May 15, Feast of Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21

Kristin White

Please join me in singing a prayer as we begin. I’ll sing one line, then you sing it back, then I’ll sing the second line, and you sing it back. Then let’s sing the whole thing through a couple of times; and whatever harmony you hear, I hope you’ll sing that into our midst as well.

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What we need is here…

What we need is here.[1]

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I’m not sure that was the prayer the disciples would have chosen to sing as they gathered together in that space, whether for safety and protection from whoever might have wanted to do them harm in the days after Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension; or for comfort, for the solace of being together with friends who have gone through the same thing, the kinship found in not having any idea of what comes next.

And what does come immediately next might not inspire those disciples to break out in prayerful song proclaiming that what they need is here. After all what’s here – a rushing wind? Tongues of fire in their midst, landing on them? Didn’t Jesus promise them a comforter? An advocate?

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I wonder how much those followers of Jesus might have instead craved after some assurance, some hope for a measure of safety, even certainty. The disciples have been traveling by foot and by boat for the past three years. They dropped their nets, and have seen things and done things that they must have thought impossible. I wonder if any of them might have wished for the sort of sameness from the first story we heard today about the people of Babel. That kind of stability only seems possible when everyone shares a place and a language, the same peculiar words. I wonder if it might have even felt like a kind of relief for the disciples to think about staying in the same place for long enough that they might find themselves doing the steady and predictable work of making bricks…bricks that could build a city, and not just to build a city but a tower, and not just to build a tower but the highest sort of a tower – one that reaches up all the way to the heavens. I wonder if, after three years of wandering, followed by the devastation they faced into, and then confusion with a measure of hope restored, and then the grief of loss again but this time with a promise…I wonder what those disciples might have been willing to do in order to keep themselves from being scattered any further than they had already been. I wonder if the faintest breath of imagination might have sneaked in to their thoughts, as it did for those builders in Babel: “Let us make a name for ourselves…”

The trouble, of course, with such a wish is that if everyone is doing the same thing in the same place, speaking the same words in the same ways, then there’s no space for harmony. And so, as we see from the time of that story in Genesis, God has been disrupting these thoughts almost from the very beginning.

Instead of giving the disciples what they might have thought they wanted, that great disrupter known as the Holy Spirit rushes and blazes into their midst. The disciples speak languages they do not know, as the Spirit gives them ability. And others who do know these languages both understand and are bewildered, because they have known those languages as their very own, and they know that those who speak them have not.

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And so, in this strange moment, instead of isolation, the disciples find disruption that spills out beyond their walls. Instead of sameness, there is now diversity. And instead of unison, they find harmony.

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Luke Powery, dean of the chapel at Duke University, claims that God is multilingual, multivocal, multicultural, multiethnic. “The gospel is polyphonic,” he says. “We should not erase our own names, our languages, our cultures, our skin colors, our hair texture, the color of our eyes, the shape of our bodies, our identities. We should not obliterate whom and what God has created…God made all of us with our own native tongue, and when we are tempted to erase that which is different, it is an affront to God and to God’s collective Body.”[2]

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So into this polyphonic harmony that is St. Augustine’s Church we welcome Josephine and Florence today. Josie’s parents were married in this church some years ago; her grandparents help with our Family Promise ministry, so that people have a place to stay together as families until they can find a home of their own once again. Flora’s family came to us last June, when her mom Marianna and her big sister Violet arrived at St. Augustine’s for the first time by bicycle. Violet has a special job to do today – she will be pouring the water that we will bless and use to baptize Flora and Josie.

In fact we all have special jobs to do, today and always. If those words of the prayer we sang at the beginning are true on this feast of Pentecost – if what we need is right here, through the Holy Spirit’s great disruptive power of a mighty wind and blazing fire, then it’s our job to be the sacred body that such a spark and such a breath inhabit. It’s the special job of each one of us, and it takes us all – not to march in lock step and use all the same words to say all the same things, not to bake bricks to try and build some kind of fortress with the understandable but mistaken idea that we can secure ourselves to heaven. But instead, to join our voices to the song – whether we’re 2 or 82 or older or younger or someplace in between, it takes everybody, and those others we’ll invite to join the singing; to find those places where our own voices resonate in harmony; and to sing Flora and Josie into our midst.

What we need is here. It’s right here. So let us go, now, to the font of our salvation.

[1] http://www.musicthatmakescommunity.org/what_we_need_is_here

[2] https://www.faithandleadership.com/luke-powery-our-own-native-tongue

April 24, Fifth Sunday of Easter and Welcoming the Rev. Joe Mazza

John 13:31-35

Kristin White

In The Spiral Staircase, the book that tells the story of her life, religious writer and former Roman Catholic nun Karen Armstrong levels the claim that faith is less a matter of understanding than it is a matter of practice. She writes: “Religion is not about having to believe or accept certain difficult propositions; instead, religion is about doing the things that change you.”[1]

Today’s gospel returns us, in the midst of this season of resurrection, to the night when Christ’s passion begins to unfold. Jesus is with his disciples; he has taken off his cloak and washed their feet and dealt with Peter and shared a meal – what will be his last, before his death – together with these friends he has known and trusted. He tells them about God’s glory, he speaks about it as though that glory has already been revealed, and he promises it will continue to be.

And then this: “Little children,” he says…it’s the only time he will address them in this intimate way in the whole of John’s gospel… “Little children, I am only here for a short time. You will look for me and you will not find me. I give you a new commandment: love each other. This is how people will know you, if you love one another.”

In this last conversation with the ones who follow him, Jesus offers no 613 mitzvot, no Ten Best Ways to Live, no two-part summary upon which hangs all the law and the prophets. In Jesus’ final moments with them at table before his passion finds traction and momentum, he gives them just one thing to do: love.

This past Thursday I joined a conversation with our bishop and priests from around the Diocese of Chicago. We began our time together by studying this gospel passage. And the thread that emerged for me in our discussion was the fact that this kind of love was probably never intended as a feeling, an experience, the kind of ephemeral-whatever-it-is that is supposed to emerge from a mysterious place once the stars have aligned and everything is in right order and people are all behaving kindly and you’ve had a nice day off and sufficient sleep and eaten a balanced diet that includes vegetables…the idea that if everything is in right order then the stage is set for a really good feeling to wash over you…that is love.

I’m here to tell you that vegetables and days off and right order and adequate sleep and kindness are all really good things, things we likely could use more of in our lives, but that’s not what’s going on here in this gospel passage. Jesus has just shared what will be his last meal of this life with his friends, and things are very much not in right order right now. “I’m only here for a little bit longer,” he tells them. “So love each other.”

Instead of a feeling, we talked around that table on Thursday about love as a verb. We talked about love as the manifestation of God in our actions, when those actions might in fact be the very last thing we actually feel like doing. The Lutheran preacher Nadia Bolz Weber describes this as agape love, the sort of love that is present with the indwelling of God’s spirit. “Agape one another,” she says that Jesus commands his friends. “Not try and create warm feelings toward the unlikable, the socially awkward, the unlovely. Jesus (knows) better than to imply that if his followers could only muster up enough niceness they (will) be up to the task of following him.”[2] Love as a verb takes this command outside the frame of those fickle qualities we might want to constrain it to. And perhaps doing those things – whatever they might be – that serve for us as manifestations of God’s love, maybe those stand the power to change us. Living love as a verb helps us to know who we are, helps us to be known as God’s own, forever.

We find ourselves at an interesting moment as Church, right now at St. Augustine’s. I’ve described this time as St. A’s season of parties. We began on April 10 with the baptism of Benjamin Klock, and continued last Sunday with Bishop Lee’s pastoral visit to us, together with another baptism and reaffirmations and receptions. This particular season will continue through next Sunday, May 1, as we bless and send our beloved associate rector, Bryan Cones, into the next season of his ministry.

Today we celebrate and welcome the return of the Reverend Joe Mazza, who arrived as rector of St. Augustine’s at just about this time in the spring of 1970. We give thanks for the ministry Joe and his wife Susan and their children – including our own warden, Joy Witt – lived and shared in this place, the friendships begun and continued across generations, to today and beyond. I’m grateful for the ways that Joe called the people of St. A’s to live Jesus’ new commandment to love each other in real and practical ways, in ways that folks maybe didn’t always feel like doing, ways that changed St. Augustine’s to be more fully who we are, and how we are known, and who we are called to become.

Personally, I give thanks for the fact of one of those changes: in 1980, Joe and the leaders of St. Augustine’s called the Reverend Janice Gordon as the first woman priest to serve on a clergy staff in the Diocese of Chicago. I am so grateful for the foundation that he laid, together with so many long-time members of this congregation, some who came before us and have gone on ahead, some who are here among us now, who lived Jesus’ command to love in ways that established St. Augustine’s as a place that welcomes everybody.

Looking at this Church, living as a member of this Body, convinces me that Karen Armstrong has something real to say about faith. Much more than intellectual assent, it’s a matter of practice, one in which we try and fall short and try again. Much more than comprehending ideas that seem incomprehensible, for me faith is about mustering our own willingness to try and try again at practicing those things that stand the power to change us. It’s about living Christ’s commandment as agape, about doing love as a verb, about manifesting God’s promised presence in a way that helps us remember who we are. This is the inheritance of generations at St. Augustine’s, and the promise of the future that unfolds before us.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says. “Love each other.”

[1] Karen Armstrong; The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 270.

[2] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/03/5-years-ago-on-maundy-thursday-i-preached-my-first-sermon-at-hfass-there-were-8-of-us-here-it-is/

May 1, Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22--22:5

Bryan Cones

So how does all this end, in your own imagination? I don’t mean what is death like, or your own “end,” but the whole shebang: How is God going to bring this great drama of creation to a close? What does salvation or resurrection or eternal life or heaven, or whatever it is we are hoping for, look like, or feel like, when it’s finally all said and done?

Maybe we picture a gigantic family reunion around one big table, all the grandmas and aunties, cousins and parents, the friends who are like family, all gathered together. Then there’s the vision of clouds and angels, happily playing harps or leading a big parade through heaven. To tease my partner David just a bit, I wonder if he imagines something like the back country of Glacier National Park, more or less untouched wilderness, with people far enough apart not to get in each other’s way. I don’t know what my own vision is, but I am at least hoping for a big Star Trek-style tour of the universe from beginning to end, and I insist on seeing every dinosaur that ever was. What about you?

The reason I ask is that whoever wrote the book of Revelation—I’m sure that’s everyone’s favorite book—anyway, when that person got done with all the scary stuff, the seven-headed dragon, and the anti-Christ and the Armageddon to end all armageddons, we get this passage today: A vision of how it all ends, or maybe how it begins again. It is a city in a garden, or a city-and-a-garden. That’s odd to me, especially since “city in a garden” is the motto of Chicago, and as much as I love Chicago and the communities that surround it, a vision of the reign of God it ain’t, hardly a picture of the peaceable kingdom, or the justice that assures everyone has what they need, or the charity extended to all, by all, no matter our color or where we come from.

Thing is, today’s great cities are very much like those ancient ones the visionary John knew: earthly cities, brutal and broken. And still John can imagine a city of God’s design: Instead of walls, both seen and unseen, open doors that welcome everyone. Instead of temples separating what is holy from what is not, the whole city is a sanctuary, where God is unconfined, and God’s grace flows freely. Instead of the shadow of narrow alleys or the glare of advertising, God’s glory reveals what is good in both light and darkness. Instead of good food and clean water for some, and lead-laced poison and food deserts for others, one crystal stream quenches every thirst, and the tree of life rises on both its banks, with an abundance of fruit. And from that tree come leaves that heal the nations, and all of those nations are welcome in that city, and all of them bring their glory to God.

Now that’s what I call an eternal city. And it’s a long way from the sad and suffering cities of the earth to that heavenly city-and-a-garden built and planted by God and revealed in Christ. So how do we get there from here?

Well, by following Lydia, of course. Lydia, woman of Thyratira, dealer of purple goods, an unusual woman in her day, perhaps, prosperous apart from any man, a free woman. She was a successful woman of her own earthly city, but when she discovered faith in Christ in the words of Paul, and when she was bathed in the crystal waters of that other city in her baptism, and ate of its fruit, she knew just how to respond: She opened her home and began to practice the hospitality she beheld for a moment in that eternal city, and began to live now as a citizen of that city yet to come.

A few stories back it was Tabitha, who having seen that city in faith, began to make clothes to adorn those in her earthly city who didn’t have anything to wear. And don’t forget Cornelius, whose Gentile faith pushed Peter to reconsider whether those rules about clean and unclean were important enough to deny citizenship in the city to come. They weren’t.

And so the story goes: Christian after Christian who sees the city in faith, is bathed in the water, eats of the feast, then becomes part of God’s restoration crew, sharing freely of the hospitality of God in Christ, living now as citizens of the city-and-a-garden to come, as if it was already here, even though it is obviously not. There’s a list of saints a mile long, most of whose names are long forgotten. Though we all remember some, I’m sure: Miepje and Patsy and Kathie, three men named Bill. We each have our list.

What’s the distance between Chicago’s earthly city in a garden and the city-and-a-garden announced in Revelation? It’s not actually very far at all from here to there. In fact it may be right on top of us now, just waiting for us to start opening the doors. We have our own Lydia to lead us, along with a Barbara, a number of Jameses and Johns, Marthas and Marys, a Jack and an Amy and some Daniels and Claires. And don’t forget Carolyn and Kristin, Tim and Tom—this could go on for a very long time, so I’ll stop, because I wouldn’t be finished until I said all our names, all of us a part of God’s local building restoration and garden crew. And all around us, people lying on mats, waiting to be healed, to be invited into the city that never fades.

And it all starts with us remembering day by day, week by week, that we are always wading in that other city’s crystal waters, always eating of its abundant fruit, sent with leaves for the healing of nations, and that the name of the Holy One is written on our foreheads. At any moment it is within us to reveal the city to which we belong, and invite everybody, everybody, everybody to come along. 

April 3, Second Sunday of Easter

John 20:19-31

Bryan Cones

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? It’s not a question one gets asked too often in an Episcopal Church, nor in the Roman Catholic churches of my youth. But it is one I grew up with in East Tennessee among Southern Baptists, as perhaps some of you also did if you came up among evangelical Christians.

It’s the kind of question that might feel a little uncomfortable; it was the kind of question meant to get at the kind of Christian you were. My Roman Catholic mother told me always to say yes, because I had been baptized as a baby, so she and my dad had taken care of that for me. Our Southern Baptist neighbors didn’t quite agree on that: for them an experience of Jesus came first, then baptism.

Even though that question reflected a difference between my Catholic family and my evangelical neighbors, I never heard their question as an unkind one, though—the people who asked it mainly wanted everyone to experience what they had. I remember a college friend, an evangelical Lutheran, rewording the famous verse John 3:16: “For God so loved Bryan that he sent his only Son…” Surely I was not all that important, I remember thinking. The good Catholic in me always insisted that we are all saved together, as a community, as a body, even as a whole creation.

But it always made me curious: When my evangelical friends spoke of “being saved,” accepting Jesus, just what was that like for them? Intellectual certainty? Having all your questions answered? All doubts removed? I came to understand in their telling of it, which they were always happy to do, that it was above all more like a feeling, a feeling of being loved and protected and embraced, not only safe from some eternal hell, but protected also from ever falling away from God’s love, or falling out of love with God. It was God’s response to their longing for Jesus— not really in their heads at all, even if it was something they thought about.

I was thinking about that same question reading today’s gospel: the story of how Thomas accepted Jesus not only as Savior, but as “my Lord and my God.” What might that have been like for him? We tend to refer to him as “doubting Thomas,” as if he was intellectually unconvinced by what the other disciples told him, and needed proof. But when we listen to this story closely, Thomas never says, “I want to understand” or “Prove it!” He says, “I want to see him, I want to touch him.” He needs a personal encounter with Jesus to believe, not an argument for why he should. Perhaps he felt left out or overlooked or forgotten by Jesus. And he won’t take “no” for an answer.

And guess what? The risen Jesus says “yes”: “Go ahead, touch me!” And Thomas believes. But, to be honest, I don’t think we should call him “doubting Thomas” so much as brave Thomas, bold Thomas, for daring to ask for what really needed to believe, and trusting that Jesus would respond.

Amazingly, that’s what the risen Jesus seems always to be doing in these stories from John’s gospel: Saying “yes” to his friends not in their joy and wonder and awe, but in response to their doubt, uncertainty, even disbelief. As Kristin reminded us on Easter Sunday, it was Mary Magdalene in her deep grief that the Risen One came to, calling her by name so that she could see him through her tears.

The Risen One in today’s story appears among the cowering disciples, passing not only through locked doors, but through their overwhelming fear of sharing his fate. In the story that follows this one about Thomas, the Risen One appears again to the disciples in their forgetfulness, after they’ve thrown up their hands and gone back to fishing. And immediately after, the Risen One has another personal encounter this time with Peter, deeply ashamed of his denial of Jesus, deeply in need of forgiveness.

Mary Magdalene, the Ten, Thomas, Peter—and us as well. All of us invited to encounter the Risen One from wherever we are, joy and wonder and awe and praise and thanksgiving for sure, and also grief and uncertainty and doubt and unworthiness and fear.

I remember my own encounter like that, somewhere around age 17, not at all certain that anyone could love me as I was, and probably not the only one who ever felt that way. And yet on a weekend retreat, I did have an experience of Jesus’ love for me not unlike that of Thomas, when finally what those evangelicals had been talking about made a little more sense to me. It was less an experience of me accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior—my mom was right, I already had— but an experience of being accepted by my Lord and my God, just exactly as I was, in all my uncertainty and fear.

As I have grown into that experience, I have become utterly convinced that the Risen One is always waiting for any of us to be like brave Thomas: to ask with boldness for what we need so that we can believe, in whatever state we are, so our Lord and God can do just what we have asked.

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Better yet: Have you accepted that your Lord and Savior accepts you, exactly as you are, without question or reservation. Now that is what I call good news worthy of an Easter alleluia. 

Katherine Pargellis Bowe Memorial

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Luke 24:13-35

Kristin White

I met Kathie Bowe for the first time three years ago this spring, when she came to St. Augustine’s Easter Vigil service. It’s a magical night, my favorite service of the year. We gather for every Easter Vigil on the night before Easter Day, processing into a darkened church, with candles and chanting and a fire; we read the stories from scripture that remind us of who we are – stories of creation and deliverance and wisdom and salvation. We sing the first alleluia since Lent began.

Kathie wasn’t a member of St. Augustine’s quite yet, on that night three years ago, though that wouldn’t be too far off (at her son Charley’s – and our then-warden’s – persistent invitation). She said some generous things about the worship that night, and the music, high praise from someone for whom music mattered so much, who had sung with some pretty gifted choirs in her lifetime.

A few weeks later I met Kathie at her home at Three Crowns for lunch and a chance to get to know her better. She had some thoughts about church and politics and music, which she shared with me between bites of a really good lobster bisque, hearkening back to her life in Maine. She showed me pictures and told stories. She talked about how very proud she was of her boys and their families, how much she loved her grandchildren. She pointed out the planters on her back patio where she would plant flowers when the ground warmed up enough. She had a particular sort of unvarnished candor and unsentimental hospitality that reminded me of the people in my life I find real and trustworthy.

When she did join this parish, Kathie began to serve as a lector. Lectors are the people who read lessons from scripture in our worship on Sunday mornings. On the Sundays Kathie read, the congregation was captivated as we listened to her sharing the word. When she read the Ten Commandments in church last year, people sat at attention. “You shall not murder!” she said. And I remember sitting up very straight in my pew, and thinking: “No! No, I promise, I won’t!”

Last year at our Easter Vigil, Kathie read the story of creation that we heard her son Charley read from Genesis just a little while ago. We quoted that reading back to her, beginning at a rather raucous Easter dinner the next day, and continuing all year long. The phrase that wouldn’t go away? “It was good.” And it was. The thing that strikes me about both the stories I’ve heard about Kathie and the experiences of her that I witnessed is her deep delight in the creation of which she spoke so amazingly at that Easter Vigil. It was good. Indeed, it was very good. 

It was good, the life she built for her family, together with her husband John, and their sons, Tony, Sandy, Charley, and Rob.

It was good, the beauty she sought and found in music and literature, the standard of ethics she hoped for, and was willing to dig in and work for, in civic life.

It was good, the quick humor she wielded in matter-of-fact ways.

It was good, her life right here in recent years, the chance to really know her grandchildren and be a part of their lives, to live in a community where she found kinship with you.

And it is good, that image we have of her standing at the edge of the water in God’s creation, the sun and the wind on her face as she looks out onto the horizon.

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The gospel passage today is another sort of Easter story in this Easter season. As you heard it read, two disciples meet Jesus along the road, and they don’t know that it’s him. He walks some distance with them, and explains and interprets scripture in a way that might have led those disciples to give perhaps just a little bit more credence to the testimony of women at the tomb saying that Jesus is alive. The disciples' eyes are kept from recognizing him, though. But they also don’t want him to leave. “Stay with us,” the disciples ask. "Stay." And he does.

Very near to the end of that passage, Jesus sits at table with those disciples, his friends, the people with whom he has shared his life and his ministry over these past years. At their meal together, he blesses bread, breaks it, and gives it to them. And in the flash of a moment, their hearts burn within them. They know. God is there, right there with them, in the person of Jesus. And it is good.

Sometimes, as was true for those disciples, those moments can come even at a time of profound loss:

…praying last rites in an emergency room just before a cold midnight in February  

…a family gathered together the next night, hands held, to pray their beloved mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, “Nonkey,” out of this life and into the next

In the flash of a moment, God is right there.

Tony and Sandy and Charley and Rob, you who are her beloved sons; and you who are her beloved daughters-in-law; and you who are her beloved grandchildren; and you who are her beloved family, and friends – I call you to look for those times in your lives when the beauty of creation is inescapable, when that which is holy draws very near and is offered to you. Watch for those times when, in the flash of a moment, your heart burns within you, and your own eyes are opened. 

God is right here.

And it is good. Indeed, it is very good.

March 27, Easter Day

John 20:1-18

Kristin White

All she has, in that moment, is her grief.

After walking to the tomb in the dark of the early morning, after the shock of seeing the stone rolled away from the place it had been three days before…after the chaos and confusion and the strange – competition? – of the running back and forth…after it all, his body is just not there. The linens lay scattered across the floor. And the other two disciples leave. They go home.

All she has, then, is her grief. There’s nothing else for her to hold onto – not even the sad comfort of ritual; she has no chance to bathe and anoint him, now, to chant the prayers singing him out of this life. Even that familiarity is beyond her grasp, beyond what she can see and touch.

So, absent it all, she stands weeping. What else is there for her to do? When two strangers dressed in white ask her why, she says: “He’s gone. And I don’t know where.”

Then she turns. Which matters – it’s worth paying attention to, this moment. She turns, and finds another person, someone she presumes a stranger; she guesses it’s the gardener, as he repeats the question the first two have asked: “Why are you weeping?”

“Just tell me where he is,” she says. “Tell me where to find him.”

“Mary,” he says.

And she knows. It’s him.

“Mary.”

He knows her name.

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When we baptize people into life in the Christian faith of this Church, we ask six questions:

·      Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

·      Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers?

·      Will you strive for justice and peace among all peoples, and respect the dignity of every human being?

·      Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

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

·      Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, and respect, sustain, and renew the life of the Earth?

To each of these questions, the person being baptized – or, more often, godparents, who pledge on their behalf – respond with this promise: “I will, with God’s help.”

Each week throughout the season of Lent that leads us to today, we have looked more closely at one of those baptismal questions and promises. In our prayers and our preaching and our conversation and our charge to go out into the world, we have asked together what it looks like to make each promise real in our lives – to say: “I will, with God’s help,” and give that promise substance with our choices and actions, day by day.

We have begun and continued conversations about real things: resisting the collective sin of racism; taking our places as members of this beloved community; asking whom we are serving when we seek and serve Christ; wondering about what dignity really looks like; protecting the work of God’s hands that is this fragile Earth, our island home; sharing God’s good news with a world that starves for the Word that is true and real.

And that’s it. When we ask what is true and real, this is what I can point to; you are who I can point to. Because those questions and promises are more than the ritual of standing with a baby in a white gown at the font. As beautiful as that moment is - and it is beautiful – it is only the beginning. Lived out over the course of a lifetime, those promises say something true and real about who we are as a Christian people. They equip us to face into hard truths: the chaos and confusion and shock and strange competitions that are all too much with us. Even those deep and profound losses, so true and so real that it seems sometimes all we have is our grief, because everything else is beyond our grasp; when it feels like all we can do is stand weeping with Mary.

You know. You know, from the news you see and the news you live.

Baptism is for something. The Church is for something more than itself. Our lives of faith matter, especially in a time when we see things we wish we did not see, and know things we wish we did not know. We need those promises in our lives because they offer us a way to stand against that which would diminish or destroy us, they equip us to steady ourselves, to say: “here, and no further.” We promise to resist evil because there is evil at work in the world. We promise to continue in fellowship because there is too much that would separate us from one another. We promise to seek and serve and safeguard and respect because all we have to do is hear one word – one word – of the daily news, to see that these practices, which make us more fully who we are, are quickly becoming evermore and alarmingly scarce.

So we make our promises, “with God’s help,” because we know enough to know that we can’t do this on our own. And when we do, when we strive, imperfectly, as we will, to live those promises out in our lives, we see our own humanity, and that of the person next to us. When we try, imperfectly, as we will, to live those promises, we catch glimpses of that which is holy within us, and within everybody, everybody, everybody. We do this imperfectly, human as we are, and so we practice, as a people responding to a question with a promise, a people sealed by the Holy Spirit who belong, forever, to the God who knows our name.

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A group of us gathered earlier this week with our bishop, who invited us into a series of meditations. When he spoke about the sacrament of baptism, Bishop Lee said that God takes what is true and makes it real. God takes what is true – that you are God’s own beloved; and makes it real – in tangible ways, in ways we can hold onto, with water and flame and oil; in words said and sung by the voices of the people we love, by the people who know our names.

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“Mary,” he says.

And she knows.

“Mary.”

He knows her name.

She can’t hold onto him, still, because he will be leaving her again, this time to ascend to the Father. But he’s real; she has that to grasp. And she sees him – in a way she might never have imagined, as she walked to the tomb in that sad morning darkness. She sees him – not his body, beaten, and broken, and lifeless, as it had been on Friday afternoon. She sees him on this Sunday morning – risen – God made manifest as her teacher and friend, the one she belongs to, forever. The one who knows her name.

Alleluia.

March 26, Easter Vigil

Genesis 1:1--2:4a; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13; Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21; Baruch 3:9-15, 3:32--4:4

Bryan Cones

Last Sunday we began telling a story: the story about Jesus’ last week or so of life, which we finished up yesterday as he breathed his last. And now with Jesus on this night we are waiting in the darkness for what comes next. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

To mark the time we have started telling our whole story again, from the beginning, in the watery chaos before time began, when it was only God on their own, wondering what might be drawn from the fertile void. And out of a watery nothingness God’s creativity called forth a flourishing something: light and darkness, sun and moon, green growing things, living creeping things, breathing human things. Out of nothing comes something through God’s imagination. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, this time a natural disaster of epic proportions, a moral disaster that humanity brought upon itself, the story tells us, which threatened to wash away all that God had made. But the Holy One won’t have it, and commissions a life raft to keep creation afloat until the crisis passes. Out of certain destruction comes salvation through God’s faithfulness. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, perhaps a bit more familiar: an enslaved and oppressed people, no hope of rescue, crushed under the heel of the god-king Pharaoh, a motley crew of Hebrews whose lives did not matter, to Pharaoh anyway. But they did matter to the Holy One, who summons a voice to speak for them, who gives a holy name for them to call, and who marshals creation in a great war against their oppressor. Out of slavery comes liberation through God’s power. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

The story goes on: That people passed through the desert and became a nation, bound by a covenant to the God who set them free. But covenants can be hard to keep, and some who had been oppressed became oppressors themselves, of the widow, the orphan, the alien immigrant. The people turned from the path of Wisdom, though she taught them her ways and called to them again and again in the unheeded voices of the prophets she sent. So finally she came herself, and pitched her tent, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Out of abandonment comes companionship through God’s steadfast love. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

And so Wisdom walked among us to show us her way, healing and freeing, teaching and listening, eating and drinking with everybody who came along. And before long she drew the attention of the god-king Caesar, and those who oppressed and enslaved the poor, and turned creation to destruction for their own purposes, who would prefer to keep for themselves what God desires for all.

Which brings us back to where we started, on this night, here in this darkness, waiting to tell the story of what happened with Jesus: out of defeat comes victory, out of death comes life, out of the old creation comes a new one, and the story of Wisdom begins anew in the risen body of Christ.

And so here we are, bearing that story, to a world beset by chaos and violence, on the edge of natural and moral disaster threatening to burn up what God has made, when some lives still don’t matter, the widow and orphan and alien are left abandoned on the border, and Wisdom’s children are still sent to the tombs. What do you think is going to happen with us?

We already know the answer: We are going to live the story we have been telling of what God has been doing all along, of what Christ is now making risen flesh in us, Christ’s body: the divine imagination that draws forth a flourishing something where once there was nothing; the divine faithfulness that shelters and protects what is threatened with destruction, the divine power that goes to battle with anything that enslaves and oppresses God’s people, the divine love that refuses to give up on anyone, the divine Wisdom who teaches and listens, heals and makes whole, who sits to eat and drink with all who have been abandoned, the divine life that disarms death forever.

So let us gather now at the waters where it all began, and begins again and again, to be bathed once more in the story of how God is saving the world. 

March 25, Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-10:42

Deacon Sue Nebel

Good Friday. The second day of the Triduum, the three sacred days leading up to Easter. This day, right in the middle, is the darkest, the most solemn of the three.  We began the Triduum last night in a somewhat festive mood, gathering for an agape meal.  Then we shifted our focus and the mood darkened.  We remembered in words and actions the events of the night before Jesus’ death.  The last meal with his disciples. The footwashing.  His final commandment: to love one another.

Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Triduum, ends in darkness and quiet.  Tomorrow, Holy Saturday, is a day of anticipation and preparation for the evening ahead. The Easter Vigil when the light of Christ dispels the darkness. New life. Hope. Celebration.  But not today, not on Good Friday. Today we gather in sadness, emptiness. The church has been stripped bare.  Today we hear the story of Jesus’ arrest and trial.  His death on a cross. His body placed in a tomb. 

Three days.  Three sets of events.  Three symbols.  Maundy Thursday: the basin and towel of footwashing.  Good Friday: the cross.  Holy Saturday: the empty tomb.  Important, all three of them, but it is the cross that Christian tradition has made central. Walk into a Christian church and you will find a cross, front and center, just as it is here.  We encounter crosses in many forms in our church life.  We carry crosses in procession. We see them in decorations, vestments, service leaflets, and prayer books.  Church logos and flags.  Many people wear crosses as jewelry.  Some simple, some elaborate. 

Today, on Good Friday, we focus on one cross.  The instrument of punishment and death for criminals in the Roman Empire.  Jesus sentenced to die because of his teachings and actions.  Words and actions that were judged to be a threat to those in power.  So, they decided to get rid of him.  In the cruelest, most humiliating kind of death. The cross of Good Friday is not an ornate decorated object. The cross of Good Friday is plain, heavy wood.  Rough, stark.  In a few minutes,  (or Kristin)  will bring that kind of cross forward and we will honor it.  Silently affirming its central place in our hearts and in our lives as Christians.

Good Friday is a day of commemoration, of remembering.  Good Friday invites us into the story of the events surrounding Jesus’ death.  The betrayal by Judas. The scattering of the other disciples.  Jesus questioned by Pilate.  Mocked and scorned by the crowd around him.  The grim details of Jesus’ death.  His body, taken down, wrapped in spices and cloth, and placed in a tomb. 

Good Friday into something else as well.  Good Friday invites us to reflect on what the Cross means to us.  What image of the Cross is most important to us? Which Cross have we taken into ourselves?  To shape who we are and what we do.

·      Is it the Cross of Good Friday?  Jesus’ suffering and death—and the meaning that we give to it.  Jesus as sacrifice.  Jesus dying for us. 

·      Is it the Cross of Jesus’ teaching in Scripture?  Jesus told those who wanted to join him, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” A cross that we choose. The Cross of Discipleship.

·      Our most important cross may be one that we experience in the liturgies of the church.  The Cross of Blessing.  The gestures of the hands of a bishop or priest.  Blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharistic meal.  Blessing the people at the end of a service, reminding them that they are children of God, loved by God.

·      Or perhaps, it is the Cross of Baptism that is most important to us.  The declaration of faith and commitment to Christ.  The final action of the baptismal rite: the anointing with oil and sign of the cross on the forehead.  With the words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  A Cross of Identity

Today, as you go out from this liturgy of Good Friday.  I invite you to take one of these images of the cross with you.  Your favorite.  Or perhaps, you might want to take another one. To see how it fits.   Whatever you choose, take it with you.  Carry it with you, as you move through the rest of the day.  Reflect on it.  Find a place for it deep within yourself. Let it work on you.  et it shape you.  Today, tomorrow, and beyond.