Freedom To Be Available

Perfection Is Overrated: Joyous Lives Lead to Generous Service

2011-06-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached on Sunday, June 5, 2011 at Trinity Church, Reno, Nevada

“Be one as we are one”. Is the Gospel writer serious? Do these words really mean that we are we to live with one another as God lives with Jesus and the Holy Spirit in their Trinitarian love? Be one as we are one. Augustine of Hippo taught that we are to become what we touch. Are we really to become what we worship as the Body of Christ? Such an interpretation leads to idolatry.

It is thoroughly amazing to me how long this literal interpretation of today’s Gospel has been sustained through the centuries by Christian churches. This interpretation has been sustained by lofty theology. A short sermon is not the time to explore the theological specifics. The words, “Be one, as we are one” sets us up for impossible possibilities and constant disappointment.

Today’s scriptural text introduces an interpretative conflict between perfection that places our primary focus on ourselves versus shifting our focus to the needs of others through service. The conflict emerges from these two different ways of reading today’s Gospel.

Let us not miss the other words of today’s Gospel. The Gospel also says that as Jesus returns to God, we remain. The Gospel just says that we remain, but if we follow the story we are left to be Christ’s witnesses of the glory of resurrection. We are authorized to be ministers of Easter joy in the world.

“Be one as we are one”, this idyllic relationship also surfaces in other unexpected and even unrecognized ways. Too often in spiritual direction or other pastoral counseling meetings I hear good people express their self-doubts about their adequacy. Good people feel so less than perfect that they cannot even possibly think about service or ministry. Good people who are performing wonderful ministries are even caught up in this dilemma of faith, as they doubt themselves.

Several years ago I was having an early morning breakfast with my friend John. John asked if I would help him reflect on the ministry that God might be calling him. John and I had been friends for some time through All Saints Church in Pasadena, but still I did not know much about his personal life. He spent a good bit of time telling me about the routine nature of his work, his self-doubts and struggles living the joy he feels on Sunday.

Much of what he shared with me I had known, but I knew little about his family life. He told me that when he was in Africa many years ago that he adopted two children, each with severe handicaps. He went on to tell me about the cost of medical care, the racism his children experienced in the US and his struggles to provide adequate care.

Our time over breakfast passed and we both had to get to work. Before we said good-bye to each other, I asked my friend, do you not see your passionate vision to adopt and humble commitment to care as ministry. My friend is a well-educated man with a very important job, but somehow he did not see his life as ministry.

Through the messiness of all his struggles John did not see the way God had empowered him with special gifts, graces and blessings to be a father for special needs children. I reframed for John his self-doubts and lack of purpose into a richly, blessed, courageous and generous life. He was doing it, he just did not recognize it nor was he able to name it.

Have you ever felt like John? Do you see the connection between the way you feel fed by this congregation’s weekly worship on Sunday and the way you feed others through your life and work during the week? Theology makes a difference for the answers you have to these questions.

We are not in the world to suffer, but rather to flourish. God wants us to flourish! As Episcopalians we have been freed up from the pursuit of perfection. The Episcopal Church’s roots in its Anglican history through the Church of England are quite different than many other historical Christian churches. The English reformers who established the Church of England sought to change the Roman Catholic understanding of the church as perfect and unstained. Churches distracted by perfection are focused on perfect unity. Individuals are distracted by their desires to be perfect.

John Jewel one of earliest English reformers was so passionate on this point that he wrote a long essay on the broadness of the church not only with space for heretics but also for the papists. In Jewel’s context it was a generous accommodation to include papists. In those days much like today, religious conflicts were over the bounds of God’s love. The English reformers aspired to create a church that was as generously open as God’s heart.

It is our Anglican tradition as Episcopalians to appreciate that as baptized persons and as a church we are not called to perfection. Spiritually mature people resist the anxieties associated with perfection. The pursuit of perfection serves as a scrupulous distraction to our baptismal vocations. The pursuit of perfection isolates us and keeps us self-centered on our own needs rather than on the needs of others.

Rather than perfection, The Episcopal Church is called to humility and passionate service. Humility is simply about listening. When we exercise humility we step back from our exclusively self-centered desires in order to listen. Passionate people are energized by a compelling vision. Passionate people press forward with their vision.

It is very easy for humble and passionate people to be in conflict or worse to ignore each other. In our Anglican traditions these back and forth moves happen simultaneously. As a result our conversations are not always comfortable, but they are rich. There is a necessary tension between humility and passion. We are called to humbly listen and passionately move forward. These actions are not sequential, but rather simultaneous.

What holds humility and passion in creative tension is our commitment to stay in relationship with one another. Staying in relationship with one another is an ancient Anglican practice that goes back to the earliest English reformers. Several years ago after the controversy over Gene Robinson’s election and consecration as a bishop, Archbishop Rowan Williams called for a worldwide listening process.

The purpose of the listening process was for opposing sides and positions around the world to listen to one another. Unfortunately through the listening process and the more recent Anglican covenant being discussed by the churches of the Anglican Communion a notion of consensus has crept in. Consensus and unity as forms of perfection are wonderful aspirations, but they are not necessities of our Anglican tradition.

We have a far greater challenge as Episcopal Anglicans as we are called to stay in relationship and conversation with those with whom we disagree. In this way we have to resist common perfectionist expectations that listening necessarily leads to the achievement of common ground. Listening necessarily leads to reconciliation. Listening necessarily leads to unity.

Anglican relationships honor listening and passionate urgency without false correction that leads to perfect unity. False corrections are anxious efforts to force premature unity that we are not prepared to live into. As Episcopalians in an Anglican tradition we have been freed up from all of this pious individual and corporate baggage associated with the pursuit of all kinds of perfection. We have been given the gift of this freedom so that we may dedicate all of our energies to living lives of generous service. What matters the most is not what happens between these four walls of this church building, but the difference we each make in the world.

I love what we do here at Trinity Church. We are blessed with great liturgy, beautiful music, compassionate pastoral care, people with good humor and so much more; but it all really has one purpose. The purpose is for all of us to be sent forth into generous service. Service goes well beyond church sponsored activities and ministries. The primary thrust of our service is the way we live our lives between Sundays. Service is about the choices and decisions we make every day.

Episcopal laypersons and clergy freed from the worries and anxieties of perfection are empowered to heal the world through their choices, values and commitments. My friend John adopted two handicapped children, but he did not recognize his choice and commitment as his vocation, call and primary service.

Do we connect the good we have do as ministry?

If you see yourself in the story of my friend John or wonder about your value between Sundays, then I have a challenge for you. I invite you to choose a life freed from crippling self-doubts or perfectionist tendencies. Freed of perfectionist self-doubts I assure you that you will be freed up for generous service to live and love as Christ’s witnesses.

The good news of today’s Gospel as we anticipate the gift of the Holy Spirit is that we have been authorized for generous service. The Spirit of Pentecost will equip us for bold and generous service.

Simply remember Jesus’ other words, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.”

The Journey: From Emmaus Piety to Emmaus Party

2011-05-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

Sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Joseph Duggan at Trinity Church, Reno, Nevada on Sunday, May 9, 2011. Gospel: Luke 24: 13-35

If I were to title my sermon I would want to call it, “The Journey From Emmaus Piety to Emmaus Party”. The proposed sermon title sets the bar very high. Just to manage your expectations I may not be able to get you all the way there. As I said to friends recently I think the most frivolous thing I have ever done in my whole life was watch the Royal Wedding live from 1am to 5am, drink black tea, eat cream topped English scones and have a splash of scotch at 3am! I readily admit that I missed the rituals of staying up all night as a teen-ager!

Yet as we listened to the glorious music from Westminster coupled with daylong parties I had a vision of the spirit of Jesus’ hospitality at Cana and Emmaus. To really catch Jesus’ party spirit requires unpacking the piety that has become associated with the Emmaus story. After all the Emmaus story is simply a story about the journey of two disciples and the way they came to recognize Jesus. The Royal Wedding ironically reminded me that piety and party sometimes coexist. I think piety and party coexisted for Jesus and alas we have only remembered the piety.

It is understandable the way that the Emmaus story so easily leads to literal interpretations. As a former Roman Catholic I remember the way the Emmaus story was used as a proof text to substantiate and legitimize the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that Holy Communion is not merely a reminder of Jesus’ presence long ago, but rather the actual fleshy body and blood of the living Christ.

In this way of reading the Emmaus story the exclusive focus is on seeing Jesus in the breaking of the bread. All liturgical Christians such as Episcopalians can certainly resonate with the power of Holy Communion, though we have different beliefs than Roman Catholics. Holy Communion is certainly one of the very special ways liturgical Christians recognize Jesus.

However, if we are not careful we can read the Emmaus text in an exclusively literal way such that we only see Jesus in the breaking of the bread. I think the Emmaus story invites us to recognize Jesus in not just the breaking of the bread as in the Eucharist and Holy Communion but also in the simplicity of two friends walking on a path from one place to another as the disciples were on their way to Emmaus. The disciples’ hearts were burning before they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

The Emmaus story like last week’s doubting Thomas story can be read in a kind of an I have gotcha tone of criticizing the way the disciples missed recognition of Jesus in their midst. Such a reading leads to a missed opportunity to connect with Jesus in new and different ways than through traditional piety. The experience of the A Lot of Good Men has taught many men in this congregation that out of the simplicity and the ordinariness of sharing a meal we are over and over surprised by what we see in each other and the new ways we see life in community as members of Trinity Church.

I think the point of the Emmaus story is to recognize Jesus’ presence in every aspect of our lives together and apart. Sometimes though if we are not careful the Eucharistic ritual and celebration of Holy Communion can too easily become the only place that we recognize Jesus. When we fall into this trap then Holy Communion becomes an idol rather than the blessed gift of God’s abundance that leads to more joy filled lives.

Like the miracle at Cana where Jesus made more wine for all to drink, similarly the miracle of Emmaus is that we enjoy the abundant presence of Jesus. Sometimes though like the disciples were distracted, other people, institutions or even our selves will impede our recognition of Jesus’ abundant presence in our lives.

When my mom was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, she was denied Holy Communion by a Roman Catholic priest who felt she was no longer able to recognize the presence of Jesus in Holy Communion. Like children who cannot receive the age of reason this priest followed the same logic at end of life. On her behalf I wrote to the Archbishop of New York and reminded him of the Emmaus story and implored him to have a priest bring Holy Communion to my mom.

The Archbishop was willing to make an exception, in what he described in a letter to me, as a ministerial accommodation for my mother. The Archbishop also instructed me that I should not make his accommodation public for fear that his gesture would give scandal to the faithful. Shortly after our correspondence my mother received Holy Communion.

Now as I look back on those days through my Protestant eyes I smile as I see that my mom experienced the deeper meaning of the Emmaus story even in her end stage Alzheimer’s. By the way at my mom’s funeral many spoke of the way she loved to have parties and at the same time she was a very religious woman.

No doubt it is why throughout her 11-year journey of Alzheimer’s she had experienced the abundant gift of recognizing Jesus in many forms beyond the Holy Communion distributed and so narrowly controlled by her beloved church. In the last three years of her life my mom laid in a nursing home bed and spent most of her day just staring at a fifty-year old crucifix on the wall that hung in every home my parents shared since their wedding day.

My Mom’s loving steady gaze gave her sons and daughters every indication that she recognized Jesus in the form of that cherished crucifix. Most of all as my mom forgot all of her children’s names and even lost the power of speech, she seem to be comforted by just sitting with us and holding our hands. I am confident in those last years that my mom recognized Jesus’ presence and warmth through holding her sons’ and daughters’ hands.

Like other marginalized people the person who suffers from Alzheimer’s has often been abandoned by their body, mind and even most friends and sometimes by even family. Jesus remains and continues to be recognized by the person with Alzheimer’s who often looks to us as just an empty shell of their former selves. As Jesus makes himself available to be recognized he reverences us even in our diminished humanity.

I tell you this story not just to say that we have the privilege to recognize Jesus even in end stage Alzheimer’s, but to show the way Jesus stays present to us beyond every impediment to our visible recognition. Jesus made a meal for the disciples for he knew in sharing a festive meal his disciples would recognize him. Jesus’ gesture was a gesture of friendship and joyful celebration. If we read the Emmaus story as only one of Holy Communion we will miss the communion also found in and through life’s ordinary celebrations at our many tables.
I don’t think that the Emmaus story is a proof text for Eucharist or Holy Communion. The Emmaus story simply offers us the occasion to celebrate the abundant presence of Jesus. The call of Emmaus is to live with open eyes and generous hearts that recognize Jesus. Both the doubting Thomas and Emmaus stories are about Jesus’ generous availability to us.

Jesus let Thomas touch his wounds and took the time for the disciples at Emmaus to recognize him. Likewise the Emmaus story calls us to live with the same kind of generosity that Jesus shows us by taking the time to let others recognize who we are.

The reason A Lot of Good Men have met for two years without an agenda of any kind is to remove the pious clutter that sometimes otherwise impedes our availability to be surprised like the disciples were at Emmaus by the presence of their friend Jesus.

As we all make an effort to remove all the unnecessary clutter from our lives we will be increasingly surprised to see that Jesus had been with us all along in forms most familiar to us. Let us share this Good News and the miracle at Emmaus with all we meet. The miracle of Emmaus has the potential to transform the world into joyous people who celebrate life just as Jesus did at Cana and at Emmaus. Than in this way our piety will lead to party and not end in idle/idol worship without joyful transformation.

"None of Us Are Blind, Are We?"

2011-04-03T14:40:00.001-07:00

Trinity Church, Reno, Nevada

Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A)

John 9:1-41

Few of us will ever be literally blind. How then do we make sense of this Gospel and make it work for our spiritual development and hear the Good News? One way is to see the mud that Jesus rubs in the man’s eyes as our own dirt. How might the mud and dirt of our lives let us see? As we proceed, it will be helpful to recall the line, “remove the plank from your own eye before you attempt to remove the speck from another.”

In today’s Gospel Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind”. For years I read this Gospel and saw blindness as the struggle or curse and sight as the gift or blessing. It is a bit murkier than this stark simplistic contrast between good and bad. I now see that blindness can also be a gift and sight, particularly self-righteous sight a curse. The disarming invitation of today’s Gospel is our free choice to be blind for a purpose.

To choose blindness we must be willing to be judged. Might we like Jesus be willing to say that we have come into the world for judgment so that others may see? Judgment in this sense is our willingness to put our faith on the line. It is so much easier to remain silent.

I remember several years ago being with a friend at dinner. He told a racist joke. I said nothing. In my head I was trying to figure out what to say, how to say it, if I had the right to say anything, could I say it charitably or would I just make matters worse. After the joke I probably did not hear a thing my friend said all night as I was trying to figure out what to say. I have often wondered how might I have acted differently. I have judged my silence as complicit in the act of telling the joke as I let it stand unchallenged.

Recently I was with Phil, another friend who is a shopkeeper. Phil was telling me a story of a man we will call Sam who had worked for him. In the first few days of his employment Sam would make very racist remarks about people as they passed the shop. A pregnant woman of color passed and Sam said one bullet is all it would take to get rid of those two.

Each day Sam mouthed off another shocking racist remark about people as they passed by Phil’s store. When Phil had heard enough, he said, “Get out of here, you are fired!” Phil told Sam that he was offended by his beliefs and that his customers deserved better. The two parted ways. I was so impressed with Phil’s actions. I immediately thought wow Phil is a much better man than I am. I was silent when a racist joke was told. Phil spoke up and he was willing to be judged.

A few minutes later, Phil said to me, “Say what do you think of all these crazy Muslims who want to build mosques in our country?” “Don’t you think we should make building mosques in America a criminal act?” The shift in Phil’s tone convinced me that he was pulling my leg. I thought he was mocking himself and other types of hypocrisy. I cautiously laughed. Phil was serious.

Somehow Phil could not see the connection between his stance against Muslims and Sam’s stance against people of color. My example this morning is racism, but who among us has not been inconsistent in some way when it comes to consistent living out of our values? Even more so who among us consistently lives in the way Jesus taught that embraces all humanity as beloved?

Phil’s words, “don’t you think, don’t you agree” brought me up short.
Again, I had a choice to be silent. This time I chose otherwise. I told Phil I disagreed with him. I said you know there is understandably alot of fear in this country after 9/11. I fully agree that we need to hold those who took those terrible actions accountable and bring them to justice. However, it is not all right to make all Muslims into terrorists.

I told Phil that as informed citizens we have the responsibility to learn about Islam. We need enough education on Islam to be able to discern who are the Muslims who follow the faith of Islam and those Muslims who interpret the Quran for their self-righteous political aims. Without specific knowledge of Islam it is far too easy to say there is no such thing as a good Muslim and refuse their right to worship in a mosque.

Phil was silent. He never remarked if he agreed or disagreed with me. He quickly changed the topic of our conversation. I self-righteously wanted to make the connection for Phil between Sam and himself, but that seem to be a bit harsher than was necessary. Phil like all of us is flawed with his blatant inconsistencies. He clearly was blind to his own inability to see in accordance with his own stated values.

Initially I was awestruck by Phil’s inconsistency. Later that evening I felt empathy for Phil. Days later I was more empathetic with myself. OK this time I was not silent, but I still felt like I had not said enough. Was my discretion polite or simply my lack of willingness to be judged by my faith? Should I have been more dramatic as Phil in his correction of Sam?

To speak up and charitably correct another is very messy work. I still do not feel thoroughly equipped to challenge others. As I continue to develop skill in the charitable correction of others, my encounter with Phil opened up an even deeper set of questions. Like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel I know where I see and even where and under what conditions I have the courage to speak. Like the Pharisees my blindness terrifies me. The space between terror over my blindness and the Pharisees self-righteous determination of sight is a very short distance. To work against our self-righteous sight it takes courage and enormous grace to ask, where we are inconsistent and act like hypocrites?

Hypocrite is a derogatory term. We don’t go around calling each other hypocrites. Hypocrite is not in our common parlance. The term may make you uncomfortable. So pick a different term. How about vulnerable or humble or fallible? My point is that we all have been inconsistent at one time or another. We are fallible. None of us live like Jesus yet!

The question is do we really want to know. I think we each face the same temptation that the Pharisees did when they said to Jesus, “surely we are not blind, are we?” If we do wish to know, then the Pharisees story may be an occasion to see our blindness in the various forms it takes. Racism is only one of an infinite number of ways we can be blind. It is our Pharisaic refusal to recognize our blindness that keeps us firmly planted in self-righteous patterns that harm right relation with other people.

Self-righteousness lets our energy be invested in being better than another rather than in our kinship with others. On Wednesday evening this past week Stefani and I heard Fr. Greg Boyle speak. Fr. Boyle is a Jesuit priest and founder of an anti-gang prevention center in Los Angeles. For 90 minutes he told one story after another of redemption.

Fr. Boyle said that by giving to one another we do not just fill needs, but we have an opportunity to see ourselves in another. It is seeing ourselves in the temptations and weaknesses of others that we develop empathy and kinship with each other. Fr. Boyle said that time and time again he has witnessed hardened gang enemies work together and become friends.

We like these gang members do this through our willingness to claim our blindness as the first step towards true sight. Do we have the courage to be led through our blindness through all the muck and mud of our lives so as to be led into a place of Christ-like sight? The Good News is if we say yes, then we may have the privilege to experience the freedom of true sight. True sight frees us up from all our self-righteous petty distractions. True sight turns our attention away from our outrage and condemnation of others and produces a space so we see our own blindness. True sight in this sense leads to non-violent communities where we cherish each other and share communion with God.

Restoring Integrity to the Words: "Do Not Worry"

2011-02-28T11:28:00.001-08:00

Trinity Church, Reno, Nevada

Eight Sunday after Epiphany
Is 49:8-16a
Psalm 131
I Cor 4:1-5
Mt. 6:24-34

In the Gospel today, Jesus says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink.” Initially I admit that these words are of a little comfort to me. As you know through my new monthly column in the Trinity newsletter I do worry a lot about what I am to eat and drink. As fun as those little restaurant pieces are to write, a literal reading of today’s Gospel risks the loss of a more provocative message. The Good News of today’s Gospel is that God will provide for our most basic needs so that we are free to unreservedly live into the fullness of God’s mission. Jesus knows however that our availability for God’s mission has been diminished due to the way our trust has been scarred by broken human relationships.

The question Jesus asks each of us today is meant to invoke indifference to our most basic human needs. Common definitions of indifference suggest postures of not caring about something. Obviously then not caring is utterly irresponsible and we ought to reject this Gospel as unhelpful to our contemporary human condition. (End of sermon) However, not caring is very different from when we act out of complete trust. Jesus invites us today into this kind of radical trust when we do not even care what it is we will eat. Holy indifference means that we live absolutely convinced that God provides for our needs.

When we live this way then all of our energy is available to be invested as Paul says in the first Corinthians reading, as “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries”. I have always associated stewardship with prudent preservation of resources not with preservation of God’s mysteries. When I think about stewardship as preservation of scarce resources that seems without fail to increase my anxieties about what I am to eat. The Gospel challenges us to redirect our worries about from what we are to eat to God’s mysteries.

We miss a deeper message behind these readings if we interpret mysteries as some lofty way of thinking theologically or even philosophically about God. The mystery is not exclusively about God as if God was some statue in a museum that draws our idle worship. The Isaiah reading beautifully focuses our attention “I have inscribed you on the palm of my hands”.

The words that precede these state “Can a woman forget her nursing child?” The Psalmist words were “But I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast; my soul is quieted within me.” The mystery we are called to preserve is this sacred trust between God as nursing mother and all humanity.

In this way today’s Gospel attempts to call us back from the chronic loss of trust that we all suffer from through our broken human relationships. When we lack confidence in God and fail to trust God’s fulfillment of our most basic needs then we become anxious and cherish that, which does not nurture us. To be a steward who “preserves God’s mysteries” is the work we all do through our efforts to preserve the honor and dignity of every person. When we act out of our abundance and trust that God will care for our needs then we serve families through Family Promise or Baby Bundles or sack lunches.

My focus so far has been on relationships specifically between God and humanity like that between the nursing mother and her child. If we take this analogy too far then we may be inclined to believe, as often is the case, that our life of faith is solely based on our relationship with God. As a congregation however we are responsible for one another. Not only are we responsible to one another, our individual actions represent and speak for Trinity Church and also for The Episcopal Church. When we are warm and friendly to newcomers, they do not just say that was a lovely person they also say Trinity is a warm and friendly place. Think about it we are all responsible for Trinity Church not just through our pledging and ministries, but the way each and every one of us treats strangers.

In 1787 Absalom Jones and other black members of St. George’s were asked by the senior white ushers to sit in the balcony. The ushers’ poor choices have been remembered as choices St. George’s Church made. If those ushers who sent Absalom Jones and his friends to the balcony thoroughly trusted God then they would have met Absalom Jones and his friends and showed them to the best seats in the church. Instead the ushers’ individual anxieties became an expression of an anxious, unwelcoming, self-centered and even violent church. History does not even remember the names of the ushers. All that has been remembered is the name of the church.

The Episcopal Church has made so many strides of inclusion over the last few centuries and even during the last year. We all do well to celebrate these inclusions too. However, there is much more at stake for congregations as we live into the fullness of God’s mission than just a spirit of inclusiveness and radical hospitality.

We might be the most inclusive church in the world, but if we are anxious about our most basic needs then we will be vulnerable to cherish things of the world more than God’s beloved people. Are we anxious about what we will eat and all other human concerns or do we abundantly invest in God’s beloved people?

A pastor friend of mine who is not an Episcopalian spends much of his ministry knocking on doors and welcoming people to come to his church. He particularly looks to knock on the doors of families with children who might not otherwise afford to go to high school or college. When he visits these families he often gives them money to send a needy son or daughter to college. My pastor friend has done this for many years. He reports that when the funded person graduates from college they never forget their pastor or his church.

Those who return to Reno come to his church and others who live far away send him money to continue his ministry. My friend is convinced that churches grow when they invest more in people than in buildings. My friend’s ministry is counter-intuitive to our anxious human inclinations to worry about our next meal and all that self-centeredness entails. The counter-intuitive move of today’s Gospel is that we honor the sacred trust of being nurturers of God’s beloved like the nursing mother with her child in the Isaiah passage. To invest in people is a profound act of trust that the pastor will have enough to eat so that he may give abundantly without reserve.

I want to tell you now about another good man. My dad had the posture that I think the Gospel is calling all of us into today. I grew up in a working class family. My dad worked three jobs so his five children would trust that their most basic needs were met as well as received the privilege of a college education. My parents never owned a car or a house and never could afford to travel outside of NYC until he retired.

My dad never worried about what it is he was to eat. In fact Dad’s lunch every day of his working life was a jelly sandwich and a couple of socialtea cookies. In the midst of my parents’ obvious lack of wealth, my dad always told us kids that we were his most precious assets. Dad often said, particularly in times of his most dire need, “I am a very lucky man as I have five precious jewels in my two daughters and three sons”. Fifty years later I remember my dad as an unselfish man who gave without reserve all he had. My dad like my Reno pastor friend invested in my future dignity. Today Jesus invites us to transform our anxieties from what it is we are to eat and to preserve, cherish and invest in all God’s beloved, restoring humanity’s trust in God and the Gospel’s integrity.

Raising the stakes a little bit higher (afterall we are in Nevada!), in years to come will history remember Trinity Church and The Episcopal Church as having preserved the dignity of every person as their most precious assets? We know in 1787 St. George’s answer to Absalom Jones dramatically fell short of this godly ideal.

I readily admit to you that this is a very demanding Gospel. Today’s Gospel invites us to completely and without reserve trust God. When we cease to be anxious about what we will eat then we can throw ourselves completely into God’s mission. However remember the Gospel invitation is not just about us. Anxiety of all kinds depletes energy and serves as a distraction from our mission as stewards of God’s mysteries. Untransformed our self-centered anxieties also hurt people like Absalom Jones and risk their trust in God.

When we have successfully restored trust to our daily human relationships it will be more likely for others to believe that God takes care of their most basic needs. The words “do not worry about what you are to eat” represent our unreserved trust in God. Our lifetime work is to preserve that sacred trust when our anxious souls are quieted through our holy indifference and all our energy is free and available to live into the fullness of God’s mission. In the meantime let us thank God for God’s awesome trust in us and in this church! Let us collectively choose to live into this awesome responsibility and be remembered as stewards of God’s mysteries.

The Magnificat: Dangerous Words

2011-01-29T23:30:00.001-08:00

December 12, 2010

As a child I imagined God as Robin Hood who cast down the mighty from their thrones and filled the hungry with good things. Utopian thinking makes for wonderfully entertaining stories like Robin Hood. The Gospel, however, is not a utopian fable intended for our mere pleasure. However, we get to choose living fables or into the world-altering potential of the Magnificat.

Father Rick Milsap reminded me recently that the Guatemalan government in the eighties arrested people who recited the words of the Magnificat in public. Fortunately, you and I in this country enjoy religious freedom. Yet in the absence of such public threats how do we access the radically world-altering nature of the Magnificat?

The Guatemalan police well knew that the words of the Magnificat were potentially world-altering and fully realizable. To alter the world in this way is a subversive act that risks the marking of a revolutionary.

Stay with me.

The word, “subversive” offends our law-abiding natures. We might be inclined to limit subversive activity as falling under the umbrella of Wikileaks or anarchy inciting chaos. A Gospel text or ministerial action is subversive when it or we go against the dominant worldly norms of society’s unity and order.

There is no easy way around the Magnificat not being subversive. Judge for yourselves.

Do worldly powers look with favor on the lowly?

Do worldly powers cast down the mighty from their thrones?

Do worldly powers fill the hungry with good things?

Do worldly powers send the rich away empty?

By unpacking some of the language of the Magnificat, I want to help recover some sense of its edgy character by pointing to its world-altering visions.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord. My Spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”

“My soul magnifies the Lord” is the original translation of the Magnificat’s opening line versus the new version that says, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord”. We are called to magnify God’s power and proclaim God’s word. “My soul magnifies the Lord” because God has made me in God’s image. The first step is to find God’s image in our selves so that like God we can look with favor on the lowly.

One of the spiritual practices in the recent Trinity Church spiritual basics series was to stand in front of a full-length mirror. I instructed participants to pray for the grace to see themselves as made in the image and likeness of God. To magnify the greatness of God we must live out of God’s image and not out of self-centered worldy images of self-reliance. In our self-centeredness we are not likely to look with favor on the lowly and we fail to proclaim the greatness of God.

For many years, in the morning, as I shaved I would look in the mirror but not see myself. I looked past myself. As a spiritual director I know that this experience is not just something uniquely odd to me. When we see nothing or only our flaws, we miss the potential of God’s image in our being. To work against this now each morning as I look into the mirror I say as a mantra to myself, “Joe, you are made in the image and likeness of God”. I don’t just say these words, but I encourage myself to accept the gift and power of this image. In the spirit of the Magnificat you might say, “My body magnifies the greatness of God”. Try this tomorrow morning and make note of how you feel.

I share this spiritual exercise with you because I believe that if we were thoroughly convinced that we are made in the image and likeness of God than our bodies, minds and spirits would have a greater likelihood to magnify and proclaim the Good News of the Lord.

Mirror gazing is far from a naval gazing narcissistic exercise. Be careful though as it is exactly this kind of thinking that can quickly become subversive. Mirror gazing becomes subversive when our spirits rejoice in God our savior. Then we trust the power of God working through us as we abandon ourselves to the transforming vulnerability of world-altering ministries.

The mirror gazing exercise is the beginning of a life-altering, world-altering process. We cannot alter and change the world unless we change ourselves first. In a Pauline view of magnification we become less and Christ becomes more. As we become less, it is not the Magnificat’s intention for us to become passive and whither away into a false humility. When Christ becomes more then we are more likely to magnify and proclaim the greatness of God. In this way the words of the Magnificat are intended to transform us into God bearing vessels of radiant love that transforms ourselves, so we look with favor on the lowly.

“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly”.

The newborn child to come that the Magnificat anticipates casts down the mighty from their thrones, as those mighty ones rely not on being made in the image and likeness of God, but they are self-sufficient and rely on themselves, on their own worldly power. The world’s powers do not look with favor on the lowly nor do they wish to lift up the lowly.

So how do we make this shift from worldly thinking to practice the liberating message of the Gospel?

In Ignatian spirituality there is something called the “three degrees of humility.” The three degrees of humility are intended to assist us in examining our lives to self-assess our progress in authentic humble living.

The three world-altering visions that I have highlighted from unpacking the language of the Magnificat coincide with the three Ignatian degrees of humility.

The first degree of humility and world-altering vision is for us to look upon the lowly with favor as God does.

The second degree of humility and world-altering vision is to lift up the lowly one by acting out of God’s power not worldly powers.

The third degree of humility and world-altering vision is to find God’s power within ourselves when we go beyond the impediment of our self-centeredness and disturb the order that oppresses and enables oppressive injustices.

Our progress towards these world-altering visions embodied through Christian ministries flowing out of our Baptism begins with that which we first desire and practice for our selves.

As we look into the mirror and see the image and power of God manifested in our being, do we find it any easier to look at the lowly with favor as God does?

As we look upon those the world considers lowly with favor, are we also willing to work towards a different world order and not just feed the lowly, but advocate for their needs in ways that lift them up to share in worldly privileges?

It is the lifting up of the lowly that makes Christians effective vessels of God’s love in the world. Lifting up the lowly reveals the subversive nature of the Gospel. There are lots of good Christians who look with favor upon the lowly. That is not to say that looking with favor on the lowly is a small accomplishment. The world does not look with favor on the lowly. Looking with favor on the lowly does not however risk altering the world in ways that benefit lowly ones. Looking with favor on the lowly lets us rest in the comfort that we will always have the poor and lowly with us.

The late Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero thought otherwise and gave the world a glimpse of the cost of doing more than looking with favor on the lowly. Romero did not just look with favor or even just feed the world’s lowliest. Romero taught the lowly of El Salvador their innate value as human beings and called them into a life-giving solidarity that made those with worldly power very nervous.

Therefore, it should not come as a surprise to us that the Latin American police once arrested people for public recitation of the Magnificat. Nor should it surprise us that Romero was assassinated. Public arrests and even Romero’s assassination were signs that people were beginning to believe in the liberating power of the Gospel, specifically the embodiment of the Magnificat. The Latin American government saw the Magnifcat as a threat to the unity and peace of their order. In worldly ordered societies the rich and powerful are looked upon with favor and the lowly are to be kept silent, subservient and forever grateful for the scraps from the tables of the wealthy.

Today we savor in the awesome beauty and majesty of the words of the Magnificat. The good news is that world-altering Christ-like presence is not magical like fables but presume a lifetime of self-effacing work. Our individual spiritual practices and community building of churches such as this are one of the key means to nurture our becoming Christ-like. Yet two life-altering choices face us every morning.

Do we wish to aspire to embody the compassion of Christ who looks with favor and lifts up the lowly?

Alternatively, do we prefer to let the Gospel be as powerless as the child’s fables?

Come Dine With Us Jesus: A Community of Sinners

2011-01-29T23:28:00.001-08:00

How do you feel about being the lost sheep or being referred to as the lost coin?

The predominant interpretation of today’s Gospel and second reading is that Jesus eats with sinners and the lost are saved.

It seems to me that these interpretations have been so overplayed by preachers that the church has been partially misled.

Friends who are not church people have told me that they don’t go to church because they don’t want to be with either the self-righteous churchgoers or the thoroughly wounded churchgoers.

Why do they think this?

Take a look at the second reading. I am grateful that Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. Formerly a sinner, but now this lost sheep is amongst the chosen.

Is the church about the chosen?

I guess I think about church and who is called very differently.

When I took my vows as a Jesuit, I said these words – In the presence of the divine majesty, I recognize myself as a sinner and the words of the vow formula continued.

We Episcopalians do not often talk about sin, but sin is a reality of our lives and the communities in which we live. Not talking about sin does not make it go away. Surely some tele-evangelists have so sensationalized sin and the condemnation of humanity that their words and actions have made sin dis-credible.

As you know I have much experience as a hospital chaplain and have even spent some time as a prison chaplain. A number of years ago a spiritual director asked me, when you visit people in prison, “Who are you visiting?” Are you visiting a criminal with whom you have no relationship? Are you visiting somebody because you are suppose to visit the imprisoned? The spiritual director continued, do you see yourself in the prisoner? Me, as a prisoner? Absolutely not. I am a law abiding citizen.

My spiritual director disagreed with me. He believed that we all have the capacity within us to harm another. As a family systems therapist he was convinced that we all have triggers that if set-off we might do some horrible things. Of course most of us never have those triggers set-off. However, this series of questions and challenges has I think made me a more effective chaplain over the years.

I read a book a long time ago that I highly recommend to you. The book is called The Violence Within by psychologist Paul Tournier. All of his books are wonderful. He wrote in the seventies and eighties. His most powerful book was I think The Violence Within. It was through reading The Violence Within that I was able to begin an answer to my spiritual director. This particular spiritual director did not so much want to spend our time talking about perfecting the spiritual life through prayer or fasting. Rather this director wanted to bring people face to face with their frailty and vulnerability as persons and as sinners. He challenged his directees to see not only the face of Christ in the prisoner, but to see oneself in the prisoner. This spiritual director worked through every self-righteous defense that I had that wanted to avoid even a remote connection to the prisoner I visited as a chaplain. I was not alone as this man had other directees and he took the same approach with them too. I suspect if he had been a parish priest he would have worked through the defenses of his congregation too.

I am sure you would agree that it is easier to say “I am called by God, though I was once a…” You fill in the blank. However, can we like the prophets of old say that though weak and a sinner we were and are chosen to serve?

What is it that keeps us so defiantly apart from recognizing ourselves in the homeless, in the prisoner and in the public sinner?

I have become very suspicious of those who claim to be better than all of us as sinners. We need only look at the former Governor of New York, Andrew Spitzer, who was the most vigilant prosecutor on sex crimes and then he was removed from public office for the same offense. There is also the story of John Edwards. It would be too easy for us to say, oh those politicians, again distancing ourselves from their offenses. Indeed these two men presented themselves as better and were harsh on those who were less than perfect. It would be interesting if today they have a different heart towards others in their shoes.

When I took my vows as a Jesuit, I quarreled with my superiors over the choice of words, I recognize that I am a sinner. I thought what an odd thing to say, but now many years later, I see the wisdom of the Jesuits.

As a pastor and priest I know the human struggles that we all face to live a good life. I also know that the stakes and expectations of goodness are very high.

As a priest I cannot give absolution to those who come to me to share a sin, unless they are repentant and willing to repair their life and sin no more in this way. However, that is far less frequently a problem for me as a priest. The more common experience is the rejection of sin, so much so that we defiantly refuse to see the potential in ourselves of the most horrible sin of those we might meet in prison.

Yet we must come face to face with ourselves as sinners in need of God’s healing balm.

Here is a very different image of church that I quite like from Dostoevsky…

Church as “a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and the righteous come together.”

Dante put it this way, “where there are the penitent and the unrepentant, the damned and the saved…”

Are we courageous enough to live in this kind of church community?

The church is not a community of mediocrity where anything goes. No a community of the penitent and unrepentant is an intentional community in process. It is a community that yearns and desires the healing balm of God. In such a community there are far more than one lost sheep. There are many lost sheep.

A few years ago when I was in Scotland we lived on a sheep farm for a week. Every day we watched the sheep travel as one community into pasture. The sheep dog kept them together. The young and the old, the babies and the working sheep, the white sheep and yes the black sheep too all stayed together.

Closer to home, at Blackstone’s Pizza in Sparks there is a picture of sheep. There are easily 20 white sheep in the picture and one black sheep. The picture gives a vivid image to the words, he is the black sheep of the family.

Again, I say to you who among us wants to be the lost coin or the lost sheep? Who wants to stand out and be different? Nobody, so we stay very close to the self-righteous. We just need to be careful that in staying close to the self-righteous that we do not deny that we are the sinners whom Jesus dines with every week at this rail.

This is not a realization that should give us an untrue need to condemn ourselves and make ourselves unworthy. Nor is the realization that should make us give into no attempts to live a life worthy of our calling as Paul says in Ephesians. No, our realization of being a sinner should as my former spiritual director advised me, make us more effective as ministers.

When you next meet a homeless person or a prisoner, maybe you will see yourself in that person. Not in their current state, perhaps, but also not out of the realm of possibility either. I think this kind of awareness at its best gives a sense of urgency about our life in Christ.

As I read the Gospel, Jesus has more joy over the one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” If this is the case do any of our churches stand a chance with this kind of judgment?

The point of recognizing ourselves as sinners and in need of God’s mercy is to recognize our need as individuals and as a church for God. Many prisoners and homeless have met God up close in this way and they can say, I am a sinner in need of God’s mercy. The Gospel calls all of us to this kind of courage to claim our fragile humanity and to courageously name it.

Let me off you a model of this as a spiritual practice. I am sinner. It feels awkward and uncomfortable to say this. Yet I serve you as a priest as much out of my struggle with sin as out of my knowledge and desire of the good. As you prepare to go to another church, do you see yourself as better than others or do you see yourself as you are and as one in need of God’s mercy? You may not be ready to stand in front of this church and say you are a sinner. You might at least be ready to acknowledge to yourself that you are a sinner. Once you can then you can live with a sense of urgency to reform your life and you will be more compassionate with those who struggle to reform their life.

It is with this kind of bold clarity about ourselves that lets it be possible for us to bring hope to those whom we minister as they will see in us one who truly understands and empathizes with their struggles to be companions of Christ.

Come Jesus dine with us, a community of sinners.

Give Me A Tranquil Heart Oh Lord

2011-01-29T23:17:00.001-08:00

There is a lot of picking and choosing going on in our texts today.

In the opening collect we prayed for an increase of “true religion”. Many a blog fight has been had in recent years over what is true religion. Since the Reformation the Christian churches have argued over who is the true church. Even the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church are divided over divergent arguments and opinions over the true church. There is picking and choosing going on in the Gospel to as to who should be invited and who should not and where they should sit at the table.

All of you are in the process of picking and choosing another church where you will worship after St. Stephen’s Church closes. You will be picking and choosing your next church. It is a stressful time for you to make these decisions as you are also in the middle of grief over the loss of your first choice, St. Stephen’s Church. It will not be an easy time for you.

No doubt your picking and choosing will even be further complicated by some important things you may not yet be aware of or have been unable to express about the close of this church and what that might mean for you. Before you get through all the stages of dying and grief you may feel compelled to think about what will come next as to the church you will attend.

You will continue to have organized opportunities to visit the other churches with a visit scheduled to St. Catherine’s in September, another visit to St. Paul’s in October and even a visit to Faith Lutheran during convention weekend. You will also have time to meet together as a parish on Sunday, October 3 as you share your reflections with each other on your church visits.

There is no doubt that there is a lot on your individual plates as a congregation. It might be helpful for you to know that Ignatius of Loyola always counseled his companions never to make decisions in times when you are spiritually uncertain or unstable by extreme doubt or even joy. The time to make the best decisions that is the ones you will live by for a long period of time is during periods of sustained tranquility.

How will you find that space of tranquility for yourself as you prepare to pick and choose another church?

First you have to look inside of yourself and judge for yourself if your heart is tranquil before the Lord. You are only ready to make decisions if your heart is tranquil. The collect mentioned the “fruit of good works” that echoes the gifts of the spirit that Paul often writes about in the New Testament. Remember the Pauline reading about the gifts of the Spirit? The gifts are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

You might make it a spiritual practice over the next few months to occasionally ask yourself as you are driving in the car, for example, do I feel love, joy, peace? Am I growing in patience? Do I have a gentle tone? Is your heart and spirit calm? These are very generic questions and they may need more specifics to be more meaningful to you.

As you speak about other parishes you visit do you speak with a tone of the Spirit inspired gentleness or rather one of aged suspicion? These will be important questions for you to ask yourself. People with tranquil hearts live in the present with the gifts that God gives them today. By asking yourself these questions you will know if you are tranquil of heart and ready to pick and choose your next church. Again these are hard choices that you face. You will likely even with your best efforts get your grief mixed up with premature picking and choosing.

We all have experienced other losses in our life apart from the loss of a beloved congregation. I have been present with people who have suffered terrible losses in their life. I have been an ER Chaplain with parents who lost a toddler to a sudden case of incurable meningitis. I have been a first cousin to parents who lost their youngest daughter in a sudden car crash. I have been friend to a family who lost their young mother to cancer leaving behind five kids behind.

I share these few examples with you because behind them are people of great faith. You don’t have to look far even in this congregation to find families who have suffered great and untimely losses of a son and or a husband. I found that often those who suffered the greatest losses in their life, these people’s lives were changed by their losses. The grief of the sudden loss of a child never goes away.

My first cousin never recovered from the loss of her youngest daughter. Some in our family have wondered if the cancer she developed only a few years after her daughter’s death had something to do with the terrible assault on her mind, heart and soul due to the loss she suffered. Yet other people who have suffered major losses often have a different perspective on life. Those who suffer great losses are often more free, as they have lost what meant the most to them and thus don’t cling to anything ever again in the same way.

This reflection brings me to today’s Gospel. “The Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can anybody do to me?” I read that last bit “do to me” as take away from me. For the one who has lost everything, their most cherished love in a spouse or in a child have only their relationship with God in tact and thus risk losing nothing anymore. Losses are never the same after that terrible loss. No other loss can match that one loss and so people are free of ever having to suffer other losses in the same way. These people learn to hold on to most other things very lightly.

These people place their hope in God for it is God and their faith that got them through their loss. The most senior members of this congregation personally know and have lived this story of loss and of hope. These members may bring wisdom to the people of this parish at this time of its loss of a church that they and you have loved. There is wisdom and a tranquility that comes through loss. This kind of wisdom is a grace of the Spirit.

The person of faith’s heart is brought to a place of complete indifference. Early in the time of loss this indifference is a feeling of emptiness, but as time passes and the heart sustains the loss, the indifference becomes an undefeatable love. The undefeatable love is that the one who has lost everything is faced with the one possession that cannot be taken away. That possession is their faith in God, their hope in God alone. It is a stunning cost for this kind of faith to be attained. Ask somebody who has suffered an untimely loss of a spouse or child, how they have since dealt with other losses in their life after that first major loss. You may be surprised by their answers. Their answers may help you process the loss of this church.

When I was a Jesuit thinking about leaving the Society of Jesus and the Roman Catholic Church looking for a spiritual director, I asked a wise Jesuit how I should decide who should be my spiritual director. I will never forget what the Jesuit said to me, “Joe find a Jesuit who has suffered much, lost deeply, fully grieved through that grief and deepened his faith through that loss”. Well I looked hard for that person but never found that spiritual companion until I came to Reno twenty years later. The people who have this kind of wisdom are often the most humble and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack to find that person.

You are much more fortunate than I was as you need not search far as these wise and tranquil people are in this congregation. Follow the example of those who have suffered great losses and come to a place of hard earned tranquility where you like they can say that nothing can be taken away from me for my hope is in God alone.

When you find this tranquil space within you then you will be able to pick and choose your next church wisely and your choice will be sustainable and continue to nurture your baptismal faith. You will also be able to live peacefully and joyfully with the people who have found what they need in other churches. You will be able to recognize your worship preferences, name your desires but see God in and through all people. The tranquil heart is the joyful person that clings only to their love of God and is free of all else.

Those who live with this kind of wisdom often do not speak authoritatively, but they are present. These wise forefathers and foremothers are in this congregation. I pray that as you grieve the loss of your church that you will be nurtured by the strength, fortitude and gentleness of heart of this congregation’s forefathers and foremothers.

The Death of Magical Thinking and the Birth of Spiritual Maturity

2011-01-29T23:14:00.001-08:00

We need to be very careful the way we read healing stories such as the one in today’s Gospel. The OT lesson and Gospel are both about the power of God’s constant presence and about the miracle of healing. Yet more often we aggressively pursue God’s healing power for our own rather than imitating God’s unfailing presence amidst severe challenges.

There is a difference between miracles and magical thinking. Magical thinking is when we think we can either demand that God act as we wish or make little miracles into something they are not. Learning the difference between authentic healing and magical thinking has for me been a series of trial and error, mostly my errors.

One of my favorite shows as a little boy was Bewitched. Do you remember the show? Samantha, a witch played by Elizabeth Montgomery was married to a mere mortal Darrin Stephens, played by Dick York and later Dick Sergeant. Samantha would twinkle her nose and all would be well to every embarrassing or uncomfortable situation. As a youngster my mom was sick for several years after my birth. I was a surprise birth! She had me when she was 48 and so it was a difficult birth leaving her very weak. Of course I knew that I could not twinkle my nose to make my mom well. Even at that young age I knew that much about the difference between real healing and magical thinking.

Even so, as much as I loved the Bewitched show and even though I could not articulate it, I was always frustrated by the huge gap that I felt between my lived reality and the falsity of the Bewitched possibility of prompt magical corrections. Another kid in my neighborhood loved the TV show Superman, but he was not so fortunate and jumped out his family’s fifth floor apartment window so he could fly like Superman. Tragically he did not live to learn the lesson that he could not fly like Superman. Magical thinking cost him his life. My friend died a physical death. Magical thinking can also sometimes lead to a spiritual death too. Today I want to talk with you about the way magical thinking leads to our spiritual death and if not challenged will impede our access to an authentic Christian life.

Dan’s mom, a friend of mine in grade school went to the doctor to discover that she had leukemia and would die in three weeks. Dan’s mom was a woman of great faith and prayed every day of those three weeks seeking a miracle, a cure. His mom even went to great efforts to travel to a shrine in Ireland known for its healing qualities, but an exhausting trip yielded no miracle or healing. His mom became very bitter in those last days before her death and her family too. When she died my friend Dan left the church for over twenty years for that is how angry he was at God.

Dan and I grew up in a Roman Catholic context where if you say these many prayers, the Blessed Mother will give you special favors or if you light these many candles something else will happen. It was a theology of chemistry, mixing magical elements together to get exactly what we wanted. I wish I could say that I left behind the predominance of magical thinking to the old fashioned, pious Roman Catholic Church of my youth. The truth is that I have found that magical thinking is alive and well in The Episcopal Church. Frankly, magical thinking is one of the demons that we all face and that we must all constantly strive against as we choose to follow the path of Christian life.

It was mom’s Alzheimer’s that eventually helped me get over my magical thinking. In the last stages of my mom’s Alzheimer’s she had a massive seizure. She was expected to die. She was being kept comfortable with some oxygen to ease her breathing. At about 3am she began to speak having not spoken for over three years. She recognized us in the room with her and was able to thank us for our loving care. The experience lasted for only ten minutes. And then she fell silent again, never to speak again. She died three years later.

Hearing my mom say my name and hear her words of love after three years of her silence was an experience I cannot put in words for you. Perhaps, a description of my resistance to letting her go again will give you some sense of my lack of indifference. As she slipped away from a little miracle of awareness back into end stage Alzheimer’s I ran down the ICU hallway to insist that the doctors keep her on oxygen and maybe she would speak again.

I was not just thinking that she would speak again but that she would be completely healed of her Alzheimer’s. I knew that part of the deficit of Alzheimer’s has to do with a lack of oxygen to the brain. I was absolutely furious at the doctors and they looked at me like I was nuts. I needed a Chaplain right then not a doctor. In those minutes of rage I went from enjoying the unexpected in a little miracle to demanding that it become a life-defining miracle.

I did not get the miracle I wanted; but my life was transformed. By standing by her side for her 11 years with Alzheimer’s, I learned how to stay present in the midst of very painful, unrelenting losses without denying it, rejecting it, pretending that it would go away, but just by consistently choosing to be lovingly present until the end.

For me being a priest is not about my healing power to fix what ails you or even to fix this congregation. Being a priest for me is about being be a sign of the unconditional love of God. As a son I lovingly and silently stood by to the end with my mother in end stage Alzheimer’s. As a priest I have been able to stand by people without giving them false hope because it might be easier for me than standing silently by as they grieve their humanity. This is not my call alone, but it is yours too. Remember the way I started this sermon. Do we yearn to be great healers like Jesus or are we willing to be fragile signs of God’s unconditional love to Elijah and to the man with demons in today’s Gospel.

Unconditional love leads to transformational healing. Magical thinking suggests that one of us has more healing power than another. None of us can fix each other. Yet powerful transformation can emerge when we choose to be fully present to one another without censoring out the ugly truths of our selves or our shared life.

Over the last few weeks a little miracle has been happening to St. Stephen’s Church. When you have said I need healing prayers, I hurt here, I am tired, I am without hope, I am sad, I feel abandoned by God and more without fear of communal judgment – these our little miracles of healing. However, we must be careful not to magically want to make this little miracle we have been experiencing here at St. Stephen’s more than it is or we risk becoming like the little boy who thought he could fly like Superman and then died the tragic death induced by magical thinking.

God’s healing rarely matches up to the healing we imagine for ourselves. Let’s face it, the miracle that we all really want for ourselves is to be immortal like Samantha in Bewitched. We want to blink away all that is uncomfortable, undesirable and painful. Yet if we wish to be truly spiritually mature, then we must let this kind of magical thinking die.

Do not be fooled it is never an easy path traveling from a life paralyzed by magical thinking to the spiritual freedom associated with authentic Christian healing. To my surprise I grieved the loss of my mother’s cognitive capacity the second time much more deeply than the gradual loss over her eight years of Alzheimer’s. Yet more than anything else in my life it was because of that little miracle that I eventually received the freedom to completely let go of my mom.

As a kid my mom always told me that she was dying. I took her at her word and believed her. Of course I now know that it was her anxiety speaking, as she did not die until forty years later. Yet as a little boy I constantly feared her loss. That little miracle changed me after I got over my momentary rage at the doctors. The little miracle and the rage were spiritually cleansing experiences that gave me the freedom to accept her mortality and to gracefully let her die when the time came.

Big miracles are very, very rare. Big miracles spontaneously happen through God, but never because we pray for them, organize all the magical elements or hold our breath insisting that they magically appear. When we live only for the big miracles we spiritually and physically exhaust ourselves closing ourselves off from the authentic life that God calls us to experience.

Therefore to avoid this, on a daily basis you and I must give our free consent to spiritual cleansing and regularly choose if we wish to journey towards eternal life with God or prefer our magical immortality. The path to spiritual maturity is not an easy one, as we must admit that we are human and that even little miracles will not let us avoid the inevitability of death when God calls us.

We must be ready and willing to let go when God calls us – no sooner like my mom’s anxious fears and no later resisting to indefinitely the call of God. Yet at the same time in all our wounded mortality throughout the process of becoming authentic we bear witness to the unconditional love of God through works of justice, love and mercy.

God Bless You!

Non-Anxious Discernment: Holy Patience Amidst Ambiguity

2011-01-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

May 2, 2010 - retreat meditation for the Daughters of The King in Reno

Today’s Gospel is about discernment and love. The Gospel says that the way we imitate Jesus’ love is through discipleship. Jesus leaves me wanting to have a set of directions about how to be a disciple who loves. Jesus leaves the disciples with very little in the way of directions. I bet the disciples are anxious just as we are when we don’t know exactly the way to proceed. We learn the specifics of our unique calls to discipleship through non-anxious discernment. Discernment is not easy and requires our patience amidst ambiguity.

Discernment often anticipates long periods of meaningless waiting until we hear the voice of God manifested through the movements of the Spirit. Meaningless waiting is a challenge for all of us as we are purposeful people who want solutions to our real problems. Our sense of urgency for quick solutions judges meaningless waiting and we resist discernment.

If you are like me I am sure you can remember times in your life where it is very difficult to wait and listen. If we are honest then we remember the way we rushed into major decisions. I can vividly remember making important life decisions out of a sense of urgency. The time I went into seminary a second time in NYC was one such time. All my family and friends told me that it would not work. I ignored them. I did not pray about it. My decision was not a spiritual decision. It was a pragmatic decision. My parents had Alzheimers and Parkinsons and I wanted to stay near them. The Jesuits would have sent me to the Caroline and Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. By going to the NY seminary I was able to get on with it. I knew the day I entered that I made a terrible decision and 18 months later I left. I made my own decision, but not one in the Spirit and so no surprise that it was not sustainable.

Discernment is the process of choosing between two loves. Loves are often manifested through multiple calls. We are called in a number of ways, but can only follow one or two of these calls. When there are many calls, desires and gifts there tends to be lots of inner noise in us. That is when we pray we cannot seem to escape the clutter in our minds and hearts.

A multiplicity of calls, desires and gifts is a blessing, but it is also fertile ground for anxiety. Anxiety impedes fruitful discernment. All of us experience different degrees of anxiety and it is not judged to be good or bad. However, when our anxiety holds us back from making responsible and mature decisions than we lose opportunities to live in the Spirit’s time.

There is a huge difference between the Spirit’s time and our time. The government moves very slowly. Like the Post Office they are slow! Yet when we want the Spirit to move us it is can also be even more painfully slow. And at other times the Spirit is ready and we are not. Both times can be ones of great anxiety. Due to the way anxiety is uncomfortable discernment is often avoided. We need to discern often when we are least ready to discern.

A multiplicity of choices is often a sign of the need for discernment.

An anxious resistance to listening is a sign of the need for discernment.

When we have much to choose we are least likely to be inclined towards discernment.

Each of us has learned responses to the ways we encounter a multiplicity of choices.

Do you feel blessed with many choices?

Are you patiently non-anxious with many choices?

Are you peaceful amidst sustained ambiguity and uncertainty?

Be honest now!

There is a wonderful model to which we can all turn to in Mary, the mother of Jesus. When the angel Gabriel visited Mary in her sixth month, he said, The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid Mary, God has found favor with you. When Gabriel said Mary would give birth to a child, Mary said, how can this be for she was without child?

Discernment always takes place in God’s time. It is necessary to be patient, to maintain trust that all is blessing and that in time you will know the way to proceed. Before we can even begin discernment we have to be willing to give up our control over the outcome. Otherwise we might just as well get on with it, make some decisions and not call it discernment. Sometimes there is little fallout from making routine decisions in this way. When we are at Cotsco picking between two brands of pasta discernment really is not necessary. At the same time I can attest to you from my life experience that the biggest decisions in our lives truly benefit from discernment. Discernment means we are inviting God into our decision-making process.

To engage in the practice of discernment means letting go of our need to singularly make the decision. Mary did not decide, she was open to the angel Gabriel’s message and consented. Consent is very different than decision and can only be recognized when we are in touch with the Spirit working in and through us. Discernment means we are willing to listen to God and the Spirit working through our lives. Listening means we are willing to be still and simply to listen with open hearts, without judgment and holding things very lightly. Play can be a form of holding things lightly as long as we are paying attention and listen.

We introduce play by looking at our lives as they are as pieces of clay that can be molded and formed in this way or that way. Playful listening is a posture towards our discernment and listening. Listening means we first begin trying to slow down the inner noise so that we can hear God rather than just our own minds talking. We listen in many different ways. Listening to God means spending time alone with God in prayer. Yet listening typically requires more than just listening to God in the solitude of our own chosen and tightly controlled spaces. Listening needs to be more than just what happens between God and us.

Discernment is often strengthened in community. We listen and hear differently in community. We particularly listen differently when we participate in communities of deep trust. Trust is not the same as loyalty. Sometimes loyal friends will not tell us what we need to hear, as they are loyal to us. You often hear people say, he is my friend meaning he would never say anything against me. Against me typically means agreeing with me and supporting me. You hear people say, he is my friend I can rely on him or her. However, true friends who know us through our hearts in community can help us see beyond our blinds spots. True Christian community has a quality of being open to the Spirit leading you.

Communities of the Spirit draw a diversity of people who do not easily get along. I have found in communities that it is in the uneven edges of community life, the asymmetries in the uneven spaces between us that is where the Holy Spirit most often resides. If we can listen at the edges of the community from those on the periphery as well as at the center we are more likely to make Spirit inspired decisions. The mature community is not anxious to make quick decisions. The mature community is willing to patiently wait and remain content in community holding ambiguity lightly.

Be honest how many of you love ambiguity in this way in your lives?

Now the good news is that you need not love ambiguity, but on the other hand if you loathe ambiguity, you make yourself vulnerable to making poorly discerned decisions. Poorly discerned decisions are decisions we make without listening to the Spirit of God. When we are less anxious then we make the inner space to listen to and hear multiple perspectives.

These multiple perspectives are not merely other peoples’ opinions, but if expressed through holy listening in communal prayer, may be inspired words that God would like us to hear. This means that we understand and respect each other as vehicles of grace and of the Spirit too. Each of you are vehicles of grace and a means by which the Spirit speaks and lets us know what we ought to do and what we are called to do. Discernment is our willingness to patiently wait to be inspired by the Spirit of God in multiple ways before we choose to act.

Spirit inspired decisions do not change from day to day, but benefit from felt continuity. It is this memory of continuity that strengthens us when challenges inevitably come later. When challenges do come we are less inclined to think that we made a bad decision. Rather than running away from a decision we made, we stay the course remaining faithful because we remember that the Spirit led us here. We are more likely to suffer with the choices we have made for we have the confidence that the Spirit directed us to this place and in time whatever challenges we experience will work for the glory of God. I don’t offer use the word “suffer” often in my sermons because I grew up over associating suffering with faith in God. Yet we are willing to suffer with life choices we have made when we made that decision convinced that the Holy Spirit called us to that place. When I decided as in when I went to seminary the second time in NYC it was easy to leave.

In discernment we pray as a community to discover that which will give glory to God. The quick decisions typically give glory to us but the Spirit inspired decisions give glory to God.

I have personally come to learn that the decisions I have made in haste have been the least sustainable and prone to my frequent change in whims. Yet when I have waited sometimes even for years before making certain decisions, then these decisions were grounded in God’s time with the grace of the Holy Spirit. It is these latter decisions in my life that have not wavered, but have remained constant amidst the challenges of life. The difference is making decisions that are based on calls from God not merely our anxious solutions to problems. Anxious solutions are rarely sustainable ones.

So, let us pray that we will be blessed with non-anxious hearts so that our spirit may be attentive to the way we are being uniquely called. Let us pray that when an angel visits us with a Spirit inspired message, we might be able to say, let it be done to me according to your loving desires God not according to my desires.

God Bless You!

The Church As The Means Not The End - February 28, 2010

2011-01-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1 and Luke 13:31-35

Abstract: The sermon focuses on three questions: Do you and I know the way we are grounded in our relationship with God? Do we understand the difference between belief in God and coming to church? Do we appreciate the tension between practice and belief? These three questions are crucial to be freeing enough to hear and respond to God’s unique call to St. Stephen’s Church, even being led to a different place.

The subtitle of my sermon could be taken from the words of the Decalogue that we just recited together, “You shall not make for yourself any idol”. Extending that which we should not make into idol, let us include the church. All too quickly we can make the church into a false idol for our worship.

The psalmist says today, “The one thing I seek is to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” In the OT reading Abram asked God about how to possess the land, his home in relationship with God. The NT turns our attention from the cares of our life in towns, cities and the buildings where we dwell to our “citizenship in heaven”.

In the Gospel we see resistance to God’s efforts to gather the disciples into a new place. Jesus says in his frustration with the disciples, you have been left with your house. So as to say, you refused to be gathered and so I leave you to your worldly concerns, as Jesus turns his focus on realizing God’s mission. The disciples were invested in Jesus in that one place. In the Gospel the disciples stayed in the familiar place they knew versus following Jesus’ invitation. Makes you wonder if the disciples really understood Jesus’ message of mission.

When the psalmist says, “the one thing I seek is to dwell in the house of the Lord”, it does not mean to dwell as we do in this building. House of the Lord is God’s being. The house of the Lord is for the people of the new covenant in NT times, the mystical Body of Christ. Most Anglican theologians have taught since the Reformation that the mystical Body of Christ is not the same as the church. This is very different than what Roman Catholics believe. Roman Catholics believe that there is a literal meaning of the church as the Body of Christ.

Membership in the mystical Body of Christ is different than our membership in St. Stephen’s Church.

Do you believe in God? Do you believe that you are very members of the mystical Body of Christ?

I don’t mean a belief in a higher power or a creative force in the universe. I mean do you believe in God? Do you believe that you are specially knitted into the mystical Body of Christ? I don’t even mean do you believe in the words of the Nicene or Apostolic Creeds. Do you have an affective, that is, personal relationship with God that binds you to God alone? At first glance that might seem like a very silly question to you. Well of course I believe in God, I am here in church.

This is fundamentally a very important question as the parish sorts out its individual and corporate commitments to St. Stephen’s as a parish and to God. These are related but distinct commitments.

If like the disciples we hesitate in following Jesus then we cling on to places sometimes making them idols of false worship. These idols become distractions from the true God. The English reformers criticized the Roman Catholic Church for making the church their God.

The disciples in the Gospel today resisted Jesus’ invitation to follow Jesus to Jerusalem. The disciples do not even understand what Jesus is talking about. Are there ways that we relate to this church building that impede seeking only to abide in God’s house in the mystical Body of Christ?

To get at this question we really do need to ask the question do we believe in God. Do we have an affective relationship with God?

The scripture text that has had the most influence on shaping my life is John 21 where Jesus says three times to Peter, “Do you love me?” Peter says, of course I love you. I can imagine Jesus saying Peter do you believe in me, for to love Jesus is to believe in God. Later in that text Peter wants to cling on to Jesus and stay with him to keep things just the way they were. But Jesus says no, I must leave you. Peter keeps on clinging and Jesus finally says, when you were young you went about as you pleased, but when you are older, you may be led to a place you may rather not go.

In the Gospel this morning the disciples are unprepared to be led to a new place. They clung on to what they knew, missing Jesus’ invitation. Jesus is inviting the disciples to align their lives with his in a mission that will draw them away from their land and homes. Mission is different than clinging to Jesus.

Do we cling to God in the house of the Lord or do we cling to the holy houses we construct?

As a spiritual director I have met several people who though their entire lives were ones of apparent commitment to the church, at some point the veil was pulled back and they were faced with the raw question – do I believe in God. It is a scary question as I have watched people who love the church realize that it was the church not God that was the focus of their love. Often this is a disorienting discovery leading people to fundamental questions about the way they have ordered their lives around the church but not around God.

Several years ago I met Julie. Julie had not grown up in a Christian household where the bible was read or her parents went to church. Yet Julie fell in love with God in the stories of the new and old testaments. Julie told me of her powerful relationship with God. Julie loved God in a home that was not friendly to God and indeed the name of God was strange. Julie had a secret relationship with God that she kept to herself and to her journal. As a young college student Julie was drawn to connect her relationship with God to a church community. Julie joined a church. It was in the church that she joined that she was told that God hates homosexuals. Julie had known she was a lesbian for many years and at news of this she broke down in tears having lost, she thought in that instant, her first and only true lover, God.

What is an affective relationship with God? Julie had an affective relationship with God that preceded her relationship with a church. Julie had fallen in love with God without the church. Then the church told Julie exactly the opposite. It took Julie almost twelve years to recover from that church’s condemnation of her. Julie has recovered and is an ordained Metropolitan Community Church Pastor. Today Julie knows the differences between loving Jesus, believing in God and coming to church. Julie knows about the tension between belief and practice. Julie knows the grounding of her belief is in God alone. Had Julie not been centered in God then when that church condemned her, she might have lost all her desire for God.

Do we cling to God or to the church?

Julie grounded her faith in God so she was free of clinging to a church that had betrayed her love of God.

So what role then does the church play or parishes like St. Stephen’s? Simply, St. Stephen’s, Trinity, St. Paul’s, St. Catherine’s and Faith Lutheran in Reno to name just a few as well as churches elsewhere around this nation and the world are a means to being fed by Word and sacrament to participate in God’s mission.

I like simple mantras for my prayer. You might try this mantra in your prayer:

St. Stephen’s church is one means to God. Our citizenship is with God alone.

Churches are nothing more and nothing less than a means to God. Our only end is our “citizenship with God” participating in God’s mission. All that supports this divinely mandated end in God and in mission is of God. All that impedes our love of God and participation in God’s mission is not of God and we should make an effort to remove these distractions. If you find yourself clinging to a church without freedom of movement, it might be worth your while to ask if you love God or the church. If you love God more than the church you will be much freer to go where God leads you. If you love the church more than God, you may lack the freedom to be led.

Our total focus must always be on our “citizenship in God” rather than in to that which we cling. Jesus said to Peter, do you love me? Hear these words as do you believe in God and then Jesus saying, feed my sheep. And at St. Stephen’s all might say, we love you Jesus and we have faithfully fed your sheep through our Bread Ministries, the Food Bank and Family Promise naming but a few. Then Jesus may say to you, are you willing to follow me wherever I lead you? Of course the parish says! Then Jesus will say, will you follow me even if it is to a place you may initially rather not wish to go?

This morning in the Gospel the disciples clung to what they knew, staying close to their familiar surroundings. But the disciples refused the divine invitation being offered by Jesus. After all they are very happy being exactly where they are – next to their favorite restaurants, movie theatres and right next to the camel crossing.

St. Stephen’s Church is one means to God. Our citizenship is with God alone.

St. Stephen’s might discover anew its life right here or be invited to participate in God’s mission in another place. None of us know for sure. Until we do, let us wait with open hands and open hearts to be led only by the Spirit of God.

As Saint Augustine once said, we will always be restless, until we rest in you, oh God. Augustine did not say, “we will be restless”, until we find that one perfect church.

Learning from Jesus’ words we know that when we have an affective relationship with God, then we will no longer cling to anything less than God.

Let us persevere in our discernment processes so that we will stay focused on our true home in God alone and in God’s mission with heartfelt love.

God bless you!

Malleable Enough to Become Fully Human

2011-01-29T22:52:00.001-08:00

February 6, 2010 – Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 138, I Corinthians 15:1-11 and Luke 5:1-11

Abstract: The sermon invites prayerful consideration on two questions: Do you wish to be malleable enough to discover the life of God in new and unexpected ways or will you maintain your known comforts at any cost? How does your need for things to be exactly the way you have known them to be, impede you from being open to invitations to new life? If St. Stephen’s Church chooses life, then it will do whatever is necessary to be nurtured by God even letting go of fear and the comfort of familiar places.

“Set us free” seems to be the recurring theme of our texts this morning from the opening prayer through the Gospel. To trust the Lord’s invitation to drop their nets, the disciples had to learn to be free of their failed experiences, their inability to find fish. Do you have a sense of the empathy of this text for our challenge in finding newcomers to be members of our parish? The disciples have to work hard to be open enough to follow the Lord’s invitation to drop their nets again despite their recent failures. They doubt Jesus and even grumble that they had been exactly on that side of the boat and found no fish. We are about to enter a year of discernment on the parish’s future mission and identity. You might say, oh no, not more discernment about our mission. We have done that before and look at where we are. Obviously that did not work.

Then as the story goes their nets broke with the abundance of fish. Wow! Given the very close connection between the disciples and the life of St. Stephen’s it might be worth exploring what might have made the difference for the disciples. For the moment I am not concerned about the way we catch fish or even newcomers. I am more interested in the disciples’ change of heart. How did they go from finding a scarcity of fish to an abundance of fish? What do you think made the difference between when they dropped their nets out of their own wills and when they dropped them at the Lord’s invitation? Do you think it is merely that their luck was better with Jesus?

Is this Gospel story about luck? I don’t think so. If the story is more than about luck, then I think we have some work to do so we like the disciples might drop our nets anew. If we take nets too literally, we might hear this text as only being about fish or at best finding newcomers. Might we exchange nets for dropping our guard. How do we drop our guard to hear the invitations of Jesus and the Holy Spirit anew? The opening words of today’s collect have given us a clue as to what may be necessary – set us free.

There are different kinds of freedom. For example there is freedom of self-determination and political freedom. We live in the land of the free. For the most part we enjoy a high degree of self-determination in America. There are constraints due to our natural talents and for some a lack of privilege, but compared to many other countries we Americans have great freedom in planning our own destinies. Not too few American presidents have gone from rags to riches and even global influence. Our political freedom follows closely too. We choose to live where we want to live, drive the car that we like, choose friends, give to charities that match our values, worship where we wish, believe what we want to believe in and more.

Through self-determination in a land of political and religious freedom we are the masters of our own destiny. After living in India for a few weeks I have a renewed sense of the privilege of being an American surrounded by the wealth of our country. Though I like most of you are not wealthy I/we benefit from state and federal infrastructure of transportation, sanitation, water and electricity. In contrast in India the power goes off every afternoon. There is not mass transit and traffic is chaotic. Poverty is side by side to wealth. It was a very disorienting context for me. As much as I wanted to be there in India, I was aware of the way my comforts here at home sometimes prevented me from fully entering into this foreign experience. I could sense myself holding back. I had a sense of longing for some of those comforts. At times I am even embarrassed to say that I may have judged some Indians as less through my American lens. We traveled on an overnight train that looked like it had been made in the early 1900’s. It was old and filthy. As a former businessman I found myself wondering why this could not be different. I found the space unfriendly and at times I was frankly afraid and angry at carelessly entering this new context.

Stefani who had been to India before was a bit more comfortable in this very different place. Crossing the street without traffic lights, with hundreds of pedestrians, fast motor bikes whizzing in and out and thousands of old rickshaws I probably would have stood indefinitely at one side of the street without ever crossing over. One day we were crossing the street and I was absolutely terrified, frozen in my tracks with all this traffic fast approaching me from every angle. Stefani said don’t hold on to me and then said, keep walking they will drive around you. They will not hit you. She was right, but wow each time was a trust walk to just cross the street.

I was way out of my comfort zone and yet I would go back. Honestly everything in me says, don’t go back. Yet at the same time I uncovered some insights there that I have not found in any book. I learned about postcolonial theology from a very different lens. It is a lens that will improve the quality of the work I do here in the US. Many postcolonial theologians write about India, but very few have been to India. In these experiences I can empathize with the disciples. I hope when I go back to India in a few years that I will feel a little less threatened by being in such a different context. I hope and pray that I will be set free so that I can more fully enter the culture of India. At the same time I expect that as I plan travel to Africa and to the islands off of Australia to visit with Aboriginal peoples I will have these jarring experiences again.

Over time during our stay in India I was less harsh on myself. I acknowledged that I had come a long way from growing up in a family for whom a foreign vacation was going from one borough of NYC to another. We lived in the Bronx and every year vacationed in a bungalow at the beach in Queens. My brothers and sisters like my self have been to Italy, England, Spain and Ireland. Yet none of us had ever been to Africa or India or places that are not designed to cater to the American tourist’s need for comfort. Stefani had been to Africa and to India. Her growing up was no more diverse and even a little less so than the Bronx as she grew up in Santa Barbara. Yet we both have a passion for hospitality. It is one of the values that literally binds us in marriage. Part of genuine hospitality is learning to be a good guest. The host has all the privilege and power of leading the guest. The guest has to be free to experience the life that the host invites the guest to experience.

Jesus as our host invited the disciples to trust Him. Jesus knew of their failures to find fish in exactly that place, but he was determined to show them a different way of seeing in the same place. As challenging as it was for the disciples to see differently in the same place, the stakes are a bit higher in different places as it was for me in India. For St. Stephen’s you too are being called to see differently in this place and the Spirit may in its own way eventually call you to see possibilities of new life in a different place.

Spiritual freedom is something very different than political and religious freedom. It has to do with the freedom to respond to God and the way the Spirit leads us into new life. Spiritual freedom is not merely about our self-determined desires, but God’s desires for us. Our desires and God’s desires very often conflict. Sometimes the conflict has been named as sin. When our desires dominate God’s desire we are vulnerable to sin. Yet sin is not the only outcome of when our desires conflict with God’s desires. Another outcome is that we become less than we are gifted to become. That is we never achieve God’s full purpose for us and so we settle for being less fully human to be comfortable.

In our home we have a framed set of words by St. Irenaues, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive”. These words were on our wedding invitation and these last seven years have been near our entryway. These words are a reminder to Stefani and me of our commitment to each other. The words are a reminder to our shared commitment to work with each other through love to bring the best out in each other. Bringing the best out in each other is different than covering each other’s back. It means that we open ourselves up to be molded by God. As we both do this, our love deepens for one another.

It requires each of us bringing a willingness to be malleable. By malleable we become like clay in the potter’s hand being molded into something of beauty. I was not totally malleable to my Indian hosts or to the Spirit of God last week. I want to be more malleable because I have had the occasion of malleability in other contexts in my life and the treasures I have discovered like the disciples have been of rich abundance. As I hear the opening collect and then the Gospel, I heard “Set us free of ourselves”. “Set us free of our own desires”. “Set us free to see as God sees”. The OT lesson instructed us to give up our sight and it is implied to take on God’s sight.

The disciples’ seashore context and India seem far away from the realities of St. Stephen’s Church. The disciples had found their inner strength to drop their nets. Instead of nets might we say they dropped their guard so that they could take in the abundance of God. I am working to drop my guard, so that the next time I might more fully enter the Indian and or African experience so I will be free enough to receive the gifts that can only be received in that context. I could stay home and never go again. If I did I would know that the reason would be simply fear and discomfort. Fear and discomfort are signs of a lack of my spiritual freedom. I want to be free to experience God in India and wherever the Spirit leads me.

What about you? Do you wish to be malleable enough to discover the life of God in new and unexpected ways or will you maintain your known comforts at any cost? How does your need for things to be exactly the way you have known them to be, impede you from being open to invitations to new life? Are you willing to let go of experiences of the past that might hold you back from going to new places, initially uncomfortable and foreign to your desired comfort? There is a real choice here. You can stay exactly where you are and leave the work to others. Yet if you do choose out of fear than we like the disciples may not find any new fish. Ultimately if the disciples stayed in that one place they would have gone hungry without anything to eat. To be fed we need to eat what the Lord puts before us. If St. Stephen’s Church chooses life, then we will do whatever is necessary to be nurtured by God even letting go of fear and the comfort of familiar places.

The City of God: When the Lord of Our Longings Conquers The Night - Faith Lutheran Church and St. Stephen's Church Reno All Saints Day

2009-11-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

John 11:32-44

Ever since being a little boy I have been perplexed by this weekend’s coupling of feasts -- Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day. As a New Yorker Nevada Day at the time was not on my radar, but if it was it may have added to my state of confusion. Starting with Halloween I remember being told by one demanding adult giver of treats, “Little boy, what is your trick and then I will give you a treat. No trick then no treat”.

As a very bashful child an invitation to perform was not something I cherished. I would have rather walked away from a treat than to do a trick. And I was ready to walk away. I did not have any tricks. I never associated a trick with a treat. As a precious child I just thought that Trick or Treating was a dumb name for dressing up. I knew little about the significance of the day. I just knew it was about collecting candy like Easter but Halloween was not religious. I recall being in a bit of a haze as a child dressing up and going out trick or treating.

As quick as the confusion of Halloween was over, then my little mind had to wrestle with All Saints and All Souls Day. All Saints was festive. All Souls was about remembering the dead. And the memory of the dead seemed to trump the festive memory of saints and their good works. I had no idea how to reconcile the confusion of tricks and treats to the light and celebration of All Saints and to All Souls with its bittersweet memories of death.

Come with me on a journey.

Fast-forward thirty years and I was in a chaplaincy program as part of my ministry formation to be a priest. As a Hospital Chaplain I was visiting a woman in the hospital suffering from terminal cancer and she was praying for a miracle. I humored her but I could not match her faith. As I look back now I am thinking I was hearing her say that she wanted God to perform a trick for her treat of good health. This lack of belief was a matter of grave concern for my Pastoral Supervisor who could not believe my disbelief. I likewise was aghast that people actually believed the miracle stories and somehow expected them to be performed today. I admit that I had been uncomfortable for praying for miracles or worse people who prayed feeling God did not answer when the miracle did not come.

This inner confusion as a child and spiritual/pastoral challenges that I have just described are amplified in our Gospel text. Last week we heard the story of Jesus healing Bartimaeus’ sight and this week he gave Lazarus his life back.

Do you believe that Jesus truly healed Bartimaeus or Lazarus?

Have you ever doubted Jesus the healer? What are our expectations of this healer?

Martha doubted Jesus. By asking about the stench of the corpse she was asking a very practical question. When Jesus says to Martha remove the stone is it the literal stone or the stoned resistance of Martha to the healing power of Jesus?

If I look back at my younger days as a pastor in the mid eighties working as a hospital chaplain there was a stone in my heart that impeded me from caring as Jesus would have ministered. The stone was erected by a pattern of experiences where miracles had not happened in my life and I was left with the brute reality of being unhealed. As a young man the tremor in my hands was the cause of much shame. I was teased by children in school and as a young workingman written up on a performance evaluation for being too nervous. I prayed always for my tremor to go away, but it did not. On a cognitive level I decoupled the unhealed tremor from my ministry and belief in God. Psychologists would say that I repressed the feelings and I failed to address them.

I stood in that NYC hospital room unable to pray with the woman who sought a miracle. I thought miracles were tricks where God says, what is it that you seek, say your prayers and offer your sacrifices and you will be remarkably healed. The sacrifice/prayer/miracle relationship made as little sense to me as trick or treat did as a kid. The treat had nothing to do with the trick. Everybody received a treat. I even received a treat for not doing a trick for gratefully the giver felt some shame on humiliating me as a child.

We can turn to Jesus and in observing and being moved by his tears transfer shame to Martha. I do not recommend this. The Gospel is not about merely cognitive beliefs but rather about where we find intimacy in our faith. Mary speaks from the heart and Jesus is weeping. Watch Jesus in the text. To whom does he turn but his Father? Jesus is the instrument of his Father’s glory of a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus is not just the great pastor or even the caring social worker. These are important jobs and we do express our care for humanity through these and any other job, but the glory of God goes much further than our good works.

Jesus points to the glory of God. He says thank you Father. In and through the glory of God miracles are possible. I suspect that like Martha we all too often miss the miracles before our very eyes. I would like to suggest that there is little difference between demanding a miracle and rejecting the very possibility of miracles. Rejection and expectation is about us not about the glory of God. The glory of God is something unexpected that if we are spiritually aware we will recognize in the ordinary days of our lives. The glory of God is all around us and sometimes we are aware enough to catch a glimpse when the stone in our heart is moved to let the light of God enter.

Stay with me on this journey.

In another hospital room in NYC six years later, after my pastoral experience in the other NYC hospital room, we were keeping an all night vigil with my dying mother. My mother, Catherine was in end stage Alzheimer’s. On that September 1992 day my mom had multiple seizures common in late stage Alzheimer’s. These seizures accelerate the onset of Alzheimer’s. In one day mom went from walking around the nursing home able to talk though making little sense to dying. Before the seizures she was able to enjoy visits from people she cared though she was unable to articulate their names. However, mom had never stopped communicating. She used her eyes and was never without giving her visitors the gift of an unexpected hug, touch or kiss. All this would change due to these seizures. It was as if the lights in her mind went completely out with the seizures.

The entire family gathered expecting that mom would die that night. It was a 48 hours vigil. We each took our turns at her bed saying our last words saying our good-byes to her. We had made peace with mom’s death before she died. Then at about 3am on the second evening of our vigil watch the doctors came by to say that our mother would probably not live to sunrise. At 4am my mom’s eyes opened. I was there with my sister Kathy. It was amazing! Mom began to speak just as we expected her to die. The doctors came in and they removed her oxygen mask.

Mom began to speak with total clarity. She thanked each of us for our care and wondered when she could go home. She not only awoke from this deep seizure sleep; but rather she awoke from the last four stages of Alzheimer’s. She was back at a place we had not seen in over a decade. She was alert and asking for friends by their names. Then within hours it all disappeared again and she lost this acute awareness. She did leave the hospital and returned to the nursing home but her Alzheimers worsened leaving her largely bedridden. It would take her several years until January 1997 before mom finally came to her peaceful death.

But on that September night in 1992 I am certain that we witnessed a miracle. It was not the miracle of a healing from mom’s Alzheimers, but it was unexpected and for her son and daughter present it revealed the glory of God. The doctors could not explain it. Some ventured a guess that the oxygen she received the last 48 hours had helped her brain. One diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is that there is a deprivation of oxygen to the brain. Upon hearing this I asked if the doctors could keep my mom on oxygen for the rest of her life. In this question I moved from the experience of the glory of God in a miracle to my human expectations and demands of God.

The glory of God is in our midst.

When the stone in our hearts shifts ever so slightly then the glory of God pours through like a great light revealing God on God’s terms not on our terms.

It has been my spiritual practice for some time now to reflect on all that I am grateful for and less lamenting. As a result I am constantly aware of the glory of God as it manifests itself in my life.

This week I saw the glory of God several times.

I saw the glory of God on Tuesday morning as St. Stephen’s Bread Ministry team took off in three cars to feed the homeless with the bread of life.

I saw the glory of God when as Street Priests Donna Murphy-Sharp, Bonnie Strader and I heard the story of a homeless man who had nothing gave his only winter scarf to the man who had less.

I saw the glory of God when I visited Bev Sharpe with Julia and Bob Stoddard. The glory of God was in the celebratory music Julia and Bob played as an expression of their faith in God and love for Bev. Judy Eisele who has faithfully fed Bev with the Eucharist has expressed the glory of God. I saw the glory of God when Domine, a nurse’s aide, at the Lifecare Center heard us singing Amazing Grace and came into the room to sing with us. There we were not only as an extension of St. Stephen’s Church but also as an extension of the entire Body of Christ praising God. I saw the glory of God in the peace of Bev’s eyes.

The glory of God is here as two different reformation traditions join in worship of one God.

Where did you see the glory of God this past week?

How has the glory of God been revealed to you through these pictures of people and momentos on this altar?

In today’s closing hymn you will hear these words: “Awake from your slumber, arise from your sleep a new day is dawning, the people of darkness have seen a great light, the Lord of our longing has conquered the night.”

On this festive feast of All Saints Day, let us pray that our eyes will be set on the City of God when the glory of God will be revealed in its full splendor. In the meantime in the city of Reno, this day, the King of Glory calls us to be people of compassion who see the glory of God in each other, seeing beyond each other’s human weaknesses.

As we let go of our demands for specific miracles the inner stones of our hearts that block out the light of God will shift. Then as People of the Light we will see a glimpse of the glory of God in one another.

God's Friends - October 11, 2009 at Camp Galilee for Trinity Church Reno Men's Retreat

2009-10-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Mark 10:17-31

Contrary to popular interpretations the Gospel is not about condemning the rich or those of us who have a few worldly possessions. The Gospel I think is asking all of us to think about what we treasure? This question is very closely related to another question -- Are these treasures ours or are they God’s? Our answers to these two questions suggest the key to living a different response than the rich young man who went away sad. Hopefully we will not leave from this time together in any way sad!

The focus of the Gospel is not that we go and sell all our possessions, give all our money to the poor and live as beggars. Such a choice overvalues poverty and diminishes the stewardship opportunity of privilege. At the same time we do need to ask some questions about what we treasure. My sense is that we are all men who cherish our spouse, our families and Trinity Church. Loving spouses, healthy families, good friends and vibrant churches are indeed good things for us to cherish too.

The emphasis of the Gospel goes a little bit further through Jesus’ question to the rich young man. My sense is that there is a little humor in Jesus’ response when he says, “don’t call me good teacher”. I sense him saying don’t try to snow me. I had a supervisor at Price Waterhouse who often said to me, “Joe don’t try to snow the snowman.” The rich young man seems to be trying to snow Jesus.

I read the Gospel as Jesus’ way of upping the ante. I think Jesus is poking fun at the young man. Jesus is asking if his treasure is only for himself or is it for others. Jesus contrasts the rich young man’s small circle of people he cherishes with Jesus’ larger circle of friends who are in communion with God. Jesus is asking us to put our treasure in service of this larger circle of God’s friends.

As men I think as a culture we are vulnerable to believe that our smarts, self-discipline and hard work have led to our privileges. So we could say, “we have earned what we have and it is ours”. Yet if we are not careful this way of thinking can lead to a defensive posture that the rich young man exhibits in this story. I can empathize with him. I sold all my possessions twice when I entered Roman Catholic seminaries and I can assure you that I did not have any better insight to this Gospel when I gave up my job, apartment and other worldly privileges and freedom.

There is another way to understand this Gospel though. It is a very different way of thinking to see all that we have received as a gift from God. To see that all we have received coming from God does not diminish our intellectual gifs, our self-discipline or even our masculine ingenuity. If all we treasure originated with God as gift to us than our discernment, indeed the rich young man’s discernment is about stewardship.

Stewardship is far more than deciding how much to pledge each year or how to be philanthropic in the greater community. Stewardship means that we acknowledge that all the gifts we have received including all of our possessions come from God’s grace. Stewardship means no longer living for our small circle of cherished ones but rather for the larger circle. Our challenge is recognizing the faces of people in need in the larger circle as our friends in communion with God.

A year ago working one night at Family Promise, I had a hard time making conversation with our guests. It was much easier for me to serve them than to call them by their name and talk about their circumstances. In future evenings it was a bit easier, but it was still a challenge for me. I have worked with the homeless before giving food through soup kitchens, staying overnight in shelters and giving to organizations that provide for the needs of the homeless. But as I look back on these ministries I see now the way I kept a safe distance.

What’s different for me now is that the homeless I am meeting in my work with Ted and others have names and stories. The homeless have ceased to be for me untouchable. I am in closer proximity. My friend Dan came with us on the street this week and several hours later he was thinking about Francis, an African-American woman who could have been anybody’s grandmother. Dan said he felt less sorry for the men but Francis melted his heart and he saw through her homelessness the way he was related to her through common humanity and communion with God.

As I read this Gospel and reflect on the work we have done, as street priests I think Jesus’ message is that we exercise stewardship over our treasures. This means recognizing God’s friends and using our judgment to make choices about how we care.

Not all of us are called to be Street Priests or even to work with Family Promise, just as Jesus is not asking all to sell all they have and move to the streets.

The Gospel does call all of us out of our small circle of friends and family with whom we share our treasures into relationship with God’s larger circle of friends.

The Gospel calls all of us out of defensive protection of our hard earned treasures to see God’s gracious hand serving our need through bestowing us with intellectual and financial gifts. In the second reading we heard that in Jesus we have one who is sympathetic to our needs.

The rich young man was not sympathetic to the needs of the poor rather he placed his sole treasure in his possessions. The Gospel calls all of us to be sympathetic to the needs of others in our community who may have not had our privileges or often through their one error in judgment have cost them the possibility of changing their plight.

Jesus called the young man’s bluff, but deeply embedded in that bluff is calling this man as well as all of us to be stewards of our treasures for a larger circle of friends.

The young man cherished his possessions above all else. Yet if he placed his treasure in being in communion with God then he would have approached Jesus differently. Indeed he would not have been self-righteously asking Jesus trick questions rather his focus would have been caring for a larger community of need than his own. As we leave this time of community and fellowship let us continue to be attentive to God’s friends in ways that expand the smaller circles we live so that our stewardship is about relationship not just providing service.

William Tyndale Feast - October 7, 2010 at Trinity Church, Reno

2009-10-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I was taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in Church History class is that contrary to popular belief Henry VIII did not provoke the English Reformation and thus establishing the Church of England later becoming Anglicanism. This was a surprise to most students even many cradle Episcopalians. The English Reformation was coming of age for quite some time.

There are two major figures in history that did provoke the English Reformation: Erasmus and William Tyndale, both of whom were contemporaries. Tyndale is listed among Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Erasmus is not, but maybe he should. Tyndale lived 1495 to 1536. Erasmus’ famous line is that we are all theologians. Erasmus democratized the then dominant Roman Catholic emphasis on the sacred order and authority of priests as divine mediators. William Tyndale in a similar way translated the bible into English so that the common man could read, meditate and learn from the scriptures without dependence on the priest.

At the heart of the Reformation is a power analysis lessening the distance between priest and layperson as well as between layperson and God. Fredrica Harris Thompsett, an Episcopalian church historian wrote the book We Are Theologians in honor of Erasmus’ words. Thompsett wrote that the “principle of divine accessibility is the central inheritance of all reformed religions”. Baptism not ordination was central to the primary identity of these reformed Christians.

Central to this divine accessibility is having the bible available in one’s own language. In our age we typically take this privilege for granted. Indeed, many prophetic missionaries in the early 19th and even 20th centuries valued the importance of translating the bible into the language of the people. Some missionaries then thought it was still a radical act. Now it is commonplace around the world to have bibles printed in one’s native language, but that is a direct contribution to Christianity from the English Reformation and specifically William Tydale’s work.

Who was this William Tyndale? He completed a Masters at Oxford and later was ordained a priest. Tyndale was a revolutionary prophet of his time. Indeed Henry VIII and others of the period attempted to kill Tyndale to destroy his work. Tyndale once wrote to a prominent Churchman, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou doest.”

Before Tyndale was ultimately betrayed and burned to death, he had finished and revised his translation of the New Testament and had made it through many of the books of the Old Testament too. His work has been described as “a well of English undefiled”. Lesser Feasts and Fasts reports that “some eighty percent of his version has survived in the language of later and more familiar versions, such as the Authorized King James Version of 1611”.

In today’s language Tyndale would be described as a political theologian for he linked politics to theology through his assessment of power he liberated people through vernacular scriptures. Indeed his last recorded words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”.

He might also be described as a prophetic priest who though not a scholar was forward thinking enough to consider how he might integrate his interest in politics, commitment to the people and love of scripture. There is no doubt that he had a special vocation from God communicated to him through a sense of the compulsion of the Holy Spirit to do this most marvelous work that would meet the test of generations after him.

It would be an understatement to say that today’s celebration of Wlliam Tyndale’s life and work is important. Our very identity as Episcopalians in an Anglican tradition can be traced to Tyndale’s contributions and his fierce independence from mediators of God’s grace. The English reformers rejected the need for a mediator of God’s grace. All had access to God and the Holy Spirit through the scriptures.

Why do we celebrate William Tyndale’s life today? At the very least so that we have a better sense of our own history as Episcopalians in an Anglican tradition. How might William Tyndale’s life be a source of encouragement for us today?

His passionate commitment to divine accessibility by all Christians through the scriptures is complemented by our Prayer Book of 1979 with its emphasis on Baptism as the primary sacrament of incorporation into the Body of Christ.

Collectively through today’s prayer book and the scriptures available in our native language we are equipped to do the work that God calls us to do. Indeed the very call to a particular vocation is channeled often through the Prayer Book and scriptures read in our native language. We must never underestimate the way we are called to exercise our faith with the same passionate determination of William Tyndale.

Total MInistry Parish: Spiritual Freedom To Act Without Clinging - October 4, 2009 at St. Stephen's Church, Reno

2009-10-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

Total Ministry in the life of the church, Wes Frensdorf once said, “involves all of those activities in which the members offer their gifts for worship, community life, caring and nurture as well as organizing and administration…But the life of the church, as the body of Christ, exists primarily for the sake of God’s mission.” For Wes Frensdorf Total Ministry was more than just the way a parish is organized or does its ministry. Wes’ core value was a spiritual one and he placed the emphasis on acting out of a compulsion of the Holy Spirit and freedom not to cling to each other especially not clinging to the priest.

Compulsion of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual freedom not to cling are deeply related. The church is not about our business, the plans we cling to but rather about the work of God channeled through the Holy Spirit manifested in our lives as one community among many other communities that make up the entirety of the body of Christ. The church is a place where we align our desires with God’s desires. It is neither pious nor straightforward work.

The way we live as a community now including gifts of time, talents and treasures will have much influence on the next generation who will come to St. Stephen’s. In our communion with God we are deeply connected with those who have come before us and to those who will come after us. We interpret God’s mission through a discernment process of deep communal listening. We listen for the often very subtle nudges of the Holy Spirit that ultimately establish a pattern that cannot be easily ignored. It is this steadily built pattern that contributes to the compulsion to act inspired by the Holy Spirit. Compulsion is different than self-determination requiring us to shed that to which we cling.

Fear, joy, ambiguity and even anger all get mixed in together when the Spirit calls us to places that we would rather not go. Giving up our control to follow the beckoning of the Holy Spirit can be downright scary. It is probably why the John 21 text has been my favorite text in all the Gospels for over two decades. I feel totally understood by Jesus’ words to Peter when he lets John stay and sends Peter on his way.

Peter wanted to stay with Jesus, but he was sent on to do ministry elsewhere. Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and Peter, each time said, Yes”. Then Jesus concluded his conversation with Peter by saying when you were a young man you went about as you wished, but now that you are older you will go where you might rather not go. When we are following Jesus we are free to act through the compulsion of the Holy Spirit.

Yet we are typically like Peter faced with our conflicting emotions navigating between the joy of Jesus’ personal call and our resistance to letting go of our self-determination. This navigating can sometimes throw us off center. When it does not feel right then we can anxiously wonder, “Are we truly following the one Spirit?” The gap between that which we seek and what the Spirit seeks for us can be huge.

I would describe this gap as fully living into ambiguity with all its uncomfortable tensions and unanswered questions. I imagine spiritual ambiguity being something like turbulence in an airplane. In my earliest days of flying as a young businessman passenger whenever I felt turbulence I thought my death was imminent. One time I remember being on a flight from Ithaca, New York to New York LaGuardia airport, less than 500 miles in a propeller prop plane. I was so scared as the wind bounced the plane around that my hands were gripping on to the chair in front of me.

My hands were flying all over the place as the plane bound forward like what felt like a roller coaster in the sky. To my surprise and horror I slapped the head of the man in front of me. Oh my God, I was so embarrassed! Of course, he was surprised and to my even greater surprise he graciously accepted my immediate apology. Perhaps he had once walked in my terrified shoes.

The plane of course was safe and I have since learned that planes can withstand much more turbulence than most planes will ever experience in flight. The plane stays the course in turbulence perhaps the pilot adjusting altitude here and there, but rarely is it at risk. Likewise I have been learning that as I listen to the Holy Spirit it will inevitably involve some unexpected turbulence in my life, but I will be safe.

For most of my life I was convinced that the Holy Spirit was calling me to be a priest. I totally missed that I was called to be a priest just not a Roman Catholic priest. I should have known this. It looks so simple as I look back over my life. Now I see the pattern of questions that I asked even as a little boy were questions of a protestant as I always questioned authority over others where agency seemed to be diminished and at its worst lost.

As a Jesuit, I had affirmations by protestant ministers, I was curious of the lives of Episcopalian seminarians, invited by the Dean of an Episcopal seminary in NYC to even come to classes as a Roman Catholic and despite all of these things I stayed the course in seeking to be a Roman Catholic priest.

On his deathbed my staunchly Roman Catholic father said, “Joe I am convinced that you are being called to be an Episcopal priest.” I said, “No dad, I am suppose to be a Roman Catholic priest”. Dad said, “No, Joe, a time will come when you recognize your call and when you do, please know that you have my blessing and do not look back”. It was over ten years between that conversation and when I was received into The Episcopal Church.

In these years in between I was shedding my self-determination and embracing the Holy Spirit’s image of priest ministering in a parish like this one that rejects every form of imposed hierarchy and aspires to act on shared compulsion of the Holy Spirit and clinging only to God’s radical mission. Like you I was searching for a church that was not hierarchical.

Theologically speaking the greatest power we have is to live trusting the Holy Spirit. How do we know that we trust the Holy Spirit? One way we know is that we do not cling or clutch to our desires as I did to the seat in front of me on that plane to NYC or to a particular version of ordained ministry. We trust patterns pointing to the subtle direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Peter clung onto his own vision of ministry impeding his action to freely follow Jesus until Jesus challenged him. Like Jesus’ and Peter’s conversation the deathbed conversation with my dad marked a dramatic turn in my life. The turn has meant that I live less with following my self-determination and that I increasingly trust the still voice of the Holy Spirit dwelling not exclusively in me but in the relational patterns of my life.

As I listened to the Spirit in this place last June I was compelled to present myself to your Search Committee. At each turn in the process I was drawn deeper into a call to this place at this time. The Holy Spirit has led me to a place I never expected or planned to be. I am not alone in this unexpected place as we heard two weeks ago when our Senior Warden, Nancy Petersen said that St. Stephen’s Vestry was surprised by my very presence in the search process and later that they were being drawn to choose me through our conversations. These kinds of Divine interventions suggest to me that the Holy Spirit is hovering over St. Stephen’s with her hand placed gently on this congregation.

On the last night that I met with Eleanor, Nancy and Norm not one of us wanted our conversation to come to an end. One part of the conversation I think that energized all of us is when I suggested that we think about making this part-time paid priest position a two-year term. I made the suggestion that if we worked together truly implementing the entirety of Total Ministry emphasizing our shared Total Responsibility that it is possible that this parish in two years might need less of my time or that of any paid priest’s time.

I am ready to work with you to create more possibilities than you may seem to have as a congregation today. We can discover these possibilities by not clinging to the future but by staying open and available to being moved by the Holy Spirit. In this way we will continue to be led towards unexpected places that draw us deeper into the heart of God’s mission for this very special church.

I want to share with you a story of a way this kind of availability to be moved was recently manifested in my life. The Sunday I preached here in August I did not have time to go home to change out of my collar before picking up Stefani at Trinity. As I arrived at Trinity their coffee hour was just about over. A young couple came up to me on the lawn and asked if I was a priest. I said, yes and they asked me will you pray for us and I said of course.

Like Jesus asking Peter if he loved him this couple asked me three times to pray with them. Finally it dawned on me that they meant right now not later. A praying circle gathered around this couple. A few minutes later another man came and this homeless man wanted to talk with a priest. He said he felt like a bum and was concerned that people were afraid of him. I assured him of his humanity, we prayed and he left.

A parishioner by name of Ted Moore watched these two experiences unfold. Ted immediately connected that morning’s sermon to push the walls of Trinity’s Church into the streets of Reno with these two unexpected visitors. Ted said there is a real hunger in this city for invisible street people to be called by their name and to be touched and blessed. Ted suggested we go out that week to see if his intuition was true. For a few hours every week since that August Sunday morning Ted and I walk for a few hours through the streets of downtown Reno asking homeless when they had their last meal, shower and warm bed and we pray, touching them and calling them by their name. By being attentive to the Spirit a new ministry has emerged at Trinity.

As a street priest I am learning from those on the street how not to cling but remain free. This work is not new to most of you given your outreach ministries. I am not preaching outreach to you, as this is one of the highest priorities of this parish, rather I am pointing to our shared ministerial sensibilities. I commit myself to you to participate with you in relational attentiveness to the Spirit and practicing freedom from that which we cling to that would otherwise impede our radical following of Jesus and living out of God’s mission.

I am convinced that God has called us to work together because God knows at this point as our journeys intersect that we need each other’s gifts. You and I probably don’t know exactly the way the work we have been called to do together will manifest itself, but if we resist our fear of a little turbulence then we will safely land in the loving arms of God. In time our shared purpose will emerge through the direction of the Holy Spirit as we participate in Total Ministry and Total Responsibility through Wes Frendsorf’s inspired spirituality and communal discernment.

Arise My Love - August 30, 2009 at Trinity Church, Reno

2009-08-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

Song of Solomon 2:8-13, James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Listen to the words and messages of this week’s scripture texts. In the Song of Solomon we heard, “Arise My love”; in the letter of James we are referred to as “my beloved” and in the Gospel of Mark Jesus reaches to the very center of God’s beloved, our hearts. These words describe a very special communion between God and all creation of which each of us are members.

Our capacity to respond to the way we are being addressed by God as “beloved” will be directly related to the way we have heard the bread texts in John’s Gospel over the last few weeks.

Christ loves us through Eucharist but there is a way we leave ourselves out of Holy Communion. Our lives can become so consumed in searching for Jesus that we miss the Christ before us. Due to our well-defined search we risk missing Jesus’ intimate relation to us when we are called by our name – “beloved”. Holy Communion is not only Divine presence. Holy Communion might be better described as radical communion.

The point of all the bread texts these last few weeks was far less about worshipping the most precious Body and Blood of Jesus and more about the way we are transformed by placing ourselves in intimate proximity to Christ through a communal Eucharistic feast. We become precious through Baptism and Eucharist.

The focus is not a temporary receiving of less than seconds each week, but rather, the way Eucharist opens us up. By frequently receiving the Body and Blood of Christ we radically open our lives to Christ. But this opening is not merely between each of us and God, but radically opens us up as a church. This radical opening is due to the way our hearts become commingled with God’s heart through the Eucharist.

Words such as “love” and “beloved” suggest an intimate communion between two lovers. Yet when the two lovers are God and ourselves we can be misled by the terms. The communion between two lovers is usually understood as an exclusive love. If we overlay this normative expectation on our communion with God then we justify a personal spirituality that sees all outsiders as intruders to our most sacred bond.

As a child I loved visiting the Blessed Sacrament in my parish church, but I always had an unspeakable question. I would name that childlike question this way - if we receive Jesus then how can Jesus be outside of ourselves?

As a theologian my concern has shifted to cautioning churches that reception of the bread and wine does not mean that we become the Body of Christ in a literal way that displaces or replaces the centrality of the Trinitarian reality for our lives. You see there is a very thin space between self-abandonment in a privatized relation to God and Divine inundation where we confuse and conflate ourselves for and with God creating our own false idols. Idols we then worship and protect from intrusion by others.

The call to the beloved is a public call to all creation. When we hear the words “my love” and “beloved” do we recognize ourselves, identify with, and feel called to respond? The scripture throws us a curve ball for God talks to us in today’s texts the way we often talk about God. God addresses us with awe and humility by naming us God’s “beloved”. Let’s just take a moment to savor our participation in this radical communion as God’s beloved.

If we can embrace and cherish our beloved nature then we will be freed from a fragmented and false humility where God is great and we are inferior missing the possibility of radical communion. That is the point of today’s texts and the tension between the law of the Pharisees and Jesus’ law. The Pharisees kept their distance as they scrupulously kept the law. Whereas, God’s law, the perfect law within us nurtured by the Eucharist frees us to live into God through each other in radical communion.

Arise my love is God’s call to all creation as “beloved”. As Trinity Church prepares to begin a new program year such recognition of being beloved frees us up from the necessity of tentatively seeking an overly defined passageway to God for ourselves or for others.

Our mission is to avoid building barriers that falsely seek to protect God’s communion from those we may see as intruders. With God there are no intruders. Therefore I want to preach beyond our Episcopalian notion of inclusion of strangers as inclusion is still about what we do and thus risks still seeing some people as intruders.

To free ourselves from this bind we have to redefine our communion with God. Holy Communion leads often to distancing the holy from the least worthy whereas radical communion abandons our inclusive responsibilities to God. The community of the “beloved” lives with a radical openness always pointing to God as the host to all. We practice this as a church when the presider says, “This is God’s table and all are welcome.”

Holy Communion may take place at this church’s table, but radical communion must be practiced at all tables. Nor does radical communion stop with an inclusive church community such as Trinity Church but goes beyond the gates of the church into the streets of downtown Reno and throughout our nation and the entire world.

Communion without intruders means each of us has the privilege to own our dignity as “beloved” and to serve with a deep sense that we are privileged to minister. The beloved is authorized in a very special way through the ministry of the baptized to care for the lover’s loved savoring the beloved in each person. Communities of beloved arise to their vocation in open communion with boundaryless space for all God’s beloved.

The time has come for us to arise out of our slumber and to celebrate God’s radical communion with all God’s beloved creation.

Living Bread As Covenant: Our Gift of Holy Vulnerability - August 9, 2009 at St. Stephen's Church, Reno

2009-08-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

John 6:35, 41-45

Bread is central to your identity as a congregation not the least through your bread program and love of hospitality. Bread is central to the larger church too. Stories about bread are stories about people in relationship with God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Bread is the conduit of all of these relationships – but not just any bread -- the Living Bread.

One of my favorite bread stories is the one at Emmaus after Jesus’ resurrection when the disciples did not recognize Jesus until they saw him in the breaking of the bread. These were his closest friends, but they did not recognize Jesus until they shared a meal with him. The Emmaus story reminds us of the centrality of the Living Bread.

Bread was central to the Emmaus story, as Jesus had become the Living Bread. Bread was also essential to the disciples’ story in the way it helped them to recognize Jesus. At Emmaus, Jesus’ story and the disciples’ story became one in their shared communion. Living Bread was a sign of the diversity of their transformation. Their stories depended on one another through their relationship with each other. As Jesus was changed into the Living Bread the disciples began their transformation through the Living Bread.

I am reminded of the OT text – Jer 31:31 – the prophet said of the Lord, “I will make a new covenant with them….”I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” The new covenant in the New Testament is Jesus. Through Jesus’ passion and resurrection we have been gifted with the Living Bread as our means to deeper communion through an ongoing process of transformation.

One way of seeing the Living Bread is as our covenant with one another in and through Jesus. Often there has been some confusion that a covenant is the same as a binding contract. That is you do this and I will do that and if one of us fails we will take disciplinary action against the other. Covenants are not hierarchical pacts that coerce the other to stay in relationship, but rather an expression of our desire to be together. Christian covenants are based on the virtue of unconditional love. A covenant is less about finding the right words to exactly describe the relationship. Contracts can never be covenants as they attempt to freeze relationships into place so they will never change.

Covenants anticipate that people will change and thus leaves space for change to gracefully emerge and tenderly engaged. Covenant provides a structure so that our best intentions are given the space to breathe and unfold bringing us into unexpected places of grace. Structure should not be confused with authoritative top-down hierarchy. Living Bread transforms structure through covenant. Living Bread as covenantal structure reminds us what we want to be mutually intentional about with each other.

A covenant that has shaped my life is made up of only eight words. In 2005 when Stefani and I were preparing to be married we went on an eight days retreat in the Tetons between Idaho and Wyoming. It was an Episcopal parish whose primary ministry was to offer centering prayer retreats. The church was across the street from a small rustic hotel where retreatants stayed. Our time together initiated a process of an unfolding covenant.

During our one-week of being together on retreat we decided to keep a journal as a means of communicating through the silence. Stefani had the journal from the morning to the evening and I had it from evening to morning. We wrote our reflections on our prayer as well as expressions of our appreciation and affection for each other. We also wrote down the ways we were beginning to envision our life together. In addition to our individual reflections, we would also write responses in the margins on the other’s comments.

Out of this retreat/journaling experience emerged an expression of our love and commitment. Specifically eight words emerged telling our unfolding story. These words are: truth, intimacy, hospitality, table fellowship, celebration, abundance, vulnerability and joy.

With further reflection we saw natural pairs: truth/abundance, hospitality/table fellowship, celebration/joy and intimacy/vulnerability. As we designed our wedding rings it seem as natural to decouple the paired words. In each of our wedding rings we have four words from each of the four pairs of words. Stefani’s ring has truth, hospitality, intimacy and celebration. My ring has joy, vulnerability, abundance and table fellowship.

Together through these two rings is the expression of our shared vision for a full life. Through these rings we are saying to one another and publicly to others that we are more likely to live a life of truth, intimacy, joy, hospitality, abundance, celebration, vulnerability and table fellowship when we are together than if we were apart.

The words did not compel us to live this way. We already were living in this way but we both wanted to deepen our experience through a shared life. In the presence of the Living Bread we exchanged our wedding rings to remind us of our primary covenant with God who forever calls us into an ongoing process of transformation.

I acknowledge to you that there’s an innocent quality to the story I just told you. However, have no fear, I am not innocent to the pain and suffering associated with a betrayal of power. Over the years of my life I have witnessed and experienced such betrayals where I have worked as well as where I have worshipped.

As a young man I aspired to be a “wounded healer” to use Henri Nouwen’s term. At the same time I was fortunate enough to realize that I was then too wounded to be a priest. Then I yearned to receive healing more than I wished to be a sign of it. I left seminary and only returned twenty years later.

In the interim years with the blessing of wise mentors I sorted out my own issues of faith identity, family history and my issues with authority. During these years a new vision of ministry was unfolding within me.

Some ministers seem to think that they can minister and heal out of their open and unhealed wounds. These ministers have not done their own inner work and can be dangerous to the People of God. The ministers who are even more dangerous don’t even know they are wounded and undiscerning churches ordain them.

I am not telling you anything that you don’t already know very well. I am confident that you like me know that it is the Living Bread who heals not even the most non-anxious priest or lay minister. It is when we believe that either priest or layperson heals our yearnings that we betray the power of the Living Bread as the only wounded healer.

In today’s second reading we are being called to deepen our relationship with each other by becoming imitators of the Living Bread. Caution is necessary here, for we must never come to believe that we can become God for then we betray Living Bread as our healing power. The emphasis must always be on our being imitators.

All of us are always in process of becoming more loving to be in communion with Living Bread but not to replace the centrality of Living Bread. It means that we bear with one another’s stories, questions and unfolding hopes. Yet this kind of transformation is challenging if we have ever been betrayed for we fear the unknown cost of our being vulnerable.

I know as a chaplain and as a spiritual director that the stories we tell our selves and each other reflect where we are in this healing process by what we say as much as by what is left unsaid. Michael Lapsey is an Anglican priest in South Africa. In April 1990 he lost both of his hands and one eye opening a letter bomb targeted for him due to his anti-apartheid activism.

He has spent his whole life since teaching people about reconciliation and communion. In a sermon he gave at All Saints Church Pasadena he talked about his travels around the world. As a means to come to know his hosts when he visited people’s homes he would ask them if he could see their family photo albums.

Lapsey noted that as people showed him their albums they seem to skip over selected stories. Sometimes albums had an empty space where a picture had been torn out. Lapsey would inquire what about the picture passed over or the empty spaces. He said sometimes people refused to talk about it and at other times people would briefly say something clearly wanting to move on with little notice. However the pain Lapsey saw in their eyes told another story.

As it turned out in almost all cases the empty space was covering up some form of deep hurt or betrayal. The picture seemed to be pulled out as an attempt to extinguish their memory, their pain and mostly represented their blunt refusal to ever be vulnerable again. Who among us cannot identify with their conviction not to be hurt?

Like couples we who are drawn to live in a parish community imperfectly enter into each other’s lives and if we are humble enough we even know that we will inevitably fail one another. Just as in other healthy relationships we are not paralyzed by this fear for we acknowledge Living Bread is our only source of communion and healing. Through the Living Bread we relearn a holy vulnerability that those in Lapsey’s story must have thought was not possible.

It has been my experience that when we forget the centrality of the Living Bread it is then that we risk betraying each other by imposing our false idols on one another. Vulnerability is not the source of our betrayal rather it is our unhealed wounds coupled with false power that imitates the power of God when we most risk betraying each other.

The Living Bread discerns and cherishes our holy vulnerability. “To you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.” The Living Bread knows each one of us in our blessed vulnerability that cannot be surpassed even by the most affirming intimacy of two lovers. Would being known in this way embarrass or shame us? For the most part I suspect not.

My sense is that the Living Bread would tenderly tell our stories. As Living Bread speaks all our pictures are cherished. Then even the pictures as in Lapsey’s story that still provoke pain would have a sense of deep healing. To be known by each other in the way that God has come to know us is our lifelong work.

As we learn to find our satisfaction only in the Living Bread then we will become vulnerable to each other letting our stories gracefully unfold. At its best this way of being is a contagious process where story begets story and questions begets new stories.

Be cautious though of people who promise you a way to fast forward yours or your congregation’s story without struggle for these are false idols of Living Bread. Our covenant call is to live into an unfolding story entrusted to communion with the Living Bread. A sign of our holy vulnerability and patience with this unfolding story is when we can acknowledge to each other that we are each only imitators of Living Bread and celebrate this without shame.

My Power is Made Perfect in Weakness - July 4, 2009 at Trinity Church, Reno

2009-08-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

2 Cor 12: 2-10 and Mark 6:1-13

Today’s readings are timely for us as we celebrate our nation’s independence. As a former colony of the British Empire we were once weak and with our postcolonial independence we became strong and powerful as a nation. It is right that we celebrate our independence.

We just heard, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” These words are not likely mottos of colonizers or even proud independent nations like America.

The question then that we must address this morning is what is the difference between human power and divine power?

If as former colonies we rightfully and proudly have rejected our colonized form of weakness, then what do we make of these words – Power is made perfect in weakness?

Frankly, these words are very easy to gloss over as ancient and irrelevant to us today. However, if do gloss over these words we do so at our peril. To find the gem hidden for us in these texts we have to work through our instinctive biases against weakness.

In both the Corinthians reading and the Gospel of Mark we see that our personal power can be haughty and boastful pointing to the strength of our own resources. The texts are challenging us to turn towards the power we receive through our complete dependence on God.

The thorn in the Corinthians reading can be interpreted as divine punishment for being too boastful. We can also take the text literally and God gave the thorn to make the man humble. The second interpretation if we are not careful quickly leads to divine punishment or a form of sacrificial love that at least for me makes God’s motives with us questionable.

I think it is an unhelpful image to see God as zapping us when we are too elated -- to use the words of this morning’s text. Let’s not get stuck there though. Our texts today help us interpret Jesus’ power in a different way than the power exercised by leaders of contemporary empires. Some speak of the power of the cross, but we must be careful how we approach the cross or we quickly fall back into an interpretation of divine punishment and that suffering will make us perfect.

Indeed, many empires have used similar texts to justify slavery and other forms of oppression in the name of God. It is so easy to blur these lines between God’s power and human weakness when we read these texts.

Let’s face it -- the words – “Power is made perfect in weakness” is a prophetic statement and as the Gospel instructs us, if we live in this way we are not likely to be recognized by friends and family in our hometowns.

In many corporate settings it is common to find high energy messages posted on the walls of the company to encourage people to perform at increasing levels of excellence. Business scholars have reported that these high-energy statements encourage employees to make money for the organization by increasing their sense of pride for their efficiency and profitability. That said, in my 15 years of working as a businessman I never saw signs that said, “Power is made perfect in weakness”. To the contrary weakness is associated with mediocrity and typically weak employees are quickly terminated.

The weakness of the second reading and Gospel is not about mediocrity or unjust colonization as we once suffered as a nation or that others face today.

As I hear today’s text and attempt a fresh interpretation I recall the Philippians passage “He emptied himself and became human.” In emptying I don’t hear sacrifice but rather opening ourselves up to love and to be loved.

The weakness is a place of opening such that our focus is not on our own strength but on recognizing and receiving God’s grace. When we recognize that our power is based on God’s grace and not on our inner strength we are less likely to boast of the possessions and power we may have accumulated, but rather point to God.

And people who are truly weak in a Godly manner know this and they point to the goodness of God’s grace when they feel this kind of power within themselves.

The biographer of Jean Vanier, Michael Downey called the thorn in today’s second reading, “A blessed weakness”. Jean Vanier is the founder of the worldwide movement of L’Arche, meaning the ark. L’Arche is a very special home for people who are developmentally disabled.

Downey wrote, “It is in our own weakness and limitation that God comes to us, not in our strength, security, and certitude. God is powerful compassion and mercy who meets us in our weakness, our blessed weakness.” As compassion, God offers us an example through Jesus of how we are to serve each other.

Vanier found L’Arche at a time in his life when he was searching for God. Vanier had spent three years in an extended retreat working with his spiritual director hoping to find God’s purpose for his life. Finally, his spiritual director exasperated by Jean Vanier’s lengthy process encouraged him to go home and pay attention to the weak and the poor in his town.

Each morning in his little countryside town outside of Paris Jean Vanier would walk to the bakery for some fresh bread. One morning he saw two homeless men who were clearly disabled. Jean Vanier invited these men into his home and soon others sought him out to care for their loved ones. Vanier says of his work that he does it out of his own struggles, confusion, uncertainty and rejection giving him that privileged space to be in solidarity with the most vulnerable.

This sounds counter-cultural to what most of us have been taught. Twenty-five years ago, upon announcing to my parents of my interest in living and working in a L’Arche community they frowned upon his work as misguided and said to me, “Joe, you can do so much better”. Vanier’s work was unknown and did not carry with it the same cache as being a member of the Society of Jesus, as the Jesuit I later became or as an ordained priest. It was risky and it was scary.

My parents are not alone in mistaking blessed weakness for mediocrity. Yet Jean Vanier’s blessed weakness is not the mediocrity or weakness that corporations eradicate by terminating their incompetent employees or even the same as the over scrupulous religious who seeks to be perfect by eliminating their very humanity.

Blessed weakness is a way of loving ourselves so that we may love the incorrigible other within us and in others. Vanier did this by loving the developmentally disabled who were disposed of in the streets of France and or forgotten in state asylums around the world. His first act of love has inspired over two hundred small communities around the world.

Not all of us are called to become members of L’Arche, but we are called to cherish the paradoxical blessed weakness of God’s power made perfect in weakness.

Vanier has taught that every person, no matter how small or even incorrigible has a gift to give that we are invited to cherish. However, his emphasis is not just that we cherish weakness out of mere charity, but that we recognize that our communities are incomplete when we purify them of the weakness that offends us. Purification is the purpose of empires. Genocide is about purifying weakness from nations. Yet it is not just nations who do this.

Vanier and today’s texts calls us to gather up what we may once have disposed of in ourselves or in others and cherish ours and their blessed weaknesses. And if we love in this way then we will quickly see the prophetic cost of being different.

With now some sense of irony due to my parents’ rejection of Vanier’s way of living, when my mother was sick with end stage Alzheimer’s I turned to Jean Vanier’s books to find strength to learn how to be a compassionate son. It was not easy. I had had a turbulent relationship with my mom and much needed to be healed in both of us. In her end stage Alzheimer’s my mom was no longer available for the necessary healing conversation that often makes a difference for families at the end of life.

Inspired by Jean Vanier’s witness, I developed a prayer mantra to say when I visited my mom at the nursing home. I love you as you are this day, not as I remember you or as I wish you to be, but as you are this day.

By saying this mantra aloud for a year, several times a week during my visits at the nursing home in time what emerged for me was a tiny glimpse of God’s unconditional love. The mantra was an occasion of healing – God’s power made perfect in weakness. This is my story. I am confident you have your own stories of God’s power made perfect in weakness. So let us gather our stories together and if we must boast, let us boast to all that Trinity Church’s power, as a community of faith, is made perfect in blessed weakness.

A Sideless God - June 21, 2009 at St. Stephen's Church, Reno

2009-08-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

Mark 4:35-41

My wife, Stefani and I have a cat named Baba that we found at the Reno shelter in September. We were told that he had a very difficult life. He was abused, adopted then rejected by his adoptive parents after only three weeks. Honestly, if Stefani and I were not sharing the cat, then Baba would have likely ended up back in the shelter. Several times I was tempted to return Baba. Yet in the last few months he has considerably calmed down. He spends his whole day on a soft blue blanket on our bed. He can go anywhere if he has his blanket.

It is common knowledge at Trinity Episcopal Church that I want to get a dog. So two parishioners were going away for a few days and thought it would be a good idea for me to care for their dog as way to have a better sense of what it is like to have a dog. So a few weeks ago we dog sat for a lovely poodle. The poodle’s name does not matter to the story. This poodle sits in his household on his blanket too for most of the day.

When Baba and the poodle met even though they shared similar blanket rituals, they hissed and barked at one another. We needed to keep them separate from one another. We imagined the two blankets side by side, but it was our vision not theirs. The cost of this separation was that Stefani slept with Baba and I slept with the poodle in two separate rooms. Needless to say we will not be getting a dog anytime soon!

Territory is important – for people and as you can see for cats and dogs.

Where are we when we hear Jesus’s invitation to go to the other side?

Often I suspect we metaphorically bark and hiss at God. Just as the cat insists on his own blanket without interruption from the strange dog, we find ways to relocate our metaphorical blankets – our customs and patterns in to new places.

The words “the other side” carries with them powerful cultural and political resonances. Other side can be as mundane as going to the other side of the street or as mysterious as to an unknown place.

We talk commonly about the other side of our families – the maternal and paternal sides.

The other side of a church aisle is merely descriptive. Often when we say other side in this way it is merely a way of differentiating between where we are and where others are. There is no judgment in saying that people sit on the other side of the church. You may have a pew you commonly go to, but there is no culture for that side of the church.

Little is at risk when we say let us go to the other side of the street for we can see what is ahead of us and behind us. We are still in control. We can see the other side as we leave from the one side of the street to the other. What we see from the other side of the street is different than what we see on this side, but it is the same street. The distance is short between two sides of the street. We see the same people as there is an easy passage from one side of the street to the other.

It is common even expected in scholarly arguments to present both sides of a question, weigh the sides and then make a judgment based on analysis for one more than the other or to reframe and create a third side.

We speak of the other side of a political issue and this often in our culture can lead to suspicion of and at its worst demonization of the other side. The Religious Right condemns pluralism and the progressive liberal condemns the narrow gate. Blue states versus red states, gay versus straight and black versus white.

The other side of the ocean does not bring with it much fear if you are going to London, but if you are going to Iraq, Africa or India to be among people who speak a different language or in a turbulent context this can provoke anxiety, fear or even our refusal to go.

When we talk about death there is an unknown quality to the other side of life.

So the other side can be as mundane as the other side of the street or the other side of death into the complete unknown. There is a spectrum or range of feelings that come with going to the other side.

In this morning’s Gospel going to the other side is not quite as simple as going to the other side of the street as the disciples take a boat to get there so it must be reasonably far away. Given the examples of the other side I have shared we can empathize with the disciples.

When you have traveled I am sure you have experienced the way ordinary events like finding your way around the city can be anxiety producing as you are in a different place. Likely the disciples at home would have experienced other storms without the same fear they have in this story.

When we travel over time in one place we realize our way and settle into what is initially different and develop a comfortable pattern and confidence. We make the space our own but the space does not change. We either change by being open to new customs or we insist on our own customs in this new place. The disciples in their fear of the storm express their anxiety about a new place.

A few months ago the Lutherans from Faith Lutheran Church crossed the street after your church’s fire to join worship with the Episcopalians here at St. Stephen’s. Crossing the street I said was pretty mundane but was it mundane for you? Was it mundane for you to cross the street? You encountered a different worship style, different space, different people, different leadership, different ministry priorities and different resources. You were not alone as although the people of St. Stephen’s did not physically go to the other side of the street, you welcomed new people into your worship space and community. Perhaps at times you even were aware that people from the other side of the street came over to this side of the street. How did that make you feel?

As you both prepare to return to your ordinary way of life without the proximity of the other, what have you learned from this pilgrimage of crossing to the other side of the street or welcoming a different people to a different tradition? How will your time give you empathy for times in the future when you will be called to go to the other side?

I grew up in a very home-bound family. My parents were proud that they never left NYC. As a result later in life leaving to go anywhere produced great anxiety in me. In the nineties I took a job where I had to do 90% travel. A priest friend said to me that I should find a restaurant in each city where I was known and go there to feel a sense of safety and companionship. In a way I relocated my familiarity to a different place. Like the cat I kept my blanket with me.

Then in 2000 I was offered a job to leave NYC for LA. Shortly after getting to LA I was homesick. I considered returning home to NYC. It was hard to put down my blanket in LA, as it was dramatically different from any city I had ever been. My urban patterns did not fit comfortably in to LA. For example LA is not walking city, as had been my custom, but a driving city. I had to learn how to drive on really fast freeways.

Then one day I thought back to all my travels and I realized how I had always been safe even in the midst of my anxieties. I sensed God calling me to trust at an even deeper level when I moved to LA. The words that came to me one morning in prayer were to accept LA on its own terms and not to compare it to NYC where I grew up or other cities I worked or lived. I lived into this mantra in a way that changed my life and opened up opportunities for me that I never had before. Since LA I have lived in affluent Cambridge, just outside of Boston, then in working class Manchester, England and now in Reno – three very different places with very different people and customs.

After living in LA though I began to see people in their contexts in a different way. I judged their way against the measure and standard of my way less frequently. In January I will travel to India to give a scholarly paper. It will be the most dramatically different place I have ever been to in my life. I am excited and also a little anxious. Yet I am going to India with a deep sense of trust that I never had before in any of my previous travels. The trust I have is that God goes before me. God is within me. And now I am confident that God is on the other side in people who look different than me. In a way it has been like learning to float. If you think about it too much you sink. If you relax then your entire body, mind, heart and soul can enjoy the calm of otherwise turbulent waters.

I have a confession. I don’t know how to swim but on occasion my wife lets me lay my body against her body in the water and for a moment I feel the extraordinary calm in my body as I rest in God’s waters. I intend conflation here – as I rest against my lover I discover I am also in the hands of God. The disciples thought about it too much and they thought they were going to sink. I often think about it too much and feel like I am sinking too, but than Stefani and or God is there to keep me afloat.

Jesus is calm on both sides of the boat and also in different places. His center is not Bethlehem or Nazareth or even Jerusalem, but life with his Father and through the Holy Spirit preaching and living the Gospel.

What have you learned from your pilgrimage to the other side or with the other side? Are you impatiently waiting to get back to your comfortable routines without the other or do you have a deeper awareness that God abides with you on both sides of the street?

I hope you have had at least a glimpse that God dwells deeply on both sides of the street. I hope you have partially witnessed God in different customs and rituals. The Good News of today’s Gospel is that when we can trust God on God’s terms than we are freer to go beyond just the other side of the street. Then our cherished church rituals become a means and much less our ends. The triumph of going to the other side is having the privilege to encounter God in a new and different place. The other side may be mysterious to you and I but God dwells on all sides.

When we live with the conviction that God dwells on both sides then we can hear and embody Jesus’ words -- Peace, be still. In the years ahead wherever you are on whatever side of the street or on the other side of the world, remember that God is with you. But God is not just with you. God is on all sides, in all places and conditions of life. If you trust and accept God on God’s terms you will never sink, but rather you will live a glorious life of unexpected and abundant grace and blessing. This is God’s gift to us today, next Sunday and throughout our lives. God everywhere is our grace and blessing, so let us live into God on all sides.

F. D. Maurice Feast Day - April 1

2009-08-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

F. D. Maurice was born into a family of a Unitarian minister whose life was marked by intense religious controversy due to the non-reformer tradition versus the Church of England, the Anglican tradition. Maurice’s theology was shaped in large measure by the way he had to come to terms with both the Anglican tradition of the English nation and the non-reformer, Unitarian tradition of his family.

F.D. Maurice was contemporaries with the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Tennyson wrote a poem to F.D. Maurice to honor his friendship. Maurice was also friend to another poet, Samuel Coleridge. Coleridge and Maurice both often wrote about the notion of polarity. Polarity is another name for the Anglican concept of the Via Media.

The English Reformation, specifically the Church of England has often been described as the Via Media – or the middle way between Roman Catholic and the Puritans extremes. Maurice and Coleridge attempt to redefine Via Media for as time passed the Via Media became more associated with a compromise position.

Coleridge argued that polarity is holding the tension between opposites. Paul Avis, a contemporary Anglican theologian writes about this notion of polarity as “a quality of thinking, an approach in which elements usually regarded as mutually exclusive were seen to be in fact complementary. These things were held in a living tension, not in order to walk the tight-rope of compromise, but because they were seen to be mutually illuminating and thereby to fertilize each other.”

F.D. Maurice referred to polarity as a union of opposites. Maurice rejected the idea that the English Settlement of the Reformation was either a cowardly or cunning compromise that lacked the courage to side either with the Council of Trent and Rome or the most radical Puritan reformers. Rather Maurice believed that Elizabeth I united within herself the extreme elements of the catholic and reformed elements of the nation.

This notion of polarity in Coleridge or union of opposites in Maurice is an important one as both attempt to capture what is distinctive about Anglicanism, that is, what it means to be an Anglican. As Episcopalians we have a share in this Anglican heritage and legacy, as The Episcopal Church is a member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

This union of opposites is a difficult concept for us to live in our lives and in the life of the Church. In the larger Church we do not often see Maurice’s union of opposites or Coleridge’s polarity at work but more often polarization between two sides. It is good for the church to recall this dimension of Maurice’s in the midst of its various global controversies.

Even without trying to understand all the nuances of these controversies today, we can all understand what Maurice was talking about by considering the various elements of our workplaces. I am sure in your workplaces you meet many very different people. I am confident that you need to find ways of working together that honor one another and acknowledge your differences without achieving what Coleridge and F. D. Maurice called a false unity. In work situations there can often be a dominant desire to go one way and not another. Yet I am sure you would agree that good team leaders know how to bring everybody along to get the project done.

It is in this way that the most authentic sense of being an Anglican also attempts to hold together very different people. Anglicanism is not about simple unities but rather about acknowledging the complex richness of God’s world.

So F. D. Maurice may have written in the mid 1800’s but his theology is as relevant today as it was in his time. If anything we would do well to cherish his union of opposites as a fresh alternative approach to our life in community in the church, our families and workplaces.

Catherine of Siena Feast Day - April 29

2009-08-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

Since I was a little boy I have always wanted to know more about Catherine of Siena. Catherine was my mother’s patron saint whom she often prayed. It was a delight for me to learn more about her.

Catherine of Siena is listed among Lesser Feasts and Fasts as well as being a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. The difference for Episcopalians as stated in the Preface of Lesser Feasts and Fasts is one of tone: “In the saints we are not dealing primarily with absolutes of perfection but human lives in all their diversity, open to the motions of the Holy Spirit”. Before we continue with an Anglican reflection on Catherine’s life, it is worth our time to consider the Roman Catholic recognition of Catherine as a saint as it reveals to us the remarkable woman she was and the model she can serve to both Roman Catholics and Anglicans in different ways.

Catherine lived in the fourteenth century. She was canonized in 1461, but did not become part of the Roman Catholic calendar of saints until 1597. In 1940 she was made patron saint of Italy sharing this privilege with St. Francis of Assisi. In 1970 Pope Paul VI gave her the recognition of the Doctor of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church has been making doctors of the church since 1298. There are only 33 doctors of the church and Catherine of Siena is one of them. Pope Paul VI in 1970 made the first two women ever doctors -- Catherine of Siena and Theresa of Avila. Then in 1997 Therese of Lisieux was made a doctor of the church. There are only three women doctors of the church.

But Catherine was not always so popular. In her time many people thought she was crazy. One Dominican priest trusted her spirit and it was due in part to his affirmation of her that she was able to trust her call from God.

Catherine is recognized for being a confessor and advisor to popes and a mystic of the church. Her major piece of writing is called the Dialogues and includes 381 letters and 26 prayers. The Dialogues is Catherine’s journal documenting her relationship with God. From a very young age she had an extraordinary friendship with God. In the course of the 33 years of her life she had three visions – one at age 6, another at age 12 and the last just before she died. In each vision she saw Mary and Jesus. In one vision she was given an invisible ring by Mary that Catherine describes as her betrothal to god as God’s special servant.

In one of the letters that Catherine wrote to God, she says to God when she experienced God’s distance, “Now is no time to sleep”. Isn’t that such a great line? The next time we feel God’s distance in our prayer, we might think of Catherine’s words. Her words suggest to me a profound intimacy that she had with God as a friend.

Catherine’s vision of the church was very Anglican. She believed that the church was a commonwealth where there is room for all in humanity and none are excluded. In one of her most powerful journal entries she gave an account of being present to a man about to be executed. Catherine often visited prisons. She met this one man in prison who did not believe. He was so ashamed of his life and his criminal acts that he doubted that he would ever receive God’s forgiveness. Catherine reassured him that before he died he would experience God’s love and forgiveness.

On the day of his execution Catherine went to the prison. Before he came in to the room where the execution was to be carried out, she prayed for him. In a most loving way she even laid her face on the table where the man was to meet his death as if to share her spirit with him. When the man laid down on the table he smiled, then laughed and confidently said to Catherine God is with me. Let us hold the image of Catherine laying her face upon the harsh reality of the table that would bring death to this man. What tables are we called to bear our bodies transforming fearful people into those who spontaneously laugh? May we be inspired by the way this man who suffered so much, in the lasts seconds of his life profoundly felt God’s love, dying in peace. Finally let us pray in thanksgiving for Catherine of Siena’s courageous love that transformed the hearts of all she encountered that we may do so in the ways to which we are each uniquely called.

Paradoxical Love - April 19, 2009 at St. Catherine of Siena, Reno

2009-08-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

Holy Week and Easter are very bodily feasts of our faith. On Maundy Thursday we are invited to wash each other’s feet. On Good Friday we had an opportunity to venerate, that is, kiss the cross, as a means of honoring the body of the crucified Jesus. On Easter we must contend with Jesus’ bodily resurrection. From Maundy Thursday to Easter morning our faith is being tested and each of us are challenged at different times and in different ways. Yet for all of us it is a faith that cannot be fully experienced without a deep and intimate connection with our own bodies. Yes, it is a paradox of faith.

To believe in Jesus’ resurrection, we must first walk in our own bodies and believe we are made in the image and likeness of God. The journey of our faith draws us from initial contempt for our bodies to being transformed by washing another’s feet, kissing the crucified body and ultimately believing in the resurrected body and life everlasting.

Thomas the apostle was a believer before Jesus’ death, but with Jesus’ resurrection he and we are being called into a deeper level of faith. Thomas was unprepared for Jesus’ resurrection. Apart from the beautiful pageantry of the Easter celebrations are we any better than Thomas? Do we really believe in the words of the Nicene Creed? “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”?

We know from the Emmaus Gospel story that some of the disciples did not recognize Jesus until he made breakfast for them. The story goes that they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. Our story this morning tells us that Thomas did not believe until he could place his finger in Jesus’ wound. Where are you in your journey of faith? Do you empathize with Thomas’ story?

There is a wonderful painting done by the Italian painter, Caravaggio called “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”. As I read today’s Gospel several times I also looked at this painting to see what more I could learn about this text. Initially, the painting struck me as odd with these men all staring at Jesus’ open side. I wondered how Thomas’ examination of Jesus’ wound was going to help him believe.

When I placed myself in this painting I was profoundly moved by the privilege of touching Jesus’ body. As I touched his body I thought about the healing touch of doctors. I thought of the many times I have visited the dying at their bedside and prayed with their families when I was a Chaplain. I also thought of the time I worked as a nurse’s aide at a hospice in NYC as part of my formation to be a priest.

As a nurse’s aide at the hospice I bathed, dressed, fed and diapered the dying. When people died I dressed their bodies for the morgue. Dressing the body really means undressing the body, washing it down, rubbing it with oil and covering with a sheet for the undertaker. Initially I was horrified by the expectation that I would dress the body. One nurse’s aide told me to care for the dead like I care for myself. She asked me, how do you wash your own body? She said you must care for their bodies as you care for your own. If you are afraid of your living body you will be afraid of their dead bodies. If you love your body, you will cherish the body of the man you bathed yesterday who today is dead.

In time I moved beyond my horror of touching a dead body. I began to recall the person’s family and their last words to each other. As this happened I moved from my own bodily fears of touching a dead body to cherishing the person whom I had bathed just a few days before. Each time I went through this process of transformation moving from my fear of a dead body to recalling the person to sensing the privilege of this intimate and holy moment. Of all the jobs I have had in my life this was without doubt the most meaningful one for me on the deepest level. This experience of caring for the body is one that I am confident that doctors and nurses in this congregation are quite familiar with too. As adult caregivers some of you may have had the experience of caring for your parents’ frail bodies with Alzheimer’s or cancer.

Thomas is looking at Jesus’ wound but he is not looking at Jesus. We might have greater empathy for Thomas if we enter this scene also. So this morning I invite you to meet Jesus in this scene and if you wish to touch his wound. How does such an invitation strike you? Do you feel timid, cautious, fearful or at all hesitant? Do you sense yourself moving towards Jesus? Do you directly look at him or do you stare at his wound? How long will it be before you place your finger into Jesus’ wound? Are your hands trembling as you touch him? Is the wound clean or messy? Do you even think about the condition of the wound? Do you readily place your finger in Jesus’ side or are you squeamish about touching possibly some dried blood?

What are you doing with you other hand? I was struck by the way Thomas has placed his finger in Jesus’ wound. But do you also see in the painting how Thomas has his other hand on almost exactly the same side of his own body as he does on Jesus’ body? As I looked at the painting I found myself looking at Thomas’ left hand placed firmly on his own side as much as I was drawn into the extension of his right hand to Jesus’ body.

Do you see that Jesus’ body is fully engaged in Thomas’ examination? Jesus pulls his cloak back with his right hand revealing his wound. And it appears his other hand is placed on Thomas. Perhaps Thomas is trembling and Jesus is helping him hold his hand still enough to touch the wound. As you know my hands tremble and people often have to help me steady my hand at certain times.

Look closer now and you will see that all eyes are on Jesus’ wound, but Thomas’ eye seems to look beyond Jesus. My sense is that there is far more to the story of Thomas than just his doubt and inability to believe in Jesus. Perhaps like the disciples at Emmaus who did not believe until they saw Jesus in the breaking of the bread, Thomas must first do something in order to recognize Jesus. Thomas says all he must do is touch Jesus to believe, but this painting does not convey a story of a believing Thomas.

Yet Thomas at least in Caravaggio’s painting averts his eyes from Jesus’ wounded body. I wonder what is going on in Thomas’ life. Clearly Thomas appears distracted. He is in front of Jesus and he is distracted looking away. I turn back to Thomas’ left hand and wonder if his hand and eyes might serve as clues leading us to a deeper meaning behind his story. I wonder if Thomas is distracted by his own concerns. Is it possible that Thomas’ own body hurts? All look at Jesus’ wound, even Jesus looks at Jesus’ wound, but Thomas, he looks away. Of all the men in the scene, Thomas looks the most frail. Is it possible that Thomas is ill?

A friend of mine at seminary, who for this sermon I will call Bill, was HIV positive. He was an African-American who was very articulate about the times he was the recipient of racism on various occasions throughout his life. This fellow was a great preacher and loved the ministry. He started his own church before he was 20 years old. Then in his late forties after his church flourished he went to seminary to get a Masters of Divinity.

He was famous for telling fellow classmates that Jesus is dead. He would say the stories of Jesus are great, but he is dead, oh so very dead. Jesus did not rise from the dead. He would laugh, and just keep saying, no Jesus is dead. All his closest friends were shocked when he would say this too. When I read this morning’s text and saw Caravaggio’s painting, I thought about Bill and remembered his story.

Bill’s story and Caravaggio’s painting help me hear the story of Thomas differently. I wonder if like the disciples at Emmaus who believed when they saw Jesus in the breaking of the bread, if Bill will see and believe only when his own body ceases to serve as a distraction. To what extent has Bill’s HIV or even racism served to condemn his body? Can the condemned body really believe in Jesus? Can Bill believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection?

I wonder if a little bit of Bill’s story might be also be a part of Thomas’ story and our own stories too. Can Thomas really see, touch and believe Jesus while his own body causes him shame or even hurts? What about us? Do the wounds of our own bodies impede us from looking directly at Jesus’ wound? Do we touch Jesus’ wound like a healing doctor or as a lover does or are we distracted by our own wounds, turning away in shame, anger or self-condemnation?

Some will recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread like the disciples at Emmaus did. Some of us will only recognize Jesus when we have recognized our embodied selves as Jesus own beloved. I think when we see ourselves as very members incorporate of the Body of Christ, sharing in the story of our salvation, specifically in Jesus’ resurrection that we will be able to say, Jesus, you are Lord.

Until then Jesus abides with us as we move from a place of distraction to when we are ready to encounter Jesus face to face. Until then Jesus pulls back his cloak to reveal his most intimate self and he steadies our trembling hands so that even when we are too fearful to look we may still touch his wound.

Do we see our wounds as means that bring us into greater communion with God or are our wounds distractions from the deepest expression of our Easter faith? Like the nurse aide who instructed me some twenty years ago, my advice to you today is to love your body as God’s own. As we paradoxically love our human bodies and those of our neighbors we then may be able to look directly at Jesus, touch his wound and believe in his divinity manifested through the resurrection.

God's Indiscriminate Love for All - March 27, 2009

2009-08-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

How is your Lent going? When it comes to Lent it is so easy to get caught up with what we are doing, giving up something or as today’s Gospel suggests that we “hate our life”. Lent for many can become a time of sacrifice. Another way of thinking about Lent is as a time for us to align ourselves with God. What does this alignment look like?

Is Lent about convincing God of our worthiness for God’s love? Or is Lent a time to acknowledge that God abides with us, so that when the Word becomes flesh in our lives we will abide with others as God abides with us?

Abiding with others as God abides with us is the challenge of Lent and indeed of our whole life. No matter where we are on our journey of faith – God abides with us.

For example, for quite a number of years I abstained from “the imposition of the ashes” part of the Ash Wednesday service. I had been hearing, “Joe, remember you are dirt NOT “Joe, remember you are dust”. Growing up as a Roman Catholic at home and at our church I was taught that as dust the purpose of my life was to purify my mind and body so that I might be pure enough to receive salvation in the next world. God abides with us.

Roman Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero’s life was shaped by his interpretation of certain words. Before he became a bishop, Fr. Romero’s focus was on the power of his priestly office. He served the sacramental needs of his people but paid little attention to their justice needs. The hierarchical church had taught him that the justice needs of the Salvadorian people were the concerns and responsibilities of the state and the political system not that of the church or its priests.

Therefore Romero never questioned the oppressive actions of the country’s power elite. Given his own fascination with power Romero was trusted by the nation’s political leaders as their ally and confidante. During these times in contrast Roman Catholic theologians like Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino were asking justice questions that were disturbing the peace of the country and of the Vatican. Romero and these other theologians interpreted the words of the scriptures differently. The Vatican made Romero the Bishop of El Salvador because they were confident that he would not disturb the fragile peace of the country.

In a way that could not have been anticipated by either Romero or the Vatican Romero fell in love with his people. His diaries do not tell us when he precisely changed but over time the people’s story became Romero’s story. As Romero’s interpretation of the words of the Gospel changed the way he practiced his priestly vocation changed too. All of a sudden Romero felt the oppression of his people as if it were his own. As Romero served the bread and wine to his people they like the elements he consecrated on the altar became for him as precious as the Body and Blood of Christ. As a result he cared for them differently and he cherished them with his life.

Eventually Romero was placed on a political subversive watch list. Why? Bishop Romero’ s love for his people led him to seek justice for them. These actions made Bishop Romero a very dangerous man for the status quo leaders of El Salvador. This past Tuesday was the 29th anniversary of Bishop Romero’s bloody execution.

Due to the way Bishop Romero stirred up the people he had been warned to stop celebrating the Eucharist at the Cathedral. Yet on March 24, 1980 Bishop Romero was killed while celebrating the Holy Eucharist. In his last sacramental act the Word became flesh through Romero’s proclamation of justice and the celebration of the Eucharist with the people he loved.

Young Fr. Romero and older Bishop Romero lived out very different interpretations of the Gospel. Yet I suspect that God abided with Fr. Romero as God abided with Bishop Romero. God did not change. Romero changed the way he practiced his priesthood, but God’s presence remained constant. Still we can get caught up in the way Romero changed. The change in Romero was important, but what is underrated is the way God abided with Romero before and after the changes he made in his life.

I resonate with Romero’s journey in the way my interpretation of words have changed the way I live my life. Yet I tell the story I am about to tell you to underscore the way God has abided with me before and after these changes.

I recall going to Washington DC in the late 70’s as a young man with a friend. On our first evening in DC we had pre-ordered tickets for a concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When we got to the concert we quickly realized that it was a Gay Men’s Benefit Chorus. As Roman Catholics growing up in the sixties we had been raised to believe that homosexuality was wrong. So at the intermission confident that we were living out our family values we demanded our money back from the sponsors.

The sponsors said no and a battle of words ensued between us. We were finally asked to leave without our money. A week later I received a call at my office from the sponsor’s lawyers with a threat of a slander lawsuit. The threat of a lawsuit has an interesting way of helping one to change their conduct, but we did not change our minds. If anything we were more self-justified in our beliefs.

God abides with us.

In the early nineties I made friends, and met men and women who transformed my heart. Yes, with the gay men and lesbian women friends I made I could no longer continue to live following my parents’ interpretation of homosexuality as my heart had been broken open. As time passed I found that my dinner table was more diverse than the church where I worshipped. For a period of time I stopped going to church for the gulf between my changed values and my church had become so deep.

God abides with us.

Then in 2000 some twenty years after the DC incident I was drawn to All Saints Church in Pasadena where for the first time I heard the words “whoever you are, wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcomed at this table.” At last I had found a church home where I would not be ashamed to bring my friends and where my friends would be welcomed.

God abides with us.

There is a way this refrain can sound self-centered not caring about justice, but quite to the contrary. In the past I have preached in a way that condemns the younger Romero in order to celebrate the older Romero. Yet I don’t think the first priority of our faith lives is the interpretation of the words. When God’s word is made flesh in our lives our hearts are broken open.

Still more hopeful than an open table is the knowledge that God abides with us where we are. To pick up on Jane’s sermon last week we cannot do anything to deserve or lose God’s love. When we can say no matter what is going on in our life that God abides with us, then it is possible for the Word to become flesh in our lives. When the Word does become flesh in our lives the way we live and the way we love begins to change. I don’t think that Lent is about getting the words right or about our sacrifices.

Many people now want to canonize Bishop Romero. Some of these people are ashamed of Romero the priest who enjoyed power without justice. I believe though that God made space in God’s heart for both the younger and the older Romero. God abided with the younger and older Romero. God has certainly abided with the younger Joe Duggan and the older Joe Duggan. I wonder are we jealous of a God who loves our neighbor as much as God loves us.

In The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion different interpretations of the words of the scriptures have divided good people. In the course of these debates too many of us have lost sight of God’s divine inclusion. God abides with all.

The Good News is that Christ’s love is unconditional. God indiscriminately abides with us. Christ abides with us no matter where we are on our journeys of faith. St. Paul says as Christ increases in me, I decrease. It is pretty clear that in the end that Christ had overtaken the life of Romero. He had ultimately forgotten himself in his selfless act of love transforming his selfish concerns into God’s cares and Jesus’ ministry. As Romero forgot his desire for power he entered the transformative power of the Gospel. The Word had become flesh in Bishop Romero’s life.

When we hear the words today, “hate your life” let this not mean that we are inconsequential as dust or just mere grains. Rather we are Christ’s beloved. As Christ’s beloved we are called to abide with one another as Christ abides with us.

We are called to abide with one another as Christ abides with us.

The journey of Lent and of our lives is letting our hearts be broken open that we may abide with one another. When the Word becomes flesh in our life it is possible for us to abide with even those who may initially offend us. Then like Romero we will love unconditionally as God loves us. Until then let us be patient with one another as our faith life journeys intersect with our different interpretations of the words and the unfinished ways we live out our love of God and neighbor.

As Easter draws near may God abide with us so that the Word will become flesh in our lives and like Bishop Romero open our hearts to indiscriminately love one another.

Knowing When to Tell - February 15, 2009 at St. Catherine of Siena, Reno

2009-08-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

Mark I: 40-45

Knowing When to Tell…

What do you make of that last line – don’t tell? Honestly I have shrugged off these words over and over as just an arcane add-on. I have also thought that this is an odd statement for Jesus to make and out of sync with the abundance that I have come to recognize through the Gospel stories.

More recently I have acknowledged that I did not understand the final line and I chose to just sit with it. To abbreviate the text and to cut out the last line changes the entire message. It certainly makes the text much easier to understand. Ah a healing story – great! Isn’t Jesus great? Yes and this morning I want us to take time to ask if there is also another message we need to hear.

Mark’s Gospel is filled with don’t tell instructions from Jesus to his disciples and then the Gospel ends with a disappointment that the women don’t go and tell the apostles that Jesus has risen. No doubt the women like you and I are confused with how to read this text and more importantly when to tell and when not to tell the Good News. The people of Mark’s Gospel always seem to get it wrong – telling when they have been told not to tell and not telling when it would have been the right thing to tell.

What is going on here? Is Jesus being humble here? So he heals but then does not want credit for it? That does not make sense given all his other healings before and after this story. Scholars refer to this not telling in the Gospel of Mark as the Messianic Secret. Of course scholars cannot agree on what the Messianic Secret means nor do we need to agree today, but it is still good to ponder this conflict between telling and not telling.

The Messianic Secret has to do with the timing of revealing Jesus’ mission as the messiah. Historians say that there were many self-proclaimed Messiahs at the time and Jesus did not want to be confused with these.

Scholars have also argued over the extent to which Jesus knew his mission from his Father and that he anticipated going before Pilate, being crucified, dying, buried and rising. In such a reading Jesus’ primary work is not all the miracles he performs during his public life. In such a reading Jesus primary purpose for becoming human was to share in our humanity, a part of which is participating in our fleshy struggles and rising from the dead. Then Jesus’ kingdom is not just a new and better Roman Empire that is more friendly and gentle or even inclusive. Jesus kingdom is that we are blessed, anointed and loved into new life through his death and resurrection. This is the Good News!

As some readers have wished to erase the last lines from the Gospel text all of us may at one time or another many have also wanted to erase the mysterious resurrection. Yet we have been taught to accept the resurrection on faith based on the tradition that has been given to us. Even before Lent begins in two weeks time we know how the story is going to go. One more time we will hear the story of the passion on Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the early services of even Easter. We do know the story, but do we really know the story? Do we really know how to discern the Good News from the great news and when to tell the Good News and to whom?

Isn’t the story different every year? Don’t we hear the story differently every year depending on where we are in our life? In one of the darkest moments of my life I just could not do the passion and so I skipped Palm Sunday through Lent and went straight to Easter. Although I skipped it I realize now that more than any other year perhaps in my life God was with me in an even more profound way that Lent in my lonely isolation from the light. In my darkness Jesus was at my side.

In other years the passion story was less painful for me to enter and also less real and I could participate in Lent. Isn’t that ironic? Collectively through all my times of absence and presence God continues to weave through my story as he does yours too. I have learned so many times that we can try to leave God, but God never leaves us. His Holy Spirit lives within you and me. Yes the Spirit dwells within us, but do we recognize the Spirit working within us?

How do we know when to tell? We discern. Discernment is a process of listening to the Spirit working within our lives. We discern by paying attention to our hearts, minds and bodies – are we drawn closer to Jesus’ story or caught in our own stories?

Our Anglican theology says that the three sources of authority - reason, tradition and scripture. Contrary to popular belief, reason does not mean that Episcopalians get to do anything we desire and the Roman Catholics have to obey the Pope. No, our reason is to be informed by the Gospel, nurtured by the sacraments and strengthened by our experience of community with one another. Through a combined listening and nurtured reason we know when to share our faith with others and when to receive care from others.

We are human and sometimes we are not attentive to the Spirit working within us. Sometimes our selfish needs get in the way of our listening. Returning to today’s Gospel the leper wants to tell the Good News of his healing, but Jesus asks him not to do so. If the leper does not listen to Jesus and he hears his voice then what can we expect of ourselves who must discern the Spirit working within us. Clearly we have the more challenging task.

Fredrick Beuchner wrote a book called Telling Secrets. Well obviously you don’t tell a secret – right? The book is a true story about Buechner when his daughters were diagnosed with anorexia when they were teen-agers. Buechner told absolutely nobody his secret even though he was burdened by the isolation he felt by his daughters’ illnesses. He did not know how to tell others of his need. He was ashamed and resisted asking for help from others.

I mentioned Buechner’s story to a man in exactly the same situation, a man who was struggling with his own daughters who were diagnosed of anorexia to read the book. The man wrote to me and said, “Joe, I don’t understand this book. I have no secrets.” Buechner did not want to tell his secret, but this man did not even know that he was keeping a secret. Both men were so isolated that they could no longer hear the Spirit working within them, losing sight of the Good News.

It seems to me that these men in their pre-occupation with themselves did not recognize their needs for care. Was either man listening to the Spirit? Was the healed leper listening to the Spirit? Are we listening to the Spirit? One way of knowing if we are listening to the Spirit is asking if we are growing in the gifts of the Spirit – are we more loving, more patient, more gentle?

So as we anticipate Lent how do we use today’s lessons as our spiritual food? I think the Messianic Secret challenges us to listen to God working in our life so we will know when to tell others. But not just listening for ourselves but listening in a way that opens us up to be attentive to the needs of another, their comfort and their care.

The way I read the Gospel story this morning is that Jesus is inviting the leper, you and me into something greater than our own story. The Gospel calls us not just into one healing but the healing of all humanity. Perhaps the leper missed the wider significance of his healing. The leper celebrated his own healing wanting to tell his friends the Good News. But perhaps his healing was not the Good News. Don’t get me wrong – it was great news, but was it the Good News still to come?

Would you have heard Jesus’ instruction in the same way as the leper and emailed your friends or would you wait to share the Good News of Easter? Is there news in our life that we tell when we should not or we should speak when otherwise we choose to be silent?

We have received the Good News already and yet we are not free from the task of discerning when to tell and when to be silent. Our telling is not just about us as the healed leper or the men with anorexic daughters appeared to think. If this were so then we would become spectators to the Gospel story rather than people who are called to be in dynamic relationship with God.

Telling follows our listening and discerning thus knowing when to invite others to bless us. Then the one who receives the blessing and the one who blesses are both healed by the Good News of Jesus words. When the time is right to tell, then Jesus’ story and our story become intertwined as one.

Even in our darkest struggles when we are deaf and blind to God’s healing hand working in our lives, even then we are called to listen, to discern and to tell the Good News.

Listen – Have you recognized the Good news in your life?

Listen – Is Jesus calling you to tell the Good News today?

Let us listen to Jesus and then, let us all go out and tell the Good News.

Ministry That Breaks Open God's Heart - August 14, 2005 at St. Paul's Church, Ventura, CA

2009-08-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Mt: 15:21-28

We are seeing a side of Jesus this morning that we don't often get to see. Jesus usually says just the right word. Maybe the difference here is that he's tired after a long day of ministry. He may even be a little irritated by his disciples who have just been urging him to send the Canaanite woman away. While all or some of this may be true, these circumstances alone do not justify or explain his harsh response to this woman. Jesus literally calls her a dog, addressing the woman with the words, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs", implying that the woman is a dog.

What I want to do this morning with you is create a space where we can fully enter into this story.

To access the Good News in this text, we need a more contemporary story. The story I am about to tell you may initially be disturbing for you; it was for me. The story has artistic and theological overtones. While I am not much of an art enthusiast, I do know that I tend to appreciate art much more when I can enter into a particular artistic expression without making a premature judgment. Art as you know is sometimes intentionally disturbing to help us "get" what we would otherwise possibly miss. So I hope you will let the artistic expression in this story touch all of your sensibilities.

A few years ago I was taking a theology class at Claremont School of Theology. Our term project assignment was to research how a community uses sacred symbols to identify themselves with God, as God's own. One student had interviewed a homeless woman who lives underneath a bridge in Los Angeles. For the purpose of telling this story, let's call this woman under the bridge, Mollie.

Mollie has been living under the bridge for many years. Mollie self-identifies herself as a trans-gender woman. So that we all have a common understanding of what this means, trans-gender persons experience a gender disconnection between how they understand themselves to be today from the physical sex in which they were born. Honestly, it would have been much easier for me to leave out this particular detail, but I don't think that the parallel to the Canaanite woman would have been made as effectively.

By using Mollie's story, particularly as a trans-gendered person I am hoping to evoke for us how Mollie and the Canaanite woman are experienced as foreigners within their social context; for few affirm their humanity or wish to include them as they are, even in our most inclusive communities. In our contemporary culture, trans-gender persons are frequently misunderstood and often disregarded as emotionally disturbed, mostly due to our own biases.

Let's return to Mollie's story. It had been Mollie's spiritual and artistic practice to collect other people's garbage; specifically, their once sacred objects. Mollie searched for and collected broken crosses, torn holy pictures, broken rosaries, cracked statues, burned bibles and similarly scarred materials that once bore for others God's sacred image. Mollie organized her collection of objects in the form of the Stations of the Cross. Mollie's stations are another version of the stations you put up during Lent around this church to help you meditate on Christ's passion, death and resurrection. Mollie organized these discarded objects in a way that reflected and embodied the Jesus who she has come to know at the center of her life's story.

Mollie is no different than you or me in this regard, in that her images of God and of Jesus reflect her life history and her experience. Not unlike you and me either, Mollie's images of God also reflect her image of herself.

The student at Claremont asked Mollie to help her understand and appreciate the meaning behind Mollie's tattered Stations of the Cross collection. Mollie said I have been told throughout my life that "I am just garbage". "People treat me like garbage". Mollie said "most of the time I feel like garbage too; except when I am in the presence of Jesus." Mollie then said, "I know that God loves me even as I am and that he became garbage to be with me in this mess". Mollie perhaps more eloquently than any seminary professor or theologian I have known completely understands the essence of the theology of the incarnation. Even though her garbage-like image may initially be offensive to us, what a gift that she senses God's presence where others have rejected her and even ostracized her. And what love Jesus has for Mollie to enter the mess of her world in a way that Jesus would be recognized by her on her terms, in the very circumstances of her life.

You can hear Jesus' words to the Canaanite woman, echoed again to Mollie - "Woman, great is your faith!" Pointing to the Canaanite woman's faith is the traditional interpretation for this text and that is indeed Good News. And yet as I prayed over these texts there was something else which I sensed the Holy Spirit leading me to share with you this morning.

The first reading and the Gospel came together for me during my prayer, in the line of Isaiah where the prophet writes "And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants - these I will bring to my holy mountain." "To minister to him", I don't ever recall hearing this line before. Mollie broke open Jesus' heart. Yes she ministered to him because she loves him. Like Jesus who emptied himself for us, Mollie and the Canaanite woman emptied themselves for Jesus because they love him.

Mollie and the Canaanite woman have turned around the condemning words of society that have objectified them as garbage and as the equivalence of dogs. They have dared to stand outside of the social labels that diminish and discard persons with the same ease as we discard our useless holy objects. Mollie and the Canaanite woman break open God's heart because they are no longer perplexed by the worldly paradox. And that paradox is that we are made in the image of God, even though we may be misunderstood, labeled or excluded by others. Now few of us have been excluded like Mollie or the Canaanite woman, yet we still often fall into similar paradoxical traps when we cannot claim and cherish God's image imprinted on us.

When we think of ministry, we don't usually think about ministering to God's heart. Rather we think of Jesus ministering to our hearts. Ministry then must be daring to break open our hearts and sharing our vulnerability, so that we may open ourselves up to the transforming presence of God and be a transforming presence to others too. When Mollie cherishes the broken objects in her sacred collection, she is cherishing her brokenness, she also cherishes the broken Body of Christ, in the same way, as she is cherished by God. It is in this inter-personal if you will, Trinitarian act of cherishing what appears to be less that we become more, just as Jesus does for the Canaanite woman in the Gospel story.

See how the Canaanite woman does not respond with anger to Jesus' harsh remark to her, but rather with love and then as a result of her love, she breaks open Jesus' heart and his demeanor towards her instantly changes. Mollie and the Canaanite woman cherish what appears to be less and doing so they become more and those in relationships with them, like you and I are also transformed by her story.

This is a very way to live because for us to do the same for others, we must become like Mollie and the Canaanite woman and minister to God's heart, in a way that breaks open God's heart and each other's hearts. We must be vulnerable enough to trust that which we often prefer to keep hidden. To live this way, we must first, also resolve the worldly paradox that impedes and paralyzes us from flourishing in God's love and service. Like Mollie and the Canaanite woman we must be convinced that we are made in the image and likeness of God and that nothing can separate us from being God's own beloved.

The Good News for us today is that God enters fully into our life circumstances, to transform us into Godly images that God cherishes as God's beloved. When we shamelessly unlock our hearts, take off our masks and claim the fullness of our humanity, then and only then, can we have a glimpse of the full humanity and divinity of Jesus, a glimpse of God's image reflected to us in our tattered and imperfect lives.

Charged and inspired with this Godly wisdom, then we will build the City of God and come into God's reign. Then in shared intimacy with God's heart, we will see Mollie as more than garbage and the Canaanite woman as more than a dog, and in so doing we through our particular life's story and ministries will transform all God's world into God's very own beloved. Reversing the paradox of the world, daring to live radically open lives which lead to transforming one another, even transforming Jesus at the end of a long day of ministry - this, this is the Good News for us today and always!

Pentecost Sunday, June 4, 2004 - St. Paul's Church, Ventura, CA

2009-08-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

It is good to be at home here at St. Paul's! This feels like home to me. I cherish the privilege that I have been given by Father Kahler to preach at St. Paul's on this Pentecost Sunday and I am also very grateful to Deacon Ed for generously sharing and shepherding me through some of his diaconal responsibilities.

Like the disciples Pentecost for me is about the interconnection between my paralyzing fears and God's desire for me to experience inner freedom in ways that release me and you from the locked rooms in which we dwell while we wait for the Lord to come. Though many have become suspicious of Pentecost due to their exclusive reliance on media hearsay about what it means to be a Pentecostal Christian, with some risk at being misunderstood I claim a Pentecostal identity for myself.

As I claim a Pentecostal identity I am making a commitment to participate in what has always been and always will be a radically unsettling and disturbing experience of the Divine transforming individual lives and human communities. By Pentecostal I do not mean that I am a fundamentalist or even that I speak in tongues; though for some this is a test of who truly is Pentecostal and a way to exclude me.

I am publicly reclaiming Pentecostal to mean that my Trinitarian relationship to God has always been rooted in and through the Spirit. When I have trusted the Spirit the most , it is then that I have found myself at odds with institutional expectations of me in my family, church and workplace. The inspiration to take back the word Pentecostal began for me when an Anglican Primate at a Bible study in Canterbury in October 2003 said, "it is possible for the Spirit to be up to different things in different places." These words gave me a legitimate space to stand when I have been at odds, feeling out of step with the compliant desires of others.

The earliest Pentecostal root is through the ministry of Charles Fox Parham in 1900. A subsequent root is through William Seymour in 1905. William Seymour was a member of Charles Parham's church in Kansas; but as a black man in an all white church he could only listen to Parham's sermons by sitting near a window on the other side of the church walls. Deeply infused by the Holy Spirit and God's abundance, Seymour knew that all are welcomed at God's table. Seymour left Kansas and traveled to Los Angeles to found the Azusa Street mission.

Parham's identity was rooted in a theology of scarcity informed by his fear of God while Seymour was convinced of the abundance of God's love for all and unashamedly and courageously preached this Good News. Parham's theology has been more frequently remembered and Seymour's theology but for a handful of communities in Latin America has been forgotten. There is little irony that William Seymour's theology has been forgotten and that what has been remembered is fear.

Fear -- that's exactly where the disciples are in this morning's reading, that's exactly where the Episcopal Church is in these pre General Convention days and that's exactly where many of us struggle to keep hope alive and not let fear dominate our lives. "Peace Be With You" - how do Jesus' words this morning coexist with William Seymour's Pentecostal theological vision in a way that you and I can claim a Pentecostal identity as Episcopalians? I want to extend Seymour and even Anglican inclusiveness beyond local hospitality. You can get a glimpse of what I mean by unpacking the Anglican Primate's words, "It is possible for the Spirit to be doing different things in different places." This Pentecostal image may sound a little chaotic to our Episcopalian/Anglican ears. These words hardly describe the unity we imagine for the Episcopal Church in these pre-General Convention days. Rather the Primate's words attempt to replace our desire for a comfortable consistent unity with contingency, difference and struggle.

I want to tell you two stories to amplify what it is I am about this morning. There were two non-negotiables for my parents - unity and respect for authority and all the privileges that come with both. Simply in my family and the church I grew up questions were not welcomed; particularly questions directed at those in authority. Most kids ask their parents why based questions that relate to how things work, for example, cars, airplanes or they ask questions about science like how ice forms or weather patterns. I on the other hand at a tender age of seven began to ask questions that I have come to see since are thoroughly related to power relations.

My uncle was a Roman Catholic clergy person; but my dad, his brother would always call him Brother Patrick, which was his name in religion rather than Willie which is what my dad called him until he entered the religious life. One day when Brother Patrick was coming for a visit I asked my mother why we call Brother Patrick, Brother Patrick, if he is dad's brother, shouldn't we call him by his first name. My mom snapped back at me and said, Joseph that is what you do to show your respect for a man of God. My mom knew me very well and said, "And further Joseph there will be none of this discussion when Brother Patrick visits us later." Brother Patrick and I that evening had a great conversation on the whole matter, deciding between the two of us that I would call him Uncle Willie. Until the day he died I called him Uncle Willie and on his death bed he thanked me for the privilege of finally being recognized as an uncle to one of the Duggan children. For me this is a sweet story that demonstrates what it means to be a Protestant with a Pentecostal identity in the Episcopal Church, the one who is inspired to ask questions that others prefer to silence out of respect for privilege.

I want to tell you another story of what happened a few years ago on a Pentecost Sunday morning. In an increasing number of churches, on Pentecost morning, the first lesson from Acts (2:1-11) is read simultaneously in as many languages as are represented by the members' cultural traditions. At All Saints Church in Pasadena, there are often 12-15 languages instrumental in reading the Acts text. I remember on this one particular Pentecost Sunday when a newcomer to All Saints Church was alarmed and disturbed by this practice. It is never announced beforehand what will happen, so newcomers experience readers dispersed throughout the congregation getting up one by one to read the text in their native language. When you first hear this, it sounds disruptive; at the very least it has a chaotic feel. This one man became indignant at one of the 15 people who had stood up to read and demanded that he sit down and show some respect to the Lector designated with the apparent authority to speak at the front of the church.
I believe that this man's instinctive, un-reflected and reactive response to the embodiment of Divine spontaneity symbolizes our own desires to bring order to Divine chaos. Divine unity is often initially felt as chaos. The cost of insisting upon our human unity as a means to ordering the chaotically felt Divine unity is that people are frequently silenced. The incalculable risk here is that usually people who have the least power are silenced first and most often.

Therefore I have come to believe that claiming a Pentecostal identity is about how we as Christians live reflectively with our power. This means living with our power in a way that welcomes self-critique as well as a communal critique so that our collective power that has historically silenced others may be transformed by the Spirit of God. Simply put, power is about the privileges which some have and others do not. Are we recognized for who we are as Uncle Willie or for our privilege as Brother Patrick? To wrestle with a Pentecostal identity as I see it is to live in a way that maintains reasonable doubt about how our collective power and privilege silences people.

The unity of Pentecost does not mean that in fear we lock the door to the room where the Spirit descended on the disciples, so that we can keep safe the treasure of the Spirit's descent for our exclusive use. The unity of Pentecost is in its dispersive nature. This dispersive-like Divine unity is counter-intuitive for most of us are stuck in our human notions of rigid order, unity and coherence. As long as we seek to control this dispersive-like quality, the Divine unity of Pentecost will continue to evade us as a church and as a culture. We must learn how to trustingly participate in the whirlwind of God's free, borderless love. This means that we will always live with risk as our comfortable consistent expectations and desires for unity will be destabilized by the movement of the Spirit that disturbs our comfortable lives.

As we receive the Spirit in community this morning, let us unlock the doors to our hearts and minds as well as to our church and all the places we live and work. This may mean as it is said later in John's Gospel "going to places where we would rather not go" and asking questions others would prefer we would not ask. The Spirit may be inspiring you to ask questions about a community or workplace matter in which many are talking about, but little is being done because it requires that you take a courageous stand. Hannah Arendt, a twentieth century, Jewish German philosopher writes "Power ultimately resides not in what we may imagine for ourselves but in what we make happen in the divided world we share with others."