of the Spirit?

Those are the kinds of questions that we must answer for ourselves, but I would like to propose that to be children of the Spirit, may sometimes mean being disruptive children, questioning the received wisdom, whether political or economic or religious, or even the ingrained habits or our families and relationships. It may mean daring to cross the boundaries that separate human beings from each other, the boundaries that inscribe injustice, that perpetuate racism, that keep people poor and vulnerable and oppressed. This Spirit of God may well push us into uncomfortable places, even encourage us to take risks.

All this takes discernment—that prayerful listening to the Spirit for what to do next. As we discern it may be helpful to remember that this disruptive presence of the Spirit is not destructive; it has a holy purpose: to open spaces for human flourishing, to make room for the reconciliation and liberation of the reign of God, the redemption not only of our bodies but the bodies of everyone, even the body of creation itself.

And that’s worth a little disruption.

May 17, Ascension

Kristin White

The Feast of the Ascension – May 17, 2015

Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53

 My former rector, the Rev. Jay Sidebotham, also happens to be an artist…a cartoonist, actually. He was one of the creators of the Schoolhouse Rock series, those short animated shows that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, teaching children of Generation X (and others) about things like “Conjunction Junction,” or “Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here.” Jay is also the creator of those cartoons on church calendars you might have seen about malfunctioning clergy microphones or Palm Sunday processions gone wildly off course.

Jay’s brain is always in artist’s mode. I remember him talking once about how he would draw the ascension (maybe he’s already done it at this point). He described a band of confused disciples looking at each other, looking up. And just above eye level hover Jesus’ feet, the rest of him disappeared into a cloud.

John and I spent a lot of time looking up while we were in Italy. I have a whole series of pictures of ceilings in the churches we visited. From frescoes by Giotto in St. Francis Church in Assisi, to a dark blue dome at the cathedral in Siena filled with gold stars and borne up by little cherubs, to Bernini’s paintings of the life of Jesus on the ceiling of the Medici chapels, to Christ enthroned in gold on the ceiling above the baptistery where Michelangelo and so many others through the millennia were sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own for ever. Having looked up over and over again in awe, to the point of getting a pinch in the back of my neck, I have some sympathy for those gobsmacked disciples. We didn’t see Jesus’ feet, but we saw plenty that caused us to wonder at how such things were possible.

And I have some sympathy for the disciples’ confusion as well. When they talk with Jesus before all the drama of this moment unfolds, they ask: “Lord, is this when you will restore the kingdom?” Is this when you will fix it? Is this, finally, when you’re going to make the world as it is into the world as it should be? (Can you hear the hope, the edge of a note of insistence in their tone?)

 But, no. He won’t give them the clear answer they seek. “It is not for you to know. You will receive power from the Holy Spirit. And you will be my witnesses, here and to the ends of the earth,” Jesus tells them.

They want something solid, something dependable. Something they can comprehend. He gives them mystery and promise, asks again for their trust. And then – a cloud? Cartoon feet hovering just above eye level? Or frescoes and gold and chubby angels and stars?

This last image of Jesus can underscore for us his divine nature. We don’t have much in the way of examples of walking and talking people being lifted into heaven before someone’s very eyes – yes, in the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah goes up before the prophet Elishah…but he had to have a chariot of fire do the heavy lifting. Jesus just – ascends. And maybe it’s a part of our human nature to keep looking the way that he has gone, just like those disciples.

Our hymns today pay tribute to the grandeur of this moment: “Lord beyond our mortal sight, raise our hearts to reach thy height,” we sang at the beginning of the liturgy. As we look up and catch glimpses of artists’ imagination of the mystery and majesty, as we lift our voices to sing of what we may not comprehend (at least I’ll claim that for myself), the ethereal nature of who Jesus is shines through until his feet are absorbed by the cloud. This is the Jesus who knows things about the Father and the Spirit that can’t be revealed to the disciples just yet. This is the Jesus whom the demons recognize, and try to escape, and ultimately obey. This is the Jesus who can pass through walls and locked doors into upper rooms, the one who heals people who have been sick for a long, long time, the one who blesses five loaves and two fish and turns it into a feast for the multitude…with leftovers.

“You are witnesses,” he says. And they are. And they will be – witnesses to his miracles, to things they saw and do not understand. But they tell the stories. And so do we. And so will we. As witnesses.

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 Artists telling this story don’t only portray Jesus feet (cartoon or otherwise) heading up through a cloud to the highest heaven of heavens, though. Many will show you something more than those feet, more than the gaping disciples and guys in white robes. Sometimes, if you look at the ground of those paintings or mosaics or woodcuts of the Ascension, you will see his footprints there, or an indentation on the rock where Jesus last stood.

There’s a message for us in that as well. It serves as a reminder that Jesus was fully divine, and he was not only divine. He was also fully human. His feet were real. They bore real weight. They made indentations. And as real as that incomprehensible mystery of his majesty is the reality that he was born into this world like we were, from a human mother. This is the Jesus who maybe gets a little disagreeable with his mother on occasion, but who makes sure she is cared for in the end. This is the Jesus who is hungry after 40 days wandering in the wild away from home. This is the Jesus who sits at table with prostitutes and tax collectors, who weeps when his friend dies, who becomes so furious that he turns over tables in the Temple. This Jesus’ impression is all over us – calling us to good news for the poor, to bring freedom to the oppressed. His human life bears weight in this world, leaves a mark, an indentation, on us.

 This story is about goodbye, for a time. Jesus is leaving them, and the disciples don’t quite know what comes next. It is a moment of departure and promise and trust, some of which we may not fully understand, other aspects as matter of fact as an extra place at the table to share a meal, a simple, practical kindness done without sentimentality. And it may not be for us to know what comes next, or when things will be as they should. Still: we are inheritors of mystery and promise, called to bear the mark of his impression on our lives.

We are witnesses, finally. We are witnesses to the intersections of human and divine, even when they’re fleeting, even when they seem to be passing away into a cloud.

We are witnesses. We are. We are witnesses…here, and to the ends of the earth.

May 10, Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 10:44-48; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Bryan Cones

Sometimes it has been suggested to me that church is boring. So if you have said or thought that, I something to tell you: Sometimes, I agree.

Take this Sunday, now the one-two-three-four-five, Sixth Sunday of Easter—and we still have two more to go! And I’ll admit to being a little bored with Easter now.

The readings for instance: Every Sunday we’ve been reading from Acts of the Apostles, and pretty much every Sunday has featured Peter standing up in front of some crowd and saying: Jesus, the guy you crucified, has been raised from the dead, and now you have to believe in him to be saved. And after six Sundays I want to say: OK, OK, I got it: Jesus was dead, now he’s alive. You don’t need to tell me again.

Then there’s the first letter of John we have been reading every Sunday, which says over and over and over again, repeating and repeating, then saying again, in as many ways as possible, the exact same thing: Love one another. After six Sundays of that, I’m ready for a good rant from St. Paul, like when he tells those terrible Corinthians to stop getting drunk at the Eucharist, or even when he makes fun of the Galatians for being so stupid that he has to write in big letters so they will understand. I’m not sure St. Paul actually ever really got the “love one another” memo.

And if that wasn’t enough, the gospel, having now run out of the all the stories about Jesus’ resurrection, is saying the same thing as First John: Love one another. OK, OK, we get it! Let’s move on.

Maybe we are even getting bored with the liturgy: I never get tired of it, but sometimes I’ve wondered if any of you are thinking “Great, here come Kristin and Bryan again to douse us with that bucket of water. We get it: We’re baptized! Point made.” Maybe this Easter stuff has run its course— too much of a good thing.

Thank goodness this week there is a little comedy, there in the first reading, when the Holy Spirit “falls” on those Gentiles. I’ve got this image in my head of the Holy Spirit minding her own business, then tripping and falling on those Gentiles: Splat! Yuck! I’ve got Gentile all over me.

And that “yuck!” was actually probably the reaction of those first Jewish Christians, most of whom indeed found Gentiles gross—unclean—and for that reason among others refused to eat with them. Our reading today makes it sound like Peter was thrilled that this had happened, but it was really a huge argument in the ancient church, and St. Paul tells us that he and Peter had a shouting match over whether Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews first.

The Holy Spirit falling on those Gentiles was a big surprise—an unpleasant surprise for those Jewish Christians, who discovered that the dying and rising of Jesus they had been preaching about wasn’t just for them: God was calling everybody, everybody, everybody, even those gross Gentiles, into this new family of the church.

Maybe Easter still has some surprises for us, even after six weeks, even after 2,000 years.

As most of us know, five young women in this parish have been preparing for confirmation, and were confirmed yesterday by Bishop Christopher Epting up at Christ Church in Winnetka. I’ve been thinking about what it is they have committed themselves to, what all of us who have been baptized and confirmed have committed ourselves to. And it strikes me that Christian life is this strange combination of boring repetition along with startling surprises. And I don’t think you can have one without the other.

I at least need that boring repetition, the reading of the same stories about Jesus over and over, the constant reminder to love one another, that splash with blessed water, as a constant reminder of who we really are: God’s beloved children, for whom God gave everything in Jesus. And we need reminding because there are plenty of voices out there in the world eager to tell us what they think we are or should be.

It strikes me that we have confirmed these young women just as they enter high school, a time of life full of messages about what you have to do to belong, about what is cool and not cool, full of opportunities to be sure, and full of temptations as well to believe that there is something lacking in us, even something wrong with us, that we are not beloved just as we are, that we have to dress a certain way, or own certain things, or belong to the right group to be loved and accepted. That’s a terrible lie that gets told in all kinds of places, and not just in high school. And that’s one reason why we come back here week after week to remind each other, and allow God to remind us, of the holy truth that we are loved just as we are, and that we should love one another just as we are.

And then when we’ve gotten good at repeating and remembering that, we can start to be surprised, surprised by all the many ways God wants to show that love for us. Sometimes the surprises are joyful, wonderful friendships, new jobs, a partner to share life with, births and graduations and anniversaries and confirmations, moments in life when it’s easy to recognize God’s grace and blessing.

And when we get really good at repeating and remembering who we are, even the more unpleasant surprises of life, the failures and lost jobs, illness and grief and even death, we come to discover in those moments as well the surprising ways God can be with us still, loving us and blessing us just as we are.

So, Signe, Julia-Claire, Sydney, Kelly and Alice, I think I can safely speak for many people here when I say how happy and grateful we are that you took this next step of your Christian journey with us. I hope you will stick with us through all the boring parts, and let them work on their magic on you, so that you always remember that you are God’s beloved daughters, just as you are, and that we in this church love you, too.

And I hope you will share with us your surprises, the joyful ones for sure, and we hope they will be many, and even the ones that are hard or sad. That’s what we are here for. That’s what it means to be the church, this people who remembers how God loves us in Jesus, so that we can learn how to love not only each other, but everybody, everybody, everybody else God has made. 

May 3, Fifth Sunday of Easter

Kristin White

John 15:1-8

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Those are Mother Theresa’s words. They are the words I couldn’t get out of my head this week as Baltimore raged and burned, as people offered reason and interpretation, as they determined and assigned blame.

We have forgotten, I thought. We have forgotten that we belong to each other.

A black man dies in police custody. A protestor grasps whatever he can hold in his hand to hurl at an officer in riot gear. A window shatters, a store is looted, a building burns, and another…and another. People on 24-hour news coverage condemn the rioters, and then others condemn those who have condemned. Social media blazes – with postings of a mother reprimanding her son for joining the throng, with people’s own reasoning behind all that is taking place and what we ought to do about it.

We have forgotten. And right now peace seems far, far away.

Jesus reminds us in today’s gospel of who we are, of who he is, of who God is: “I am the vine, and my father is the vine grower,” Jesus says. “God removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit….I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.”

It’s not a comfortable thing, pruning. Our family lived for a long time in Oregon’s wine country before we came here for seminary. I remember the pruning season – happening within these past several weeks. My friends who worked the vineyards talked about the vines needing to be stressed. They would cut the branches and vines back to the point of almost too much, have them go without added water, without enriching the soil with extra nutrients. That’s what happens in pruning. And the stressing, that “almost-too-much-ness” brings forth abundant fruit on the vine.

Mark and Dottie Dunnam, our new friends and our hosts during the time we were in Florence after Easter, took us to lunch one day in the village of Lamolé. It’s on a hilltop in Tuscany, in the heart of the Chianti region. (I say that not just to marvel at the fact that it actually happened, but also because I didn’t realize Chianti was a region – I just thought it was a nice kind of wine to enjoy with Italian food…). As we got closer there were vineyards across every hillside of the drive. And the pruning had just happened. “Those branches and vines look like little sticks,” Dottie said, of the grapes that had been so severely cut back. And they did. “It’s hard to look at them now and believe that they’ll be lush and filled with grapes in a couple of months.” And they will. And they will bear better fruit because of the very starkness and severity that we were noticing on that drive.

Nothing of what Jesus says in today’s gospel points toward our comfort. Those things that are not life-giving will be cut away and destroyed. And those things that are beneficial will be cut back just as severely as the vines we saw on a hillside a couple weeks ago. (Ouch.) I hold that knowledge, and the image of those vines, together with Mother Theresa’s words: “We have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

Please hear me now when I say that I don’t for a second believe that God has brought about the suffering in Baltimore in recent days, or in the devastation in Nepal, or in any of our own individual lives. None of those things is a lesson to chasten or challenge or teach us to become better Christians. I believe God weeps with those who mourn Freddie Gray and Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and with every officer who is attacked while trying to protect and serve.

And.

And if we belong to each other, if God abides in us and we abide in God as today’s scripture says, I also believe that right now this is a moment for us to listen. This is a moment for us to pay attention in our own lives and in our shared life as branches of the same true vine. This is a moment for us to ask: What needs to be removed so that together we will bear good fruit? It’s a moment for us to pause and remember who we are, remember that we belong to one another.

Looting and violence were not the only thing that took place in Baltimore this week. Lots of people marched their protest peacefully – most of them, my guess. Clergy leaders and members of their communities stood in the streets as witnesses to their faith. On Tuesday morning, people helped each other clean up the mess that the rioters left behind. They boarded up windows that had been broken, they helped get the shells of burned cars towed away. Nail by nail, garbage bag by garbage bag, they remembered who they are by the things that they did: actions showing that they know we belong to each other, actions that will bear good fruit.

Those vines, pruned and cut at the start of the season of growth, don’t look much like what they will become. They’re stressed, and thirsty…and before too long, they will be green. Soon they will flower and the fruit will set and grow and ripen. “Those who abide in me and I in them,” Jesus says, “They will bear much fruit.”

My prayer is that we will. My prayer is that we will listen, and we will remember who we are, we will remember that we belong to each other.

My prayer is that, together, we will abide.

April 26, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Bryan Cones

John 10:11-18

Yesterday I was at the first communion of my nephew, Michael, who is also my godson. I am not an outstanding godfather, especially when it comes to gifts— from his godfather, Michael got a nice card and $20, which I told him could only be used to buy Bibles—but I did OK with the first gift I bought for him: an image of Jesus the Good Shepherd— one of those brightly colored Salvadoran folk pieces, with a very inviting Jesus, surrounded by all his sheep.

It’s the Jesus I want Michael to know and love. It’s the Jesus I have known and loved, the Jesus who cares for the sheep, who defends them from the wolves, who gives up everything—“lays down his life”—for them. And I want Michael to know that he is one of Jesus’ irreplaceable sheep.

One of the biblical roots of that warm and inviting image is today’s passage from John. Yet the Good Shepherd speaking today in John’s gospel is anything warm and inviting: Just before this passage Jesus has accused his opponents the Pharisees of lacking spiritual sight, of willfully refusing to see God’s work in Jesus in the healing of the man blind from birth. Just after this passage, Jesus’ confrontation with his Jewish counterparts will become more intense, with Jesus saying finally that they are not his sheep.

We can hear the edge in the parable, in Jesus’ talk of “hired hands” and “wolves”: “We’re talking about you,” the Christians of John’s community are saying to their opponents. “There is one flock and one shepherd, one Way, Truth, and Life.” And that shepherd is Jesus. It’s a fairly exclusivist message, one that echoes Peter’s words in Acts: “There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”

That’s not a very politically correct or even sensitive thing to say nowadays in our religiously diverse world and society: I admit that several times I’ve read that “way, truth, and life” passage at funerals, with its line that “no one comes the Father except through me,” and cringed a bit, wondering what those present who do not share Christian faith were receiving it.

That exclusive claim of salvation through Jesus alone has a troubled history of “enforcement” of all kinds, and Christians have even used it on each other, and there is no shortage of religious exclusivism driving conflict all over the world. Nowadays thoughtful Christians prefer dialogue over debate. Maybe there is even broad agreement in polite society that religions are more or less equal, or, as scholar of religion Karen Armstrong has said, “all religions teach the same”— compassion, or the Golden Rule, or something like it.

It made me wonder for a second yesterday why we bothered with that First Communion, or why we are encouraging our five young women as they seek confirmation. Might we be better off just teaching them compassion, the basics of living together as human beings, and let go of the specificity and exclusivity of the Christian story, along with the checkered history that has come with it?

And yet: There is something about Jesus that still matters. There is something about this particular story of God in the world, something about specific and unique about a God who dives into God’s own creation, takes flesh and becomes human, something revelatory about the pattern of dying and rising, of “laying down one’s life” for another, however we understand that, that would be lost if we boiled it down even to the finest of virtues.

I guess I don’t agree that all religions teach the same thing, even if some of our conclusions about the basic requirements of living together echo one another. I certainly have a different way of leaning in to the reality of religious pluralism than those ancient Christians, or some Christians today. I am confident that God desires the salvation of all people, and has made generous provision to fulfill that desire in ways and means I do not know.

But even if all humankind finally arrived at the perfection of compassion or the universal observance of the Golden Rule, and even if I may wish for a better, more generous Christian history, or a better, more generous Christian church today, still I would want my godson to know Jesus the Good Shepherd, to love Jesus, to choose to be his disciple, and for Michael to discover his own role in God’s work in Jesus Christ.

I know for me that means giving him every opportunity to encounter again and again what God has done for us in Jesus, every chance to choose Christ as his Way, Truth, and Life, so that the story of Jesus continues to be told and so that the mystery of Christ can come to greater fullness, in Michael, and his sisters, Addie and Kirsten, and in Signe and Alice and Kelly and Sydney and Julia-Clare and those they will be confirmed with, in all the young people of this parish, not to mention in all of us.