Isaiah 7:10-17; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Six impossible things before breakfast… It’s not such a stretch at this time a year, is it? We have to believe at least six impossible things each day just to make it through to the next day. I will get all the gifts wrapped in time, I will bake a batch of cookies that doesn’t burn on the bottom, I will get the house cleaned for our guests, I will remember all the groceries so I don’t have to go to the store on Christmas Eve…
It hardly seems possible, but Christmas is just two days away. Can you believe it? In just two days we will hear the angel choirs and smell the sweet hay and see the Savior of the world lying in a manger. In just two days we will gaze with Mary at the baby and ponder the words of the shepherds in our hearts. In just two days we will stand with Joseph and…well, stand there.
In just two days we will read again from the gospel of Luke that most familiar of Christmas stories, in which heavenly light shines on angels and shepherds and mothers and babies but never on Joseph. He is present only as a shadow might be present at the edge of the glory of God. He is in every scene, but with no speaking roles, unless he’s the one who asks if there is room for himself and his weary wife at the inn. And yet, none of the story would have been possible without him.
This morning we read from the gospel of Matthew a far less familiar Christmas story. Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. In this story, heavenly light shines on Joseph alone, while Mary and an angel move in the shadows on the edge of his scenes. Suddenly, that figure from our nativity sets whom we usually mistake for another shepherd has a life and a spirit and a voice of his own – he still has no lines, but Joseph’s actions in this Christmas story speak volumes.
“I can’t believe that,” Joseph might have said to Mary, when she told him an impossible to believe tale about how she came to be pregnant. “Can’t you?” she might have responded, pleading. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.” But then Joseph would only have sighed sadly and said, “There’s no use trying. One can’t believe impossible things.”
Joseph and Mary were betrothed to one another, a commitment that was far more legally significant than our engagements are today. Mary’s pregnancy, which Joseph only knew was not his doing, would have brought shame upon them both. Her family would not have accepted her back, forcing her to earn her living and raise her illegitimate child on the streets. And that was the best case scenario – according to the law, she might be stoned to death for her unfaithfulness.
What a mess. One day Joseph is happily going about his work as a carpenter, dreaming of the home he will build for his wife-to-be, dreaming of the life they will build together. When he wakes up the next day, she’s pregnant, his trust is betrayed, his name is ruined, his livelihood is threatened, his future is uncertain. Joseph has every right to cast Mary out into the street, but Matthew tells us he is a man of deep compassion, a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, and so he decides to divorce her quietly, to separate himself from the mess.
Joseph’s sleep must have been fitful that night, filled with dreams of shadows and stones. But as he tossed and turned, an angel appeared to him and whispered an earful of impossible things for him to practice believing before he ate breakfast. Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid. The baby she carries is of the Holy Spirit. You will name him Jesus, which means “God saves”. Your son will save people from their sins.
At the heart of Matthew’s Christmas story is a good man who wakes up to a wrecked life. He looks at the mess he had nothing to do with creating, and he must decide whether to believe his dreams, to believe his wife, to believe God. The Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor wonders, “Will he believe the impossible and give [the tiny, helpless, powerful, vulnerable Savior] a home, or will he stick with what makes sense and let the miracle go hungry?”
Things were a mess for King Ahaz in our reading from Isaiah. The kingdom of Judah was in imminent danger of being overtaken by the powerful Assyrian army. Other smaller nations were urging King Ahaz to join forces with them against the Assyrians, but Isaiah counseled him to have faith in God’s power to deliver Judah instead. In a rare move, God personally offers Ahaz a sign that all will be well – before a newborn baby grows old enough to eat solid foods, the kingdom of Judah will be safe.
It is true for all of us, isn’t it, that life can get terribly messy. Like Joseph and his wife Mary (who, remember, utters a bewildered “How can this be?” when an angel announces the role God hoped she would accept)…Like Joseph and Mary and King Ahaz, we are daily presented with circumstances beyond our control, lives we never would have chosen, messes we can’t possibly clean up alone. We need a helper. We need a cleaning service. We need a savior.
Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Six impossible things to believe before breakfast. It was going to get messier before it got any easier, if it would ever be easy at all to be the adopted father, the legal guardian of God. But Matthew tells us, When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife…and she bore a son; and he named him Jesus. Jesus, the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “God saves.”
In this season of expectation, of waiting for Emmanuel, God-with-us, of waiting for God to come into our messiness, we learn from prophets and angels and dreams, we learn from the stories of King Ahaz and Joseph, that God is already here. God is already here, strengthening, supporting, protecting, calling us to enter the mess faithfully, knowing that God is with us.
We also learn, though, that God comes to save us in, and not necessarily from, the messes that we make and that get made all around us. God saves us by calling us to believe the impossible – that God’s love is stronger than death, that God’s peace is more powerful than chaos, that God’s light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.
In the messy Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich dreamed of God, and she wrote, “The words ‘You will not be overcome’ were said very sharply and very powerfully as a security and a comfort to be used in any tribulation that may come. God did not say, ‘You will not be troubled’ or ‘You will not have bitter labor’ or ‘You will have no discomfort,’ but ‘You will not be overcome.’ God wills that we pay attention to this word and that we be ever strong in faithful trust, in well-being and woe. For God loves us and delights in us, and wills that, in the same way, we love and delight and strongly trust in God – and all shall be well.”
The season of Advent all along has been about God coming to be with us, not just once wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger but every day of our lives, calling us to believe that with God, all things are possible, as Jesus told John the Baptist in our gospel reading last Sunday: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised. With God all things are possible. Is it possible that we might say yes to God? That we might, like Joseph, have the courage to embrace the messiness of life, adopt it as our own, and rock it tenderly in our arms?
As we approach the little town of Bethlehem and make our way toward the stable, may we risk getting messy, may we believe the impossible, may we hold our dreams close, may we draw a long breath and shut our eyes and listen for the angels who whisper day and night in our ears, “Do not be afraid. God is here. It may not be the life you planned, but God may be born here, too, if you will permit it. And you will call his name Jesus, ‘God saves.’” Amen.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Advent 1A, Part 2
On the real first Sunday in Advent, I preached at Episcopal Church of the Advent in Sumner. Little Charlie and I stayed Saturday night in Greenwood, where he treated Mary Dent and me to his own version of the Nutcracker. Of course, it consisted entirely of the battle between the Nutcracker and the Rat King.
The shelves have been stocked with Santas and snowflakes and Christmas stars since, when, Labor Day? We’ve been surrounded by sleigh bells for so long that surely we’d have arrived at the stable by now. But when Advent finally arrives, the readings seem to lead us toward the parousia, the second coming of Christ in power and great glory, rather than toward his first coming at Bethlehem, in humility and deep darkness.
The Latin word adventus means “coming”. And yet, despite the calendars that mark the season, Advent is not at all about counting the days until the baby is born or counting the days until he returns. This briefest of seasons looks back (even as we are looking forward!) to God’s coming into the world to make a home here, and it also looks forward to God’s coming into the world to take us home. But the Latin, adventus, means more nearly a coming that is imminent than a coming that is 22 days away, let alone generations away. And so this season is mostly about the gazillion advents that take place between the beginning of the story of Emmanuel, God-with-us, and the end. It is about God coming into the world, into our lives, each and every day, in expected and unexpected ways, in anticipated and unanticipated moments.
My aunt tells about an airplane flight she took from Alaska back to her home in the southwest. It was dark when the flight took off, and she closed her eyes but found she couldn’t sleep. So she settled herself as best she could to see out the window, where a brilliant full moon was casting its light across the clouds. After a while, she looked across the row of seats to the window on the other side of the plane and saw something she did not expect. The light over there was purple and pink and orange and gold. The sun was rising. My aunt says she was filled with wonder at the possibility of being in that exact place where night and day meet, and that she wanted to run up and down the aisle and shout at everyone, “Wake up! Everyone, wake up! If you don’t wake up, you’ll miss this moment!”
Both Matthew and Paul were just as eager to shout, “Everyone, wake up!” at the believers in their communities. When Matthew was writing his account of the good news, the earliest Christians believed Jesus would return within their lifetime, and so they urged one another to be prepared. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. By the time Paul was corresponding with church communities throughout the Mediterranean, the urgency had begun to shift from expecting Christ’s imminent return to expecting a much longer wait in a world that seemed hostile toward hope. If Jesus had already come in humility and deep darkness, and was not coming back any time soon in power and great glory, what were the faithful to do?
They weren’t to count down the days. In the verses just before our gospel passage begins, Jesus says that not even he knows when he will return. Instead of counting, writes Paul, in this in-between time when the night is far gone and the day is near, we are to love one another. The coming of God into the world through the law could be summed up in the single commandment to love one another. What are the faithful to do while they wait for Christ to come? Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep…Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, Love come down, Emmanuel, Love-with-us. Another preacher has said, “One does not have to wait for something out of the ordinary [like announcements from angels or airplane rides through daybreak]. The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God [which is to say, Love] and to make way for it to come into being here on the earth.”
Light and darkness are familiar to us as images of Advent. We light candles in anticipation of the birth of a baby on a dark, silent night, the birth of light in a dark, noisy world. Darkness is something of an ambiguous image in this season – in it is danger and shelter, unease and stillness, anxiety and courage, death and newborn life. We are accustomed, exhausted, perhaps, from walking the Christmas aisles at Walmart, to settling gratefully under the mantle of Advent darkness to wait for the day of the Lord to come.
But today, on the first Sunday in Advent, Jesus calls us to wakefulness and action, to attentiveness and preparedness, to love. Not the sentiment of love that drops a few coins in the bell-ringer’s bucket, but, as my aunt says, a “steely, resolved love” that walks into the darkness with God, intent on illumination. Advent is the season in which we are called to live urgently as the church, practicing mercy and forgiveness and comfort and peace. To open our eyes in the darkness and see – and be – a great light. When we wait in this way, as the Body of Christ, walking the path of God’s vision for the world, we will find that God has already come. God has been here all along, coming into the world over and again in unexpected ways and at unexpected moments and through unexpected people, including us. And in all of those “advents”, those comings of Christ, from the day of Incarnation to this Sunday morning, from tomorrow straight through to the last day, the light steadily grows. There is still deep darkness, but Love like silver stars is enlightening, charting the way toward dawn.
Our readings today, then, are not about the first advent or the second advent of Christ, but rather they are about a God who comes. A God who loves. A God, our God, to whom darkness is not dark, to whom night is bright as day. When our consumer culture has us looking 22 days ahead, when our end of the year reports are looming, when exams are around the corner, when Christmas cards haven’t been sent, when travel plans haven’t been finalized, when bills are piling up, when calendars are overflowing with obligations, the season of Advent calls us to stop and be awake, to watch, to see how God comes into the world each day, as surely as the sun rises. The season of Advent calls us to love as God has loved us, enough to walk into the darkness bringing light.
Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on which day your Lord is coming. Really, Jesus? We know exactly when you are coming. We know that you are here now, for you promise to come whenever two or three are gathered in your name. We know that you are here whenever we love one another, not the sentimental kind of love but that steely, resolved love that sees you in all people, especially the most unexpected. Besides this, we know what time it is, how it is now the moment for us to wake from sleep. Now is the time for us to go up and down the aisle, up and down the sidewalks, up and down the hallways and highways shouting to everyone, “Don’t miss it! Don’t sleep through, or shop through, or sorrow through, or skip through the marvelous moment of love when night meets day, when the light of the world comes upon a midnight clear.” Now is the time to watch for the ways God loves us and comes to us each and every day, and for the ways God comes to others through our love. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
O come, thou Dayspring from on high, and cheer us by thy drawing nigh. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadow put to flight. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel! Amen.
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 24:37-44
Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. Really, Jesus? We know exactly when you’re coming. Turn on the TV, open the newspaper, tune in the radio and it’s right there: “Only 22 shopping days left until Christmas!” We know exactly when you’re coming. Or is it when Santa is coming…
The shelves have been stocked with Santas and snowflakes and Christmas stars since, when, Labor Day? We’ve been surrounded by sleigh bells for so long that surely we’d have arrived at the stable by now. But when Advent finally arrives, the readings seem to lead us toward the parousia, the second coming of Christ in power and great glory, rather than toward his first coming at Bethlehem, in humility and deep darkness.
The Latin word adventus means “coming”. And yet, despite the calendars that mark the season, Advent is not at all about counting the days until the baby is born or counting the days until he returns. This briefest of seasons looks back (even as we are looking forward!) to God’s coming into the world to make a home here, and it also looks forward to God’s coming into the world to take us home. But the Latin, adventus, means more nearly a coming that is imminent than a coming that is 22 days away, let alone generations away. And so this season is mostly about the gazillion advents that take place between the beginning of the story of Emmanuel, God-with-us, and the end. It is about God coming into the world, into our lives, each and every day, in expected and unexpected ways, in anticipated and unanticipated moments.
My aunt tells about an airplane flight she took from Alaska back to her home in the southwest. It was dark when the flight took off, and she closed her eyes but found she couldn’t sleep. So she settled herself as best she could to see out the window, where a brilliant full moon was casting its light across the clouds. After a while, she looked across the row of seats to the window on the other side of the plane and saw something she did not expect. The light over there was purple and pink and orange and gold. The sun was rising. My aunt says she was filled with wonder at the possibility of being in that exact place where night and day meet, and that she wanted to run up and down the aisle and shout at everyone, “Wake up! Everyone, wake up! If you don’t wake up, you’ll miss this moment!”
Both Matthew and Paul were just as eager to shout, “Everyone, wake up!” at the believers in their communities. When Matthew was writing his account of the good news, the earliest Christians believed Jesus would return within their lifetime, and so they urged one another to be prepared. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. By the time Paul was corresponding with church communities throughout the Mediterranean, the urgency had begun to shift from expecting Christ’s imminent return to expecting a much longer wait in a world that seemed hostile toward hope. If Jesus had already come in humility and deep darkness, and was not coming back any time soon in power and great glory, what were the faithful to do?
They weren’t to count down the days. In the verses just before our gospel passage begins, Jesus says that not even he knows when he will return. Instead of counting, writes Paul, in this in-between time when the night is far gone and the day is near, we are to love one another. The coming of God into the world through the law could be summed up in the single commandment to love one another. What are the faithful to do while they wait for Christ to come? Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep…Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, Love come down, Emmanuel, Love-with-us. Another preacher has said, “One does not have to wait for something out of the ordinary [like announcements from angels or airplane rides through daybreak]. The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God [which is to say, Love] and to make way for it to come into being here on the earth.”
Light and darkness are familiar to us as images of Advent. We light candles in anticipation of the birth of a baby on a dark, silent night, the birth of light in a dark, noisy world. Darkness is something of an ambiguous image in this season – in it is danger and shelter, unease and stillness, anxiety and courage, death and newborn life. We are accustomed, exhausted, perhaps, from walking the Christmas aisles at Walmart, to settling gratefully under the mantle of Advent darkness to wait for the day of the Lord to come.
But today, on the first Sunday in Advent, Jesus calls us to wakefulness and action, to attentiveness and preparedness, to love. Not the sentiment of love that drops a few coins in the bell-ringer’s bucket, but, as my aunt says, a “steely, resolved love” that walks into the darkness with God, intent on illumination. Advent is the season in which we are called to live urgently as the church, practicing mercy and forgiveness and comfort and peace. To open our eyes in the darkness and see – and be – a great light. When we wait in this way, as the Body of Christ, walking the path of God’s vision for the world, we will find that God has already come. God has been here all along, coming into the world over and again in unexpected ways and at unexpected moments and through unexpected people, including us. And in all of those “advents”, those comings of Christ, from the day of Incarnation to this Sunday morning, from tomorrow straight through to the last day, the light steadily grows. There is still deep darkness, but Love like silver stars is enlightening, charting the way toward dawn.
Our readings today, then, are not about the first advent or the second advent of Christ, but rather they are about a God who comes. A God who loves. A God, our God, to whom darkness is not dark, to whom night is bright as day. When our consumer culture has us looking 22 days ahead, when our end of the year reports are looming, when exams are around the corner, when Christmas cards haven’t been sent, when travel plans haven’t been finalized, when bills are piling up, when calendars are overflowing with obligations, the season of Advent calls us to stop and be awake, to watch, to see how God comes into the world each day, as surely as the sun rises. The season of Advent calls us to love as God has loved us, enough to walk into the darkness bringing light.
Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on which day your Lord is coming. Really, Jesus? We know exactly when you are coming. We know that you are here now, for you promise to come whenever two or three are gathered in your name. We know that you are here whenever we love one another, not the sentimental kind of love but that steely, resolved love that sees you in all people, especially the most unexpected. Besides this, we know what time it is, how it is now the moment for us to wake from sleep. Now is the time for us to go up and down the aisle, up and down the sidewalks, up and down the hallways and highways shouting to everyone, “Don’t miss it! Don’t sleep through, or shop through, or sorrow through, or skip through the marvelous moment of love when night meets day, when the light of the world comes upon a midnight clear.” Now is the time to watch for the ways God loves us and comes to us each and every day, and for the ways God comes to others through our love. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
O come, thou Dayspring from on high, and cheer us by thy drawing nigh. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadow put to flight. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel! Amen.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Advent 1A
We started Advent a little early at Saint Andrew's Upper and Middle Schools this year... The acolytes and readers helped with the sermon by blowing on noise makers when the sermon began...
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 24:37-44
Happy New Year!!
That reading from Romans did say Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep – so I’m just checking on you!!
Happy New Year!!
It’s actually a little hard to know how to mark a year in the life of our school. August to May, of course, is the way we do it for grades and grade levels and graduation. But then there is January, when the calendar announces that a new year has arrived and we’ll spend the next month trying to remember to put ’08 instead of ’07 on everything. And here at Saint Andrew’s, because we are by name an Episcopal school, we have yet another new year’s day to mark – today. Happy New Year!!
Today we are marking the beginning of the season of Advent, the four weeks during which Christians prepare for the coming of Emmanuel, which means God-with-us. Advent is the start of a new year for us, because we go back to the beginning of the story of our faith, long before there were shepherds abiding in the field, long before a stable was filled with light, long before an angel announced that Mary would have a baby boy. We go back to a time when the world was for very many people a dark place, and God’s people prayed that God would come and with great power make things right again. We recall the words of the prophets, like Isaiah, who spoke of a new day when there would be peace between nations and justice for all people. Finally, near the end of the season, we will tell the familiar story of angels and dreams and announcements and songs, such as the one Mary sang about the child she would bear, about the new thing God was doing: God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and has sent the rich away empty. God has come to the help of the faithful, for God has always promised to show mercy.
The start of a new school year, the start of a new calendar year, and the season of Advent, the start of a new church year, are all filled with hope and expectation and preparation – we want it to be a good year, right? We want to be ready for what the new year will bring.
I spent several New Year’s Eves (the December 31st ones) at an Episcopal youth retreat in the mountains of North Carolina. We always started the night in the chapel, warm from the glow of candles and the excitement of the evening. We filled that place to the rafters with our worship and especially our music, singing and clapping and dancing, and then we danced our way through the icy cold air to the hall where the big party was waiting, and we danced some more and counted down the hours then the minutes then the seconds to the new year. The night was full of noise and celebration. Some time after midnight, we walked back toward our cabins, and I remember noticing how silent and dark and still it was underneath the trees. Through the bare branches, I could see the stars like silver lights in the blackest sky, making that darkness dazzle with joy and hope as the new year was just beginning.
Many years later, when I was in seminary, I spent several New Year’s Eves in New York City, surrounded by mountains not of trees but of concrete and steel. There, the stillness was inside our warm little apartment and the noise and celebration were outside in the cold, where just a few blocks away thousands of people were dancing and clapping in Times Square. But then, most nights were something like that in New York City. It didn’t have to be New Year’s Eve. There was always noise – the hum of traffic, the rumbling of the subway, the whine of car alarms, the wail of fire engines, the roar of airplanes flying low over the Hudson, the voices of people talking, arguing, laughing, singing, or yelling in the streets…
Advent, like any new year, like any day of our lives throughout the year, is full of contrasts – there is hope and fear, stillness and noise, light and dark, expectation and anxiety, preparation and feeling unprepared. And even as Christians are preparing especially for that silent night, that midnight clear, when Emmanuel, God-with-us, must have been anything but silent as he tested out his newborn lungs, we can all prepare for the unique ways in which God comes into our lives each and every day. Because this, too, is what Advent marks – God with us now, God with us here. How can we make ourselves ready for God to be God-with-us, on mountaintops and on city streets, in stables and on stage, in congregations and in classrooms and in community, in joy and in grief, in rare silences and constant sound?
In this place, at this school, through our studies and our teamwork, through our friendships and our service to others and through all that we do here, we are preparing ourselves to live as light in dark places, as peacefulness in noisy places, as hope in fearful places. God is with us. Happy new year!
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 24:37-44
Happy New Year!!
That reading from Romans did say Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep – so I’m just checking on you!!
Happy New Year!!
It’s actually a little hard to know how to mark a year in the life of our school. August to May, of course, is the way we do it for grades and grade levels and graduation. But then there is January, when the calendar announces that a new year has arrived and we’ll spend the next month trying to remember to put ’08 instead of ’07 on everything. And here at Saint Andrew’s, because we are by name an Episcopal school, we have yet another new year’s day to mark – today. Happy New Year!!
Today we are marking the beginning of the season of Advent, the four weeks during which Christians prepare for the coming of Emmanuel, which means God-with-us. Advent is the start of a new year for us, because we go back to the beginning of the story of our faith, long before there were shepherds abiding in the field, long before a stable was filled with light, long before an angel announced that Mary would have a baby boy. We go back to a time when the world was for very many people a dark place, and God’s people prayed that God would come and with great power make things right again. We recall the words of the prophets, like Isaiah, who spoke of a new day when there would be peace between nations and justice for all people. Finally, near the end of the season, we will tell the familiar story of angels and dreams and announcements and songs, such as the one Mary sang about the child she would bear, about the new thing God was doing: God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and has sent the rich away empty. God has come to the help of the faithful, for God has always promised to show mercy.
The start of a new school year, the start of a new calendar year, and the season of Advent, the start of a new church year, are all filled with hope and expectation and preparation – we want it to be a good year, right? We want to be ready for what the new year will bring.
I spent several New Year’s Eves (the December 31st ones) at an Episcopal youth retreat in the mountains of North Carolina. We always started the night in the chapel, warm from the glow of candles and the excitement of the evening. We filled that place to the rafters with our worship and especially our music, singing and clapping and dancing, and then we danced our way through the icy cold air to the hall where the big party was waiting, and we danced some more and counted down the hours then the minutes then the seconds to the new year. The night was full of noise and celebration. Some time after midnight, we walked back toward our cabins, and I remember noticing how silent and dark and still it was underneath the trees. Through the bare branches, I could see the stars like silver lights in the blackest sky, making that darkness dazzle with joy and hope as the new year was just beginning.
Many years later, when I was in seminary, I spent several New Year’s Eves in New York City, surrounded by mountains not of trees but of concrete and steel. There, the stillness was inside our warm little apartment and the noise and celebration were outside in the cold, where just a few blocks away thousands of people were dancing and clapping in Times Square. But then, most nights were something like that in New York City. It didn’t have to be New Year’s Eve. There was always noise – the hum of traffic, the rumbling of the subway, the whine of car alarms, the wail of fire engines, the roar of airplanes flying low over the Hudson, the voices of people talking, arguing, laughing, singing, or yelling in the streets…
Advent, like any new year, like any day of our lives throughout the year, is full of contrasts – there is hope and fear, stillness and noise, light and dark, expectation and anxiety, preparation and feeling unprepared. And even as Christians are preparing especially for that silent night, that midnight clear, when Emmanuel, God-with-us, must have been anything but silent as he tested out his newborn lungs, we can all prepare for the unique ways in which God comes into our lives each and every day. Because this, too, is what Advent marks – God with us now, God with us here. How can we make ourselves ready for God to be God-with-us, on mountaintops and on city streets, in stables and on stage, in congregations and in classrooms and in community, in joy and in grief, in rare silences and constant sound?
In this place, at this school, through our studies and our teamwork, through our friendships and our service to others and through all that we do here, we are preparing ourselves to live as light in dark places, as peacefulness in noisy places, as hope in fearful places. God is with us. Happy new year!
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Posting Pictures...
...of purling (well, knitting), not preaching! I've never added a picture to a post, and just wanted to know if I could do it!
So, while I'm at it, this is a prayer shawl I'm knitting for the St. Peter's-by-the-Lake prayer shawl ministry. At one end, which you can't see in the picture, I tried my first knitted ruffle. Took a long time, but MUCH more fun than fringe!
Now off to see what a posted picture looks like in the blog!
Friday, November 09, 2007
Saint Andrew
Sermon delivered at our Saint Andrew's Day chapel services at Saint Andrew's Episcopal School. We celebrated a few weeks early of the actual feast day. There were bagpipes and cake - heaven for Episcopalians!
Deuteronomy 30:11-14; Psalm 19:1-6; Matthew 4:18-22
I am Saint Andrew’s, many of you claim in the remarkable video that promotes this school on our website. I am Saint Andrew’s, where it is "cool to be smart," where what we learn in the classroom is never bound by four walls, where spiritual growth and moral responsibility and academic excellence are taught in observatories, art studios, science labs, courtyards and classrooms, on playing fields, at performances, in chapel, and among friends. I am Saint Andrew’s, you say.
I am Saint Andrew, a voice echoes back to us from a roadside in Galilee, somewhere near the shore where a boat was anchored and fishing nets drawn up to dry in the sun. I am Saint Andrew.
Today we celebrate the man whose life and ministry were so compelling that we would name our school after him and choose his symbols for our crest. Today we celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day, and how his story is part of ours, how our six decades of stars rising are part of a far more ancient constellation in which our own Andrew was the first to shine.
There are two different stories in scripture describing how Andrew met Jesus. Andrew and his brother made their living as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. When he wasn’t fishing for fish, though, Andrew busied himself with fishing for the meaning of life, and he believed he had found it in the preaching of his teacher, John – John the Baptist.
John was one of those nutty professor types – you knew what he taught was true, but his methods seemed slightly mad. He wore camel-hair clothing, kept to a diet of locusts and honey, and imposed on anyone who came near him an unfettered extroversion. He went about in the wilderness preaching and prophesying about One who would soon come in God’s name and turn the whole world upside down and inside out with love.
One day, John and his disciples (his students), including Andrew, were sitting near the road when Jesus happened to walk by. John pointed to Jesus and said, “That’s him! He’s the One, God’s chosen One, the One I’ve been telling you about!” Andrew was immediately hooked and ran after Jesus, who played Andrew for the fisherman he was by dropping the bait, What are you looking for? Jesus reeled Andrew back to his house for the afternoon, where we can only imagine what the conversation must have been like before Andrew finally made his way back to where he had left his brother cleaning the fish and untangling the nets. "You’ve got to meet this guy!" Andrew told his brother, whose name was Simon Peter. In many traditions, then, Andrew is remembered as the very first disciple of Jesus.
They had the chance the next morning, when out at sea with his hands full of fish Andrew was still talking about his afternoon with God’s chosen One. Jesus was again walking by, and when he saw Andrew and Simon Peter he called to them, Follow me, and you will not need your fishing nets any longer. I will make you fish for people! Follow me! And immediately, the gospel tells us, immediately they dropped their nets and followed him.
Andrew appears only twice more in our scriptures. When Jesus finds himself in the midst of a crowd of more than five thousand hungry people with nothing to eat, it is Andrew who brings forward a young boy with five loaves and two fish that became more than enough to feed the multitude. When two Greek men come forward hoping to meet Jesus, it is Andrew who welcomes them and takes them to Jesus, thus teaching us that God’s good news is for all people and not just a chosen few.
Not much else is known about Andrew’s life. He preached the gospel far and wide, perhaps traveling as far as Greece, where he was eventually crucified on a cross resembling an “X” (called a “saltire”), which appears along with a fish hook in our school crest. Legend places him also in what would become Russia, preaching along the coast of the Black Sea.
Andrew is the patron saint of Russia, Romania, and Scotland. Most celebrations of Saint Andrew’s Day within the Episcopal Church owe much to the Scottish tradition, so that bagpipers are in high demand during November. Again according to legend, the Roman emperor Constantine, in the 4th century, moved Andrew’s bones to Constantinople. A monk was warned in a dream, however, that the bones would not be safe there, and that he should take the bones to “the ends of the earth”, which at the time seemed to be the coast of Scotland. The town, the cathedral, and eventually the university of St. Andrew’s were founded in the place where the bones were said to rest. In the 8th century King Ungus of Scotland saw a cloud shaped like a saltire, and declared that Andrew was watching over them in battle. The saltire later became a part of the Scottish flag, the Union flag, the flag of the Confederate states, and of course our own state flag.
We are, indeed, Saint Andrew’s, in more ways than one. Andrew’s first witness to the good news of God’s love, and his lifelong commitment to that witness, brought an extraordinary and, to be honest, unlikely mix of people together to help in the work of turning the world upside down and inside out. His brother, Simon Peter, stumbled over his own two feet time and again, and yet he would become a giant of the faith and the foundation of the church. A little child, invisible in the eyes of the ancient world, in the eyes of Andrew had more than enough in his lunchbox to offer to God.
Andrew brought people together, and he continues to bring people together today. We are brought together here in his name, and I believe he would rejoice to see a community as diverse as ours, as unlikely as ours in that we represent such a rich variety of backgrounds and traditions and stories and gifts and faiths. We are, indeed, Saint Andrew’s, sharing with him an eagerness to learn, an openness to that which is new, and a readiness to change the world for the better. In this hungry world, people are biting. Come on, y'all, let’s go fishing… Amen.
Deuteronomy 30:11-14; Psalm 19:1-6; Matthew 4:18-22
I am Saint Andrew’s, many of you claim in the remarkable video that promotes this school on our website. I am Saint Andrew’s, where it is "cool to be smart," where what we learn in the classroom is never bound by four walls, where spiritual growth and moral responsibility and academic excellence are taught in observatories, art studios, science labs, courtyards and classrooms, on playing fields, at performances, in chapel, and among friends. I am Saint Andrew’s, you say.
I am Saint Andrew, a voice echoes back to us from a roadside in Galilee, somewhere near the shore where a boat was anchored and fishing nets drawn up to dry in the sun. I am Saint Andrew.
Today we celebrate the man whose life and ministry were so compelling that we would name our school after him and choose his symbols for our crest. Today we celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day, and how his story is part of ours, how our six decades of stars rising are part of a far more ancient constellation in which our own Andrew was the first to shine.
There are two different stories in scripture describing how Andrew met Jesus. Andrew and his brother made their living as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. When he wasn’t fishing for fish, though, Andrew busied himself with fishing for the meaning of life, and he believed he had found it in the preaching of his teacher, John – John the Baptist.
John was one of those nutty professor types – you knew what he taught was true, but his methods seemed slightly mad. He wore camel-hair clothing, kept to a diet of locusts and honey, and imposed on anyone who came near him an unfettered extroversion. He went about in the wilderness preaching and prophesying about One who would soon come in God’s name and turn the whole world upside down and inside out with love.
One day, John and his disciples (his students), including Andrew, were sitting near the road when Jesus happened to walk by. John pointed to Jesus and said, “That’s him! He’s the One, God’s chosen One, the One I’ve been telling you about!” Andrew was immediately hooked and ran after Jesus, who played Andrew for the fisherman he was by dropping the bait, What are you looking for? Jesus reeled Andrew back to his house for the afternoon, where we can only imagine what the conversation must have been like before Andrew finally made his way back to where he had left his brother cleaning the fish and untangling the nets. "You’ve got to meet this guy!" Andrew told his brother, whose name was Simon Peter. In many traditions, then, Andrew is remembered as the very first disciple of Jesus.
They had the chance the next morning, when out at sea with his hands full of fish Andrew was still talking about his afternoon with God’s chosen One. Jesus was again walking by, and when he saw Andrew and Simon Peter he called to them, Follow me, and you will not need your fishing nets any longer. I will make you fish for people! Follow me! And immediately, the gospel tells us, immediately they dropped their nets and followed him.
Andrew appears only twice more in our scriptures. When Jesus finds himself in the midst of a crowd of more than five thousand hungry people with nothing to eat, it is Andrew who brings forward a young boy with five loaves and two fish that became more than enough to feed the multitude. When two Greek men come forward hoping to meet Jesus, it is Andrew who welcomes them and takes them to Jesus, thus teaching us that God’s good news is for all people and not just a chosen few.
Not much else is known about Andrew’s life. He preached the gospel far and wide, perhaps traveling as far as Greece, where he was eventually crucified on a cross resembling an “X” (called a “saltire”), which appears along with a fish hook in our school crest. Legend places him also in what would become Russia, preaching along the coast of the Black Sea.
Andrew is the patron saint of Russia, Romania, and Scotland. Most celebrations of Saint Andrew’s Day within the Episcopal Church owe much to the Scottish tradition, so that bagpipers are in high demand during November. Again according to legend, the Roman emperor Constantine, in the 4th century, moved Andrew’s bones to Constantinople. A monk was warned in a dream, however, that the bones would not be safe there, and that he should take the bones to “the ends of the earth”, which at the time seemed to be the coast of Scotland. The town, the cathedral, and eventually the university of St. Andrew’s were founded in the place where the bones were said to rest. In the 8th century King Ungus of Scotland saw a cloud shaped like a saltire, and declared that Andrew was watching over them in battle. The saltire later became a part of the Scottish flag, the Union flag, the flag of the Confederate states, and of course our own state flag.
We are, indeed, Saint Andrew’s, in more ways than one. Andrew’s first witness to the good news of God’s love, and his lifelong commitment to that witness, brought an extraordinary and, to be honest, unlikely mix of people together to help in the work of turning the world upside down and inside out. His brother, Simon Peter, stumbled over his own two feet time and again, and yet he would become a giant of the faith and the foundation of the church. A little child, invisible in the eyes of the ancient world, in the eyes of Andrew had more than enough in his lunchbox to offer to God.
Andrew brought people together, and he continues to bring people together today. We are brought together here in his name, and I believe he would rejoice to see a community as diverse as ours, as unlikely as ours in that we represent such a rich variety of backgrounds and traditions and stories and gifts and faiths. We are, indeed, Saint Andrew’s, sharing with him an eagerness to learn, an openness to that which is new, and a readiness to change the world for the better. In this hungry world, people are biting. Come on, y'all, let’s go fishing… Amen.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
For Hope
St. Andrew's Episcopal School - Upper School Chapel
Tyler Christopher Varnado, a member of the senior class, died two days earlier in a car accident. I did not have the opportunity to meet him, for which I am aware I am the poorer.
Isaiah 40:28-31; Romans 8:26-39
Our readings this morning, like our hearts, are full of questions. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Isaiah asks, wondering if we know that God does not grow exhausted by our need for help.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Paul asks, wondering if we know that God does not ever leave our side.
Why did this happen? Why Tyler? Can’t this all just be a joke? we ask, wondering if, wishing that we could wake up and find it all a very bad dream.
There are no easy answers – perhaps no answers at all – to the difficult questions we ask. There is nothing that can undo the terrible tragedy that has been done, nothing that can rationalize it, nothing that can excuse it, nothing that can justify it.
And so we are left with one question. How do we go on from here? we ask, wondering if there is any reason to hope. Friends, if we asked Tyler this question, how would he answer it? What would he say?
I did not have the privilege of meeting Tyler, but I have heard so many of your stories about a person who loved life, who loved his friends and family, who loved this school. I have heard stories about a person who laughed well, soared well, studied well, and slept well. I have heard some colorful “Tylerisms,” at least those that folks are willing to say in front of a priest. I have heard about passion, loyalty, genuineness, and courage. How do we go on from here? I believe Tyler’s life gives us a really good answer.
I also believe the answers we heard in our readings can help us. Have you not known? Have you not heard? God does not grow exhausted by our need of help and comfort and strength. In this is hope. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing, Paul says. I am convinced, he says, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. In this is hope.
How do we go on from here? Just as life has not ended but is changed for Tyler, so is life not ended but changed for us. Just as he goes on from glory to glory, in the words of his faith, so do we go on from here one step at a time, crying one moment, laughing the next, wondering, wishing, believing…in this is hope.
The first to hope so freely, so fully, were those who in the early morning light of Easter discovered that not even death would not hold God back from us, or us from God. And so we can with confidence give thanks for life that is not extinguished but that instead burns bright with Easter hope.
On our altar this morning are candles for our Saint Andrew’s seniors, one for each, including Tyler, whose light will always burn bright in their hearts. We would like to invite you, seniors, as you are comfortable and beginning with the front row, to come forward and light a votive from our Paschal candle, the light that is kindled on Easter morning, the light of life. Our tears, our laughter, and our lives will burn brighter for having known Tyler. Tyler has shown us, as does the light from a single candle, that light is never diminished when it is shared. Instead it grows and lights the way for us to go on from here. In this, friends, is hope.
Tyler Christopher Varnado, a member of the senior class, died two days earlier in a car accident. I did not have the opportunity to meet him, for which I am aware I am the poorer.
Isaiah 40:28-31; Romans 8:26-39
Our readings this morning, like our hearts, are full of questions. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Isaiah asks, wondering if we know that God does not grow exhausted by our need for help.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Paul asks, wondering if we know that God does not ever leave our side.
Why did this happen? Why Tyler? Can’t this all just be a joke? we ask, wondering if, wishing that we could wake up and find it all a very bad dream.
There are no easy answers – perhaps no answers at all – to the difficult questions we ask. There is nothing that can undo the terrible tragedy that has been done, nothing that can rationalize it, nothing that can excuse it, nothing that can justify it.
And so we are left with one question. How do we go on from here? we ask, wondering if there is any reason to hope. Friends, if we asked Tyler this question, how would he answer it? What would he say?
I did not have the privilege of meeting Tyler, but I have heard so many of your stories about a person who loved life, who loved his friends and family, who loved this school. I have heard stories about a person who laughed well, soared well, studied well, and slept well. I have heard some colorful “Tylerisms,” at least those that folks are willing to say in front of a priest. I have heard about passion, loyalty, genuineness, and courage. How do we go on from here? I believe Tyler’s life gives us a really good answer.
I also believe the answers we heard in our readings can help us. Have you not known? Have you not heard? God does not grow exhausted by our need of help and comfort and strength. In this is hope. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing, Paul says. I am convinced, he says, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. In this is hope.
How do we go on from here? Just as life has not ended but is changed for Tyler, so is life not ended but changed for us. Just as he goes on from glory to glory, in the words of his faith, so do we go on from here one step at a time, crying one moment, laughing the next, wondering, wishing, believing…in this is hope.
The first to hope so freely, so fully, were those who in the early morning light of Easter discovered that not even death would not hold God back from us, or us from God. And so we can with confidence give thanks for life that is not extinguished but that instead burns bright with Easter hope.
On our altar this morning are candles for our Saint Andrew’s seniors, one for each, including Tyler, whose light will always burn bright in their hearts. We would like to invite you, seniors, as you are comfortable and beginning with the front row, to come forward and light a votive from our Paschal candle, the light that is kindled on Easter morning, the light of life. Our tears, our laughter, and our lives will burn brighter for having known Tyler. Tyler has shown us, as does the light from a single candle, that light is never diminished when it is shared. Instead it grows and lights the way for us to go on from here. In this, friends, is hope.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Meditation #1
Meditation #1 - The first in a series of three meditations for the ECW Quiet Day at Trinity Episcopal Church in Natchez, MS.
Yesterday, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School where I serve as chaplain, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the school’s founding. “Six Decades of Stars Rising” was the theme of our campus-wide worship out by Lake Sherwood Wise, nestled behind the observatory, where stars were visible not in the sky above but rather in the procession of students and faculty that wound its way to the lakefront.
“It’s like we’re the stars, right?” a third grader asked me earlier in the week. “For six decades the students have been like lights rising up in the sky?” So much has changed in the 60 years since students first gathered in the fellowship hall at the parish of St. Andrew’s. They have twice outgrown their space. Headmistresses and headmasters have come and gone. Textbooks have been introduced and become worn and outdated. Laptop computers have taken the place of notebook paper.
So much has changed in 60 years, but my third grade friend is correct – the students have always been the stars, lighting the way for succeeding generations, so that yesterday morning the campus was positively radiant. Through six decades of stars rising, the light of learning has been overshadowed only by the yet more brilliant light of Christ shining through the school’s founding as a community of faith and service. The light continues to shine.
And things continue to change. This year there are some forty new women and men added to the constellation of faculty and staff, and a search is underway for a new head of school. A new schedule has been implemented, based on some unintelligible mathematical formula that concluded six days of the week would be better than five, and that classes should be rotated from day to day, so that if this Monday were an A-day, you’d start with 1st period and go through 7th period, and then next Monday would be an F-day, starting with 6th period and working its way around to 4th period… And there is a new chaplain this year, still a little blinded by the light, still a little confused by the schedule, still in the process of learning how to read the stars, how to read the students…
When I accepted the call to serve at St. Andrew’s, not long before the start of the new school year, the old but familiar anxieties started surfacing… What would I wear the first day of school? How would I find my way around? What if no one talked to me? Would I be cool enough? Funny enough? What if no one liked me?...
According to Webster, anxiety is “a state of being uneasy, apprehensive, or worried about what may happen.” It is almost a poetic definition, I think, imbued with the very uncertainty that makes us anxious, for what may happen, of course, may also not happen… When worry whispers what if, what if, we find we are not as sure of the way forward as we once were, and we become anxious about what may happen.
According to theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, anxiety is the state of being within 24 hours of delivering a sermon or, say, a series of quiet day meditations. According to the new chaplain at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, anxiety is the state of just having realized that she is required to prepare no less than three sermons every week. My anxiety rose as my star sank into a sea of what if’s. What if I’m boring? What if they laugh? What if they don’t laugh? What if I don’t have anything to say? What if I do, and they don’t listen?...
I know, of course, that our lectionary dictates the annual appearances of passages from scripture and prayers from our tradition, but I can’t help but wonder whether God was casting stars my way not long ago when I opened my prayerbook (anxiously!) to begin preparing a sermon and read this collect assigned for the Sunday on which I would be preaching.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to that which shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
We hear this collect every year on “the Sunday closest to September 21,” the Sunday closest to the beginning of fall, the Sunday closest to the beginning of that season when earthly things burn orange and red and yellow and gold and then fade and pass away. We hear this collect on a September Sunday when the air, still warm with summer winds, is beginning to stir both leaves and lives with a sense of uncertainty about what lies ahead.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, or in its more traditional form, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly. Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious, not to mind… Another piece of poetry for me, when now in my work I ask children to mind in class, to give their attention, to be obedient. Not to mind earthly things, then, is not to give them our attention, not to be obedient to them, but instead to love things heavenly.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about, not to mind earthly things. What if, I wondered, what if I did not give the what if’s my attention? What if I did not mind them? What if I was not anxious about being cool or funny or profoundly inspirational? What if I didn’t worry about what may, or may not, happen?
Today, in community and in quiet, in word and in sacrament, I want to invite us deeper into this poem-prayer, this collect that accompanies us at the turn of a season and through the changes and chances and challenges of life that does not often stand still. I want us to rustle playfully, like children not minding, in the leaves and stars it casts at our feet.
I started first grade not at an Episcopal school but, rather, at a public school in the most Episcopal place on earth, in Sewanee, Tennessee, perched high up in the Appalachian Mountains as near to heaven as one can get. I remember walking to school past buildings that looked like ancient castles and cathedrals. I remember listening to the tower bells ringing out hymns I knew as well as my nursery rhymes. I remember the giant tree in our backyard that offered its roots as a playhouse and its leaves as a carpet. I remember hiking with my family on long afternoons when the air around us and the leaves underfoot were crisp and filled with the fragrance of fall. I remember not being anxious about anything.
So much had changed years later, when we returned to those mountains a little further north, and made our way one autumn day along a favorite path around a mountain. I was in junior high school, at an age when the changes in our bodies and hearts and minds reshape us daily, it seems. I was a teenager at a new school, with new friends, and a new desire to fit in. Childhood was ending, and I was anxious. As we crunched along the wooded path that afternoon, we began to notice and then to pick up and carry with us some of the leaves that had fallen. Orange, gold and brown surrounded us, lovely leaves we would press later on between the pages of our encyclopedia. But we were determined to find that one elusive perfect red leaf, with no blemishes or tears or any other imperfections. I do not remember if we found it. I do remember relishing our time searching together.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. We might see in autumn, with its falling leaves and lengthening shadows and long, slow drain of green warmth and life… we might see in autumn a reflection of those seasons in our lives when things that have fostered contentment and happiness and wholeness in us change, then fade and pass away and leave us in the cold. What may happen to us when these changes occur? What may not happen? Of course we are anxious.
At least we are in good company. Over and over in our scriptures, we read about women and men of faith who nonetheless struggled when life as they had always known it burst into flame and then faded away. In fact, it very literally happened that way to Moses. We know well the story we heard this morning, about the day when Moses stood before a burning bush and was never the same again. Everything had already changed from the comfortable life he had known as a child in Pharaoh’s household; when the truth of his Hebrew heritage came to light, he had fled, and was now content to live as shepherd in the hills of Midian.
On as ordinary a day as this one, upon ground that Moses walked every day, the angel of the Lord appeared in a flame of fire out of a bush…Moses, Moses! God called to him…The place on which you are standing is holy ground. In a flash, Moses understood that his life was passing away, changing beyond his ability to measure, and for two chapters he pleads with God to let things remain as they have been. Pharoah won’t listen, Moses insisted. The Israelites won’t believe me. I’m not as powerful as the Egyptians. And I can never think of the right things to say. Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?...What if…
Moses, Moses, God said, I will be with you. And in the end, that’s what Moses would cling to, and not for the first time and not for the last, God changed everything, and life passed away, and a new life began.
On another ordinary day, upon ground that she walked every day, Martha saw Jesus and his disciples going by. Something in him compelled her to invite them in, a bold and reckless move for an unmarried woman to make. But the flame she had kindled in her kitchen sparked a fire in her when she realized her sister, Mary, was sitting at Jesus’ feet rather than helping her prepare a meal for their guests. Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.
Martha, Martha, Jesus said, You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. And in the end, that’s what Martha would cling to, and not for the first time, and not for the last, Jesus changed everything, and life passed away, and a new life began.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. Life on this earth is constantly passing away, isn’t it? We know of course, because both scripture and experience teach us, that such earthly things as wealth and success and status, and even beauty and health and skill, are only temporary. But far less measurable things also fade – things like life and love and hope and dreams and traditions and relationships and security. We don’t usually call these things earthly, but I submit to you that even they take on an earthly quality when we make them the center of our world.
In the same way, things that are of the earth can take on a heavenly quality, even though they, too, may pass away with time. Writer Molly Wolf explains, “A Maserati is one sort of thing; beef stew with Merlot is another, especially when the purpose of the stew is to express one’s delight in God’s creation and one’s love for those to be fed…Earthly says, ‘Make these things your God’; earthy says, ‘God is here in God’s extraordinary creation, give thanks.’ Earthly says, ‘We can make and control, and suffer for and make others suffer for, things we declare to be beautiful and valuable.’ Earthy invites you to pick up one single fallen leaf from a scarlet maple and be clonked cross-eyed by its sheer glory.”
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. So much has changed since first grade, since our first encounter with God, since Jesus first came into our lives. There is so much to be anxious about. There are so many what if’s. As we move, in our own lives, through seasons of transition and uncertainty, how is God calling us? How do we respond? Like Moses, perhaps, making the case that we just can’t change? Like Martha, maybe, complaining that the change isn’t fair? As we move, in our own lives, through seasons of transition and uncertainty, how is God calling us? How do we respond?
We are now going to enter a time of quiet reflection (for many of us, this is itself a big change!). I invite you use this space, if you wish, for prayer or meditation, for journaling or drawing, or simply for sitting in silence. There are pens, pencils, paper and other art supplies in the front pews. You are also welcome to find another space on these lovely and holy grounds, to walk, or to rest. When you hear the bell ring, about thirty minutes from now, please return to the church.
Yesterday, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School where I serve as chaplain, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the school’s founding. “Six Decades of Stars Rising” was the theme of our campus-wide worship out by Lake Sherwood Wise, nestled behind the observatory, where stars were visible not in the sky above but rather in the procession of students and faculty that wound its way to the lakefront.
“It’s like we’re the stars, right?” a third grader asked me earlier in the week. “For six decades the students have been like lights rising up in the sky?” So much has changed in the 60 years since students first gathered in the fellowship hall at the parish of St. Andrew’s. They have twice outgrown their space. Headmistresses and headmasters have come and gone. Textbooks have been introduced and become worn and outdated. Laptop computers have taken the place of notebook paper.
So much has changed in 60 years, but my third grade friend is correct – the students have always been the stars, lighting the way for succeeding generations, so that yesterday morning the campus was positively radiant. Through six decades of stars rising, the light of learning has been overshadowed only by the yet more brilliant light of Christ shining through the school’s founding as a community of faith and service. The light continues to shine.
And things continue to change. This year there are some forty new women and men added to the constellation of faculty and staff, and a search is underway for a new head of school. A new schedule has been implemented, based on some unintelligible mathematical formula that concluded six days of the week would be better than five, and that classes should be rotated from day to day, so that if this Monday were an A-day, you’d start with 1st period and go through 7th period, and then next Monday would be an F-day, starting with 6th period and working its way around to 4th period… And there is a new chaplain this year, still a little blinded by the light, still a little confused by the schedule, still in the process of learning how to read the stars, how to read the students…
When I accepted the call to serve at St. Andrew’s, not long before the start of the new school year, the old but familiar anxieties started surfacing… What would I wear the first day of school? How would I find my way around? What if no one talked to me? Would I be cool enough? Funny enough? What if no one liked me?...
According to Webster, anxiety is “a state of being uneasy, apprehensive, or worried about what may happen.” It is almost a poetic definition, I think, imbued with the very uncertainty that makes us anxious, for what may happen, of course, may also not happen… When worry whispers what if, what if, we find we are not as sure of the way forward as we once were, and we become anxious about what may happen.
According to theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, anxiety is the state of being within 24 hours of delivering a sermon or, say, a series of quiet day meditations. According to the new chaplain at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, anxiety is the state of just having realized that she is required to prepare no less than three sermons every week. My anxiety rose as my star sank into a sea of what if’s. What if I’m boring? What if they laugh? What if they don’t laugh? What if I don’t have anything to say? What if I do, and they don’t listen?...
I know, of course, that our lectionary dictates the annual appearances of passages from scripture and prayers from our tradition, but I can’t help but wonder whether God was casting stars my way not long ago when I opened my prayerbook (anxiously!) to begin preparing a sermon and read this collect assigned for the Sunday on which I would be preaching.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to that which shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
We hear this collect every year on “the Sunday closest to September 21,” the Sunday closest to the beginning of fall, the Sunday closest to the beginning of that season when earthly things burn orange and red and yellow and gold and then fade and pass away. We hear this collect on a September Sunday when the air, still warm with summer winds, is beginning to stir both leaves and lives with a sense of uncertainty about what lies ahead.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, or in its more traditional form, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly. Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious, not to mind… Another piece of poetry for me, when now in my work I ask children to mind in class, to give their attention, to be obedient. Not to mind earthly things, then, is not to give them our attention, not to be obedient to them, but instead to love things heavenly.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about, not to mind earthly things. What if, I wondered, what if I did not give the what if’s my attention? What if I did not mind them? What if I was not anxious about being cool or funny or profoundly inspirational? What if I didn’t worry about what may, or may not, happen?
Today, in community and in quiet, in word and in sacrament, I want to invite us deeper into this poem-prayer, this collect that accompanies us at the turn of a season and through the changes and chances and challenges of life that does not often stand still. I want us to rustle playfully, like children not minding, in the leaves and stars it casts at our feet.
I started first grade not at an Episcopal school but, rather, at a public school in the most Episcopal place on earth, in Sewanee, Tennessee, perched high up in the Appalachian Mountains as near to heaven as one can get. I remember walking to school past buildings that looked like ancient castles and cathedrals. I remember listening to the tower bells ringing out hymns I knew as well as my nursery rhymes. I remember the giant tree in our backyard that offered its roots as a playhouse and its leaves as a carpet. I remember hiking with my family on long afternoons when the air around us and the leaves underfoot were crisp and filled with the fragrance of fall. I remember not being anxious about anything.
So much had changed years later, when we returned to those mountains a little further north, and made our way one autumn day along a favorite path around a mountain. I was in junior high school, at an age when the changes in our bodies and hearts and minds reshape us daily, it seems. I was a teenager at a new school, with new friends, and a new desire to fit in. Childhood was ending, and I was anxious. As we crunched along the wooded path that afternoon, we began to notice and then to pick up and carry with us some of the leaves that had fallen. Orange, gold and brown surrounded us, lovely leaves we would press later on between the pages of our encyclopedia. But we were determined to find that one elusive perfect red leaf, with no blemishes or tears or any other imperfections. I do not remember if we found it. I do remember relishing our time searching together.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. We might see in autumn, with its falling leaves and lengthening shadows and long, slow drain of green warmth and life… we might see in autumn a reflection of those seasons in our lives when things that have fostered contentment and happiness and wholeness in us change, then fade and pass away and leave us in the cold. What may happen to us when these changes occur? What may not happen? Of course we are anxious.
At least we are in good company. Over and over in our scriptures, we read about women and men of faith who nonetheless struggled when life as they had always known it burst into flame and then faded away. In fact, it very literally happened that way to Moses. We know well the story we heard this morning, about the day when Moses stood before a burning bush and was never the same again. Everything had already changed from the comfortable life he had known as a child in Pharaoh’s household; when the truth of his Hebrew heritage came to light, he had fled, and was now content to live as shepherd in the hills of Midian.
On as ordinary a day as this one, upon ground that Moses walked every day, the angel of the Lord appeared in a flame of fire out of a bush…Moses, Moses! God called to him…The place on which you are standing is holy ground. In a flash, Moses understood that his life was passing away, changing beyond his ability to measure, and for two chapters he pleads with God to let things remain as they have been. Pharoah won’t listen, Moses insisted. The Israelites won’t believe me. I’m not as powerful as the Egyptians. And I can never think of the right things to say. Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?...What if…
Moses, Moses, God said, I will be with you. And in the end, that’s what Moses would cling to, and not for the first time and not for the last, God changed everything, and life passed away, and a new life began.
On another ordinary day, upon ground that she walked every day, Martha saw Jesus and his disciples going by. Something in him compelled her to invite them in, a bold and reckless move for an unmarried woman to make. But the flame she had kindled in her kitchen sparked a fire in her when she realized her sister, Mary, was sitting at Jesus’ feet rather than helping her prepare a meal for their guests. Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.
Martha, Martha, Jesus said, You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. And in the end, that’s what Martha would cling to, and not for the first time, and not for the last, Jesus changed everything, and life passed away, and a new life began.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. Life on this earth is constantly passing away, isn’t it? We know of course, because both scripture and experience teach us, that such earthly things as wealth and success and status, and even beauty and health and skill, are only temporary. But far less measurable things also fade – things like life and love and hope and dreams and traditions and relationships and security. We don’t usually call these things earthly, but I submit to you that even they take on an earthly quality when we make them the center of our world.
In the same way, things that are of the earth can take on a heavenly quality, even though they, too, may pass away with time. Writer Molly Wolf explains, “A Maserati is one sort of thing; beef stew with Merlot is another, especially when the purpose of the stew is to express one’s delight in God’s creation and one’s love for those to be fed…Earthly says, ‘Make these things your God’; earthy says, ‘God is here in God’s extraordinary creation, give thanks.’ Earthly says, ‘We can make and control, and suffer for and make others suffer for, things we declare to be beautiful and valuable.’ Earthy invites you to pick up one single fallen leaf from a scarlet maple and be clonked cross-eyed by its sheer glory.”
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly;…even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away. So much has changed since first grade, since our first encounter with God, since Jesus first came into our lives. There is so much to be anxious about. There are so many what if’s. As we move, in our own lives, through seasons of transition and uncertainty, how is God calling us? How do we respond? Like Moses, perhaps, making the case that we just can’t change? Like Martha, maybe, complaining that the change isn’t fair? As we move, in our own lives, through seasons of transition and uncertainty, how is God calling us? How do we respond?
We are now going to enter a time of quiet reflection (for many of us, this is itself a big change!). I invite you use this space, if you wish, for prayer or meditation, for journaling or drawing, or simply for sitting in silence. There are pens, pencils, paper and other art supplies in the front pews. You are also welcome to find another space on these lovely and holy grounds, to walk, or to rest. When you hear the bell ring, about thirty minutes from now, please return to the church.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
