mothermariclair

The Second Sunday of Epiphany 2009

2009-01-18T10:57:00.000-08:00

Beginning with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer the beginning of communion was marked by the priest reciting a collection of biblical verses called the Comfortable Words.

They went like this:

“Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.
COME unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

Hear also what Saint Paul saith: This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

Hear also what Saint John saith: If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins.”

These words were meant to remind what was being relived in the celebration of the Eucharist, and to reassure us, in a way, that each and every one of us was worthy and welcome to share in the sacrament at the table, because Jesus had assured our invitation.
In a way, we convey the same message here at Trinity when we say “All are welcome”.

Along the way fom the 1662 Prayerbook to the 1979 Book of common prayer that we use today, these comfortable words dropped out. Many hours and pages of sound theological and liturgical argument went into the decision to leave this aspect of the Eucharistic Prayer out of our current prayerbook, but in times of great difficulty or grief, they immediately return to my mind, because in them I am reminded that I am beloved of the Lord, precisely because I don’t deserve his love, and I live my life in the safe cradle of his love, even when the world feels frightening and uncertain.

I mention grief particularly because just yesterday we as a parish lost someone very dear to us. Those of you who in the parish who did not know Wendy Woodcock have probably heard her story- diagnosed with cancer as a young mother, she was given six months at most to live. 14 years later, her battle had become our battle too, and the fierce strength and perseverance she showed in her fight for life was a humbling inspiration to us all.

This was a woman who was a force to be reckoned with- she was the entertainment at our monthly Peacemeal dinners for folks in the area affected by HIV and AIDs, and scheduled her chemotherapy sessions so that she would have the most strength on those third Sundays of the month.

This is why, as we share in the grief of her mother Barbara, her daughter Victoria, and her husband Ron, I take comfort in the knowledge that God, in losing Jesus to sacrificial death, shared in the experience of grief and death as well, and feels our sorrow with us.

We have heard some other very comfortable and comforting words today. In the reading from Samuel we hear God calling to a young prophet, in the psalm we are reminded that God has known us in our mothers’ wombs, has created us and knit together our features and limbs, and has created us lovingly, always watching over us, knowing our thoughts from afar.

And then, in the Gospel story, we have Jesus, literally knowing Nathanael’s thoughts from afar, amazing him with a report of his own actions carried out under a fig tree far from Jesus’ sight. Jesus cautions Nathanael not to be amazed by this, it is simply a parlor trick compared to the sights he will see in the Reign of the Son of God, visions of angels ascending and descending from heaven, but we can tell that Nathanael is impressed anyway, and flattered, that this great and powerful Rabbi Jesus has taken the time to know him.

Who among us is not comforted by this parental, omniscient God? And, being good children, who among us hasn't railed against him at some point as well?

And I know that, hearing this, I find myself longing for a God right now that will step in, save me from grief and difficulty, and make the way clear, tell me what to do and map out the path I should take, but I was reminded recently that God rarely shouts!

Instead, God is a steady, quiet presence, waiting for us to notice the tugs and coincidences and series of events that, upon reflection, have been showing us the path we are already on, with God’s hands spread over us, protecting us and giving us that little extra nudge we needed along the way.

And what greater comfort can we ask for, than that certainty of God’s love for us in Christ, in the knowledge that we are offered refreshment when we are weary, and the assurance of everlasting life?

For so God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish.

2008-12-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Day, I read a sermon written by Barbara Brown Taylor, fellow Georgian and Episcopal priest, who is one of the best preachers around these days. A few folks have asked for the text of the sermon, which is called God's Daring Plan, and is found in her collection of sermons titled Bread of Angels.

Though I encourage you to buy the whole book, since it has a number of wonderful reflections in it, you can find an excerpt of the text of this sermon here. But if you have some post-Christmas gift cards, pick up the whole book and throw in "When God is Silent", a lecture she gave as part of the Lyman Beecher Lecture series in 1997 that has been published on its own.

I'm off to my homeland for the next two weeks!

A Bright Spot

2008-12-15T16:41:00.001-08:00

My seminary class, the General Theological Seminary class of 2007, did an amazing job of raising money for our class gift, and as a result, we had the chance to really make an addition to the fabric of seminary life that would hopefully outlast us by a century at least. We decided on a baptismal font for our Chapel of the Good Shepherd.

The chapel was dedicated on Halloween in 1888, given by Glorvina Hoffman, the mother of the then-current dean, in memory of her husband, his father. It is a beautiful structure built in the college gothic style, based loosely on the chapel at Keble College, Oxford (coincidentally where I finished my undergraduate degree, though I didn't spend much time in the chapel). The chapel was, and is, the heart of seminary life, but never had a font since it was not a parish, but a college chapel devoted primarily to the saying of the Daily office and celebration of the Eucharist by students and faculty. If any baptisms needed to be done, they took place at St. Peter's Parish, Chelsea, around the corner on 20th St. Presumably weddings and funerals followed the same pattern.

However, as the seminary class make-up shifted from entirely young, unmarried men to a mix of genders, ages, and marital/partner status (and some might argue as the Book of Common Prayer shifted to an Easter focus), the need for a baptismal font became clearer- and the opportunity to use it arose more than once as babies were born to residents of the Close. During my time as a student and chapel sacristan, the compromise was an oval shaped copper roasting pan, which quickly took on the grim and hilarious name of The Baby Poacher.

Many things are changing on the life of General these days. For many reasons, seminary education is transforming from something that was almost exclusively a residential, three year program to part time and local study options, sometimes over six or more years, on numerous campuses throughout the world, and often with students commuting in from communities where they continue to live with their families and work in their secular jobs. Endowments are dwindling and buildings are aging and words like missional and emergent are entering the ecclesiastic vocabulary, and so places like my seminary Close, a city block in Manhattan surrounded by the busy city but enclosing an oasis of calm green where the spirit is nurtured in community, are getting rarer by the moment. Two Episcopal seminaries shuttered their buildings this year, and others will probably follow. General has agreed to let a private contractor build multi-million dollar condos on our 9th Avenue front, and leases our Tenth Avenue building as a conference center and luxury hotel, all in the hopes of staving off a similar fate.

In our own way, my class has embraced this perhaps necessary evolution. We raised a lot of money for our standards, but not a drop in the bucket of what GTS needs to insure its survival. However, for as long as students worship in the Chapel, as of installation last week they will be greeted by a tactile memorial of the centrality of the Baptismal Covenant in our lives as Christians, and of our continual rebirth into Christ in that Easter morning of our baptisms:

Final Sunday After Pentecost, Nov. 23, 2008

2008-11-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

We have a beautiful image of God’s love painted for us by Ezekiel this morning. Speaking to his own people during the Babylonian exile, he reassures them that they have not been forgotten by their Lord, recounting a vision of God’s love for his chosen:
“As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep, [says the Lord]. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness…they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, says the Lord God, I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.”
This tender language contrasts with the language of division that comes next, of the proud, fat sheep separated from the lean, sentenced to slaughter for their scattering of the weaker sheep in the flock, who are fed on this justice, in a powerful message of hope to the Jews who had been taken from their homes and scattered in a foreign land. It is in a different context historically that Jesus tells his parable of the sheep and the goats. In exile no more, his fellow Jews are in Israel again, but still subject to foreign rule, and still in need of words of direction and hope. Jesus speaks of the goats not as dominating or strong but as lacking in compassion- and for this they are damned. This passage paints Jesus as Christ the King, judging in the final days, and I have always found that image difficult- which is why I am happy that we begin with Ezekiel, and his love song to his sheep.
What is clear here in both passages is that God loves his people as a shepherd loves his sheep, as a parent loves a child, and for me that love, and what we do with it as God’s beloved sheep, is the true message of the Gospel.
Recently, I was at a conference, and as happens in a group of strangers, I began to chat during breaks with those around me, and engage in the usual sort of introductory talk, typically about anything but the reason we’d all wound up together in this room.

As the week wore on we became united in our common plight, in this case the pursuit of the artful homily, and we became more familiar with each others’ stories and lives, and it was in this context that I had a conversation with a woman who’s daughter had very recently experienced a break-up. The girl was heart-wounded, in a way that I think we all have experienced in our lives, usually in our teens or early twenties, and can all identify with no matter how many years it has been or how happy we presently find ourselves. The daughter was in that stage of grieving where the very idea of finding the energy to live the number of years it will take to learn to live with the pain seems defeating, and even the intellectual reality of a future day when this loss wasn’t all consuming isn’t conceivable.

The woman was suffering equally, in her way- as a mother who sees a child suffering and knows that there is nothing she can do to spare her baby this experience, that she cannot make it right and also cannot do much at all, except sit and comfort and share in the passing of time.

I think we find Jesus in a similar place, emotionally, in the gospel passage we have heard today, as he contemplates the sheep, and the goats. Jesus tells this story as one in a series- lazy bridesmaids shut out of the banquet for failing to prepare their lamps, a slave cast out into the darkness alone for failing to be a proper steward of resources, goats cast into eternal fire, denied the presence of God, for failing to take care of each other.

Who is Jesus in this story?

He is a shepherd as Ezekiel paints him- a shepherd who, having raised his sheep from lambs, rescued them when they strayed, bound their wounds when they were injured, is now heartbroken at the prospect that they might be lost to him by their own willful refusal to love each other.

He is a teacher and friend and lord, who is trying desperately to impress upon his disciples the importance of loving, feeding, clothing, sharing the least in their midst. His anxiety is for their success, and he knows that his death approaches, and so he also fears for his own sake- that he has failed them, somehow, has perhaps not done quite enough- and in this he is like that mother grieving for her daughter’s heartbreak- grieving the reality that he will not always be in this life to wipe the tears away, offer comfort in pain.

And so he also needs something, as Passover approaches, and the cross, and his death. He needs a bit of certainty, certainty that he has done all that he can to prepare his brash and beloved sheep to venture forth into a world that has the potential to be frightening, and cruel, and careless about the fragility of a mother’s child.

Jesus knows that to survive the living of life with their spirits and souls intact, these men and women will need every help they can get, and the greatest tool he can give them is compassion, a consciousness of their shared lives, their shared experiences, and their sharing of his word with the world. And so he gives them this gift: the love that they share with one another and with the stranger, through feeding, and clothing, and welcoming, and comforting, and hopes that it assures them of safety and little suffering in their lives.
I can’t think of a better gift to be given this day, than a reminder of the need for compassion in our lives, in our dealings with each other- that we remember that we are all loved as a sheep raised from a lamb, as a mother’s child, and as God’s beloved creation.

AMEN+

Sermon 26 October 2008

2008-10-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

Twenty Fourth Sunday of Pentecost

'“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

We have had some rough times in the Episcopal Church of late- dioceses split, bishops deposed and defrocked, various factions aligning and realigning.

Quoting a wise priest and psychologist on the current state of the Anglican Communion*:

“We know that many factors have contributed to the current movement to split the Church and create some form of [central] international authority for Anglicanism. Disagreements about doctrine and governance, differences in cultural practices and beliefs, personal ambition, power struggles, subversion and funding from outside parties, reverberations from colonial and missionary history, and other causes have been discussed at great length. What I haven’t seen is much attention to psychological factors, and specifically to the psychology of bullying. Where bizarre thinking and behavior have been observed in a particular place over a period of many years, leading to a catastrophic outcome, the possibility should be considered that a critical factor in the entire drama has been the success of a disordered individual in gaining a position of power and using it to play out on a grand scale his own internal need to split the world into pure and impure, good and evil, true and false, faithful and treasonous, saved and damned, orthodox and apostate/heretical.

A skilled bully is fully capable of wrecking the health of people she works with…and of destroying or disabling the organization she works [within]. This kind of bully typically struggles against feelings of being empty and worthless (thus is profoundly envious of other people’s capabilities and self-esteem). Her inner world is characterized by a severe split between these extreme negative emotions and thoughts and the need to see the self as positive, even ideal. She projects her intense self-destructive impulses onto others and thus believes herself to be an innocent victim under constant threat.

Any disagreement with the bully’s views or questioning of her actions is interpreted as persecution. Her destructive actions toward others are, in her mind, justified by this perceived danger to herself. Her talents and charisma are systematically and relentlessly deployed in a calculated effort to gain power over those around her and displace her intolerable inner conflict and negativity onto the environment. Organizations [and communities] provide the bully with an inviting container for her disordered projections and an arena in which she can safely play out her inner battles, which might otherwise destroy her.

Those around the bully must be either duped or intimidated into complying with her program, or else expelled. The aim is to eliminate anyone whose competency would show up the bully’s limitations or reveal her machinations, and to keep everyone else under tight control.

In this mission of control-and-destroy, [the bully] counts on other people’s trusting nature, their essential decency and fairness and their inclination to play by the rules, think and debate logically, negotiate in good faith, and give each other (and her) the benefit of the doubt. Having created a chaotic situation in which the rules cannot effectively be mobilized to defend individuals or restore the organization to healthy functioning, she punishes and attempts to induce guilt in those who try to undertake any creative or restorative action. Efforts to reduce harm or avert disaster are thus blunted or driven underground.
[Eventually] a culture of bullying may develop. Like abuse in families, bullying in organizations can become systemic. The bully in a position of power surrounds him- or herself with people he or she can rely on to bully those beneath them, keeping the foot soldiers or pew-sitters in line.

Bullies often bring out the worst in people and aggravate any existing weaknesses and problems in organizations. What is worse, they use the virtues and strengths of people and organizations to undermine them. A highly-placed bully strives to persuade his constituents or employees that the destruction and division being wrought are for their benefit and reflect the organization’s highest purposes. It is, in reality, never about them; yet their souls and bodies, their time and devotion and talent, along with all the other assets of the organization, will be systematically exploited for the purposes of the campaign.

Eventually the inner pathology of the bully may dominate or even become embodied in the organization. The bully has achieved victory when her internal splits, her paranoia, her lack of a core positive identity, her boundary issues, her negativity and instability have been successfully displaced and given concrete form outside herself. The membership becomes severely polarized and alienated; the organization may either fragment or become so damaged as to have to shut down. Those left on the ground typically feel worthless, impotent, tainted, disorganized, incompetent, empty and exhausted. They find it very hard to recover mutual trust and to mobilize the…resources to salvage the organization so that it can get back to its original mission.

Where bullying has broken down an organization, harmed individuals and shattered relationships, an important first step in the healing process is to recognize that this is not a ‘normal’ situation of people behaving badly (for which they could ask forgiveness and learn to do better), or an ordinary (though serious) disagreement (about which there could be further study and negotiation); nor is it mainly a matter of inept administration or inadequate application of law or policy. The survivors first need to realize that they have been left holding the bag of a serious disease which is not itself communicable, yet which damages the mental, physical and spiritual health of all those it touches.”

I submit that this pattern of dysfunction goes much deeper than a few rogue bishops in the Anglican Communion in the 21st Century, and in fact is the root of all sinful behavior of which we have all been victim and perpetrator- so much so that Jesus himself spoke to it in the Gospel passage we read today:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' And `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

As my wise priest notes, the root cause of bullying behavior is a deep sense of worthlessness in the bully, a firmly seated insecurity, which causes an inability to believe that God crafted every single one of us lovingly, intentionally, so that we might reflect that love to the world.
In fact, when we assert ourselves over others with no attention to the damage done, we are denying Christ in that other person- by asserting our selfhood violently, emotionally, physically, over that person.

This pattern of behavior is self-allowing as well- Who among us wishes to view our self as a victim? So we fail to hold the bully accountable for her or his actions, and the accountability necessary for a healthy community breaks down as a continuation of our own powerlessness.
The cycle of ugliness replicates- feeling powerless, we grasp at what power we feel like we do have and assert it over others, forgetting love and God completely as we strive for self-interest.
Where does this seemingly universal instinct come from?
I think it is from our own human need to rally against our smallness in this great big world, our need to seize control in any way we can, and in the seizing denying God his place in our life. Afraid of having nothing, no one, we grasp at false idols, and perversely they ensure our solitude!

For the last eight weeks or so here at Trinity we have been running a Disciples of Christ in Community program. In DOCC, we meet in small groups and discuss different issues, and two of those are the Greek concepts of AGAPE and ADIKIA.

Agape is divine love, the sort of love that God showed us in his creation of the world, and reasserted in his giving of Christ for us. This is a love that we are filled with and reflect outward to others, and we can never love as perfectly as God does. But in our striving for perfection we perfect our humanity.

Adikia is also a sort of love, but it is a love for other that is motivated by need, selfish self-serving behavior that is sinful in its essence. It is love given to another conditionally, with the expectation that we will receive something in return.

In another gospel story, a wealthy young man comes to Jesus and asks how he can be assured of eternal life. Jesus tells him to follow the commandments. The young man tells him that he already does this, and so Jesus says, “You are half way there then! Now sell everything you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have eternal life.”
The man walks away, heartbroken.
Jesus tells us to release our self-serving agendas, to stop trying to control every aspect of our own little worlds, to stop trying to insure our own security, and instead become part
of God’s one great big beautiful world, where we can love without ceasing, rather than lobby and manipulate and politic.

Fear of insignificance leads us to ensure our own meaninglessness; fear of death leads us to abandon the living of this life.
SO HOW DO WE MOVE FORWARD?
“The full extent of the damage and pain now have to be brought out into the open. Anger and regret must be expressed, and losses mourned. Individuals and…groups will have to face their own weaknesses and acknowledge any contributions they may have made to the present debacle. People will have to come to grips with the ways in which bullying has… twisted their behavior, exploited their vulnerabilities, and even used their virtues to set them against their own best interests and isolate them from their fellows.

Anglicanism itself with its Broad Church tradition is vulnerable to exploitation by this kind of illness. This is not a reason to give up our tradition. Nor should individuals doubt their own gifts, whatever they may be, which set them up for being exploited in this situation. I submit, in fact, that the Anglican way, tolerant and inclusive, embracing such a broad range of theological views and liturgical styles, is a model of good mental and spiritual health. Where we see that model under attack, we should be suspicious.”
CONCLUSION:
Assertion of self over the needs of all others, no matter the consequences, is a bill of goods that we have been sold for generations. Our current economic crisis can find its roots in the selling of an image of success that requires the leveraging and mortgaging of every last dollar to attain more and more material things, to force others to admire our success as exemplified in these things, to be beholden in our own images of our selves in them. We are in a place in our society where some parents think it is better to die, and take their children with them into death, than face a life of reduced buying power.

We have the chance in this time, in this place, to realize that this bill of goods we have been sold is FALSE, that it can only leave us, like overgrown playground tyrants, perched on our mountains of ill-gotten toys, heartbroken and terribly alone- afraid even of the God who made us.

In Christ, we are shown that another way is possible, if only we can be so brave as to trust God, love our own selves, and love our neighbor…
What a wonderful message- love of self, other, God- for this church- this Anglican Communion, this Episcopal Church, this Trinity Parish- in these confusing but potentially life-changing times!
AMEN+'

* For the full text of the blog thread that I am quoting, click here. It is not in its original blog, which was the beloved "Fr. Jake Stops the World", which closed its doors in July of 2008. Please note as well that, despite the similarities in screename, I am not Mary Clara, the original author of the article. I have been many thigns but never a psychologist- but hey, there's still time!

2008-10-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

Lately I have felt a lot like this little scrawny fuzzball of a chicken, running around so much that I can't remember to keep the feathers on my tail, much less where I'm headed next.

So, as I so often forget to do, I took a second to stop and enjoy this beautiful part of the world that I've managed to wind up in.

Just down the street from my church, on what is purported to be the most photographed road in Bucks County, some of my parishioners live in Cutalossa Farm. This historic property was once the home of Bucks County Impressionist Daniel Garber, whose studio has been renovated into a sheep barn/ events space, and where many of our parish gatherings like quiet days and retreats take place. It was where I interviewed for my job, and in the middle of March, getting on the train in gray slushy New York and getting out of the car in the middle of bucolic wonderland left me feeling like Dorothy when she stepped into Oz and technicolor for the first time. And there is livestock!

You can see the farm's website here if you happen to be in the market for a miniature babydoll sheep, or google the name for more scenery photos.

So today, in between casting my absentee ballot at the courthouse and returning phone calls in my office, I stopped in to visit the sheep.

The pasture scene, complete with Bromley's Mill:

To deter tourists from feeding the animals bananas (true story) or other unsuitable food, a feed dispenser was installed. The quarters it collects are given to local charities, and the chickens know the sound of a coin being rotated in the slot now, so all come running.

When a chicken takes feed from your hand, it is disconcerting, but feels like little gentle beak kisses, rather than actual pecking.

The sheep are famous for their small stature and "smiles", and are bred as pets rather than Sunday dinner. Their bells are just as picturesque as the rest of them, and as they charged over to the fence to get in on the feed I was distributing to the chickens, the sound and the sunlight and the green of the grass all worked together to take me out of my daily anixeties and rushing and worrying and into the mental equivalent of Switzerland in the summertime.

Who wouldn't love that face? Doesn't your blood pressure seem lower already?

Not to turn this into a personal journal but...

2008-08-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

I managed to grow my first ever moonflower, after four years of trying!

A close-up of the bud before sundown:

And explosion of beauty!

And, as a bonus, a glamour shot of Lulubelle, plotting a jump up on the furniture:

Sunday Aug 24, 2008

2008-08-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

The Nintey-seventh Sunday after Pentecost, for real?

Good morning!
Last week I spoke to you of covenants, relying heavily on the thoughts of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. This week I would like to talk to you of community, of what it means to be a community of God, of how each of us is Peter in today’s Gospel story, each of us is the cornerstone upon which our church is built.

Sam Lloyd, Dean of the National Cathedral, describes in a lecture he gave as part of the first Disciples of Christ in Community, or DOCC, program there, precursor to the DOCC program that begins here on Sept 13, and which –here comes a shameless plug- I hope all of you will sign up for in the narthex today, the four basic principles of the life of faith. First, we are called into covenant relationships with God. Second God calls us to live in community,, in search of the fulfillment of what human life is meant to be, Jesus called this fulfillment the Kingdom of God, the reign of God, possibly Heaven on earth. That’s the third principle, the destiny, the fulfillment of what we are made for. The fourth is about how we enter the Kingdom of God- the Old Testament says that one enters the kingdom by fulfilling the law, but Jesus changes this because he says you cannot enter the kingdom of God simply by obeying the law, entrance requires receiving a gift of love from beyond all of us, the gift of God’s love.”
So to summarize Dean Lloyd’s directives, we are called as Christians to :
+accept a covenant relationship
+live in community
+participate in the Kingdom of God
+enter the kingdom by receiving God’s gift of love.

Well! That sounds easy enough! Or does it? Do we really know what it means to fulfill any of these four points? Do we really know how to sense when God is calling us in our lives? Or, as Dean Lloyd puts it, using the image of Moses and the burning bush from Exodus,
If the bush is burning every day, do we turn around and notice it?

When Moses encountered the burning bush, he was minding his own business, going about his daily routine, and all the sudden there is a bush, flaming, and a voice, calling “Moses, take of your shoes, for you are on holy ground!” and then a voice laying out, simply, the task God was setting for him, “Moses, take my people and lead them to freedom!”

Dean Lloyd poses this question: What if Moses had been busy that day? What if his BlackBerry was buzzing that he had 27 new emails, and a meeting in fifteen minutes, and he knew he had to pick the kids up form daycare and stop and get some milk an a loaf of bread on his way home? Then it would have been quite easy for him to say I don’t care that a bush is burning, I have things to do, and Israel would not have been rescued, and there would be no Old Testament, and no New testament, right?

That would have been bad for us, me particularly as I would be up here with my notes, all dressed up, with no congregation to preach to!

However, Lloyd’s point is that bushes burn everyday, and it is up to us to take the time to stop, and listen.

And most often, these opportunities for revelation, for acceptance of God’s call, are not as fantastic and jaw dropping as the spontaneous combustion of a talking bush, but are more ambiguous, like a thought that passes through us out of nowhere, or an emotion that is stirred as we watch the nightly news. These are not spectacular moments, but subtle moments in which we are grasped by things in our ordinary lives that nevertheless lay hold of us, and the question is : do we stop and take notice? Or do we hurry on to the next thing?
These revelation moments are usually something that happens in this ordinary world of ours yet causes us to stop, wake up, and take note of something. For some it can be a health crisis that suddenly humbles us with our own mortality. For others it might be noticing, for the first time, the body of the homeless person huddled over the grate that we pass every morning on our way into work. For some it might simply be waking up one morning to a world that seems like it is lacking in some unnameable way, and realizing that what it is lacking is us.

For St Augustine, his revelatory moment came 35 years into a life devoted to pleasure, seeking in every philosophical movement, every chance of debauchery, a truth he realized he did not have. Yet one day, as he sat in his garden, exhausted by his deepening frustration that there must be something more to this life than he could find, he over-heard some children playing in another garden, and singing a simple nursery rhyme. The words they sang were “Take and read, take and read, take and read” and suddenly, this time of all times, something grabbed a hold of him inside and he rushed into his home, found his mother’s Bible, and opened it to a passage that said ‘leave behind the old ways you’ve been living, and start a new way’. By paying attention to something that pierced his consciousness, he radically altered his life, and the rest for us is history.
Charles Wesley was similarly caught unaware while idley listening to a preacher in the street of his town one day, and his heart grew strangely warm as he heard the same old words in a whole new way, and the Methodist Church was born.
Dean Lloyd, in his DOCC presentation, said that “the God we see in the Bible is one who cares deeply about the entire human race, and has called particular people to community, to show in the way that they live their lives what God’s love is all about for the rest of the world. The vocation of the people of God, the vocation of the Church, is to live in community with each other so that people could recognize God’s love being spread among them.” Community was at the core of the whole story of Israel, and the heart of Jesus’ ministry and message: he called Peter, and Andrew, and John, and all the Marys, and Martha, to live a special way with him- “to they were people sharing their lives together, and in the sharing, learning what it means to know God’s presence.”

My hope in introducing the DOCC program in this place, at this time, is that it will seal us together as a community- through shared study, discussion, and time spent side by side, perhaps noticing the burning bushes in our midst, and that we emerge as true brothers and sisters in Christ, with the ability to speak plainly in our disagreements, work together to do the work of God here and now, and always speak the truth in love. Because it is only when we can hold up mirrors to ourselves and our congregation that we can see the reality of our life together, and can shape it into something resembling the Kingdom of God.
For each of us is the cornerstone, and each of us is the builder, and each of us is fully alive in relationship to each other.
AMEN+

SERMON 17 AUG 2008

2008-08-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

14th Sunday after Pentecost

NOTE: For the full text of Rabbi Sir Sacks' address, please click here.

I am going to do something this morning that I have never done before-
I am going to be quoting at length from an address by the Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, who is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, given to the gathered bishops of the Anglican Communion, including most of the bishops of our own Episcopal Church, at Lambeth Palace two weeks ago. Rabbi Sacks was invited to discuss the relationship between the people and God, or the idea of covenant, which is a hot issue in our church these days.

I do not present this to you because it piques my own interest in Interfaith relations, though it does, nor because it is an interesting outside perspective on the issues in Global Anglicanism at present, though it is, but because in explaining the nature of covenant relationship, I believe Rabbi Sacks gives an explanation of the life of faith that is so exquisite, and challenging, that it is necessary for any Christian community- global, national, or simply our own little Trinity- to consider it.

And so I begin where the Rabbi did, with a recounting of a sight seeing tour he imagines taking with his grand-daughter:
“It was such a beautiful day, …[and] I imagined meeting up with my little granddaughter…and taking her to see some of the sights of London. And we’d begin…outside Parliament, and I imagine her asking what happens there, Grandpa what happens there and I'd say what happens there is politics. And she'd say, what's politics about, and I'd say: it's about the creation and distribution of power.
And then we'd go to the city, and see the Bank of England, and she'd ask what happens there and I'd say what happens there is economics. And she'd say: what's economics about, and I would say economics is about the creation and distribution of wealth.
And then on our way back we'd pass St Paul's Cathedral, and she'd ask, what happens there, and I'd say what happens there is worship. And she'd ask: What does worship produce, create and distribute?
And that's a good question, because you see for the past 50 years, our lives have been dominated by those two other institutions: politics and economics, the state and the market, the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The state is us in our collective capacity. The market is us as individuals. And the debate has been for the past fifty years: which of the two is more effective? The left tends to favour the state. The right tends to favour the market. And there are endless shadings in between.
But that leaves out of the equation a third phenomenon of the utmost importance,” and the rabbi goes on to explain why.
“The state is about power. The market is about wealth. And there are two ways of getting people to do what we want them to do. One of them is to force them to do it – the way of power. The other one is to pay them to – the way of wealth.
But there is a third way:..”
And to explain this third way, the rabbi used this example,

“Imagine, for a moment, you have total power, and then, in the fit of craziness you decide to share it with nine other people. How much power do you have left? You have 1/10 of what you began with. Supposing you have a thousand pounds, and you decide to share it with nine other people. How much do you have left? 1/10 of what you had when you began.
But now supposing that you decide to share, not power or wealth, but love, or friendship, or influence, or even knowledge and you decided to share those, with nine others. How much would you have left? Would you have less than when you began? No, you would have more; and why is that - Because love, friendship and influence are things that only exist by virtue of sharing them with others. And those are the goods I call covenantal goods – covenantal goods are the goods that, the more I share, the more I have. And that makes covenant different from wealth and power.
In the short term wealth and power are zero-sum games. That means if I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. Covenantal goods are non-zero-sum games, meaning, we [can] both win, The more I give away the more I have – we both win. And that has huge consequences.
Because you can see with wealth and power, economics and politics, the market and the state, they must be – they cannot be other than arenas of competition, - that’s right that’s good but covenantal goods are arenas of co-operation.
And the question is where will we find covenantal goods like love, like friendship, like trust, like influence? You won’t find them in the state, you won’t find them in the market, you will find them in marriages, [in partnerships,] in families, in congregations, in communities – you will find them in society, so long as you remember that society is something different from the state.
You see there are two words that sound as if they were almost the same but they are actually very different. I mean the word contract and I mean the word covenant.
What’s a contract? A contract is an agreement between two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, and they come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. And so you get a commercial contract that creates the market, and you get the social contract that creates the state.
A covenant is something different. In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and the integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pledging our faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither of us can do alone.
And that is not the same as a contract at all. A contract is a transaction, but a covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests, but a covenant is about identity. And that is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.
And there it is – as simply as I can put it. Economics and politics are about the logic of competition, Covenant is about the logic of co-operation.”

“And now I want to ask a very fundamental question, why is it that societies cannot exist without co-operation? Why is it that state and market alone cannot sustain a society?”
The rabbi finds the answer to this question in the theory of evolution, and why, if the fittest individuals survive, we are not a world of fierce competitive individuals destroying each other until only one is left. This was studied by many scientists, the rabbis says, and what was discovered was this:
“natural selection does work through the genes of individuals, but individuals, certainly in the higher life-forms -- survive only because they are parts of groups. And groups only survive on the basis of reciprocity and trust, and what I have called covenant, the logic of co-operation- without co-operation there is no group and you need a group to survive. One human being versus one lion, the lion wins. Ten human beings versus one lion, and the humans [have] a chance.
And it turns out that the very things that make Homo sapiens different – our use of language, and the size of our brains, even the moral sense itself – all of these have to do with the ability to form and sustain groups and this phenomenon is called by the scientists ‘reciprocal altruism’. Sociologists call it trust. Economists call it social capital. And it is one of the great intellectual discoveries of our time. Individuals need groups. Groups need co-operation. And co-operation needs covenant, bonds of reciprocity and trust.
Traditionally, that was and I believe still is the domain of religion. That is what religions create and distribute… [i]f you only have competition but not co-operation, if you only have the state and the market and not covenant, then society will not survive.
What then happens to society when religion wanes and there is nothing covenantal to take its place?
What happens is that relationships break down. Marriage grows weak. Families become fragile. Communities atrophy. And the result is that people feel vulnerable and alone. And they turn those feelings outward, and the result is often anger which, God forbid, can become violence. Or they can turn those feelings inward, and the result, God forbid, is depression, [disorder, and abuse]. What happens when religion wanes, when covenant wanes, is that you will find spiritual poverty in the midst of material affluence.
It doesn't happen all at once, but it happens slowly, gradually and inexorably. Societies without covenants and without the institutions needed to inspire and sustain them, gradually disintegrate. And the result is a loss of freedom and the loss of the dimension of graciousness in our lives together. So that is where we are and where we are headed – God forbid.
Covenant is what allows us to face the future without fear, because we know we are not alone. The purest line of covenant says
'Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are with me.' Covenant is the redemption of solitude.
And we find that there are two covenants: the covenant of fate – that is the global covenant of human solidarity and the covenant of faith- the covenant between people who share dreams, aspirations, and ideals. You will note the covenant of fate precedes the covenant of faith- because faith is always particular but fate is universal.”
And with that, the rabbi comes to the present. “We are living through one of the most fateful ages of change since Homo sapiens first set foot on earth. Globalisation and the new information technologies are changing everything in our world… doing two things simultaneously. Number One: they are fragmenting our world into ever smaller pieces, into ever smaller sects of the like-minded. And Number Two: In the opposite direction globalisation is also thrusting us together as never before in history. The destruction of a rainforests there adds to global warming everywhere. Political conflict in one place can create a terrorist incident thousands of miles away. Poverty there moves consciences here. At the very moment that covenants of faith are breaking apart, the covenant of fate is forcing us together -- and we have not yet proved equal to it.
The sanctity of human life is being ravaged by political oppression and by terror. The integrity of creation is being threatened by environmental catastrophe. And the respect for diversity is imperiled by what one writer has called a clash of civilisations. And to repeat -- the covenant of fate precedes the covenant of faith. Because before we can live any faith we have to be able to live. And we have to have to honour our covenant with future generations so that they will be able to live. And that is the call of God in our times. “
And there we leave Rabbi Sacks for now. But what does his message mean for us, now?
In order to be the community that we want to be, need to be to survive, we must examine our covenant, with ourselves as well as God.
In examining healthy organizations, distinct stages have been identified in community making (Peck, "The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace").
In the beginning is a pseudo-community, in which members of a group attempt to be an instant community by being extremely pleasant with one another and avoiding all disagreement. The essential dynamic of pseudo-community is conflict-avoidance; the basic pretense is the denial of individual differences.
It never works.
Next comes chaos, in which individual differences are right out in the open, and energy centers around well-intentioned but misguided attempts to heal or convert, with the underlying motive being not love but making everyone “normal”, with no real notion of what normalcy actually looks like.
But if the members can keep together, can love each another and keep trying, they eventually become a community, a group that has become open and has learned not to hide or heal or convert but to listen, accept differences, and rejoice in each other, and as long as its members continue to love each other during the inevitable falls back through chaos and even pseudo-community stages, it will be healthy, and grow.
I think that right now, at Trinity, we are stuck in chaos, stuck in a liminal stage between chaos and pseudo-community, simultaneously yearning for the comfort and safety of our past and the hope of who and what we know we can be, to ourselves and to the world.
I say, let us be that community we know we can be.
And returning, once more, to the words of the rabbi,
“Let us walk together towards the mountain of the Lord, side-by-side,
hand in hand,
bound by a covenant of fate that has the power to turn strangers into friends.
In an age of fear, let us be agents of hope… [and] together let us be a blessing to the world.”

Amen.

SERMON 12 PENTECOST: Mr. Joel Esala

2008-08-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Trinity, Solebury A/V system went down a couple of weeks ago, so here is the text of the sermon our own Mr. Joel Esala, Director of Children and Youth Ministries, preached last Sunday. It was a stirring message and a promising introduction to the Trinity community!

"It is indeed an honor to speak with you this morning. Sarah and I been so welcomed by those of you we’ve met, and those we have yet to meet, we look forward to doing so in the coming weeks and months. In just three weeks of being on the job, it is readily apparent what a special place this is and how blessed we are to be here. Having just barely gotten my feet, this week I jumped in the deep end this week at Vacation Bible School and had a wonderful time telling stories of Jesus to the children.
Today we hear about a story about Jesus that is very familiar for most of us. The feeding of the 5000 is one of few stories that make it into all four Gospels. It appears that the writers of the Gospels agreed on something—we need to hear this story. It is an indispensable part of the Christian diet, which we ignore only to our own starvation. Like everything in Matthew’s Gospel this story is intended to answer two questions: who is this Jesus and how are we to serve him?
Our reading begins as a story already in progress. The lectionary omits the opening phrase, “Now when he heard this…Jesus withdrew from there.” So what did Jesus hear that prompted his withdrawal? The previous story in chapter 14 alerts us that Jesus had come to the attention of Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great who had attempted to kill Jesus as an infant. Herod Antipas had a birthday feast for himself, a lavish affair for the rich and powerful, where after drinks, debauchery and erotic, incestuous dancing, the final course is served which was the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Crooked and licentious politicians are hardly a modern invention. When the powers that be are confronted by prophets like John the Baptist and Jesus, the response is always the same: kill the dissenter to protect our power.
In life and in death, John the Baptist points our eyes to Jesus. John’s death portends was is to come for our hero. And it was after this that Jesus withdrew from the crowds. After hearing the fate of his cousin, knowing that a similar fate was likely in store for him as well, Jesus tries to get away but he cannot. As the multitudes follow him to a deserted place, like the Israelites following Moses in the wilderness, Jesus does not do what many of us would do—namely throw a fit and say, “I just need some space!” Instead he looks upon the crowds and in an act of unimaginable mercy has compassion on them. While grieving the death of his cousin, knowing his own life is in danger, Jesus ministers to the needs of others by healing the sick.
And the contrast with Herod could not be more salient, giving us the answer to the question, who is this Jesus? While Israel’s supposed king is feasting on immorality and violence, Jesus meets the needs of the hurting and sick, the multitudes of the poor, not in a profligate palace but in the wilderness. So which one of these is the true king? The answer is clearly that Jesus is Israel’s true king and as the rest of the Gospel makes clear, he is also the world’s true king, or as Paul puts it, the Messiah who is over all. Real power does not lie in Herod’s wealth and violence but in the compassionate service of a homeless man. If Jesus is the world’s true king, our question must be which of these kings will we serve in the wilderness of our daily lives? How will you and I use the power and privilege we’ve been given? The rest of the story is the answer to that question.
Out of concern for the needs of the people, Jesus’ disciples tell him to send the crowds away so they might be fed. Jesus responds to his disciples—which includes you and me—“you give them something to eat.” This type of response from Jesus is probably all too familiar to many of you. You look around at the needs of the world, the needs of our church and community and say, “you know, someone ought to do something about that.” Jesus responds, “great idea, you do it.” One of the things that attracted me most to Trinity is the fact that you all have taken up Jesus’ invitation and run with it. You know, somebody ought to do something about the fact that kids have nowhere safe to play in West Philadelphia. Great idea, says Jesus! You do it. And with the help of the whole congregation the youth here have answered his call. Whether it’s Mission Philly, or Peace Meal or Tabasamu, and now by embracing the UN Millennium development goals, Trinity Church has and continues to answer Jesus’ call with time, talent, prayers and monetary support. It’s one of the biggest reasons I eagerly sent my resume to this church, because I wanted to be a part of this kind of community.
The problem for the disciples saw is the same problem we see today. The needs are so great that anything we have to offer is at best a drop in the bucket that seems irreparably filled with holes. How can five loaves and two fish, or 10 days in Guatemala, or a garden in West Philadelphia make any lasting difference when 862 million people will go hungry this year, 50 million more due to the recent spike in food prices world wide? What good can such efforts do however well intended they are? Jesus says in verse 18, “Bring them here to me.” Give me your efforts, however meager or ambitious they may be. Just bring them to me. You bring your willing spirit, your gifts and give them to me. Then we hear those familiar words in Matthew that we’re sure we’ve heard someplace else: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” Four verbs jump off the page at us: Jesus takes the bread, he blesses it, he breaks it, and he gives it. The same four verbs appear at the Last Supper where on the eve of his own death, with his disciples scared and confused, Jesus again meets the needs of others by instituting the meal the church has fed upon ever since.
The shape of the feeding of the 5000, is the same shape as the Eucharist, which is the same shape as the Christian life. As we offer Jesus our service, our possessions, and ourselves he takes us, just as we are. Whether you feel you’ve got it together or that your life is spinning out of control, Jesus takes what you offer without coercion or exploitation. He does not force us to offer ourselves to him as a ruthless tyrant but gladly takes us to his table, as an invited guest to his royal feast.
After taking our offering, Jesus blesses it. As Eugene Peterson puts it, “He doesn’t examine it for flaws, doesn’t evaluate and appraise it, criticize or reject our offerings. ‘Two fish? Is that all you could come up with’ We can’t imagine Jesus saying anything like that.” No, to be a disciple is to be blessed by Christ. He gives thanks to God for every one of us, without preference or prejudice, for all are welcome to feast with him. But he doesn’t leave us as we are: Jesus breaks what we offer him. This act is all too familiar for many of you. You offer some part of your life to God and it breaks. Good dreams shatter as you wrestle with God, and he puts your hip out of socket. And just as John the Baptist’s life was broken, so too will Jesus be broken for us, and in service to this king we too are broken for others. However we come to God, God does not leave us as we are. To be of true service, Jesus breaks us that we may be put to good use. He exposes our flaws and failings so that he might work deep within us to reform us into a blessing for others, just as the limping Israel becomes a nation from whom comes the Savior of the world.
Only after our gifts and our lives are broken can they be given for the world. Jesus offers back to us what we gave him, only now our offering can be of true service, a true blessing for the world. What was once fives loaves and two fishes, what was once a meal offered once a month at a congregation in Bucks county, what was once a idea floating around in someone’s head, “you know, somebody ought to do something about that…” has now become a gift so abundant that there is plenty left over, twelve baskets to be exact.
How do we serve this king Jesus, who stands in such stark contrast to Herod and the kings of 2008? We serve him by delivering the much He gives us from the little we have to give. We serve him as our lives take shape around a meal, where we are fed and sent out to do his work to feed others, until finally one day all will be fed, and all will have enough. Now, can we even believe that such a day is possible? Well, we pray for it every week when we say, “thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” You give them something to eat, Jesus says. But Lord, we have so little. Bring what you have to me, Jesus says, and watch me turn your little into something that will last.
Oh Lord Jesus, take, bless, and break us, that we too might be given to others, that one day all will be full. Amen."

My Vacation So Far: Roodi the Wallaby

2008-08-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

SERMON 27 JULY 2008

2008-07-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

11th Sunday after Pentecost

(Note: Due to a hard drive failure, this sermon was not recorded at the 9:30 service on Sunday. So as you read it, imagine the voice of God! Or, you know, a slightly caffeinated priest:)

I spent the last half of this week in retreat at a convent in the Hudson Valley- truly “in” retreat, as I was consciously leaving the busy-ness of parish life to take some time for prayer and silence and reflection over the first year of my ministry as a priest. It was nice couple of days of getting back into the rhythm of steady chapel prayers, sung with an ever smaller choir of elderly nuns, relaxing on the gracious screened porch reading and enjoying the breeze off of the hills and river, observing silence at most meals. I spent one night absolutely rapt, watching as a catydid that was missing one of its rear legs lighted around my room.

-Life without television!-

I was less thrilled when he then spent the rest of the night alternating between chirping at an amazing volume and causing me to wake up every hour, thrashing at imagined bug-human contact, until I could catch him in a glass in the morning and release him to the wilds of the backyard.

And I got to meet with my spiritual director from seminary, one of the founding sisters of the order, who has spent her life traveling around the world, teaching children in China, Africa, and many different small island nations. She is 79 years old and has a bulletin board in her office covered with photos of children she has taught, and in some cases their children and even grandchildren, and each is displayed with the care of a grandmother showing of a new grandchild, and accompanied by cards saying “We Miss You!”

She told me on this visit, off handedly as she was loaning me a book from her shelf, that she had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I felt something in my stomach sink at the news, picturing the symptoms my friend was facing, the uncontrollable tremors and loss of voluntary muscle control, an overall diminishing in her capacity to be the independent globetrotter I have known her to be and eventually, dementia.

But just as quickly, I was conscious of her lack of anxiety about these things. She has a good doctor and is responding well to medication, but I knew immediately that her ability to take this news without fear or anger was rooted in her profound relationship with God, developed over fifty years in the monastic life, in steady prayer and contemplation of God’s promise made in Jesus, and in her certainty that, as Paul states so starkly in his letter to the Romans, “If God is for us, who is against us?”

With God on our side, what shall we fear?
I saw in this frail, white haired little woman who has always reminded me a bit of a baby bird, in her Birkenstocks and nun-length white skirt, the strength of a mighty fortress, sustained and supported by the knowledge that God loves her and holds her, carefully, in the palm of his hand, protecting her all the days of her life.

I was so excited, when I read the Gospel for today, to see that loving relationship explained not once or twice but five times by Jesus to his listening crowds, and without really feeling satisfied with his attempts. One of the commentaries that I read in preparation suggested that after the fifth parable, when Jesus asks “Have you understood all this?” the crowd says yes just to stop him from trying to explain it again, because they are thoroughly confused.

But what I think we are being told is this: the Gospel is at once modest and ridiculously over the top. Like a tiny grain of mustard that grows into an enormous bush, a small tree really, or a bit of yeast that grows exponentially until everything it touches is affected, God’s promise in Christ is simple and yet wild and audacious in what it offers. We love God and our neighbor and in return we are given the kingdom of heaven!

It seems too easy for our modern minds to comprehend, our fellow Christians have spent two thousand years complicating it to make the exchange seem more even- surely we must love God and our neighbor and also build hospitals, or love God and our neighbor but also refrain from dancing, singing, playing instruments, eating meat on Fridays, referring to God with the gendered pronouns, stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, living in caves in the desert with no neighbors at all, on and on all in an attempt to justify to ourselves how it could be true that for God, we are the pearl of great price and he is the merchant who has sold all he owns, has sacrificed his only son, all for us.

And in return, we, like the master of the household, must bring out everything of our treasure, new and old, the best of ourselves, to glorify his name. To coin a parable of my own, the kingdom of heaven is like the grassy backyard of that convent, and we are that one legged catydid, suddenly finding himself free and alive and perched on a blade of grass, unable to comprehend what he had done to deserve it.

If God is for us, who is against us?

We are the mustard tree,
the yeastful bounty,
the treasure rich field,
the bulging nets,
the pearl of great value,
the old woman staring into the face of a wasting disease, undaunted,
and we can never fully comprehend what God has done for us.

And so we will be strong in him, and rejoice!

A Quiet Spot in the Storm

2008-07-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

A parishioner brought by some beautiful flowers from her garden yesterday, and as I took a break from the riotous joy and chaos of 70 Vacation Bible Schoolers this morning, I noticed that between the arrangement in its blue glass mason jar and Lulu gnawing on her morning bully stick, I had a pastoral moment on my hands.

Enjoy!

SERMON 6 JULY 2008

2008-07-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

8th Sunday After Pentecost

Good morning, and congratulations for making it to church today! Don’t mention it to your friends who slept in, but you actually get three bonus points on your holy permanent record for every time you come to church on a holiday weekend. Little known fact!

And, watch this segue- speaking of little known facts…

The passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans that we just heard has been a familiar companion in my journey towards priesthood. It is troubling at first read- not just because it is a tongue twister of a passage but because of the scrutiny of life that it illustrates. Because once we get through the ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ language, we realize that what Paul is saying is that now that his eyes have been opened and he is a Christian he fears that he cannot live the life Christ is calling him to. I think most of us can identify with him.

Commentators point out that at the time of this writing, some 20 years after his experience on the road to Damascus, ‘Paul was not living a life of sin as he had before conversion. His words reflect the keen perception into the deceitfulness of human nature of a man so close to God he could see virtually every self-centered, evil, twisted… nuance… that still lurked in him. He abhorred it, groaning and yearning for complete deliverance from it!’

Paul here is struggling with the paradox of the knowledge of good and evil vs. the human capacity for failure- in other words, he has realized that in striving to live a righteous life, it is easy to become overwhelmed by just how many ways one is falling short.

I know that as a new deacon I struggled mightily with the idea of being a living, visual representation to others of a holy life, all the time, with no breaks where I could just not be a priest for a weekend or a couple of hours, and could loose my temper or snap at someone or just not be able to live as Mother Teresa did and see the face of Christ in every one I met. I was afraid it would be like being told as a child not to scratch a mosquito bite- you know how that mosquito bite IMMEDIATELY started itching, crying out to be picked at, until you were obsessed with the idea of scratching and couldn’t do anything but give in even though you knew it would just make it worse?

I was pretty sure that at the moment of my ordination I would be taken over by a sort of Tourette’s Syndrome that manifested itself as uncontrollably swearing like a sailor, blaspheming, and being rude to waiters and doormen, or cutting people off in traffic and making obscene gestures while wearing a collar.

But eventually I realized two things- first, that being a priest didn’t bring with it any responsibilities I shouldn’t have already been carrying as a Christian, and second, God knows that he called us to something that our humanity makes impossible, and so he gave us Jesus Christ as well. We tend to forget that our God is a forgiving God- thanks be to God!

Paul has accepted the necessity of forgiveness in this passage from Romans, is in fact rejoicing in it! He is acknowledging that the sort of behavior we see in the OT story of Rebekah’s submission to the servant of Abraham is as aspirational as any fairy tale. Rebekah is rewarded beyond her wildest dreams for her ability to be gracious, for being so innately good that she interrupted her own chores for a stranger and his thirsty camels. We would like to believe that we would do the same, but some part of us knows that eventually we would want to simply get our own chores done. Rebekah was rewarded for being sweeter than sugar and nicer than nice and more than anything else, if you were reading closely, for not being a Canaanite. If this is supposed to be a morality tale, we are out of luck. How do we follow this example? Many of us, just like Paul, have struggled throughout our lives with standards we have set so high as to be unattainable, only to find ourselves feeling worthless when we inevitably fail. How does this do honor to God?

The Gospel makes it clearer- Jesus notes that John preached his message by fasting and abstaining, and he was denounced as a crazy person, yet when Jesus preached his message by eating and drinking with all, he was called a glutton and similarly condemned, and both were ignored by most. He recognizes that it is our human nature that allows us to both justify our bad behavior and find our own good behavior insufficient. Most puzzling is his next statement: I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Jesus here des not mean literal infants, but those who are as infants in their knowledge and understanding of God. Like Paul, we know just enough to be self-critical, to focus on every single thing that we are not doing as well as we could, and loosing sight of how much we rely on God’s grace to get us through.

To continue a theme from last week- if we got it right every time, we would not need God and we certainly would not need Jesus. But it is because we almost never get things right on the first or the second or the third try that we continue to come to this table, to fall down our knees and to be reminded that we are part of something bigger than our mistakes, that we are supported and strengthened by God’s love through Christ, so that we can go out into the world despite all that we are told by our often competitive, winner-takes-all culture and try again.

And this is where the beauty of our faith is laid open to us: Jesus says "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

[M]y yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

There is the true gift we receive through Christ.

There is the freedom we are blessed with, to perpetually strive towards gentleness and humility in heart, secure in the knowledge that we have someone walking beside us, shouldering the bulk of the load, and supporting us when we are at our weakest by the sheer force of a love that surpasses all understanding.

What comfort and relief we are given, and who knew that it would come to us through death on a cross!

The Seventh Sunday following Easter

2008-05-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

SERMON

7th Sunday after Easter

Today’s readings bring to mind a French platitude:

“The fool looks at the finger that points at the sky”.

It makes an easy warning against the dangers of getting caught up in details and, so doing, failing to see the bigger picture, to understand what is truly important- which could be called a simple definition of the human condition.

This scenario plays out over and over again in the community of disciples throughout the gospel stories - from disciples arguing over who gets the best seat next to Jesus in heaven, to Peter, at the Transfiguration, wanting to build a church and set up shop after seeing a sign that told him to go into the world and preach.

The poor apostles can’t seem to get it right, and one finds sympathy for them as their mistakes always seem to involve an angel or two appearing to point out the obvious-

In resurrection stories, at the empty tomb they are asked by two figures in dazzling white, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” You can almost hear the exasperation as the stunned followers stare blankly, and the angel says- ‘Remember, he told you, three days- he would rise again?’

In the Acts lesson for today the apostles stand by, bedazzled by the ascension of their recently deceased friend into the heavens, only to have some angels pop up again, and ask “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” Again that tone- ‘Your work is to be done here, on this earth, among those left around you? Do you people have any sense?’

Throughout the narratives of Jesus’ life and resurrection, the disciples become sort of stock characters of clumsy misunderstanding, simply not getting it, only to be set right by Jesus as wise teacher, or angels as literal deii ex machinae to clear up any difficult plot points.

The message here is simple: we, like the disciples, are human, and so we will always have trouble aspiring to live into God’s plan for us, but we must continue to try. And in this trying, in this struggling toward living the Gospel together, is our salvation.

Scott Bader-Saye, theologian and professor, makes the point in his essay Long Division that this set of readings for today gives us an account of Jesus’ last words- in John before his death, and in Acts before his ascension- and it turns out that “Given this one last opportunity to say what needed to be heard and remembered by his disciples, Jesus’ attention centers on our unity and our witness, which turn out to be one and the same thing.”

This equation of unity and witness is challenging to a church in a time of trouble- as ours is- globally in our communion, nationally as parishes secede in search of “orthodoxy”, in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, and even here in our Trinity community- as we look for ways to walk apart, battle lines are drawn, division is sown, and individuals become either for or against, rather than one in the body of Christ.

Let me step aside for a moment to make clear what I mean by "unity"- Christian unity is not glossing over differences for fear of ruffling feathers, it is not shying away from disagreement or pretending that it doesn't exist, but embracing the issues that divide us, in love, and gathering around the altar table as one Body, despite them.

John recounts that Jesus prays, "Holy Father, protect them in your name . . . so that they may be one, as we are one." Why does Jesus specifically ask God to protect the unity of his followers to guard us against division? Bader-Saye says to answer this we must proceed a bit further into John’s text: "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me . . . so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" .

Bader-Saye notes that Jesus’ language seems circular, but as the relationships are untangled one thing becomes clear: the unity of Christ’s followers is not incidental to our salvation. As we [strive to be] made one with Christ so we are made one with [God]. But we are one with Christ only if we are one with each other. Our fellowship with God depends upon our unity, as does our witness to the world -- we are to be one "so that the world may believe" that Jesus is from God and that God loves us.

It is often said that Christians cannot exist in solitude, but this exegesis proves that. In order for our message to be God’s message, Christ’s message, we must live it, together, and not selectively- not just in church on Sunday morning where it is easy, but in every moment of every day, with church friends as well as coworkers, strangers, acquaintances. Our message of loving God above all else and neighbor as self cannot be diluted in our secular dealings-

we cannot forget that we are called by Christ to respect the dignity of our fellow human beings, even during the work day when we are trying to accommodate profit margins,

or

socially, we cannot sit by silently to avoid the awkwardness of challenging an acquaintance who is casually racist, or sexist, or cruel, but instead must speak truth, in love.

Accordingly, in order to have unity in our community of faith, we must have internal unity as individuals walking this path of faith- for just as when we split our personalities into different selves- one face for church, one face for work, one face for home- we come dangerously close to losing any notion of who we are, of what we stand for, of what we believe, when we do the same within our community, only dischord can follow.

Having God at our core allows us to see Christ in the face of every one we encounter, especially the one we have vilified as enemy, or other.

This anchoring in God is not easy, nor is it bound to make us popular in a world with more secular priorities, if we are doing it correctly. But the lessons prepare us for this as well- in 1 Peter we are reminded that “if we are reviled for the name of Christ, we are blessed with the spirit of God resting in us”- if we are oppressed [by the powers and principalities for living out our faith,] we should rejoice, insofar as we are sharing in Christ’s suffering. The imagery in this passage is terrifying and almost paranoia producing, but strangely comforting- our adversary prowls around us like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour- but we can resist him, steadfast in our faith, because we know that throughout the world our brothers and sisters in Christ are undergoing the same kinds of suffering, and mounting the same resistance.

We must live what we preach! How truly radical!

Bader-Saye sums it up nicely:
"When we fail to embody in our [selves and in our] communities the peaceful reconciliation that is salvation, when we fail to restore unity, our words about Jesus appear hollow. The solidarity of the church not only enables our witness, it is our witness."

And so, as you go out from this sanctuary and into the parish hall and into the world, do not sow division, but seek to love your enemy- do not be the finger that manages to distract the world from the promise of God, which we point to with our lives.

Easter at Trinity Solebury

2008-04-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

was fabulous. The sanctuary was filled with what must have been a thousand lilies, the smell was heavenly, the pews were overflowing, the music and choir were even more spectacluar than usual, and all of the senses were appropriately engaged in proclaiming our risen Lord.

Great job, everybody!

Maundy Thursday Sermon

2008-04-17T13:12:00.001-07:00

I'm getting congregational push-back for not updating this thing often enough, so here is, finally, the sermon I preached on Maundy Thursday.

"This night is a night of symbols,

a night of re-enactment,

a night of history- lived.

As we begin the Triduum walk of Christ’s last steps this evening, steps that culminate in Easter light, we remind ourselves of Jesus’ last night in life- we remember, through the Gospel story, a beloved leader, fully human, fully divine, taking on the role of a servant in his last hours, tying a towel around his waist and gently, with love, washing off feet- feet weary from three years of walking the countryside and coastlines of Nazareth, Caeserea, Judea, Galilee, truly weary from following a teacher, not knowing if he was insane or the Son of God, but following nevertheless, learning, and ministering, and hoping that this was the one who would rescue a people degraded for countless generations, that this Jesus was the one who would fulfill God’s promise to Israel.

And there, in the midst of a shared meal, this hoped for Messiah, this beloved rabbi, takes on the role of the lowliest house slave, becomes like a servant to these his followers, and washes their dirty feet.

Imagine the shock- you don’t even have to imagine it, actually, Simon Peter makes it explicit when he asks, baffled, ”Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Remember, these are disciples who have seen a few strange things in their time with Jesus, they have seen their Lord walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes, heal the sick, raise the dead, and this act manages to beg the question! “Lord, you will never wash my feet!” Lord, I will never let you take on such shameful, humiliating work! I will die before I let you, my savior and my God, dishonor yourself so.

But Jesus washes on, and one by one, these disciples are forced to sit, uncomfortable and embarrassed, as the one they have thrown away their livelihoods, their families, their lives for, performs this lowly task. He knows they will not understand what he has modeled for them, and so he tells them: “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet, For I have set for you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

I have been your servant, and won’t you be my servant too?

And here we sit, two thousand years later, filled with the same discomfort, same embarrassment, same sense of the shameful, at the idea of re-enacting this scene of foot baths and towels! Despite years of experience and writing this very sermon, I am distracted a bit by thoughts of the pedicure that I didn’t manage to get today, and what if there is fuzz from my socks?

Try, if you can, to put those anxieties out of your mind, try to let yourself be comfortable and allow your brother or sister in Christ to be as Christ to you, and you to be as Christ to them.

Because this is so much more than feet not often seen naked in public, and warm water, and soft towels- this is praying, with our hands. This is giving of ourselves as Christ gave once, this is a symbol of loving obeisance, and, alongside the sharing of the common cup and plate around the altar tonight, this is our covenant with Christ and each other. Tonight, in this liturgy we model a life of servanthood, of true humility and love and orientation to the other.

And, when this lesson is learned in the growing light of Easter hope, the act of servanthood is fully understood as life-giving.

In his book Holy Things, Gordon Lathrop says that the actions of Maundy Thursday tell us all we need to know about a life lived in Christ-

“The preaching…means only to bring to explicit speech the intention of the whole complex [dance]”.

This will hit you full in the stomach later, when we strip the altar. Only then will you begin to fully realize the weight of the abandoned and crucified Lord.

And as you leave this church in silence and darkness, you will understand:

“God is the one who brings something out of nothing, life out of death, new out of old.” God is the one, in the history of our salvation, who gave life to this creation, God gave his son to this untrustworthy creation, who betrayed him and denied him and who strung him on a cross, and God resurrected that son, as a covenant for the love he has for us, and as a promise of the resurrection we will all share, on the last day."

Wonder

2008-01-14T13:10:00.000-08:00

Have you ever discovered something, and it is so spectacular that you can't understand how it could have existed without you knowing?

That's how I feel about this:

The video is from "The Sultan's Elephant", a four day puppetry project presented by Royal de Luxe, a French puppetry collective, on the streets of London in May of 2006. You can read more about Royal de Luxe here.

The engineer has collaborated on a permanent installation called Les Machines d'Ille in Nantes. You can ride the elephant. How incredibly awesome is this?

Today's sermon!

2008-01-13T04:52:00.000-08:00

Before it has even been preached!

"I had the good fortune to attend the ordination to the priesthood of a close friend from seminary this past week, and the occasion sticks fresh in my mind still today.
It was a glorious celebration, lasting two days, and I was surrounded by classmates and other seminary folk, all focused on this new beginning for my friend as a priest, and those facts alone would have made for a memorable occasion.
However, I have attended quite a few ordinations over the last year, including two of my own, and as jaded as it sounds to say, the occasions eventually start to run together- particularly the sermons!
There is a certain genre that I am now quite familiar with, called “the ordination sermon”, and it is typically given by some seasoned and accomplished priest or bishop, and it generally takes the following form:
I. A reflection on what it is to be a spiritual leader
II. An examination of the priest-to-be’s good character, usually accompan9ied by an anecdote from her or his life
III. An inspirational quote or two
IV. Finally, a charge to the new priest, with an emphasis on important things to remember as this new stage of life begins.

This most recent ordination sermon, however, was [reached not by a minister but by a seasoned and accomplished laywoman, a professor who has spent her life surrounded by members of the clergy of all orders, and so, perhaps, is not that intimidated by those of us in collars.
I think it was for this reason that the preacher’s message stayed with me, and turned to baptism- since this is the initiation into Christian life and ministry that all of us have shared, and so it is an experience with which we are all familiar.
Our model for baptism is taken from Christ’s own life- we have heard Matthew’s recounting of that baptism today, and we are reminded that Jesus himself turned to John for this initiation into service, into ministry, into a life lived to the glory of God. Sadly for those of us who are clergy-people, there is no parallel recounting of Jesus’ ordination as a minister of his own church, and so as a church we had to make that one up on our own. But there is a truth in this that we cannot escape, a truth that caused, by it’s recognition, the creation of our own Anglican Church- we are all called to priesthood in faith, and we answer that call “yes” in baptism. Some of us feel we are called to formal, ordained ministry, such as my friend and Ginny and Marshall and me- we believe that at some point in our lives God reached out and called us to leadership within our church, to make this community of faith our livelihood as well as our spiritual succor.
Some are called to passionate lay ministry, and take on leadership in areas guided by faith but not institutional- within our own community we have strong examples of this- our own Kyle Evans, who leaves us this week as youth director, is called to life in the world of mission, and is choosing courageously to follow this rewarding but less standardized path.
Jesus was called to suffering and inevitable death, all for our sake.
We are all offered choices in this life we live- How truly soul gladdening it is to choose!
If you’ve been following the model, here comes the inspirational quote:
In the poem A Summer Day, by Mary Oliver, the poet says:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

This is the question that we should ask ourselves everyday, and though it is hard sometimes to find and feel the freedom within ourselves to answer it, that is the ministry that we took on when we were washed in the waters of baptism, when we were accepted as Christ’s own and said: “YES, we will put our whole trust in Jesus’ grace and love, when in the words of the baptismal covenant we pledged to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ!

And all of those yeses bring us back, again, to a question heartbreaking and mindblowing in it’s simplicity and in it’s charge:

What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"

2007-12-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

It seems the only time I get a chance to update this thing is when I'm in the office all alone on a Saturday...which I try not to be as often as possible, since that's my chance for Sabbath time. Though I realize now that the reason the importance of keeping Sabbath (basically taking a 24 hour period to pray, study, sit and be with God, not run errands and write sermons and try to fit everything else in) was hammered into us time after time in seminary was because it's really really hard to remember/make time to do it in the rush of parish life. So today for my "sabbath" I'm catching up on things in the office and then heading to New Jersey for a friend's ordination to the priesthood- really not a bad way to get in touch with God in my life, actually, in church among friends and fmaily, celebrating the beginning of a new priesthood.

I just had my first Christmas at Trinity, which was as magical and wonderful as I had been told, and included a very unique liturgical effect via disco light ball during Silent Night, which the kids loved and I actually found really endearing. It's nice to learn the little touches and idiosyncracies that make each church its own. At my seminary parish, Transfiguration, it was benediction every Friday in Lent and saying the prayer of humble access before every communion, and as foreign as those things felt to me when I started, I find myself missing them now. So too with the disco light ball, which was more like an octopus or satellite than the mirrored thing I was expecting. So- another milestone passed!

A milestone not passed was my planned Celebraiton of New Ministry on Dec. 16. Despite much praying and pleading and preparation and worrying on the part of many here, the weather intervened, not icing the roads as feared but instead knocking out the power for a full day. We had three very cold but very intimate candle lighted masses that morning, but had to cancel the rest of the days programs when the well pump finally gave up the ghost and we had no power, no heat, and no water. Friends from seminary in the surrounding areas were already on the way, though, so I got to have a smaller, more low key "family" celebration with all of them, which almost made up for the cancellation of the service! It was another sort of sabbath keeping- it's easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of a situation where everything is brand new and seems to need all of my attention, and a return to a familiar group around a table breaking bread, referencing a shared history, was a nice and well-timed reminder of the bigger picture of my own life.

Stay tuned for the rescheduled service though- a date of March 2 has been suggested, though I'm not sure how I feel about having a big celebration on my behalf during Lent (even on a Sunday, even on Laetare Sunday), but I guess one of my resolutions for the New Year will be to sit down with the master calendar to set a date. And hopefully no acts of God will intervene, because seriously, if it happens a second time I'm going to feel like someone is trying to send me a message...:)

I know I promised photos from the TYG retreat- they are now in a previous post- but I got a picture in the mail today from my first ever baptism, and as soon as I can get permission from the family and figure out how to scan it in, I'm going to post it. There is so much going on in the world that is hard to understand and that akes us feel little or helpless- a picture of a smiling baby grabbing at my chin while being initiated into the life of Christ is a good reminder of the simple, good aspects of living.

Happy New Year, everyone!

2007-10-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

So, I'm not trying to brag or anything, but if you check the comments section of my last post you will find indisputable evidence that John Bowe reads my Trinity blog!

Or at least Googles himself regularly. Or has some magical sixth sense that tells him when someone has linked to his Amazon page.

I survived my first ever Fall retreat with the Trinity Youth Group (barely). It was very rainy and very cold and though the lovely stone cabins of Camp Mensch Mill are fitted with heaters, said heaters were not operational this weekend.

However, I got to know our TYG folks a little better and was privy to some simply astounding sights, such as Dylan Platt breakdancing and Steve (Mr.) Wilson falling down in the mud about six times.

Pictures to come!

EDIT: And here are some:

The theme was Wild Wild West.

Mr. Wilson and the gang, talking about God and stuff. Or playing poker, I can't tell.

All together now!

Who are the most atttractive Assistant Rector and TYG Sponsor in this picture? Why, I believe that would be me and Mrs. Boser.

The very talented Ryan Sager.

I thought I had one of Dylan spinning on his head, but this one shows him on the front end of that particular move.

And Evan Powell brought the house down with "A Little Help From My Friends"

and a little help from his TYG friends. Yes, I know I'm corny.

And then I went home and slept and slept and slept. Looking forward to TYG2008!

2007-10-26T07:56:00.001-07:00

Okay, I love soft fluffy sweaters as much as anyone else, and have made some questionable purchases in the pursuit of treating myself, but

equals

.

I try not to be super-preachy in this blog, but at some point my ordination vows (and fundamental call as a Christian) requires me to speak clearly. Living life as a Christian consumer is hard and made up of a whole lot of grey, but occasionally we are faced with a true black or white decision, and cashmere dog sweaters fit neatly into the Old-Testament-style-excess column.

We are faced with complicated feelings as people of faith in a culture where happiness and fulfillment is presented as a product, something to be bought and paid for. One of the banner days in my education as a Christian and as a priest was the day I read a book on ethics that stated clearly that we are Christians first, citizens second. The book was quoting a document written by a Roman decrying the civic danger of the developing Christian sect, well before Constantine had his world-shifting experience at the Milvian Bridge.

Accordingly, this is not a new concept but one that is regaining prominence as we begin to suspect that perhaps we have been sold a false bill of goods- the things that we cherish are those things that we receive as gifts from God: family, friends, community. It is love in relationship that makes us truly happy, not the gifts we exchange, and this is helped along by the increasing realization that so many of the products that we associate with joyous, frivolous, pure examples of affection are the fruit of an economy reliant upon the basest abuses of one human by another. We've known for over fifteen years that some of our favorite brands use sweatshop labor in developing nations, we've seen Blood Diamond, and we know from experience that if we push for change, we can convince the market that ethically sourced products make good business sense.

This post was brought to you by internet sweater shopping and Nobodies by John Bowe, which sort of changed my life a little bit.

Faith and Fr. Matthew

2007-10-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of words today, so I thought I would pass along something that never fails to make me smile: Fr. Matthew Presents.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Fr. Matthew, and his wife Melanie, in seminary, and they are a hilarious and frighteningly intelligent couple. Matthew started putting together a series of brief, funny videos on issues relating to the Episcopal Church after he graduated, and now he has quite a collection- as well as sponsors like The Geranium Farm and Ask The Priest.

Enjoy!

2007-10-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a dinner party (really that doesn't quite portray it adequately, since there were so many people there that there were five tables stretched throughout the house) to meet the New Jersey contingent of Trinitarians. It was so much fun and a great chance to chat with folks in a more intimate way than at the back door of the church on a Sunday morning, and a good way to experience the hospitality that really defines Trinity as a parish. I will rave about it more, but for the purposes of this post I was surprised to learn that the lamb roast that made up our main course was from one of the attendees own stock- literally, this roast had been roaming her pasture recently (thankfully I don't know *how* recently, since I'm still a little squeamish on the hoof to platter thing)- and was probably some of the bets lamb I've ever eaten.

I am doubly excited about it after reading this article today.

Hooray for green and delicious!

2007-10-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

I just finished my first funeral.

I had anxiety dreams last night, and after a long life of them (they were particularly horrible in law school, always involving an exam that had to be taken for a class I didn't know I was signed up for) I've gotten to the point where they kind of amuse me in their predictability. Last night's had me showing up for the funeral without a clergy shirt and with red pants, and the only alb I could find was knee length. Also the entire church was full and everyone was Spanish-speaking (this I know is because I've been wanting to learn Spanish for some while now, since I feel morally obligated to learn to speak the second most common language in my world) and no one had mentioned that before hand. And as usual I didn't have a sermon, which ALWAYS happens in my dreams the night before I'm scheduled to preach.

In the actual, real/waking life funeral, there were a few hitches, but all in all I think we celebrated properly a life that was definitely one to celebrate. The family stood up to give their own remembrances and I learned so much about this woman, who had lived to 92 and filled her life with an even longer life's worth of living. I caught myself halfway through thinking that I would be very happy if my own life could be described as her's was- elegant, graceful, loving beauty, surrounded by dogs (Great Danes and weimaraners!) and horses and roses, full of family and friends and art and a well mixed martini, and ending in her home of more than fifty years, with her loved ones around her bed.

She was buried in a part of our cemetery that I haven't spent much time in, and with the Indian summer sun shining through the trees over it it seemed like the most beautiful place on earth and a fine place to rest for eternity. And I'm pretty sure her family will remember the sun on the grass and the birds chirping and the sense of a truly peaceful end, rather than the PA system that wouldn't work.

Goodness gracious...

2007-10-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

I never thought keeping up with a blog would be so much work!

Today's post is brought to you by my beagle, Lulubelle, who apparently ate something she shouldn't have, which means I'm in my office watching her to make sure she doesn't explode all over the place, and in the meantime updating this thing, so, um, yay for canine digestive idsorders, I guess.

I spent this last weekend with ten parishioners at Holy Cross Monastery, an Episcopal Benedectine community in New Paltz, NY. I knew quite a few folks who had taken retreats at this monastery during my time in seminary, but this was my first visit. The weather was beautiful- the monastery is located in the Hudson River Valley on top of a hill overlooking the river, and the trees had all started to turn during our visit. The food was overwhelming, the chapel services made me wistful for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, and I think I can speak for our entire group of Trinitarians when I say it was a wonderufl experience. I never made it down to the river (the monks are very cautious about the prevalence of deer ticks, and thus Lyme disease, in the area so the view from the back yard was just fine for me) but even coming from the bucolic splendor that is Bucks County, the place was sublime.
This coming Sunday we celebrate
the Feast of St. Francis and the accompanying blessing of the animals (I know, I know, but you try getting people to trailer in their horses and sheep on a weeknight), and then I'm off to the National Church's Ecumenical Young Clergy Conference. Though I am excited about the chance to meet young ministers from other denominations, I'm equally happy to see some of my fellow GTS Episcopalians. And my 30th birthday is the last day of the conference, so I get to celebrate this landmark as every little girl truly dreams- with two hundred pastors, priests, and ministers in a hotel ballroom in Baltimore!

And now I'm off to the grocery store to replenish my stocks of white rice and chicken stock for the dog. Don't hate me because my life is so glamorous. You too can be an ordained priest in God's church.

Putting the Ministr in Administration

2007-08-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I crack myself up mightily.

Early morning drip coffee seems to facilitate this, and this morning I had coffee from Dunkin Donuts at a going-away-on-sabbatical party for our Youth Minister here at Trinity, Kyle Evans. For part of her time away from us, Kyle will be in Kitale, Kenya, as part of a dental mission trip through Tabasamu. Two of our Trinitarians created this organization, and I encourage you to check out the website. And if you have thirty thousand toothburshes cluttering up your house, or are trained in the dental arts and looking for a unique experience in exotic travel and mission, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you!

I have been away from the parish for about a week, and am astonished not only by how much I missed being here but also how much happened while I was gone, and the resulting need for me to be in the office rather than out visiting folks and enjoying the last of the summer weather- hence my corny title. This feeling of being a little bit behind at all times is probably going to be the hardest thing for me as a priest, but I'm starting to get used to it because there are simply too many opportunities in the world (even my slightly smaller, majority livestock populated world of Lower Bucks County) to give proper attention to in a day. Particularly if you, like me, like to move at Eyeore speed when discovering new things and sort of wallow around in new ideas to feel out all the edges of them before moving on to action.

This, dear ones, is why God created the internet. However, the sheer amount of information that we have access to through the internet can, if you are me, make pondering how to live a life of Christian witness borderline paralyzing*.

With that in mind, I now present the first of what will probably be a regular feature, which I will call God is in the Hyperlinked Details.

Because my mind is centered on coffee and food and faraway lands, today will be about eating ethically. In the last few years greater attention has been given to the implications of the choices we make as Christians in the United States, from politics to what kind of cars we drive to what kind of food we eat. Though Jesus and a cucumber seem to have very little in common, when you start to think about who grew that cucumber and whether it was grown with or without chemical pesticides and how it was transported from the place where it was grown to the place where you bought it and how much you paid for it, the theological implications become clearer.

Suddenly, you find yourself asking: What Would Jesus Eat?

For most folks, coffee has been the product which made the concept of environmental and ethical sustainability something to consider. We get most of our coffee from corporate plantations in developing nations where issues like worker rights as well as environmental impact often took a backseat to economic considerations.
That is now changing, as companies with the market clout of Starbucks and Whole Foods feature suppliers that pay living wages, allow unions to organize their employees, and use organic or other earth friendly growing processes. Where once your best option was simply shade-grown, you can now find coffees on the local market that guarantee ethical growing, harvesting, roasting, packaging- even carbon-neutralized delivery methods- so that you can rest assured that your morning cup is good for you and good for the world.

The Episcopal Church has even gotten in on this, with our very own Bishop's Blend. Thinking even more locally, you can buy coffee at Trinity through our youth group that supports our mission relationships in Guatemala, but for that you have to actually visit on a Sunday. First cup is free!

You might find some products in the grocery store that have a black and white logo stating that they are Fair Trade Certified. If my blogging skills were better, you could even see this logo right here, but you'll have to click the link. TransFair covers a diverse range of products, from coffee to fruit and sugar, that you can buy and eat with an untroubled conscience.

The Local Food movement is an aspect of sustainable eating that has gotten more attention lately. The basic concept is that the closer the source of your food and the more seasonal, the better it is across the board. Think of it on the village scale: food produced in and for a community is produced with that community in mind. Sustainable Table is the place to start for information on how to eat locally, and in Bucks County we are blessed with opportunities to put this into action. Farmers' markets and dairies abound, and an hour spent picking my own peaches in the sunshine and getting to know the folks who grow them wins over a trip around the supermarket any day.

For me, this is where my mind starts running off and it seems that my only option is to grow tomatoes in my kitchen sink and never leave the house. Of course it would be awesome if there was some sort of magical food fairy who delivered delicious sustainable meals to my door with the promise that no one was harmed in the making of my dinner, but until then, it helps to remember that one simple step is worth a thousand not taken.

And now it is time for lunch!

*For a peek into my talent at overthinking what seems like a simple choice, ask me some time about my attempt to buy new towels. Or if you are a houseguest of mine, ever, and wonder why you are given effectively a ball of strings for after-showering purposes.

2007-08-09T13:48:00.000-07:00

Transitions bring out a funny side of my personality. Inevitably I catch myself looking forward to changes in my life in terms of all the new things I'll be able to do- take up a new hobby, learn a language, train for a marathon- no matter the reality of what I'm transitioning out of, or into.

A case in point: somehow I had convinced myself that leaving seminary for parish ministry would free up tons of time in my personal life. Despite the fact that my seminary schedule, particularly my final semester, looked most like that of a fifth year college senior. Granted, I had a part time job at the National Church Center and was taking a full load in credit hours, but I also spent a substantial part of my day on the Close watching my dog roll around in the grass or finding a restaurant with my friends.

I know that anyone reading this will not be shocked by the actuality of the situation- I spend a lot of time at church, or doing churchy things in other locations. And I love it. I knew coming in that I would have the incredible blessing of being privy to the defining moments in the lives of parishioners like births and baptisms and weddings and sickness and deaths, but I guess I mentally blocked the part about how hard it is to keep up with daily life gets for just me and my circle of friends and family, and so keeping up with the daily lives of the three hundred or so families that make up Trinity Church is even harder.

I wouldn't trade the chance I've been given by God to share in the life of this place for the world. Just this week I've helped a couple plan their wedding (which I get to officiate!), I've helped grieve at a funeral where I also heard joyful stories of the life we mourned, I've preached at two services, celebrated the sacrament of Holy Eucharist at another, and participated in conversations about the future of life at Trinity with folks whose own spiritual paths are inextricably part of it. I've even found out that the youth group thinks I look like Snow White. I can't think of what greater blessing there is than being a part of such a dynamic community of faith- I just have to figure out how to fit in going to the gym, too!

I don't know how those of you wiht jobs in the secular world manage...

(luckily my dog, Lulu, is as comfortable snoozing in my office as she is in my living room)

The Young and the Godly

2007-07-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

This morning, while getting ready for the first day of my second week of work at Trinity, I caught some of the first installment of a series on NPR about young people starting out in various ministries. It is meant to audibly track these various men and women over their first year of work in churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples.

I feel so *current*!

Click the highlighted text for The Young and The Godly.

I was the celebrant yesterday at my first two Sunday services. Much like in my first solo celebration of the Eucharist last Wednesday in our chapel, I was reminded of the substantial psychic difference between participating in a service that I basically have memorized and actually leading it. It kind of reminded me of my first administrative hearing (though on Sunday I could at least be reasonably sure that everyone was on my side). My mind was in a thousand different places at once trying to keep track of pages and hymns and what I was forgetting to prepare myself to do next. It helped that the acolytes, music director and choir, lay ministers, lay preacher, lectors, ushers, etc. all were pros at their parts of the service, so I just had to fill in the gaps!

My default Eucharistic practice is to sing the prayer (typically in Rite I language, since that's what I've been doing every Sunday for the last two years or so), so I was a little nervous that if everything collapsed and I had to wing it I would find myself singing "The Lord be with you" to the stomach churning silence/cricket chirping of an entire church full of people not sure how they should respond. This confused silence happened a couple of times when I first started chanting the Gospel at Transfiguration, since no one was used to a woman's singing voice and octave, and I wasn't keen on repeating the experience! Luckily I was able to pull it off, if not perfectly then without any derailing mistakes, and, as the venerable David Hurd is oft to say: God was praised.

However, I removed the microphone from the equation, figuring that it would be one more thing to complicate/mess up (plus I really do have a phobia of the thing from all the horrible stories about live mics carried unwittingly into the bathroom before the service, or broadcasting a remark meant for one or no others to the entire church), and though I was able to project and have the whole congregation hear my natural voice, I am a little froggy today.

So- my next task is to conquer the wireless mic pack!

So...

2007-07-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

A priest, a lawyer, and a Southerner walk into a bar. Then she says...

So begins a joke a friend made up about my multitude of identities. At just three months shy of my 30th birthday I have grown up in and been molded indelably by Southern culture, have practiced civil rights and labor law at my dream firm in Atlanta, and lived for three, too-short years in New York City while training to be ordained, just two weeks ago, as a priest in the Episcopal Church and became the assistant rector at Trinity Church, Solebury, PA, in the heart of Bucks County, which surely must be one of God's chosen places in creation .

When I packed up to move to the General Theological Seminary in the summer of 2004, I was more than a little worried that what I thought was a call to ordained ministry might turn out to be a bad case of wanderlust and an inability to commit to one profession for the entirety of my adult life. As a child I was the one who was always paralyzed in decision making, able to see all of the positive and negative aspects of each side of any situation, and wished for superhuman decisiveness as my superhero power.

It took about two months in the seminary chapel for me to realize that I was truly answering God's call, and in doing so was becoming part of a community of friends, teachers, mentors, and clergy that would form me and give me the strength and love needed to undergird my life of ministry and, honestly, make me a fuller, more whole person. I have been blessed to live into my vocation relatively early in life, and can't imagining being anything besides a priest in God's church.

But then I've only been a priest since July 8, 2007, and if I've learned anything from my journey so far, it is that God has a particular sort of sense of humor, and it seems to be triggered by making five year plans...

This blog will be a place for me to feel out my first year of ministry at Trinity Church, my life in a new town far away from friends and family, and my continuing relationship with God. I welcome comments and critiques, sidetracks and random jokes, and hope that if you stumble upon this little corner of the internet, or even seek it out, you will take something nourishing or thought provoking or perspective shifting with you!