The Feast of St. Theodore of Tarsus

Published on by Tina Shippey Category: Feast Day, Meditation

St. Theodore of Tarsus
Archbishop of Canterbury, 690

The saint for today, September 19th, is Theodore of Tarsus, one of the earliest Archbishops of Canterbury.  St. Theodore could be considered the patron saint of late calls, as he was consecrated an archbishop and sent to England in 668, when he was about 66 years old.  He could also be the patron saint of keeping the peace between two groups that really didn’t like one another.  Much of his ministry in medieval England was trying to get folks to the table who did not want to talk.  Theodore helped prevent war between the two kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia by means of diplomacy, and he struggled to bring together the Celtic and Roman branches of the church in the British Isles.  Theodore even established a school in Canterbury that brought Greek and Latin learning together with the Celtic learning of the Isles.

This was tough work, but Theodore (it seems) was tireless in his ministry.  And we remember him not just because it’s interesting to think about an old man standing between two kings with their swords drawn (though this is certainly interesting), but because we, too, are called to bridge gaps and bring together people or groups that are otherwise at each other’s throats.  Christ reconciled us to God, and so we must show forth that same reconciliation in our own lives and in our own communities.  Christians, in many ways, are called to be diplomats, making peace  where we find strife.

May we bring that same peace and love to others that we ourselves have found in God.

Our readings for today are:

Psalm 34:9-14 or 112:1-9
2 Timothy 2:1-5, 10
Matthew 24:42-47

 

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for September 16th, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey Category: New Testament, Sermon

mural at the Hagia Sophia

Proper 19
17th Sunday after Pentecost
September 16th, 2018

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
Click here to access these readings

Jesus is so very good at asking the right questions. Did you ever notice this? Especially in Mark’s gospel, which we’ve been reading all this year, Jesus seems to ask more question than give answers. And these questions, at times, seem more illuminating than any right answer he could give.

Have you ever had a teacher like this? Or, not just a teacher, but someone in your life who was just so good at listening, and so quiet, so that when they did speak, you opened up immediately and listened? These sorts of people, at least in my experience, often asked questions rather than gave answers.

Once, while I was discerning my call to the priesthood, I was at a particularly confusing time. I had done a lot of thinking (and probably not enough praying) alone, and my thoughts had turned into a jumble. I couldn’t discern God’s voice from my own needs or wants or desires. I felt like a tangle of Christmas lights pulled from the attic: all wound about myself with no idea of how to begin.

And so I sought out a friend and laid it all before him. And how I laid it out! All my worry and anxiety came spilling out in one great mess, and the more I spoke, the more I worried that there was no way my friend could help. It was too tangled, too complicated, too interconnected for anyone (I feared) to see the end of it. And my friend listened calmly, nodding here or there, but never taking his eyes off me. And when I finally stopped to breathe, and of course really just sighed, knowing there was so much more to explain, my friend finally spoke, and all he asked was, “Tim, where do you see God in this?”

It seems an obvious question, and of course it is. But in that moment, that simple question cleared my confusion away, it made my skies clear again. With that question, my friend had shown me the beginning, where to start.

This is a “Jesus question”. Not that it’s a question about Jesus or that he quoted a question Jesus asked. But my friend’s question was a “Jesus question” because it pulled me down to the heart of what was going on and the heart of my confusion. This is the sort of question Jesus himself asks the disciples in our gospel reading this morning.

At first, though, he begins with a rather simple question: who do people say that I am? And the flood-gates open! Apparently this has been quite the topic of conversation! People say that Jesus is John the Baptist, or maybe Elijah, or maybe even one of the prophets. And I imagine that they gave all of these answers, and probably others, all at once, in one great jumble of sound. And this is pretty natural. For Jesus has been all over the place, casting out demons, healing the sick and the injured, raising the dead, and teaching with this strange authority he seems to get from no earthly source. People are wondering who this guy is. They know something big’s coming, but they don’t know what it’ll be, and just like us they’re snatching at guesses of what the future might hold. Like those Christmas lights, they know there’s light here, but they can’t figure out how to untangle it and figure it out.

And this is when Jesus asks his “Jesus question.” For he listens to all these guesses, takes it all in and ponders it, but then he asks, “But who do you say I am.” And this question, it shifts everything, it turns everything on its head. It says, sure, that’s the gossip about me, but who do you – you who’ve been walking with me and listening to me and talking with me, you who’ve broken bread with me, who I called to be with me day in and day out, through hardship and joy – who do you say I am?”

This is, I think, pretty much the climax of St. Mark’s gospel. This is the question, I think, that Mark not only wants us to Jesus asked but to hear Jesus asking us even now: who do you say that I am? For when we read the gospel and, really, the entire Bible, we’re not just reading a record of things that happened two thousand or more years ago. Mark didn’t write his gospel just so that we could have a chronicle of events in a man’s life. No, I think Mark wrote his gospel because he wanted to show us both Jesus’s life in the past and his continued life, in our lives even right now, and how Jesus is still asking us this question: who do you say that am I? And this question brings us to the ground floor of our relationship with Jesus and with God the Trinity.

For some of us, this question may come as a comfort, a small reminder that God is with us, even in the confusion. For others, it may come with a bit of a nudge, a reminder that we need to continue walking in the Way of Christ, to continue to nurture that relationship we have with Jesus. And it might come, like it came to St. Peter, as a reminder that we’ve grown a bit stagnant. For sometimes, like Peter, we have the right answer, but we don’t know the full meaning of that answer. For Peter’s right, Jesus is the Messiah, but Peter thinks that being the Messiah means quite a bit more (or quite a bit less) than undergoing great suffering, being rejected by all the church leaders, and killed. The right answer doesn’t always mean being correct.

But here is the grace of God, and to see it we have to take a peak beyond our readings. St. Peter’s right, but in the end he’s wrong, and is rebuked for it. Jesus even calls him “Satan.” And Peter might be forgiven for feeling a bit crushed and even falling into despair. But even if he does, he sticks with Jesus and he keeps listening. Perhaps he realizes through this that he’s not quite there, not quite sure just yet who this Jesus is. And so he keeps on with the man, continues to follow his teacher. And in the next chapter, just a few short verses beyond our gospel reading today, it is Peter, along with James and John, who are brought to the mountaintop, and it is to them, who struggle and are lost and give the right wrong answers, it is to these wayward people who see Christ transfigured before them. And so we must remember that, just because we are lost, we are never without God.

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for September 9th, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey Category: Old Testament, Sermon

The Trinity, or The Man in Sapphire Blue, Hildegard of Bingen, c. 1151

Proper 18
16th Sunday after Pentecost
September 9th, 2018

Isaiah35:4-7a
Psalm 146
James 2:1-17
Mark 7:24-37
Click here to access these readings

Have you ever seen a miracle?  A real miracle, not just when it snows on Christmas, or you realize you still have ice cream in the fridge even though you thought you ate it all already.  Those are great things, but I’m talking about miracles, real, true, honest to God miracles.  Have you ever seen one?

Isaiah has, it seems, at least in a vision or a dream.  He writes about them in our Old Testament reading this morning.  Look at it again.  I’ll start at the end of verse 4: “’He [meaning God] will come and save you.’  Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for you.  For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”

This is some amazing stuff.  And look closely, for it’s even more amazing than at first glance.  “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped”; these are miracles indeed, but the next are even greater miracles: the lame will not only get up and walk, but they’ll leap like deer!  And the tongue of the speechless will not only speak, but they’ll sing, and not just the blues or a dirge, but they’ll sing with joy!  And it gets better: out there in the wilderness, out in the desert, waters shall suddenly burst forth; and not just a few drops, but enough to fill streams.  And that sand will become a pool; and not just a pool that will dry up but that ground that is thirsty, that yearns for water, that’s whole being is leaning in hope for drink, that same ground will become a spring, and not just a spring but many springs of water.  In each picture, things get better and better and better.

This is some set of miracles Isaiah has seen; it’s some work of God!  But, I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, there’s a little part of us that wonders, “Yeah, but does stuff like this really happen?  Isn’t this just a metaphor about God’s love?”  We certainly pray for miracles: we pray for the healing of our friends or family who are sick, or we pray for the safety of our loved ones, or the rescue of the lost.  We pray that everything will turn out right, and that they’ll get better, that the medicine will work this time, that this new procedure will see them through.

And sometimes miracles do happen, and sometimes prayers heal.  But sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes accidents happen, and people don’t wake up, or the lost stay lost, or our loved ones, who are so joyful and happy and full of life, they fall, and slip away, and die.  And in those moments, it’s easy to feel a little disappointed.  Many of us slip into doubt.  We may feel like we’re not praying hard enough, or praying correctly, or that maybe if we weren’t such horrible sinners, our prayers might work a bit better.  A friend of mine once said, “Yeah sure, Jesus answers prayers.  He just doesn’t answer mine.”

But Jesus says, he always says, “Listen!  Listen!”  Grief and sorrow plug up our ears and stuff up our eyes, but when we look and listen not just to what we hope for but what God is already doing in the world, we see miracles all around us.  For, as John Rottman writes, “even when God does not work a miracle of physical healing, Jesus always heals his children when they come to him.  Sometimes he steadily brings them into closer and deeper relationship with him, giving contentment and peace even in the face of death. Sometimes he breaks the power of addiction and evil in their lives.  Sometimes he heals emotional wounds.  Even when he allows them to die, they are not beyond his healing power.  Death ushers them into the great and final healing of those who go to be with Christ.  When his children ask, he never turns them away at the door.  Jesus never fails to give his children the bread of his healing power.”

I find this quote very powerful.  People in our culture are always looking for reasons to doubt God, and we need to be, as Christians, the voice in their ears that reminds them, “Listen, listen!  God is at work healing even now, even at this very moment.  It might not always look like great flashes of light or earthquakes, but even still God’s life is in the world drawing all things to him.  Miracles are all around us, for life and love are poured into this world with reckless abandon; like a toddler trying to fill a cup with milk, the cup of this world runneth over.

I’ll end this sermon today with a story: during my time one summer as a hospital chaplain, I spent a lot of time with people who were facing death, or at least a rather serious operation.  Often people were worried, or scared, or just plain lonely for an ear, so I did a lot of sitting, listening to life stories, holding hands, and praying.

One couple, though, was different.  I saw on the patient’s chart that he, the husband, had just signed papers to be transferred to hospice.  He was going to die, and he knew it.  I took the elevator up to the room, expecting the man and his wife to be in tears.  But when I knocked and opened the door, I found something different.  The air in the room, it was light.  Not lit up by the sun or the overhead lights, but light, not heavy.  It was easy to breathe.  And the couple sat – the man in the bed, the wife on a chair next time him – with such ease, such grace.  And I sat down with them, we talked, and they told me their story.  And in the conversation, I asked, “Are you afraid?”  And both of them shook their heads, and the man said, “We’ve been Christians all our lives.  We’ve struggled and prayed and walked with Christ.  I’m ready to go to God.”  And I think for him, for this man, it was as if the waters broke forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert, that the burning sand become for him a pool, and his thirsty ground springs of water.  And I know this to be true, for he became a spring of water for me.  He was, I believe, a miracle of God.

 

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for September 2nd, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey Category: Epistle, New Testament, Old Testament, Psalm, Sermon

Detail of a page from the Book of Kells (c. 800)

Proper 17
15th Sunday after Pentecost
September 2nd, 2018

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Click here to access these readings.

Sometimes our lectionary works really well.  Sometimes we come to church, hear the readings, and you can see so easily how they connect.  Sometimes, though, that’s not the case, and the readings seem like a Broadway play I once saw; it was a variety play, with all these different pieces with different songs and different sets and costumes.  But when I saw it I didn’t know it was a variety play; I thought there was a story.  And so with each new scene I was scratching my head, thinking, “What in the world is this about?”  I did my best to create some semblance of a plot, and, for a while, I had one, and it was pretty compelling; but then at intermission, when I told my dad all of this, he just shook his head.  “There’s no plot, Tim,” he said.  “It’s just disconnected pieces.  That’s part of the fun.”  Sometimes the lectionary selections are like that.  Sometimes life is like that.

But not today, not this morning.  This morning the lectionary works well.  All the readings fit together.  The Bible, you see, is full of many different themes: there’s hope, perseverance, dedication, struggle, even sorrow and frustration, but so too death and resurrection.  All these themes run through the Bible, criss-crossing back and forth, weaving in and out of one another.  And you can see these themes in some of the study Bibles around.  John had one the other day, and in the margin on all the pages are little references to other passages in the Bible that are quoted, or mentioned, or referenced.  Medieval artists tried to represent this tapestry-like nature of the Bible in the margins of their manuscripts, with all their mingled designs of animals, people, and geometric shapes.  One job of the lectionary, and one of our jobs when we study the Bible inside or outside of church, is to take one of these pieces or threads and pull it out, look at it, and figure out how God is speaking a word to us in all these different parts of the Bible.

And this morning’s theme is about…well, it’s about freedom.  And that might seem strange.  For all these readings, in a way, are about rules and laws, what to do and what not to do.  In Deuteronomy, we hear of statutes and ordinances.  In the Psalm, we hear about keeping your word and swearing to do no wrong: “Whoever does these things, [these rules], shall never be overthrown.”  In the letter of St. James, we hear of more things to do, and even in our gospel, we hear of Jesus Christ talking about practices, rules, and defilement.  But even so, I believe all these readings are about freedom.

And what is freedom?  Well, my atheist friends would say that freedom is the ability to do anything you want, to choose your own fate.  They chafe at God because they don’t want someone telling them what to do, how to live, and what is good and what’s bad.  They want the freedom from that sort of authority figure.  I don’t agree with their image of God, but even so: they want a freedom from something.

Or perhaps freedom is like when teenagers go off to college.  Now, they’re not only (supposedly) free from something (free from parents, they way things have been, etc.), but free to do things.  They’re free to stay up however late they want, go to whatever parties they want, and goof off, as they want.  And even if they choose not to goof off, and they sit and study, that is a choice they are free to make.

Now, these are certainly two different types of freedom.  But the freedom that Jesus is talking about, and the freedom that we encounter in these readings this morning, is a little different.  Elsewhere, Jesus said, “you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32).  And we may rightly wonder, like those who were around him, what is this freedom that Jesus is talking about?  And in Psalm 119, we hear “I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought your precepts.”  And we may question, “How am I free if I am bound by precepts, bound by laws?”  We get closer to what I’m talking about in 2 Timothy.  Here we hear, “for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7).  For where the spirit is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17), and that spirit is of power, and love, and self-discipline.

This freedom we hear of in the Bible is not just a freedom from something, or a freedom to do something, but a freedom in something.  Think, for a moment, of baseball.  There are rules, certainly: After three outs, the teams switch being at bat or in the field.  When running to a base, you have to stay in the narrow, little baseline.  And these rules are pretty strict.  But when you’re playing the game, those rules fade into the background.  Not that they disappear, but that they become the very foundation of the game, the ground you walk on and the air you breathe.  And something happens when you “play by the rules”, or, rather, when you’re “in” the game.  You hear athletes talk about it every now and again, for there’s a glory in the game, of breathing the air of the rules of baseball that is a freedom.  There is a glory in the crack of the bat, in the lights, in the smell of the glove, even in the dust that you kick up.  And this glory, this freedom, isn’t from something, or the ability to do something; it’s a freedom in baseball, a freedom in and through and up beyond and with the game that jostles the heart from its slumber and makes it alive again.

This is the sort of freedom that Jesus and the Bible are talking about.  For Jesus didn’t come just to give us stuff to do so that we wouldn’t goof off all the time.  Jesus came to save us from sin and death, not so that we could get back to the status quo.  No, for Jesus freed us to something, to a life in God, to a life lived along a path of freedom.  And this freedom may look at first like a lot of rules, a lot of words that so often can seem empty and rote, a lot of prayers we really don’t want to say so early in the morning or so late at night.  But when we enter into them, when we live those prayers, and these liturgies, when we walk up to the communion rail not thinking about doing everything right but because we love Jesus and here is a way to meet him, when we see that the water in this font isn’t just liquid but the very light of salvation, then…then we see that this life is a holy life.  We see that this life is a good life.  And that little path, that narrow gate, opens up to a great landscape, burgeoning with life and love.  This is the path that Christ calls us to live; this is the freedom that that path calls us to.

 

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for August 26th

Published on by Tina Shippey Category: New Testament, Sermon

Proper 16
14th Sunday of Pentecost
August 26th, 2018

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Psalm 34:15-22
Ephesians6:10-20
John 6:59-69
Click here to access these readings

There’s a book I’ve always loved called Sirens of Titan, by an author named Kurt Vonnegut.  Now, Vonnegut writes a lot of satire, and I read the book back in high school when I was all nice and innocent, so maybe I missed the point, but, I’ve always thought Sirens of Titan to be a really beautiful book.  It’s a good old sci-fi story, about space travel and different worlds, but at the center are these two characters, a man and a woman.  And at the beginning of the book, they’re told that they will fall in love with one another.  And they are disgusted with the idea.  One of them is this rough and tumble kind of guy, and the other is a woman of high society.  They couldn’t be more different, they know their differences, and they can’t fathom that they would ever love each other.

But, you know, something changes throughout the story.  Something changes – slowly -about these two characters. They go through a lot as they’re traveling to different worlds.  They encounter different creatures and fantastic sights that are more than they could have ever imagined.  And these sights, these experiences chip away at them, dig into them, and change them.  Not all at once, but ever so slowly, so that when the two finally meet again at the end, they do fall in love.  It’s not an epic love, not some great romantic love with sweeping music like in Hollywood.  But it’s a gentle, steady, even love, a sort of love that you, or at least I, could believe in.

Now, we don’t hear much about this sort of love in our gospel reading this morning – at least, not yet.  First we hear of its opposite..  One of my commentary books says that this is a pretty anticlimactic ending to all this talk of bread and blood and life – but I think it’s more of a tragedy.  Now, this is one of the central moments of John’s gospel.  Here, Jesus reveals something very important about himself, that he is that bread that came down from heaven.  He reveals that he is the bread of life, that his flesh and blood are the salvation of the world.  This is a revelation much like the transfiguration, where we see God’s glory and God’s hope for this world shining through the cracks, when we can catch a glimpse of God’s love and joy.

And we Christians, two thousand years after it happened, love this scene.  We read it and think of Christ’s presence in our lives.  We hear it, and we think of how Christ enriches us, nurtures us, saves us, when all is darkness.  We hear in these readings a hint of the Eucharist, the center of our worship here every Sunday, that great feast to which we are called and which is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

But not folks in Jesus’s day.  When they heard it, they shook their heads and said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”  They heard this message that fills us with hope, and they turn back and no longer went about with him.”  And this isn’t because they were confused, or stumped, or that this teaching wasn’t really for them.  They didn’t come to this difficult teaching as we might come to learning Biblical Greek, or hiking the Comida de Santiago, things that might take a great deal of effort but which we know we can accomplish with a bit of willpower and prayer.  No, these disciples turn back and no longer went along with him.  This is it for them.  They’re through.

We should not, perhaps, be too hard on these men and women.  Folks of Jesus’s day might have been taken aback with the idea of eating human flesh and drinking blood.  And we should be, too, in a way.  There’s a certain audacity to Jesus’s words here.  He’s trying to break down people’s assumptions, and he’s trying to get inside their hearts, which always takes a bit of pushing – and some people just don’t like that.  They think he’s messing with tradition too much, messing with the Law, when what Jesus is really trying to do is show them the beating heart of that same tradition and that same Law.  And, in the end, they see Jesus as just another wandering teacher, just another human being, not the Son of God.  Who is he, they wonder, to make such fantastic claims?  And so they hear this teaching, and turn back.

In the gospels, Jesus faces some rather dark times.  After his baptism, he is driven out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  In the garden of Gethsemane, he falls to the ground and prays, “Lord, take this cup from me; but not my will, but yours.”  That’s a tough prayer.  And, of course, there is his trial, the road to Calvary, and the bloody crucifixion.  Jesus was no stranger to darkness.

And here we find him in similar darkness: that moment when he reveals part of his being is the moment, and the reason, that Jesus is abandoned.  He’s left alone because of who he is.  And when the dust settles, and the twelve disciples are all that’s left, you can almost hear the pain in his voice when he asks, “Do you also wish to go away?”

And Peter’s response to Jesus is important, for it shows in him a great love.  He says, “Lord, we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  Now these short few words – “come to believe” – they are important here.  There’s a story to those words; there’s a history to them.  There are hard, long days beneath the sun in those words, and there are long nights awake struggling with Jesus’s words, his ministry, and with his very being.  Peter’s words aren’t from someone with just some passing understanding of Jesus, but from someone who has walked continually with Jesus, day in and day out, whose ear was always open and eager, even if he did not understand fully.  They come from a man who pondered those words, wrestled with them, leaned his whole being into them to see not just what they meant, but the greater reality of hope and love that they lead to.  These are tired words, but they are strong words as well.

And isn’t this how it is in our own lives with Christ?  Sometimes we have flashes of insight, surely, what people call “eureka” or “ah ha!” moments.  Sometimes God gives us sight and we take in, in one great draught, the light of God.  But more often, I think, at least with me, we approach God in steps.  We walk with God, pray with him, talk with him, go to him in our frustrations, our anger, our sorrows, and each time we find that we’re leaning on God more and more.  Our faith is something we “come to”, something we gather from our experiences of God on the road of life.  And eventually, hopefully, it is also something we even “know” from trusting God more and more.  Our life in Christ, and our trust in him, is something that gets deeper and deeper each and every day, until that last day when we are finally welcomed home.