Category Archives: Grace Church

Reorienting my priorities

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I’ve been at Grace now seven months and I’m settling in somewhat. I’ve learned a great deal about the parish, the job, and about myself in the process. One of the things I’ve learned is that my day is quickly filled with routine administrative tasks–everything from dealing with tension between volunteers and staff, thinking about issues in the homeless shelter or security, or of course financial matters. And then there’s the dishwasher.

What that has meant is pastoral care has played a minor role in my work so far. A large reason for that minor role is the fact that Grace has a cadre of Eucharistic Visitors who regularly take communion to our homebound and hospitalized members. In addition, we have a very gifted and energetic deacon who has taken responsibility for much of our pastoral care needs.

I finally made space today for making some pastoral visits of my own. It’s about time, after seven months. I spent the morning with a parishioner in his home, admiring his art collection, getting to know him better, and sharing our interests in the relationship of body and mind, and our concern for the homeless.

This afternoon Deacon Carol and I made the rounds of Oakwood. We spent a lovely afternoon with parishioners who are rarely able to make it to services. I got to know them a little bit, we shared something of our lives, our interests, our hopes and fears. And at the end of it, I was totally exhausted, as drained as I would have been had I spent the afternoon going over our financial statements (which I had done on Tuesday). But I was also exhilarated by the opportunity to get to know people, make connections, and think about ways of spending time with them on a regular basis (as I was coming home, it struck me that a monthly service at the facility where we spent the afternoon today, would be a great way of connecting regularly with our parishioners there.

And, OK, since it’s Lent, I’ll make a confession. I’ve got two close relatives, a brother and sister of my dad, who are in difficult medical situations. Feeling helpless to respond to their situation, it’s probably made it more likely that I would reach out to people I can visit.

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 7, 2010

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It seems like it’s inevitable. Every time some great tragedy happens, whether it be 9-11 or hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti, Pat Robertson is going to make news for saying something outrageous about how this event is God’s punishment on someone.

But it’s not just Pat Robertson and it’s not just great disasters like those I’ve just mentioned. We do it too. We do it when we seek an explanation for the suffering of a friend or loved one, ourselves, or even a stranger we hear about it. What did they, or we, do wrong, to deserve this?

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First Sunday of Lent, 2010

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Lent 1, Year C

February 21, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

I sometimes wonder what visitors or newcomers think when they come to our services on a day like today. I mean, there was the Great Litany which I love. But its language is archaic and the chant itself sounds more like something out of the Middle Ages than the twenty-first century. Then there are the lessons we heard today, which themselves come from a far distant past and don’t seem to speak to us. As I read the gospel for today, images from Hollywood movies came to mind—especially “Devil’s Advocate, that Al Pacino movie in which he plays a devil figure and takes Keanu Reeves to the top of his tower and tempts him with wealth and power. How do these stories, how does our liturgy connect with the lives we lead here in the twenty-first century?

It takes a curious sort of person who would look forward to the self-examination and self-discipline that the season of Lent encourages. Most of us want our religious lives to focus on celebration and joy, not the repentance, the gloom and doom, of Lent.

In fact, that is only part of what Lent is about, and perhaps not the most important part. The “Invitation to a Holy Lent” that is read during Ash Wednesday services, refers not only to repentance and confession of sin, but also to the fact that Lent began as a period of preparation before baptism. So it was a time of instruction in the Christian faith. But whether or not we celebrate baptisms on Easter, Lent should serve as a season in which we deepen our understanding of our faith.

But that’s a hard thing, because the small corner of our lives which is dedicated to our relationship with God has to compete with everything else that demands our attention—our families, work or school, our leisure time. We may find it difficult even to get to church many Sundays—the roads might be bad, it might be too cold, or we might not be able to find a parking space when the square is blocked off for something like Winter Festival. For many of us, perhaps for most of us, no matter how much we want to nurture and deepen our relationship with God, there is simply to much to do from day to day, too many other demands on us. In the end, it may be that all we have time for is an hour or an hour and a half on Sunday morning.

The rigors of a Lenten discipline that deepens our understanding of our dependence on God, that deepens our faith, and that makes us more deeply aware of our of our relationship with Christ, that sort of discipline seems infinitely remote from the daily existence we lead, the routines of work, family, and whatever else that occupies our time and energy.

So we come to church this first Sunday of Lent, and hear the alien language of the Great Litany, and encounter the penitential tones of the litany and of our liturgy today. And then we hear the words of scripture; the story of God and the people of God two thousand years ago, and we wonder how our stories, the stories that brought us here relate to that story.

For there is an enormous chasm between our lives and our world, and the world of the texts we’ve heard.  The texts we heard had their origins in very different worlds from each other too.

With the gospel, we are actually picking up the narrative we left off back in January when we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism. Today’s gospel recounts the very next episode in Jesus’ life. It may be a familiar story, but like so many familiar stories from the gospels, we often overlook those details that are most important for helping us make sense of them. In this case, the story begins with the observation that “Jesus, full of the holy spirit … was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Luke is reshaping Mark’s version of the vent significantly, for Mark says that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. For Mark, at least on this occasion, the spirit seems to be a less than benign force, while Luke emphasizes its comforting presence for Jesus.

The temptations, too, are significantly in the two gospels. Mark says only that Jesus was tempted in the desert. Luke and Matthew agree that there were three temptations although they change the order slightly. They are temptations about who Jesus is, about his relationship to God, and about the nature of his ministry: Satan tests Jesus, perhaps even taunts, by asking him to make bread from the stones. Satan tests Jesus, by offering him earthly power. And finally, Satan urges Jesus to test God, by urging him to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, so that the angels might save him.

Each time, Jesus responds to Satan by quoting scripture; more precisely by quoting the book of Deuteronomy. In Luke’s sequence, in the last temptation, Satan quotes scripture of his own to Jesus. In a way, theirs is a battle over scripture, but in a sense, too, Jesus is battling with other Jewish interpreters over the meaning of scripture. It is a battle over the story of scripture, of what it means and to whom it belongs. It is a battle he would continue to wage throughout his public ministry.

The story of the Israelites in the wilderness is a story of a people testing God, complaining when there was no food or water, when the way looked long and arduous. The Jews of Jesus’ day were looking for a political Messiah who would deliver them from their Roman occupation much as the Maccabees had freed them nearly two centuries earlier.

But Jesus rejected that way and as he did, he interpreted scripture in a way that was new and challenging to the religious elites of his day. He was telling a new story. The temptations he faced are a clear rejection of the path of political and military power, and the full implications of the path Jesus chose would only come clear on his last journey to Jerusalem.

Paul, for that matter, is battling in a somewhat similar way in the letter to the Romans as he tries to find a way for including Jew and Gentile in this new community that is being birthed. But Paul gives us reassurance, again quoting from Deuteronomy, that scripture is not beyond our ability to understand or grasp—indeed, scripture lies within us: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” The passage from Deuteronomy that Paul quotes makes clear that the “word” refers to the commandments, the law. But for Paul, the story of scripture was not an exclusive one, it extended to Gentile as well as to Jew, to all of us.

The Invitation to a Holy Lent that is read on Ash Wednesday also encourages us to “read and meditate upon God’s holy Word.” It is an invitation to enter into and make scripture’s story our own, and to interpret our stories in light of scripture. I suppose that if I could encourage you to do anything this Lent, it would be that, to take the time, even if it’s only a few minutes, to read the weekly lessons, but to do it early in the week before they are read on Sunday. That’s what I try to do each week. Ideally, on Sunday afternoon, after I’ve recovered from Sunday morning services, I will read through the next Sunday’s lessons and allow them to float around in the back of my mind for a few days.

To read and meditate upon scripture is to enter into and reflect on the story of God and the people of God, to let that story begin to shape our own stories. We see in today’s reading from Deuteronomy what seems to have been some sort of ritual enactment. As part of that ritual of giving thanks for having received the promised land, the story of God’s mighty acts on behalf of God’s people was recited. It is a story that defines the people of Israel in a particular way, “My father was a wandering Aramean” and goes on to recite all that God did on their behalf.

We tell such stories repeatedly, our liturgy is itself such a story—We give thanks to you to God, for the goodness and love you have shown to us in creation, in the calling of Israel. … in the word made Flesh. Stories like this tell us who we are, where we belong, and for what purpose we live.

Yes, it may seem sometimes as if all of that—the story of the liturgy, the story of scripture—seem infinitely remote from the stories we live out each day but Lent invites us to reflect anew on those deeper connections and as we do, to deepen our connection to God.

Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany

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Transfiguration

Grace Church

Last Epiphany, 2010

February 14, 2010

I’m sure that by now most of you have seen or heard about the article from this week’s Isthmus about the homeless shelter. If not, it’s posted in the back and is available online. I urge all of you to read it. I knew it was coming out; I wasn’t quite sure when it would appear, and I certainly had no idea of the content. But Thursday morning I got up around early and was working on a couple of projects. I kept checking their website to see if anything was on line. Then I saw the cover and the headline: “Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s homeless shelter is a dispiriting place.” And my heart sank. I still had no idea what was in the article, so when I came to the church, I stopped by Barrique’s to see if they had copies of this week’s issue yet. I went to the office and read the article.

I’ve preached about the shelter a good bit already in the months I’ve been here and if you visit my blog, you’ll read more of my ruminations. Seven months is not a long time to develop a perspective on one’s ministry in a new place, but it has become clear to me that right now, a good bit of my job is going to be involved in the issue of homelessness. I didn’t expect that, and I’ve had more than one parishioner say to me that they wished I hadn’t already gotten so involved in it.

I wished I hadn’t as well. I certainly didn’t expect it. Coming in, I suppose I thought that having a homeless shelter, run by an outside organization, would give me a little cache, my ministry a little edginess, without actually having to be very involved.

But I quickly learned that wouldn’t be enough. As winter came on, and as I walked past the line-up night after night, I began to be more and more troubled by what I saw, more concerned about what I heard, more passionate about what was going on. And I learned that there were others who were also becoming more involved and more passionate. Perhaps we are close to achieving critical mass. I don’t know.

The headline on the article was troubling. I immediately shot an email off to the author to complain about it, and he assured me that there would be a clarification in the next issue. For better or worse, it’s not “our” shelter. We rent space to Porchlight, but of course we bear responsibility as Christians for the treatment of the guests and for the kind of hospitality that is shared there.

The shelter is a reflection on us as a church. The conditions in it, the treatment of the guests by Porchlight, all say something about how we understand and live out our call to be Christ’s body here. That’s why that headline should bother us. My first reaction was quite natural, to get defensive, to attack the messenger. Perhaps yours was as well. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of truth in that headline: the shelter is a dispiriting place. I hear it almost every day from the men who stay there and we at Grace share in the responsibility for what it has become over the years.

Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not placing blame or criticizing the past clerical or lay leadership of Grace, nor Grace’s membership. I’m not interested in exploring or analyzing the history of the relationship between Grace and Porchlight. I learned quickly that Grace is a complex institution that requires a great deal of energy, time, and commitment to keep going. We can’t do everything that needs to be done. We don’t have the resources: financial, human, spiritual, to do everything. So people have to make difficult choices about where to spend money, where to invest time and talent. You might have called a rector whose passion for the gospel and ministry lay elsewhere and would have focused her energies and your attention on different projects. Instead, you called me.

The story broke as I was thinking about my sermon for today and beginning to look ahead to Lent. As I pondered Luke’s gospel for today and thought about the situation of the shelter guests I remembered the quotation from Matthew’s gospel that I was quoted as referring to in the article: The church’s job, I said, is to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. I was alluding to Matthew 25 to the parable of the sheep and goats, and Jesus words’ “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” I’m perfectly comfortable thinking about encountering the face of Christ in the homeless, the hungry, in victims of violence and oppression, even in the faces of those suffering in Haiti. Yet I wonder whether my comfort is too comfortable, whether I fully understand what it means to encounter Christ in those faces.

I’ve said repeatedly these past weeks that Epiphany is a season during which we celebrate God’s glory and presence in the world, and above all the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who makes God’s glory and presence manifest in himself. The season of Epiphany always ends with a reading of the gospel story of the transfiguration, that eerie, otherworldly encounter of Jesus with Elijah and Moses on top of a mountain.

I’ve never found this story particularly compelling, probably because I’m not generally fond of those stories that emphasize Jesus’ divine nature or his miraculous powers and this one has nothing to redeem itself like the healing of someone who is blind or deaf or possessed. Instead, it seems to be all about the divine and kind of gratuitous at that, with the appearance of Elijah and Moses.

That might seem to contradict much of what I said last week about experiencing God, as Isaiah did in his vision, as Paul did on the road to Damascus, and as Peter did in the miraculous catch of fish. Each of them was transformed by the experience, each was humbled, each was called. They were other-wordly experiences. The difference, it seems to me, is that in the transfiguration we have two odd and unbelievable events—the first is the transformation of Jesus. Luke doesn’t call it transfiguration, saying only that the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white. The second event was the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah.

The Transfiguration confronts us directly with the problem and the mystery of Jesus Christ’s divinity. But it does so in a curious way. On other occasions, with the miracles, for example, the demonstration of Jesus’ power is on behalf of someone else, to heal them, to restore them. In this case, the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity is for no reason, or perhaps only to show forth Jesus’ divinity.

But to focus only on what happens to Jesus is to miss some of the significance of the story. Luke’s version is unique in several respects. First, only Luke mentions what the three talked about—“Jesus’ departure.” Literally, the Greek reads “exodus.” So not only are we put in mind of the children of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness by the presence of Moses and the mountaintop setting; there is a connection here as well. And of course it is important that even in the context of a transcendent event like this, we are reminded of what is to come, of the cross and Jesus’ suffering. Another important point made by Luke is in the description of the disciples. It’s not at all clear what is meant here. The NRSV reads “they were weighed down with sleep, but since they were awake they saw his glory. Again, one is put in mind of Gethsemane, and of the same three disciples in Luke, sleeping, because of grief. In the midst of this glory, we have a foreshadowing of the cross.

Indeed, just a few verses along in the gospel, Luke will write: “And Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  It’s a journey we will be walking with him in the coming weeks—the journey to Jerusalem. Lent is a time of reflection, penitence, and preparation for Easter. The glory of Christ that we experience in the resurrection, the glory of Christ of which we have a foretaste today in the story of the Transfiguration, is also the glory of the cross.

Lent has been most often seen as a time for individual focus and reflection, an opportunity for each of us to deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is appropriate, however, that we thank of it as a communal experience as well, that our journey is not one we make alone, but with our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is fitting, then, that as part of our Lenten devotion in the coming weeks, we reflect together on our shared responsibility for Madison’s homeless. I would like to begin that process of reflection by inviting you to join me next Sunday at 8:45 in the library for an initial conversation. I don’t know where that conversation will lead us but I pray that together we will discern where God is leading us.

Peter wanted to build booths on the mountain so that he and the other disciples could continue to bask in the glory of the presence of Moses, Elijah, and the transfigured Christ. He wanted to linger there, as we want to linger in the joy and glory of Epiphany. But the memory of this event will have to suffice for a time, as we make our way through Lent toward Easter and the greater glory of the sorrow and suffering of the Cross transformed into Easter.

Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s Homeless Shelter a dispiriting place

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That’s the headline I woke up to this morning. Here’s a link to the front page. Rather dispiriting, don’t you think? I shot an email off to the author of the article before reading it; it wasn’t yet on the website. By the time I got to the office, copies of The Isthmus were available. The article by Joe Tarr was well-researched, well-written, and balanced. He spent a night in the shelter to get some first-hand experience of what goes on there.

In a return email, Joe assured me they would make a clarification in next week’s issue, but anyone reading the article would quickly realize that the shelte is run by Porchlight, not us; and that it is ours only because we rent the space.

Still, part of the headline is true. The shelter is a dispiriting place, and we need to shoulder some of the responsibility for that.

There is a great deal of energy bubbling up in the downtown area around the issue of homelessness and the shelter and I am very hopeful that there will be some substantive changes. Several innovative ministries and outreach programs have developed recently and the growing concern over conditions in the drop-in shelter may lead to some change there too.

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In the Year the King Uzziah died

Grace Church

Epiphany 5, 2010

February 7, 2010

The liturgical calendar moves on. We are nearing the end of Epiphany and already the staff is looking ahead to Lent—we are busily putting the final preparations to the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper, working on bulletins for Ash Wednesday and nailing down the final pieces of our Lenten programming. Tomorrow, I will be heading off for a two-day clergy retreat. I don’t know what they are like in this diocese, but in Upper South Carolina, our January or February retreat was clearly a pre-lenten retreat; it was designed for us to prepare spiritually for the season, so that in turn we might nurture the spiritual lives of those in our care.

I’m looking ahead to Lent, but we’ve still got two Sundays in Epiphany to get through and both of them have as their scriptural focus peak spiritual experiences. You have already heard me criticize the editors of the lectionary for various decisions they make, and no doubt I will make similar comments from time to time. They were more than occasionally ham-handed in the way they dealt with scriptural texts and injudicious in their editing. Still, on this fifth Sunday after Epiphany in Year C, they got it exactly right.

The season of Epiphany offers us the opportunity to reflect on God’s presence among us; God’s presence in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, but also the ways in which God manifests Godself in the world and in our lives. The Psalms are full of reminders of God’s glory—“The heavens declare the glory of God” our hymns of praise repeatedly have us singing about the glory of God. We read about that glory in the story of the wedding at Cana and in the coming of the magi.

In today’s lesson from Isaiah, we hear one of the most familiar, and most transcendent experiences of God’s glory in all of the biblical tradition. The prophet Isaiah has a vision, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lofty.” It is so important to the biblical tradition that the song the seraphim sing has become our song in the Eucharistic liturgy. For many scholars of religion, the vision described by Isaiah and his response to that vision, have become something of a paradigm for understanding religious experience in general, not just Jewish or Christian.

Isaiah describes a vision in such vivid detail that it may seem to us as if we are with him in the temple. He claims to see God, but the vision itself is of God’s throne and a being so vast that the hem of God’s robe filled the temple. Seraphim were in attendance, flying and singing. As Isaiah looked on, he felt the temple shake as if it were in an earthquake and the temple itself filled with smoke.

Isaiah’s response to that awesome vision was to recognize the vast gulf that divided him from God. He described himself as lost, a man of unclean lips, unable to perform the tasks to which God might be calling him. It is an experience similar to the one we heard the prophet Jeremiah describe in last week’s reading from Hebrew Scripture: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah’s response to God’s words is to protest, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But God insists and reassures Jeremiah, just as God reassured Isaiah, that God would put words in the prophets’ mouths.

Paul described a very different sort of experience in I Corinthians 15, the experience of the risen Christ. It is one of the key passages in all of Paul’s writings, a key passage for understanding Paul and a key passage for understanding New Testament Christianity. Paul cites for his readers a long list of all those who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He seems to be saying, if you can’t take my word for it, here’s a list of everyone to whom the risen Lord appeared, go talk to them. The accounts of the encounters with the Risen Christ in the gospels as here in Paul seem unable to explain the radical transformation that took place; changing a rag-tag bunch of disciples into a group of men and women who took the gospel to the ends of the earth. That’s the important point.

As with Isaiah and Jeremiah, what matters is not so much the experience itself, it is the response. Isaiah and Jeremiah became spokesmen for God, prophets of Yahweh, and Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ was also a call, as he says in Galatians. In fact, the language of Jeremiah echoes in Paul’s understanding of his own call: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased 16to reveal his Son to me.” For Paul the appearance of the Risen Christ to him was less significant for affecting his conversion than it was in establishing his authority as one of the apostles.

Speaking of which, the gospel story of Jesus calling the disciples is easily the least dramatic of all of the call narratives we have before us today. Jesus is by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The crowds pressing in upon him, he seeks refuge from them in Simon Peter’s boat and teaches from that place. When he concludes, he tells Peter to put his nets back in the water, and there is a miraculous catch of fish. Jesus uses this to invite Peter, and the others, to follow him, and thus they become Jesus’ disciples and, to use the words of our gospel, “fishers of people.”

So Peter, Paul, and Isaiah each had pretty spectacular things happen to them, and their response in the end was to set about on the tasks that God had given them, to respond to God’s call.

I mentioned in my sermon last Sunday that one of the challenges facing Grace today, indeed one of the challenges facing Christianity as a whole, is the lessening importance of religion as a factor in people’s lives. A series of surveys has shown the growing number of people who identify themselves as belonging to no religion. Often, when this answer is probed, respondents mention that they are “spiritual, not religious” that they have spiritual lives, even nurture them, but they do that outside of traditional religion. My guess is that for at least some of you, something similar is true. You may come to church, but if asked to describe spiritual experiences, you might mention something that had no connection with traditional worship or life in community.

I have no doubt that those of you who fall into that category have authentic spiritual lives. In some respects we have been culturally programmed over the last two centuries to seek spiritual experiences outside of traditional religious institutions. Many of us might find ourselves as likely to pursue meditation practices that have more in common with Buddhist techniques than with traditional Christian forms of prayer.

Even more important than the “spiritual not religious” idea is the notion that we are seekers, each of us in some way on some sort of spiritual journey or quest. From time to time, we may find ourselves in pursuit of deeper and more fulfilling spiritual experiences, trying to quench a thirst that never seems to end. We might desire ever greater highs without taking the time to understand them or their effects on us. For most of us such quests are deeply individualistic, often occurring entirely in solitude.

As we come to the end of the season of Epiphany and begin to look toward Lent, making a connection between the experiences of the sort we read about in today’s scriptures and the hard work of deepening our faith, may be what binds Epiphany and Lent together. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul did not satisfy themselves with the religious high of their experience. For it was not just a high, it was also a low. Each of them responded to the glory of God with an awareness of their own finitude and inadequacy and each of them came out of their experience on fire to do God’s work in the world.

The quest for spiritual experience is not enough. Our communal worship, the Eucharist, and our individual experiences may be ways of encountering God, but we should never allow them to become ends in themselves. Our lessons make the case that spiritual experience should lead to a sense of call and mission, a new awareness not just of our finitude or even a deeper sense of our relationship with God. As we end Epiphany and look ahead to Lent and Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem and the cross, may our experience of the glory of Christ become strength and nourishment for the journey ahead.

Can we talk?

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I’ve been in Madison for over six months now, and one of the things I’ve learned is that agencies, organizations, even communities of faith don’t talk together. For example, there is apparently no structure for clergy to meet regularly and share information and support one another. Presumably, this is done on the denominational level. Certainly we Episcopalians meet regularly. But even though Grace is within three or four blocks of two Lutheran churches, a United Methodist church, and a Catholic church, I have met only one other member of the downtown clergy.

What that means is that it is difficult to find out what other churches are doing, especially in terms of social services. Are we duplicating one another’s efforts? Are there ways we might cooperate on larger projects? Such questions can’t be asked because there is no one to whom one might ask them.

Take homelessness for example. It turns out there are conversations going around all over the downtown area, that involve homeless men and women, clergy, social service providers, and advocates. At these conversations many of the same topics come up: conditions in the drop-in shelter, the availability of social services, etc. People want to mobilize to do something, but the first thing they think of is to develop a new program or organization. It might be better to broaden the conversations and above all, gather the data about programs and problems.

To that end, we at Grace have done something fairly simple–compile a list of meal programs in the downtown area. Sure, such lists exist, but when we began to compare the list with the programs that homeless men and women actually know about, the list suddenly became much longer. So here’s what we’ve come up with: Free Services.

What surprises me most is that more than 25 years ago, when I was doing Field Education at a downtown church in Boston, one of my jobs was to create a roster of services provided by downtown churches, and to develop a way for those churches to communicate what they were doing with one another. Perhaps such efforts took place in Madison’s past, but today, we churches are the proverbial “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

To be honest, I have reached out to other clergy and most of those whom I have contacted have been welcoming and gracious in their response. So perhaps we have the opportunity of turning things around.

Sermon post-mortem

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I’m never quite sure whether I pull off what I’m working on. Yesterday, given the constraints of other commitments, I wasn’t happy with the final shape of the sermon. But some of what I was groping toward must have come through. A parishioner called me today and said lovely things about my sermon yesterday.

That’s not why I’m writing. Instead, I’m writing about two other things. First, a series of conversations at coffee hour about our decrepit dishwasher and how we should proceed. We can get it fixed. The problem is, it doesn’t do what we need it to do. It constrains our ministry because our kitchen is not adequate for the purposes to which we put it, or could put it, with the proper equipment. Our food pantry can’t re-package bulk food for example.

Then, I saw a post on the Episcopal Cafe that led me to this. There’s much here with which I disagree but it seems to me that the right questions are being asked. I especially like the parable of the life-saving station. I’d heard it before but it had slipped my mind. In some ways, it captures the history of Christianity in America. The full parable is here.

I was involved for a couple of years in a parish that was a fairly recent church plant. It was successful at the level of bringing people in, but I don’t think it was particularly at shaping and forming disciples.

I do think on one level that it is all about liturgy or worship. The old Anglican/Episcopal mantra was lex orandi, lex credendi, praying shapes believing. We have a gift to offer the larger church and the world–a gift of an experience of God rooted in beautiful music, beautiful language, and at Grace, a beautiful space. We need to find ways of sharing that.

Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

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A More Excellent Way

Grace Church

Epiphany 4, 2010

January 31, 2010

I know that for most of us, our primary exposure to scripture comes on Sunday morning. A few of us might read the text more closely, study the bible either individually or in groups. Some of us are relatively familiar with the texts from Sunday School, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people who attend Episcopal Churches have at best a superficial knowledge of scripture. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing you. If anything, I’m criticizing the church, and its lay clerical leadership, for not taking the education of children and adults seriously enough.

What that superficial knowledge of scripture leads to is a pretty fuzzy, incomplete, and misleading understanding of who Jesus was. Most of us have a picture of him in our minds as a nice guy, good teacher, who didn’t ruffle many feathers, or if he did, it was only because they needed to be. That image of Jesus as a nice guy may be so deeply engrained in us that when we hear stories like the gospel that was just read, we either miss the conflict entirely, or totally misinterpret it.

As I said last week, Luke dramatically alters this story of Jesus’ return to his hometown, moving it to the very beginning of his ministry, telling the reader what Jesus said, and shifting the focus away, at least slightly from the reception he receives there. Perhaps the most striking element in Luke’s story is that it seems as if Jesus goads the crowd into taking action against him. There’s an odd and abrupt shift of sentiment. Luke reports that all spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words.. Then the crowd asked, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

It’s after that question that Jesus seems to provoke them. First he quotes the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself;” and says that they will want him to do the sort of healings in Nazareth that he has done elsewhere. Instead of answering those objections directly, Jesus cites the two examples from Hebrew Scripture, the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and their healing of two gentiles.

The meaning of this exchange is obscure. Does Jesus want to incite the crowd’s anger? Or is something else going? Is his challenge to them a response to the question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” If we think back to what I said last week about the Isaiah text quoted by Jesus. It serves in Luke as what we could Jesus’ mission statement and his identity as Messiah is measured by the extent to which he preached good news to the poor, gave sight to the blind, etc. So, he is basically laying out his future ministry to his listeners, identifying himself as the Messiah, and declaring the year of the Lord’s favor. And the response from the crowd was not recognition that he is the Messiah, but recognition that he is one of their own, Joseph’s son. They are given everything they need to see him as the Messiah, but all they can see is the one who grew up among them.

Sometimes it is hard to see what’s in front of our eyes, and sometimes it’s hard to accept the message coming to us—whether that message is good news or bad. In fact, it’s often the case that the best news is the hardest to hear. Jesus came to Nazareth, proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, proclaiming, in other words, the coming of God’s reign. His listeners didn’t understand what he was talking about, but when he put it into words they could understand, they recoiled and resisted. When he mentioned Hebrew prophets healing gentiles, their ears closed up and they attacked him.

Accepting the new can be dangerous and scary. We don’t know what might happen down the road. We can’t see clearly into the future. For most of us, we’re pretty comfortable with doing things the way we’ve been doing them. They seem to work pretty well, after all.

But closer examination reveals that isn’t the case. I mentioned last Sunday some of the discussion the vestry had on our retreat two weeks ago. We talked about our vision for the future, and we also did some hard work laying out some of Grace’s strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, as is always the case in such conversations, talk turned to the way things used to be. Long-time members can remember when our congregation was much larger, when we had a youth group of fifty members and a Sunday School that filled the education wing. Often, such reminiscences can turn into discussions of how we might get back to that time.

Well, the reality is that the world, Madison, and the church have changed dramatically. To make the point, I will use a very different example than Grace Church. A few years ago, I did some consulting work with a parish in the county seat of a largely rural county in South Carolina. Their congregation had declined significantly since the sixties, and they were hoping to turn things around. The mantra I heard repeatedly was “We’ve got to attract young families.” The county’s population was declining, because the textile mills that had provided employment had closed and there was around 20% unemployment. I did some demographic research and learned that something like a third of the children under age 18 lived in single-parent households. In other words, the chances of attracting two-parent families with stable employment were pretty low. If they wanted to be the church and grow, they were going to need to do some creative, and hard, thinking.

We at Grace need to do some hard thinking too. It’s easy for many of us to think back to the “good old days” of the fifties through the eighties when the church thrived. But those days are long gone. As I said, the world, Madison, and the church have changed. Many of these changes are gigantic—like the lessening role of religion in America and in Madison, increased ethnic diversity—I could cite dozens of things. Some of them may seem relatively insignificant, like the growing importance of Sunday as the only day when families can spend time together. We can do little or nothing about many of them, but taken together they mean that to expect the church to look like what it did thirty or forty years is not only unrealistic, it would lead to its complete irrelevance, and probably its death.

But still, we hold on to that vision of the past. It collides with the present and impedes our future. That is true for an individual parish like Grace. It’s also true for our denomination as a whole, and indeed for mainline Christianity. So what do we do? How do we capture a vision of the future, that brings what is best of our tradition forward and brings the life-giving message of the gospel into a new world?

Well, that’s the question. It may seem innocuous, but in fact, different answers to that question, different ways of approaching it, can lead to intense conflict. In a very profound way, conflict over that question is what has driven conflict within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion for a very long time and it threatens to tear our denomination and our global communion apart. But there can be, and often is, equally intense conflict on the local level. When facing such conflict, it’s important to remember that in spite of our differences, there are deep and lasting bonds that tie us together.

That’s what Paul is talking about in I Corinthians. The past few words we have read his famous analogy of the Christian community as the body of Christ, in which each member is of equal importance. He didn’t write that in a vacuum. In fact, the community of Corinth to which he was writing was embroiled in nasty conflict internally, but also externally, with Paul himself. He writes in order to hold that community together, and in order to preserve his relationship with it. That’s the context for today’s reading, the so-called love chapter.

He has just been saying that there is a variety of gifts, but the same spirit, varieties of services, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God. He uses the metaphor of the body to stress the organic relationship of all members in the community, the necessity of all, the importance of all. When he comes to the end of that discussion, he transitions from it by saying, “But let me show you a more excellent way.” And with that, he begins “Though I speak with the tongue of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” Paul was talking about relationships within the body of Christ. Love is that which binds us together; indeed love creates the body of Christ.

But love is also the path showing our way into the future. We live in a culture in which it seems impossible to disagree and remain in relationship. Our political discourse is impoverished, little more than shrill rhetoric aimed at scoring points, whether that conflict is over healthcare or the Edgewater development. In the Episcopal Church it seems easier to walk away than to remain in conversation with those with whom we disagree. And for many, when there is conflict in a parish, we find it easier to leave than to stay and struggle. Yet, if we are to be the body of Christ, if we are to offer God’s Christ’s reconciling love to the world, there is no more excellent way, than to show that love in all that we do as God’s people in the world, as God’s people in this world.

The Year of the Lord’s Favor: Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year C

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The Year of the Lord’s Favor

Grace Church

Epiphany 3, 2010

January 24, 2010

Today’s lessons are all about great preaching. The lesson from Nehemiah is one we rarely hear; indeed, it comes from a book that is read only rarely in the three-year lectionary cycle. And since this is an Episcopal Church, probably none of you, unless you were raised in a different Christian tradition, could even find it in the bible. Still, it’s a great story, and an important one for the history of Judaism, and for the history of scripture itself.

For scholars think that this story captures one of the key moments in the development of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah. As I’ve mentioned before,  Babylon conquered the Kingdom of Judah and carried off the political and religious elite of that kingdom to exile in Babylon. Now in the ancient world, when you were conquered by another people, that pretty much proved that not only were they more powerful than you, but their gods were more powerful than yours, too. So most conquered peoples came to accept the religious superiority of their conquerors, along with the military and political superiority.

That didn’t happen to the exiles in Babylon. Instead, they began to rethink their theology, their faith, and sought a way to fit their experience into a new understanding of who God was. Along with that, they compiled and organized texts. Some they wrote in Babylon; others they brought with them. It was in exile in Babylon that most scholars believe much of the Hebrew Bible came to take something of the form we have today.

When they were released from exile, many returned to Jerusalem; among them Ezra and Nehemiah. They brought with them their new theological understanding, and these new scriptures. In today’s lesson from Nehemiah, we hear Ezra reading that text to the assembly of people. It took all morning, and he didn’t just read; he also interpreted the text.

The gospel story relates Luke’s version of Jesus’ first public sermon. Jesus has just been tempted in the wilderness and Luke reports that “filled with the power of the Spirit” Jesus begins his public ministry, a preaching tour through the synagogues of Galilee. Eventually, he finds his way back home in Nazareth. When he gets there, his reputation seems to have preceded him. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke tells us it was his custom, signaling to the reader that yes, Jesus is a good Jewish boy) and as is not unheard of for local boys made good; he is asked to perform. We can imagine that there’s quite a crowd in attendance; people want to know what the fuss is about, they’ve heard about Jesus’ activity in Capernaum and the other towns of Galilee.

So Jesus stands up, reads from the Torah, and sits down to interpret it. The text he reads is itself dramatic: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free. To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Now there’s a puzzle here. In the first place, this quotation is a combination of several verses from Isaiah 61 and 58 so we don’t know if the formula as it stands goes back to Luke or to Jesus himself, but it certainly wouldn’t have been a logical reading from scripture in the synagogue. The second thing that’s interesting is what it leaves out. The verse that reads “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” continues in Isaiah, with another phrase, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” So Luke, or Jesus, leaves out a prophecy of gloom, doom, and destruction. Instead, it’s a message full of hope and promise.

Luke puts this story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to tell us something very important about Jesus. It’s a summary of the key themes of Jesus ministry. We can see how important it is for Luke by recognizing how he has changed the story from the versions in Mark and Matthew. In both of those gospels, the visit to the synagogue in Nazareth comes after a significant portion of Jesus’ ministry. Both gospels put it after big chunks of Jesus’ teaching and a number of his healings. For them, it is only a story about Jesus’ rejection in his hometown. They don’t tell us anything about what Jesus said. By placing it here, by putting these words in Jesus’ mouth, Luke is telling us to pay attention—this is what Jesus is all about.

So Jesus reads these verses, then he sits down and tells the congregation, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The people are amazed by the power of his words. There are several fascinating things about this text. In the first place, we see Jesus behaving like he’s supposed to do. He’s a good Jewish boy, he goes to synagogue on the Sabbath, he knows his scripture. But then, when he begins to speak, he blows away people’s expectations. Perhaps the congregation was expecting to hear how all this might happen when the Messiah comes. Instead, Jesus tells them, it’s happening right now!

Another key element of the text is the importance of the spirit. It’s something Luke stresses throughout his gospel, and I’m sure we’ll have more to say about it as we go through the gospel this year in the lectionary. Today’s reading begins, and Jesus, filled with the power of the spirit. And of course, the words Jesus reads from Isaiah begin with the phrase, the Spirit of God is upon me…” So, Jesus filled with the spirit, proclaims the year of God’s favor, preaches good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, proclaims release for captives, and freedom for the oppressed.

To put it into contemporary language—this is Jesus’ mission statement according to Luke. He makes this clear later in the gospel when the John the Baptizer, now in prison, has gotten word of Jesus’ activity. He sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask him if he is the Messiah or if they are to wait for another. Jesus response to them, and to John is “Go tell John what you have seen, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the poor have good news preached to them.”

Jesus’ mission statement, but is it ours? I suspect that, just as in the case of the wedding at Cana, where our usual focus is on the miracle, here, we want to see Jesus’ words as relating only to him, and to his miraculous powers. But we’re not so easily left off the hook. If we follow Luke’s gospel, and then read in the book of Acts, which is the second half of Luke’s story, we see the same emphases being stressed. In Acts, the disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, do amazing things, like give sight to the blind and set the oppressed free.

Ezra and Nehemiah came back from exile in Babylon with a vision for what God’s people might become. Jesus came back from the wilderness with a vision for his public ministry.

In the coming weeks and months, we will be talking a great deal about what the future holds for Grace Church. During the vestry retreat last weekend, we spent a lot of time talking about Grace’s present and future. We analyzed our strengths and weaknesses as a parish—what we do well, and what we don’t do so well. We looked at the challenges that face us, and the opportunities that we haven’t fully exploited. We also shared what we hoped Grace might look like in five years. All of this is part of a process that will help us clarify what our ministry and mission is and should be in this place. In the coming weeks, we will begin to share our work with the parish, and invite all of you to reflect on and contribute to this effort.

But however we articulate our own mission and ministry, the standard by which we must judge it is the Gospel. And it’s not inappropriate that we use this passage as our guide. Is this the year of the Lord’s favor? How are we going to bring good news to the poor? Help the blind to see, the lame to walk, the oppressed go free? Do our ministries match up to that job description? If not, why not?

What might it mean to grab hold of Luke’s vision of Jesus’ ministry, for ourselves, for our church and our community? What difference might that make? Oh, I know there are all kinds of things that get in the way. We lack the funds, the time, the commitment, the people, there’s so much else to do.

I know it’s daunting. The needs are so great and we are so few, but my friends, that’s what it’s about. We come to church to be nourished, to be filled, to find spiritual growth and we do, in the fellowship, in the proclamation, and in the celebration of the Eucharist. But we need to remember that we are nourished at the table not only for our sake, but for the sake of the world and for the sake of Christ. We often leave our worship with the dismissal—let us go forth rejoicing in the power of the spirit. Like Jesus, filled with the power of the spirit, let us become a people of vision, empowered to do great things!