March 20, Palm Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40; Luke 22:14--23:56

Bryan Cones

Where is God in all this? That could be a question many of us have been asking since this time last year: violence and destruction in Paris, Istanbul, and Baghdad, which still echoes in the news this week, tragic deaths and unimaginable violence in Chicago, an endless war in Syria whose victims wash up on Europe’s shores, a political campaign marked by anger and frustration, spilling over into a contest of profanity and name-calling, even physical attacks and recrimination. Where is God in all this?

And that’s just in the world out there, without even touching those hard moments of family or personal life: the unexpected and unprepared for deaths, the surprising sickness, the diminishment of just growing older, the betrayal of friends, suffering the mean girls or the bully boys, the feeling of just being alone. Where is God in all this?

What a very good question, one our Christian ancestors were asking themselves as they reflected on the events of the week we are about to begin: Where was God when God’s Son was suffering so? Where was God when the Romans crucified the Chosen One? And where was God when those who followed the Christ suffered rejection and persecution themselves? And here today, on Palm Sunday, we begin to tell once again the stories through which they answered the question: Where is God in all this?

The story actually began last week, with Mary of Bethany’s prophetic anointing of Jesus, her actions signaling where God was in that tender moment, caring for the Son as Jesus prepared to make his final journey. Today we tell more of that story in two parts, beginning with a joyous parade in which the voice of God rises up from those who have been silenced and ignored, so powerful that even those religious authorities couldn’t shut them up, lest God make even the stones sing.

We skip today the part where the crowd invades the Temple, turning over tables in God’s protest of the blasphemy of ripping off the faithful poor as they tried to worship God. That bit of activism is what draws the attention of the Romans, and will end in the story of Jesus’ death we tell today, but not before Jesus shows us where God is: in the forgiveness showered not only upon those with whom he is crucified, but upon those who do the crucifying as well.

That’s not the whole story, of course—don’t forget the middle. On Thursday we tell the story of the night before Jesus died, when God was in the holy meal that is the pledge of God’s love for us, and in the holy act of service that is our pledge of love for all, and in the holy watch through the night with our friend as we wait for Good Friday’s dawn.

On Friday again we tell the story of that fateful day, when the power of evil seemed for a moment to win, as the Just One stood before the unjust, as all his friends, save three, deserted him in his hour of need. Where God was then is sometimes hard to see, though perhaps it was in God’s refusal to destroy what God had so lovingly made, even as it destroyed the Just One.

Which brings us to Saturday, when we gather in the tombs at night, following the faithful women who hoped to anoint the Anointed One, there to discover what God had known all along, that no shadow can overcome the brightness of God, a God who is present through both light and darkness. And so in darkness we tell the whole story again from the beginning of where God has been all along, until we get to the end, which is actually the new beginning, the story of living always where God is, in life that death cannot overcome.

And so we gather today, to tell the story again, starting at the beginning, and staying for the middle, all the way to the end, not just by reading it but by living it: to join the parade of palms and praise today, and to shout with the crowd that wants Jesus dead, to eat with Jesus one last time on Thursday night, and to practice with him the humble service he came to reveal, and to sit up with him in his terror until it becomes too much, to return on Friday before it is too late to accompany Jesus as he dies, to gather at his grave on Saturday night to mourn him, until we are surprised by the new thing God has done on Sunday.

This is Holy Week, when we make present the story we live by, so that we can learn again just how to see where God is in all this, by remembering where God has been and always will be: with us through the same moments of joy, sorrow, service, care, waiting, watching, never failing to be with us to show us the way, never failing to draw new life out of what seems like loss. As we remember this story in word and action this week so may we also discover that God is always wherever we are, whenever we tell this story. 

March 13, Fifth Sunday in Lent

John 12:1-8

Bryan Cones

Imagine yourself for a moment witnessing this act of very public and extravagant affection of this woman toward Jesus just before his death. It is so surprising, even a little shocking, that I can’t help but wonder what really happened and just who this woman was, and what motivated her to do what she did.

Like the account of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan, this story appears in all four gospels, a good sign that something like this really happened, though unlike the story of John and Jesus, the woman’s identity and motivation shifts a bit. In Mark and Matthew, where she anoints Jesus’ head, the story leaves her unnamed, and we know nothing about her. Luke turns her into a woman with a past, a sinner of some sort, and history assumes she was a prostitute, though without any evidence or justification from the story itself.

But here in John, we know exactly who the woman is: Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus, and a good friend of Jesus, so good in fact that when her brother, Lazarus, had died, she let Jesus have it, grilling him about where he had been when Lazarus was sick, and why he hadn’t shown up in time to heal his friend.

In this story, only a short chapter later, the resuscitated Lazarus is back at the family table. And so here again is Mary, this time without a word, covering Jesus’ feet with a shocking extravagance of immensely expensive perfume, and wiping his feet with her own hair. It’s a magnificent act of love and thanksgiving.

Imagine the looks on the faces of the rest of those men at the table, some of whom were offended, if Judas is any indication. Or were they jealous because no one had ever touched them with such care? They judge Mary, it seems, because she didn’t do the proper thing, the expected thing, the righteous thing: giving this extravagance to the poor.

But Mary knew that something else was needed, that this journey to Jerusalem was not going to end well for her friend. In six short days he was going to receive the very opposite treatment: in place of anointing, there will be beatings; in place of perfumed oil, the smell of blood; in place of the softest hair, the hardest of nails.

And so Mary did what only she could do: prepare Jesus’ body for burial, treating his body for a moment with the kindness that only she could offer her friend, Judas and all her other detractors be damned. Her act of kindness is a work of art, a response with her own body to the grace and salvation she had already experienced in Jesus, whose love and power had restored the body of her brother to life.

It is creativity so marvelous that we remember it still every time we tell this story, and I have to wonder if its effect on Jesus was so great, that he imitated Mary’s creativity on the night before he died. Was it Mary’s surprising and creative act of love and service that inspired Jesus to get down on his hands and knees to wash the feet of his friends? Perhaps we have Mary of Bethany to thank for the liturgy we will celebrate a week from Thursday as we wash each other’s feet.

For these weeks of Lent we have been reflecting on the questions of our baptismal covenant, questions that propose how we might respond to the saving work God has done for us in Jesus. We sometimes call them “vows” or “promises,” and today we will consider the one that calls us to care for creation, which for good reason might lead us to discuss climate change or environmental justice for people, such as those in Flint, who suffer the worst effects of pollution.

But seen through the surprising and creative way Mary of Bethany honors “creation” in her creative care of the created body of Jesus, perhaps we might see these questions of baptism less as vows or promises to act in some specific way, more as invitations to creativity like Mary’s. Perhaps they are encouragement to explore the ways we, with Mary, might practice the “art of salvation,” how each of us might take what God has so freely given us in Jesus and make it flesh and blood in our own bodies, as Mary did, in our own surprising and unrepeatable way. God may be inviting us all to get creative with our thanksgiving, to embody salvation in the way only we can do it.

We can’t be Mary of Bethany, of course—but we can be us: knitting a shawl that gathers prayers into soft embrace to shelter the body of one who is sick or grieving; sitting at the bedside of one we love as death carries them into what lies ahead; hauling beds and chairs and tables to transform a parish hall into a bedroom that for a moment feels like home for a family who lacks one; showing up at a community meeting that tries to address just why those families lack a home of their own; sharing one’s reflections on faith and life with friends on a Thursday night in the parish lounge; bearing a loaf of bread to make someone new feel welcome, or picking up bread and delivering it to a feeding ministry so that it won’t get wasted; singing a song of praise to carry the spirits of fellow Christians or anyone else heavenward; planting a scarlet runner bean seed to behold with wonder the power of life at work in God’s creation.

This is the art of salvation: our thanksgiving for what God has already done once for all in Jesus, embodied in countless new ways in us, until at last the mystery of the body of Christ comes to fullness. And if the surprising creativity of Mary of Bethany is any indication, we are still a long way from exhausting the artistic potential of what God is still revealing in those who follow Christ on the Way. 

March 6, Fourth Sunday of Lent

2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Kristin White

Will you proclaim, by word and example, the good news of God in Christ?

When Michael Curry stepped into the pulpit at Washington National Cathedral last All Saints Day to preach his installation sermon as Presiding Bishop, he said, “Jesus came to…transform this world, from the nightmare it often is, to the dream that God intends.” He went on, in that magnificent space, with more bishops than it would be easy to count, and everything and everyone fully adorned, to say that that was not what the day was all about. “The real reason we are here,” Presiding Bishop Curry said, “Is that at the beginning of the service, we renewed our vows of baptism.”

And so I return again to the promise that is our focus this week: Will you proclaim, by word and example, the good news of God in Christ?

What does that mean for you, that promise you made: “We will, with God’s help,” when you were baptized, or, more likely, the promise that was made on your behalf, as you were baptized as an infant or a child? What does it look like in your life, to proclaim God’s good news by both what you say and how you live? Where do you see it made real in the words of scripture, particularly today?

You know the story of today’s gospel, no doubt – the parable Jesus tells in response to the Pharisees’ and scribes’ grumbling about Jesus and sinners and tax collectors: “This guy welcomes them…and eats with them…”

You know – the man, his two sons, one with the audacity to ask for his share of the family inheritance, which he blows off in what the King James Version of the bible calls “riotous living,” then finds himself in trouble, working with pigs who eat better than he does. So he goes home. He goes home, prepared to say all the things you’re supposed to say in a moment as potentially humiliating as that might have been. But when he gets there, it seems like he barely has the chance to get the words out of his mouth before his dad has thrown a robe around his shoulders and put a ring on his fingerand shoes on his feet, ordered the killing of a fat calf and planned a party to get started exactly right now.

His older brother, the one who didn’t ask for his inheritance, who didn’t go off to live riotously, who didn’t go anywhere at all, but stayed put and did the work of a faithful son…he’s not so ready to party. “All that is mine is yours,” says the father. “Your brother was dead and is alive, he was lost and now is found!”

Where is the good news here? And how are we to talk about it?

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In the second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, then there is a new creation…” All of it is from God, who reconciled us to God’s own self through Jesus, who gives us that ministry, entrusts us with the ministry of reconciliation.

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At different times, the story of the Prodigal has landed on me in different ways. Sometimes I’m curious about what exactly was involved in that little brother’s “riotous living.” And sometimes, I understand the older brother’s indignance, older sister that I am (with apologies to my younger sister Becky who is here with us today); more often, that indignance embarrasses me, makes me uncomfortable. And sometimes the word I hear is purely one of thanksgiving for a father prepared to set everything aside and lavish abundant love on the lost child, now found.

Today, I find myself wondering about what comes next. I wonder how this reconciled family – if they are in fact reconciled on this younger son’sreturn – lives differently as a result of that reconciliation. I wonder what the good news looks like in their life. And I wonder, if this parable were to take flesh, how they would share their good news in the days ahead. I wonder how they might proclaim it, even, in what they say and how they live.

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In his installation sermon, Bishop Curry talked about last summer’s General Convention, the wide gathering of the Episcopal Church at which he was elected the first black Presiding Bishop. “I heard a call at that Convention,” he said, “I heard a call for evangelism and a call for reconciliation – to work for evangelism, sharing the good news of Jesus, and to work for racial reconciliation, to cross the divides that separate us.”

The Presiding Bishop went on to tell this story: “In the 1940s, long before desegregation, before Brown v. Board of Education, before Rosa Parks sat on that bus…an African-American couple went to an Episcopal Church. They were the only people of color in the church. They went to worship – the woman had become an Episcopalian, the man was studying to become a Baptist preacher…The service went along, following the order of the 1928 Prayer Book. The woman had told her fiancé beforehand, “When the time comes, I’ll go up for communion, and you can either stay here or you can go up and receive a blessing.” He said, “Well I’ll just sit here and see what happens.” So the time came, and she went forward to kneel at the altar rail, and the priest was giving out the sacrament. And everyone else was not…black…And that was all okay when it was the bread getting passed out, but then the chalice came. And the man looked up and saw there was just one cup, and it had wine in it, too! But the wine wasn’t the issue – it was just one cup. And he watched as the priest took the cup to each person, to the lady just before the African-American woman (remember, this is before desegregation, before Brown v. Board of Education, before Rosa Parks sat down…) and then the fiancé took the cup (“the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, shed for thee, preserve thy body into everlasting life”); and he looked. And then the next person received, and then the next, and the next. And years later, the man would say that he joined the Episcopal Church because he really hadn’t imagined that that could happen in America. He said, ‘Any church where blacks and whites drink out of the same cup knows something about the gospel that I want to be part of.’ 

The Holy Spirit has done evangelism and racial reconciliation in the Episcopal Church before, because that man and woman were the parents of the 27th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.”

My friends, we have good news to share that God has entrusted to us in the person of Jesus. We have the stories of our faith and of our lives to share with people who need to hear them, stories we have our own need to share of those moments when we see glimpses, when our lives have been transformed from the nightmares we sometimes encounter, to the dreams that God intends. 

In the words of Paul’s letter, we are a new creation, entrusted to continue the ministry of reconciliation in thanksgiving for the ways that God has reconciled us.

It’s good news. Good news, indeed. 

How will you live, reconciled, as a new creation? How will you proclaim God’s good news in the person of Jesus by what you say and by how you live?

February 28, Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

Bryan Cones

I know Lent is supposed to be a time for self-examination and all, to look at ourselves and see if we might  take our baptismal covenant a bit more seriously, but seriously, these are the readings that supposed to help us do that? As our second reader Meghan wrote when I sent her the second reading from Paul, “Yoikes!”

Yoikes indeed… We could boil down a paragraph from Paul today to something like: sexual immorality = death; unfaithfulness to Christ = death; complaining = death.

And it’s not just Paul: In probably the goriest passage in Luke’s gospel after the crucifixion, Jesus is commenting on a tragic accident —a tower falling down and killing 18 people— along with a grotesque act of imperial abuse— Pontius Pilate mingling the blood of Galileans he executed with his Roman sacrifices. I wanted to tell the kids to cover their ears while Sue was reading.

Jesus is at pains to point out that the victims of those events hadn’t been more sinful than anyone else, so they didn’t deserve it—but then goes on to say unless his hearers repent, things will be even worse for them! I’m not sure that lovely parable about the fig tree can save it. How’s that for Lenten encouragement?

Even the first reading, with its amazing vision of God in a bush that burns but doesn’t burn up, its revelation of the divine name, and its promise of freedom to an oppressed people, has within it a problem: The land that I AM is going to give to the Chosen People already belongs to someone else, with consequences that extend all the way to the present day in the land where Jesus walked—and not just there, but in many places where Christians have landed and decided that God had promised the land to them, no matter who was already there.

And there’s the rub: These difficult passages aren’t just hard by themselves. They echo still today in the way they are used and interpreted. The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s may have faded from our popular imaginations (though that crisis continues) but those of us who remember it probably remember the ways in which a passage such as the one we heard from Paul today was used to explain why so many gay men had a fatal illness. It was a divine punishment for sexual immorality. That was an interpretation with catastrophic consequences for the faith of many of those gay men and those who cared for them and journeyed with them all the way to death.

And that line about complaining has been used against poor people for a long time—something like they should stop complaining and work harder. When I was a Roman Catholic seminarian in college, I remember my faithful evangelical neighbor explaining to me that in his experience most people who were poor were poor because they made poor choices. I remember first thinking that it was probably a little more complicated than that. Then I thought if I was poor and needed help, I sure wouldn’t want to run into him, but it also struck me that this faithful Bible-focused Christian had evidently missed all those parts in the Bible where blame for poverty falls not on the poor, but on the rich, both for their dereliction of duty in relation to those in need and because their selfishness and injustice are borne by widows and orphans.

These unhelpful approaches to unhelpful passages in the Bible all seem to boil down to something like: People somehow deserve the suffering they are experiencing. In various forms it’s used to make sense of addiction and illness and poverty and war and so on, usually to the detriment of persons actually experiencing them. Maybe sometimes we even turn that interpretation on ourselves: I am suffering because I deserve it, and God is punishing me.

Paul tries to save this a bit by suggesting that God may be using these experiences to test us and help us grow, and won’t give us anything too hard for us to bear. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m terribly interested in being in a relationship with, much less worshiping, a God like that. Life is hard enough without God making it into an object lesson. That’s not the God I experience and know.

What’s that God like? I think a dear friend of mine summed it up best. After years of struggling with what he saw as a mistake in his past and wondering whether God was punishing him or trying to teach him a lesson, he was driving to work one day and had his Eureka moment: God isn’t punishing me, he realized, because God doesn’t punish anybody. And almost immediately it followed: And I shouldn’t punish anybody either. He told me it was like God had unplugged one idea, and plugged in another, and that he almost wrecked his car when he realized what God had done. When he told me that story, I wanted to take off my shoes, because I knew I was standing on holy ground.

Will you seek and serve Christ in every person, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being? Those two questions from our baptismal covenant are a mouthful, and there are countless ways to live them out. But I wonder if, in light of the these readings, we might start to renew our commitment to them by first repenting of those scriptures and their interpretations that get in the way of loving our neighbor or ourselves, or produce the very opposite of justice and peace because they do not lead to respect for the dignity of every human being.

It seems to me that living out the demands of our baptismal covenant may start with remembering the God who called out to Moses: the God who appeared as an oxymoronic bush that burned but did not burn up, the God whose name is the refusal of name, more like an invitation than an identity. This is a God beyond any human certainty or knowledge, a God who invites silence and wonder before any speech.

And if we want to be a part of this God’s mission of freeing people and honoring human dignity, and partnering in God’s work of justice and peace, that likely begins with remembering that every person we encounter is an image of that ungraspable God, with that same holy fire burning within them.

When we stand facing one another, we stand where Moses stood. “Remove the sandals from your feet,” I AM warns us, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

February 21, Second Sunday of Lent

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

Bryan Cones

One of my first culture shocks as a Roman Catholic exploring the Episcopal Church was this thing called “coffee hour”: “Are you coming to coffee hour? Please join us for coffee hour. We will gather for coffee in the parish hall/undercroft, etc., etc.” As a Roman Catholic who took his Sunday Mass obligation pretty seriously, this coffee hour thing seemed a bit overmuch, sometimes even feeling more like an obligation than an invitation. Wasn’t celebrating Eucharist enough? And why couldn’t be it “coffee 20-minutes-or-so”? I mean, really: What does coffee hour have to do with salvation, whether mine or the world’s?

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and the prayers?” asks the Baptismal Covenant. The apostles’ “fellowship” is evidently as important as their teaching, along with the breaking of the bread and the prayers. Is coffee hour or its equivalents part of that covenant? And what kind of “fellowship” are we talking about? Because if it is, coffee hour is indeed important for salvation, both ours and the world’s. But that seems to promise a lot in a cup of coffee.

Not that I don’t get the importance of Christian fellowship to address that basic human concern: the desire to be known, to have a community in which we can express and share what is dearest to us or what concerns us most, whatever is at the heart of who we are. Believe it or not, I even hear that need in today’s first reading. If I listen for the deep human need that Abram shares with God, underneath all that covenant stuff and animal sacrifice, it’s the basic unfulfilled desire for a child of one’s own: one to love and cherish, one who will remember that child’s parents, one who will carry on a family legacy. Abram wants that desperately, and the lack of an heir, if you read the whole story, causes a lot of trouble in his marriage and his family. (See the story of Hagar and Ishmael, innocent victims of that marital trouble.)

I can imagine a present-day Abram or Sarai needing a certain kind of fellowship. It’s the kind in which the question, “How are things going for you?” is sincere, no matter what the answer; it’s the kind that has space both for “We’re expecting a baby!” and “Things aren’t going very well at all, and sometimes I feel like it’s never going to get any better. Sometimes I feel like giving up.” That is indeed the kind of fellowship that could contribute to a person’s salvation. Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

Jesus, too, in the gospel today, could use a kind of fellowship. At some point he must have felt like everyone was out to get him, both Herod and Jesus’ religious opponents who suggest Jesus leave town before Herod does him in. Jesus has a response both smart-alecky and tender, but I wonder what it was like for him, not only to feel like somebody, or a lot of them, was out to get him, but also to know that there really were people out to get him!

Nowadays I wonder what that’s like for other people in similar situations, for an African American teenage boy, for example, who might justifiably feel like the world is out to get him, constantly blaming him for problems not of his making, and seeing examples in young men that look something like him—LaQuan McDonald, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown—that suggest a combination of some people and a whole society may indeed be out to get him just because he is a Black male of a certain age. What kind of apostolic fellowship might he need? Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

I understand that last week the Lenten conversation after church turned to racism and its effects on all of us, and there was hunger for more conversation like that. What kind of fellowship makes that conversation possible? Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

For me it’s the kind in which I know I am loved enough that I can risk revealing my ignorance as a White person about what it’s like to be African American or any person of color in a White majority or White dominant society, knowing that inevitably I will also reveal the way racism still operates in me, and how being White brings me so many unearned benefits—just because I look like I do.

I can only guess at the kind of fellowship an African American person might need for that kind of conversation. But in light of what friends and colleagues who are African American have shared with me, I wonder if it might be at least the kind in which it’s OK to express and share the justifiable anger and frustration that comes from having to explain for the umpteenth time how hard it is just to drive while Black in Chicago or on the North Shore, without even mentioning the other forces that make life as an African American difficult in our society, or adding the complexities of being African American and transgender, or African American and a man, or a woman, or gay, or African American and successful, or African American and poor.

Is that the kind of fellowship the covenant is talking about? If it is I’d have to say that it is indeed the kind that might save the world. And if you need a little proof for that, look to the apostolic fellowship of the historically Black churches, which not only have sustained many African Americans through this centuries-long struggle, but also spilled out into streets and up to lunch counters, and marched across bridges in Montgomery, Alabama, finally to win a single step on the long path to justice. Apostolic fellowship can be powerful force to reckon with. Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

So what does coffee hour or its equivalent have to do with salvation? It looks like it could have a lot to do with salvation, especially when it bridges the apostles’ teaching, the breaking of the bread and the prayers, which we make present in ritual in here, with our everyday lives of faith in the world out there. It may do that by fostering real, authentic relationships of love and justice and mercy and understanding, of which this world is in desperate need.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and the prayers? I admit, the “coffee hour” part was a stretch for me, but upon reflection, I can honestly respond wholeheartedly: “I will, with God’s help.”

February 14, First Sunday of Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2,9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

Deacon Sue Nebel

It is a moment of great delight for me when I hand off the Gospel Book to one of the children standing around me and tell them to take it to Children’s Chapel. There they gather in a circle hear the Gospel story once again and reflect together about it. I was tempted this morning, as I sent them off, to add the words, “It’s a great story!” A great story it is, one that I anticipate will engage the children easily. Jesus and the devil. Good guy vs. bad guy. A contest of “I dare you.” How will Jesus do in this one?

Good question: How will Jesus do in this one? We fully expect him to win, of course, but it won’t be easy. The setting for this confrontation with the devil is the wilderness, where Jesus has gone immediately after his baptism. He stays there for a period of forty days, eating nothing. The devil arrives on the scene to tempt Jesus. To test this man who is supposedly the Son of God. To find out how strong and powerful he is. Can he be won over? The devil is a formidable adversary. His first challenge is on the personal level. Knowing that Jesus is weak from hunger after his long time of fasting, the devil says to him: “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus responds that one does not live by bread alone. He will not give in to a temptation to satisfy his own personal need. There is much more to life than his own self-interest. Well, that approach doesn’t work, so the devil decides to think bigger. To appeal to the human desire for power. Showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, the devil offers him glory and authority over them. On one condition: that Jesus will worship him. To this temptation, Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’” This Jesus is steadfast in his faith and unshakably loyal to God. He will not be deterred from that. All right then, if Jesus is going to throw quotes at him, the devil will try that tactic. He takes Jesus to Jerusalem, high up to the pinnacle of the temple. There he dares him: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ’On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”. Jesus doesn’t bite on this one either. He counters with another quote, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” The devil is no match for Jesus, so solidly grounded in God. He wins in this confrontation, hands down.

This story of the devil’s effort to tempt Jesus, to draw him away from God is more than a story about Jesus. It describes a fundamental pattern of our lives, the push-pull. back-and-forth dynamic of our relationship to God. A pattern rooted in baptism. The rite of baptism asks us to turn away from evil. To turn and pledge our loyalty to God. I think it would be worthwhile at this point to take a close look at what we promise. I know that some people find it helpful to have a visual resource, like the printed page, in front of them when someone is talking. So, I invite you to take the Book of Common Prayer out from the rack in front of you. It is the red book with a cross on the cover. You may need to share because there are usually only two in each pew.

Now, turn to page 301. At the beginning of the rite of Holy Baptism, the candidates for baptism are presented. If they are adults, they present themselves and speak for themselves. If we have children or infants, parents and sponsors present them and make the commitment on their behalf. Then comes the Examination. You don’t get to just walk up to the font and have holy water poured over you. You have to respond to questions. Big questions. There are six of them. First, three renunciation, or turning away, questions:

• Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?
• Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
• Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

Look at what we have in these three questions. First, evil as big picture, cosmic forces. Satan, our friend the Devil. And God. The second question focuses on evil in the world, forces that destroy the goodness of human beings, communal life. Things like the desire for power and control, domination and oppression. Systemic forces such as racism, sexism, and economic inequality. And then, third question: Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God. Evil is personal. A me-first or my-interests-over-anyone-else’s mind-set. Words and actions that diminish others and separate us from God.

After the three renunciation questions, we shift to affirmation. The person to be baptized has said “no” to evil and is now ready to say “yes” to God. The very first question names that shift as an act of turning:

• Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept his as your Savior?
• Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?
• ·Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?

What is asked for here is allegiance, trust, and obedience. Commitment to Jesus, a promise to follow him, to live according to his teachings.

During this first part of The Examination, the six questions, we are an audience of sorts. We watch and we listen. Then, our role changes. We are asked if we will support the person in their life in Christ. We respond, “We will.” At that moment, we enter into the action. We become active participants. We join the person who has just made a commitment and renew our own promises, in the words of the Baptismal Covenant. It is on page 304 The Baptismal Covenant consists of questions to which we respond. Questions about what we believe. Questions about how we will live our lives. How we will live out our faith in our words and actions.

Here at St. Augustine’s, in the season of Lent, we are going to reflect on these questions, a different one each week. This week’s question is: Will you persevere in resisting evil and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? An appropriate choice with today’s Gospel lesson about Jesus and the devil confronting each other in the wilderness. Temptation and resistance. Wouldn’t it be great if that were the end of it? Jesus triumphs and we’re done with the problem of the devil. But it doesn’t end that way. The final line is the lesson is: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from [Jesus] until an opportune time. The devil isn’t giving up. The struggle will go on. Wouldn’t it be great if our baptismal commitment to turn away from evil and turn to Jesus were a simple, one-time thing? All done, all set, let’s move forward. It doesn’t work that way.

Will you persevere in resisting evil and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? The Church, in its wisdom, recognizes that the question is not if we will fall into sin, but rather when. Our struggle is against evil in its many forms is on-going. So, we asked. It asks us to recognize our failings, or wrongdoings. To express sorry and regret. And to ask for forgiveness. And then to return. To re-turn. To repeat that fundamental action of baptism. To turn to Jesus. Resolved to be stronger in the wilderness of our lives. To be better in the work that Jesus wants us to do.

February 7, Feast of the Transfiguration

Kristin White

Luke 9:8-43a

Mountains are not exactly practical places. They’re steep and craggy. You have to watch your step, or, chances are, you’ll stumble – with serious consequence. There’s usually no water nearby unless you have a way to melt snow, and no comfortable place to sit, much less to build a house.

But the view.

It’s good for you to be there, when you are.

Good enough, in fact, for the time you’re there, to make a person forget the precariousness of it, forget the lack of easy footing, forget thirst and the wish for a comfortable place to sit.

And I have to say, I find it kind of delightful to talk about mountains here in Illinois, which as it turns out is the second-flattest state in the country (thank you, Curious City). The flattest? Florida, it turns out. But that’s a different podcast for another day.

Anyway. In this story of the Transfiguration, Peter and James and John go to the mountain to pray. As Jesus prays, his face changes and his clothes turn white. Moses and Elijah show up with him in glory, they talk about Jesus’ departure from Jerusalem. Peter and James and John see this through some kind of a sleepy haze – “It’s good for us to be here,” Peter says…like he does…”let’s build three dwellings.”

Many of us have places we have returned to over the course of our lives, land that we have known with parents and grandparents, places we tell stories about as we put our children’s feet on ground that we have walked.

My family has camped at Paulina Lake in Eastern Oregon since my Great-Grandmother Hazel took her children there when my grandmother was five years old. Hazel was trying to keep her children safe during the influenza pandemic in 1918, so she took my grandmother and her siblings away from Portland and to this remote place far from the city. They would return to the Lake every summer of my Grandma Rae’s childhood, and she would in turn raise her own children there in the summers as well – my dad and his brothers, Dick and Pete, their sister Molly. Paulina Lake is where I learned to fish, where I got lost in the woods more than once, and where Grace walked on tiptoe as a Native American Princess Hunter. Paulina Lake is where we scattered my grandfather’s ashes, and a few years later, my grandmother’s with him.

The lake is set inside a dormant volcano crater, with a peak high up above it. Every time we’re there, John and I make a point of hiking all the way to the top, all 7,994 feet of it. You can look out and see everything, it seems like…miles and miles and mountains and mountains and mountains.

After the work of that journey, it’s good to be there.

Peter didn’t know what he was talking about with those three dwellings up on the mountain, through his sleepy vision – the author of this gospel makes a point of saying so. A cloud overshadows the disciples, and they’re terrified, and voice inside the cloud says, “This is my son, my chosen…listen to him.” And then Jesus is alone. And they don’t talk about it at all.

The last time we hiked Paulina Peak was nearly four years ago. I had just met several of you in the interview process, put everything I had in the months leading up to it in discerning this call telling me that you were the church God was leading me to serve. There was still snow on the Peak as we hiked it in July – John threw snowballs at me from the trail when I started to lag. We found some German tourists to take our picture at the top, next to the elevation sign. And it was good for us to be there, good to look out on land that I have known my whole life and before, even as I knew in my bones that we’d be leaving again.

There’s a part that gets left out of this gospel, that second half about the next day. It’s bracketed off in our lectionary book, an optional thing to include after the shining and the white clothes and Moses and Elijah and that “It’s good for us to be here” business from Peter.

It’s the next day, when Jesus and the disciples have come down from the craggy precariousness of the mountain. And there’s a crowd, with somebody’s kid needing help. The disciples can’t do it themselves. But Jesus can, and he does, and he chastises those disciples just a bit, and then he gives the boy back to his father.

John and Grace and I left the next day after our hike in 2012. We said goodbye to our family, gave thanks because it had been good to be there, drove our rental car back around the lake and down a dirt road, out of that sleeping volcano.

In the shadow of another mountain a little while later, I had a phone call from Karl Anderson. He was head of the search committee here at St. Augustine's, calling to let me know that the committee had recommended the vestry call me as rector. Did I mention that we were in the shadow of the mountain? That was important in that moment, because as soon as Karl shared the news, my phone went dead…cell service interrupted by a very large hunk of rock looming over me. (And they kept silent, the scripture says…) John has pictures of me walking around a country highway holding my phone out trying to pick up a signal so I could call Karl back and say YES – it would be very good for me to be there.

We need both of those pieces of the gospel story, it seems to me. We need the precariousness and impracticality of a mountaintop in our lives – even the hard work of getting there and the confusion that sometimes comes. We need to take in the mystery and the majesty of a God who has known us since before we were born, a God who can take our breath away…and then, when we find it again, to find it with the whisper: “It is good for us to be here.”

And we need those otherwise bracketed verses of ordinary time on the next day – the call to come back down off that mountain, to return to life among the people, hear our own needs and respond to other people’s. We need the practical, the earthy, the reminders of our own limitations that we really can’t do this all by ourselves. But we can, with God, with one another.

It is good for us to be there, on the mountain.

And it is good for us to be here, on this flat land, with each other.

January 31, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Kristin White

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

"And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

I was nine years old the first time I remember hearing First Corinthians 13 read. I was in church at the time, at a wedding, and serving as an acolyte – for which I remember getting paid $5. That part seemed kind of awesome at the time.

I remember trying to imagine what it looked like, to see something through a glass dimly (and wondering why you wouldn’t just go ahead and shine it up like my dad would have with the handkerchief he kept in his back pocket, so you could see whatever it was more easily.) I remember the priest, Fr. Waldron, warning the couple ahead of time, sternly, not to kiss for too long.

There’s a part missing, though: a piece of a verse that doesn’t show up at the end of the scripture passage from the first letter to the Corinthians that Bryan preached last Sunday, the same piece of a verse that doesn’t show up where today’s reading from that letter picks up today. It’s the very last half of a verse from the twelfth chapter, and for some reason it just gets dropped:

“And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

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Bible scholars will tell you that Paul would never have intended for today’s second reading to take the place of honor that it has, as the customary reading at weddings. It has become a standard, after all – lots of nice, good-feeling stuff about love (appropriate for a wedding, it seems), and no angry God language about who gets in and who suffers eternal condemnation (also helpful for a wedding, especially when there may be lots of visitors who might have in fact avoided church because of such things). Scholars would say that Paul’s letter was written as a warning and a corrective to the church, not as the safe adornment of a romantic moment, or as the text of greeting cards and coffee mugs.

But a still more excellent way? Love is more than ornamentation, Paul would say. God’s love is more. God’s love is the shape and substance of that excellent way.

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Bryan talked in his sermon last week about the fights that the people of Corinth were having at the time of this letter. They were valuing some gifts above other gifts, which led to valuing some people above other people…and you can imagine the fallout from that.

The Christian faith, which was called The Way during Paul’s lifetime (a still more excellent one, right?), drew all kinds of people. Sure, it included the Jews who had followed Jesus from the early days of his ministry, and also the Gentiles who had up to that point led pretty separate lives, and other groups of people as well. There was great disparity between the groups themselves, too: wealthy and poor, landowners to homeless, lepers and those who had been healed, women, men, children, slaves, tax collectors, soldiers. It was a diverse group, almost from the outset.

They didn’t all always get along.

They didn’t all always value each other’s gifts, or always act in ways that could be described as kind, or patient, or helpful.

They didn’t all always wait for dinner until everybody got to the table.

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The trick of this text is that it invites people to seek that still more excellent way – a way which is neither saccharine sweet sameness where everything is always awesome and everybody thinks alike and dresses alike and talks alike; nor can it be the sniping and Darwinian segregation of cafeteria mean kids on the first day of freshman year. No, that still more excellent way commands something more of us. It promises, instead, that those who follow Jesus would practice the kind of radical love for everybody that possesses a fierce and steadfast imagination of what is possible. It calls us to be the kind of beloved community in which unity and difference can flourish together.

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My own academically guilty confession, which might scandalize my Bible professors, is that I don’t actually have a big problem with this passage being used at weddings. Sure, it fits nicely among the baby’s breath and pink carnations of that wedding I remember serving in 1980. But this letter from Paul, it also has muscle and grit.

Anyone who has been married or partnered knows that relationships where we match our lives with another require those very things. Marriage is hard. However much a person believes, bouquet in hand or buttonniere on lapel, that they will think and act and live in similar ways with the person opposite themselves throughout the whole of their lives…well, there are few things like living together to bring our differences into sharp relief. Without much notice, we can find ourselves in moments when we don’t always value each other, or see what the other brings as gift at all, or feel like holding dinner until that other person has gotten to the table. Sometimes, everything is not awesome. And our faces are up against that glass now smeared with our tears, and seeing dimly indeed. Yes, Paul’s letter fits here, too.

It takes muscle and grit to find that more excellent way, whether in the lived reality of marriage and partnership and family, or honest and committed life in community. Especially when everything is not awesome. Especially when we can’t see the other side. To choose the practice of love again and again and again as our shape and substance requires more than platitudes and superficiality; it takes more, sometimes, than we might realize we have.

Because, let’s face it - when we’re hurt or tired or frustrated or scared, it’s easier to be impatient or unkind. But God’s more excellent way offers something different than that to the people who were the church at Corinth so many years ago, to the people who are the Church today: what abides is faith and hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

God’s love, robust and determined and persistent and active love, is what bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God’s love is the love that never ends.

And that still more excellent way gives us the shape and substance as people and as a people, in “God’s unshakeable grasp (of love) on our lives. (That) is the source of our greatest security and, (so), our freedom to actually be patient and kind, to bear all things and not insist on our own way.”[1]

We live the modern translation of this letter’s call in a hundred different ways and more at St. Augustine’s. In a little while, we’ll gather in the parish hall to talk about what that has looked like over the past year, and what we envision together for the future.

Before we do, though, I want to thank you for the honest and determined and practical and deep, deep love that you show for one another in this church, and for a world that starves for the very thing that you are.

As we enter today’s Annual Meeting conversation, thank you for choosing love as the shape and substance of our life together, for recognizing that all we do and everything we will talk about today grows out of that context. Thank you for trusting that without love, our planning and mission campaigns and buildings and budgets and advocacy in the service of justice all lose their meaning. Yes, these are righteous and worthwhile things for us to do. And before and after and throughout it all, this beloved community is called to be a community that practices love.[2]

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That piece of a verse that got lost from the reading between this week and last is not lost at all at St. Augustine’s Church. I’m grateful…so very grateful…to be in your company as, together, we continue to find God’s still more excellent way.

[1] Jerry Irish, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 1. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. 306.

[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2734