Ash Wednesday
March 26th

Today’s readings are:
Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 103
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Click here to access these readings.

        I want Easter. I want it to be Easter. I want the colored eggs, the little green grass made of plastic. I want pastel colors. I want white vestments and alleluias and that bright, spring sunshine to be inside the church as much as it is outside. I want Easter, when Jesus is alive and the whole world is changed. I want an empty tomb, I want the flaming tongues of Pentecost, I want Jesus alive and well and joyful.

        But here we are. It is Ash Wednesday. We have over a month of Lent before us, we have over a month of Lent between us and that open tomb, that Jesus alive and joyful and that hope of the world after his Resurrection. And today, as Lent begins, we do not have the bright spring-white vestments of Easter but the dark, purple, penitential ones of Lent.

        We are an Easter people, aren’t we? Aren’t we? We’re a people who live in the light of the Resurrection, a people who live in a world where death has died, where hope unlooked for because it’s just too good to be true, where that hope and that love have thrown open the gates of death, shattered the bonds of sin and darkness, and led us into a life of light and life. We are an Easter people, so what are we doing with the soot of death upon our foreheads?

        I’ve preached lately on why Lent is a good and healthy thing. I’ve preached about how we need to take stock of our relationship with God. And we do this not because we’re scared of getting into trouble or because, as if God were a strict teacher and is going to send a bad report card home to an equally strict parent. No, for, again, we are an Easter people: our relationship with God is one of love, that is founded and fashioned out of love. And relationships founded on love are endlessly deep. Lent is the time when we explore that love, see how we can enter into that love more fully, more openly, so that we become that love ourselves. Goodness, could you imagine becoming love? That’s what we’re called to. That’s what we’re called to as Christians. To become love.

        Yes, we are an Easter people, but we are living in an Ash Wednesday world. Because of Jesus Christ, death no longer has dominion over us. We are free from it, free from the binds of death; but death still hurts. Darkness is still a cloud that confuses us and turns our hearts to worry, anxiety, and hatred. We humans still hate those who are different than us, sling ugly words at those we don’t understand. We still beat people and abuse people emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. And there are people in this world who hate themselves and see only darkness before them. We live in a hard world.

        And it’s good to remember this, not because we need to hate the world, too, or because we need to cut ourselves loose and just look forward to the joys of heaven, to grin and bear the pain of the world because the afterlife’ll be worth it. No, we need to look at the hard, ugly, hateful world, and that hart, ugly, hateful world inside of ourselves, because Jesus Christ came not to condemn the world, but to save it, to tell you that all things, all things, are worthy of the love of Christ. You are loved, not because God forgets your sin for a while but because God loves you. All of you, every – last – bit.

        The world needs to hear this. People need to hear this. Have you ever had the privilege to tell someone, someone who thought themselves unworthy and forgotten, that they are in fact precious and beloved of God? It is a grace and an honor to do so. It is a gift. And you know what, it is also the mission of all Christians, no matter what creed or denomination, to do this: to enter into the darkness, to even the darkest parts of human existence, be it in the world around us or in our own hearts, and to dispel that darkness with love. And I don’t mean some greeting card love, but a love that is strong and that looks death and despair in the face and says, “No, you are nothing against the light of this love.” For that love is true reality; for God is love.

        And so today, Ash Wednesday, we look death in the face. And part of looking death in the face is realizing that it is still painful, and that for some, that pain is deep and it is real. But we look death in the face because we have already looked Life in the face, and we know it to be a person, a person of love, and we know him to be stronger than death.

        I could end here, but I want to say one more thing. I hope that these words, and this service, has grounded you in the Love and Life that is past death. I hope that our time here on Ash Wednesday has filled you with a renewed purpose, so that you will enter into a holy Lent and look forward to the Joy of Easter. That may be the case for some of you, but it might not be for others. Looking death in the face is hard, and so I want to say: you are not alone. We do not look death in the face alone as individuals but as the Church. If looking at death has stung you, or hurt your, or if you are afraid, remember that we are here for you, both I as your priest and us as your fellow siblings in God. Nor are we alone, for God himself has looked death in the face from the cross. And he stands now among us as our brother Jesus, in whose hands is real bread, and in whose voice is the salvation of all.

the 11th day after Pentecost
Proper 16
August 25ht, 2019

The readings for today are:
Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

Click here to access these readings.

            Have you ever heard of the liturgical workout? No, it’s not what Episcopalians do when they go to the gym. It’s what we do right here in our church nave. It’s often said that we Episcopalians, and many others who worship God liturgically, are always standing up and sitting down. And you might not notice this if you’ve worshipped this way for a long time. It all seems, to us, pretty simple. We sit down for readings – unless it’s the gospel reading, then we stand. We also stand for the Nicene Creed, but then we sit back down for the Prayers of the People. And when it comes time for the Eucharist, some people stand and some people sit (both are just fine, by the way). And some people, if their piety is just right, will kneel instead. We are always getting up but then sitting back down.

       And we don’t do all this just because it’s fun to stand up and sit down all the time. When we pray liturgically, we don’t just pray with the voice but with all the senses and the whole body together. And each of these different ways we pray – they mean something. Why do we stand at the gospel? It’s because we are people of Jesus Christ, people of the Gospel, and we stand to show respect to the words of our Savior. Why do we sit or kneel at confession? It’s because in our confession we are humbling ourselves before God. Nor are we just saying, “God, I’m sorry”, but using our whole body, our knees and our shoulders and our hands and our voices to confess our sins to God. And why? Because we feel that doing so helps us come to a fuller realization of our sins and mistakes and, hopefully, leads us to an amendment of life. Physically sitting or kneeling, we believe, helps that process, as does, when we’ve been absolved, standing up helps us enter more fully into God’s mercy, grace, and love.

       There’s a kind of “stuff-ness” to liturgical worship, isn’t there? There’s a lot of stuff, a lot of physical things that you can touch or things that we do. We’re always standing or sitting, bowing and crossing ourselves, or using water or oil or chrism or bread and wine. We have chalices and patents, bells in towers and hand-bells that acolytes can ring through the whole Eucharistic prayer (not that this happened recently…). Our priests wear three layers of clothes and we like holding hymnals better than using projectors. We like stuff – things we can reach out to and touch, things we can hold, things that help us reach out and touch God and one another in love.

       But then comes the letter to the Hebrews. The author seems to be saying something different here. He writes that, when we come to God, we come to something that you can’t touch. Being with God isn’t like holding onto stuff like bread or a book, but like a blazing fire, something that is there and that you can see but that you can’t reach out and hold in the palm of your hands. Or like darkness or gloom, or the raging of a tempest, or even just the sound of a trumpet. These things move us, or allow us to see, or send us running, but no matter how much they affect us we can’t hold them. You can’t put God a box or a nice pretty bag. We can learn about and be brought to God through things, through stuff, through God’s Creation; but at the same time, it’s important to remember that God isn’t Creation. God is more than this world. God isn’t tangible, he’s not what we can see on the surface of things. God is more than that.

       So, does that mean that we’re wrong to like all this stuff in our worship? If God is something that we can’t touch, if God is like the sound of a trumpet, or the blaze of a fire, or darkness and light, things we can’t hold, then is it okay to have so much stuff here in church that we can hold? Well, yes, it is. This is actually an old question for us Christians, one that folks were talking about over a thousand years ago. You see, back in the 7 and 8 hundreds, people were worried and wondering: should we really be making art that depicts God? Should we paint pictures of God or build statues of him and his saints? People were, of course, already doing this, and doing it quite a bit, but theologians were wondering if it was such a good idea. They were worried that people would see those pictures and statues and think, well, here’s God right here – and then worship the pictures and statues and forget about the true God. In other words, they asked: doesn’t all this stuff – these images, these statues, these bits of our worship that are just things – doesn’t all this stuff get in the way of worshipping God?

       And the answer from a thousand years ago is this: no. Keep your art and love your art. Keep all that stuff in your churches. And they said this not because they just really liked art but because of how God saved humanity in Jesus Christ. God did not come down as some vague spirit to save us. God did not just think us into salvation. And God didn’t just give us some great, intelligent, wise person to lead us into a better way of life. No, God came down to us as Jesus Christ – as St. Paul writes in Philippians: God humbled himself to be with us, to walk on this earth with us, to kick around in the dust and to lift us from the dust, all to save us. God became that dust, entered into and became that dust that we are, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, so that that dust, so that we who are dust, could walk in eternal life.

       But the essence of things, the truth of things, is not in the dust, but in the one who became dust, who humbled himself, even to death on the cross. All this stuff here in church is beautiful and joyful and so very helpful to our lives in God, and while these things aren’t God, we shouldn’t just turn from them all to a form of worship that is somehow more pure because there are fewer things in the room. For in being Incarnated into this world, God said to a bit of metal with a rope attached to it (a bell): you are worthy to sing my praises. And God said to some sheep wool and probably a bit of plastic fabric (a chasuble): you are worthy to stand at my altar. And God said to us, who are dust, and to dust shall we return: you are worthy to shine with the same light as that of my Son, Jesus Christ. Because through all of it the light of Jesus Christ, which is like a burning flame lighting our path, or the sound of a trumpet calling us home, through all of it shines the holiness of Jesus Christ.

Ascension Day

Today’s readings are:
Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47 or 93
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

Click here to access these readings.

Today is the Feast of Ascension Day.  It’s one of the big days of the Church.  Another way to say this is that it’s one of the Principle Feasts, alongside Easter, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, All Saints’ Day, Christmas, and Epiphany.  Principal Feasts are the holiest of holy days, and we celebrate them with special acts of devotion, prayer, and joy.  There’s a world-wide effort, actually, to encourage pray all across the Church on these ten days between Ascension and Pentecost.  I’ve posted a few of these on our Facebook page, but you can also find the main page here.

Ascension Day looks to the passages in Luke and Acts listed above, where, following his Resurrection and teaching the disciples, Jesus ascends bodily to be with God in Heaven.  There’s a lot of great art throughout the history of the Church that depicts this event.  There is also a chapel dedicated to the ascension in the church of Our Lady of Walsingham in England.  Inside the chapel, if you look up, you’ll see a set of feet (Jesus’) ascending through the ceiling.  You can see this picture above.

Now, Ascension Day (and images like feet sticking through the ceiling) might seem like a strange or really very particular sort of thing to celebrate.  Jesus’ ascension may appear to be another bit of theological nit-picking much like the old medieval discussion of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.  Whether Jesus died again after the Resurrection, or wandered away to some other country, or rose bodily to Heaven, may not seem to matter all that much.  Jesus is with us, and isn’t that alone important?  But I think that the ascension is one of the really important parts of the story of Jesus, and it’s a part of the story that touches us closely.

Let me take a step back for a moment and tell a story.  After my wife and I had our first child, a friend of ours in seminary gave us a little book called “Holding your Newborn Child.”  It was a set of meditations on bits of Scripture and prayers that the Church holds dear.  Nor was it all a bunch of vague philosophizing, but were centered on the new life that we held in our arms.  

And I remember, very well, how real that life was.  As an infant, my daughter wouldn’t sleep unless she was held, and so my wife and I traded off holding her all through the night.  We were exhausted, but it also bound us with our daughter in a really special and amazing way.  During those long nights, I remember praying in a way that I had never prayed before.  I had always had worries, sure, and been anxious or joyful or hopeful about the future, but in holding that young baby, just a few days old, I was centered in my prayers so much on the present moments of grace.  The reality of this child, this small weight of life in my arms, and my love for her, was my prayer.  I found that I had no words to pray other than, very simply, to hold my daughter.

And just like a newborn, Jesus is not just some vague “figure” or spiritual force that exists in our lives.  Jesus is not just a hope, not just a dream, nor just some “energy” that we direct with our prayers.  Jesus is real, and Jesus is alive.  And Jesus is alive not as a spirit, but in his body as well.  And that brings us, who are both bodies and souls, so much closer to him.  It reminds us that our bodies matter, that our care for Creation matters, and that our lives matter.  Christians can’t just look to the future when all will be made right; we must also look to what is present, to the life that is in our hands and indeed all around us.  And we are also reminded that God holds us, for we are to him his beloved children.  God’s real arms, as Jesus Christ, are holding us, even now, in our grief, raising us up in our sorrow, and celebrating with us in our joy.  God is truly, truly present.

There are a lot of parts of our Church and our Christian lives together that is about stuff.  On Sunday we gather together in a single place, kneel or stand with one another, and join together in the Eucharist, which is the eating of real bread and the drinking of real wine.  And when we go out from our worship into the world, we work with our hands and our feet, our voices and our bodies, to do the work of God.  And God is present in each of them, both bodily and spiritually, especially in the Eucharist but also in our good work as Christians. 

In the end, Ascension Day reminds us that God is real, and not in some “purer” way that hates the world and is ashamed of bodies.  No, on Ascension Day we remember that Jesus Christ is, even now, in bodily form, but in the most perfect bodily form.  And it is this form to which we will one day go ourselves, and which all the world, in the New Heaven and the New Earth, will one day be.  And it is a further emphasis of the promise that God is with us, always and forever.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Readings for this week are:
Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

Click here to access these readings.

        What does it mean for God to make his home among mortals?  This is something that St. John writes in our reading from Revelation that we just heard: where the loud voice says from the throne: “See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.”  And John wasn’t the one who came up with this idea; all of the Bible, really, is trying to help people understand that God is with us.  And God is with us not in some small, secondary, or ancillary way, like a relative who stays (or overstays) through the holidays, or a friend who’s there in the good times but, really, when the going gets tough, is nowhere to be found.  No, the Bible tells us that God is with us.  That’s why Jesus, whose name means “to deliver” or “to rescue”, is also called Emmanuel, which means, quite simply, “God is with us.”  God is with us, God dwells with us, God lives with us; but what does it mean for God to make his home among us?  What does it look like in our lives, and what does it feel like in our hearts?

        Well, to be quite honest, I think often we think of God living with us like a boy getting a new dog.  Gwendolyn has this book called Charley’s First Night.  It’s a really wonderful book about Henry Korn getting a little puppy called Charley for his birthday.  It’s all written from Henry’s point of view, and it’s all about Henry showing Charley around his home.  And for Henry, everything (from the place where the vacuum is kept beneath the stairs to the moonlight through the kitchen window) everything becomes new and magnificent.  Everything speaks of Henry and Charley’s new love for one another.  And this is all summed up at the start of the book, where Henry says, “I carried him in my old baby blanket, which was soft and midnight blue, and we were new together and I was very, very careful not to slip in the snow and I thought about his name.  I was the one who thought up his name.  Charley.  Charley Korn.  My name is Henry.  Henry Korn.”

        Now, I mention this story not just because I really like children’s books, but because Henry’s love for his new dog Charley, and the way that they were “new together”, it’s really one of the ways we experience God.  And this is especially true when we’re young, or when we’ve been brought by the Spirit into a new closeness with God.  Think, yourself, of times of particular joy for you, recently or in the past.  Maybe when your kids or grandkids were born, or at the beginning of spring when all the flowers started blooming.  Doesn’t it feel that same way, that you and those things you loved, and God as well, all felt new together?  I think of the first day of my road trip from Georgia up here to Oregon with Helene.  We were delirious with joy, and each mile seemed new.  But I also think of the disciples in the Book of Acts on the day of Pentecost, when the tongues of flame settled above their heads, and they spoke in all the languages of the world and proclaimed the Good News, the Gospel, of Jesus Christ raised from the dead.  Everything is new in these moments, even Henry Korn’s old baby blanket, which became soft and midnight blue.  And they were new together.

        But over time, newness wears off.  Things become normal again.  Not even the saints live their full lives in the pure ecstasy of the newness of rebirth in the Spirit.  After a while, we go back to the work-a-day world, and not because God leaves us, but because we are called to bring God back into that work-a-day world.  We Christians are messengers, ambassadors, guides, who have seen the true light and wish to help others see it, experience it, and live it, too.  The Joy of God is not for us alone, but for us to give to others.

        But when this happens, when we come down from the summits of our experiences with God and go out into the world to do God’s work again, when this happens, God living with us might seem less like Henry and Charley and much more like Henry’s parents and Charley.  Dogs are fun for kids, sure, but parents end up doing all the work.  Dogs need to be walked, fed, potty trained, and brought to the vet when they’re sick.  I remember, as a kid, wondering why my own parents got frustrated with my dogs; weren’t dogs all fun and joy and beauty and wonder? 

        There are times for us Christians when God, or at the very least Christianity, can become something of a chore.  For God works deep into our lives, deep into the fabric, the warp and woof of our lives.  It’s great when God lifts our hearts to sing in the joy of the new spring of our souls, but, man, when God asks us to lay all things open before him, or to let parts of us (and, worst of all, parts of us that we might really like) die, when God says to love our enemies, to open our hearts even if it hurts, to love even if it means something like death on a cross – well, God begins to look much less like a puppy or a bright, sunny day and more like a hard-nosed boss who won’t stop nagging for more productivity.  As C.S. Lewis writes, we often want, not God the Father, but God the kindly Grandfather, who dotes on his grandkids and sits back to let them do what they want.

        Last week, I preached on the idea that the Bible isn’t a set of laws or rules that we need to follow, but that it is a book that we need to give our heart to and to love.  We enter into the world and the story of the Bible, and love it as a story, and doing so is what changes our lives and helps us grow closer to God in Christ.  And it’s the same with the Christian life.  If the Christian life were just a set of things to do, just a list of good deeds and best practices, then it wouldn’t mean much.  Because people, because the world, because life, isn’t just about best practices; life is about living, it’s about living to God and with God and in God.  The Good News of Jesus Christ isn’t the discovery of some new way to live, as if we uncovered some political system where true peace is possible, or some law code that explains and enacts justice perfectly.  The Good News of Jesus Christ is that all things, whatever they are, have the potential of rebirth baked into them.  That everything, from working in our garden to our old baby blankets to us broken, wayward humans, have the love of God deep down within them.  And not only that, but the Spirit of God himself is with us, to lift us through death and resurrection to a life fully renewed in love and hope.

        When God makes his home among us, then , it’s much less like getting a new puppy.  Or, well, perhaps it is, though it is God who brings us home, wrapped in his old blanket, which is soft and midnight blue.  It is God who brings us around the house to show us the light and the joy and the goodness in all the things.  It is God who is very, very careful not to slip in the snow, who shows us around the house saying, “This is home, my beloved”, and he says it again and again so that we know that we’re home.  And it is God who reminds us that part of our work is to go out into the cold, wet, rainy world and bring in others, so that we can bring them inside and show them that it is not just our home, but everyone’s home.  It is God’s home.