Becoming Living Stones

 Sermon preached at Evensong, 2nd Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025, celebrating the 165th Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church of the Redeemer:  Psalm 46, 1 Peter 2:1-5, 9-10

165 years. That’s 8,580 Sundays.  Week by week, 8,580 times, the people of God who worship in the tradition of The Episcopal Church have gathered in faith to give thanks and pray, and to be given strength and courage to go into the world “to love and serve the Lord,” “in the Name of Christ,” and “in the power of the Spirit” by serving those whom God calls neighbors and friends.

Take that in for a moment. Savor it. Feel these walls soaked with prayer and thanksgiving, the faith and hope of many generations.

Yet, this moment is not about nostalgia.  It is about remembering, but in sacramental traditions like ours, remembering is never solely about the past.  When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was asking us to do more than not forget him.  He was asking us to acknowledge his presence in the moment of remembering, and to allow that encounter with the past, in the present moment, to send us into the future.

So, an anniversary like this one is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is not only a celebration of the past.  It is a celebration of the future for the people of God in this place.

But do we dare talk about the future? Do we dare imagine a future for this place and the people who gather here? Do we not have to be honest about how uncertain the future is for a congregation like this one?  Do we not have to fear that this place will one day—sooner rather than later—become something other than a place to worship?

Yes, of course we have to be honest about the present moment. We have to acknowledge our anxiety, our fear.  But we also have to say, with the writer of Psalm 46,

The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

And with that expression of faith, we can dare to hope and continue to serve as if the future is not a threat but a possibility.

The apostle Peter gives us an image that helps put some flesh on the bones of this hope. He says

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

“Like living stones.”  There is nothing more dead than a stone.  Yet we heard Jesus use this same image on Palm Sunday. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowd is shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” Some of the Pharisees ask Jesus to make them stop.  They sense—quite correctly—that this proclamation is dangerous.  Jesus replies,

I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.

For many in the world, the church seems very much like a stone—stuck in an existence it cannot change. Its stone—its buildings—however beautiful, increasingly vacant, lifeless, “for sale,” to be re-purposed for something more useful.  If it is living, it seems stuck in time, obsessed about itself and its own survival, uncertainty and anxiety the only signs of life.

How to turn this around? How to become living stones, that shout out the goodness and greatness of God in spite of what looks like a time of despair?

It’s a two step process, at least Psalm 46 would have it so.  Step One:

Be still then and know that I am God.

We cannot break out of the cycle of anxiety and self-obsession without learning to be quiet. We can only hear God if we shut up.  The writer of the psalm asks us to have faith; “The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our stronghold.”  But then she is wise enough to say that this faith requires that we be quiet and listen.  “Be still then, and know that I am God.”

We can only gain confidence about the future, church, if we believe that God is still speaking to us, and if we take the time to listen.

Step one:  be still.  Step two:  trust.  Assuming we are listening, we can only put into practice what we are hearing when we trust who God is. Again, Psalm 46,

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear …

If we are to be living stones, it will be because we trust the God who is our refuge and strength, and when we embrace that trust (to paraphrase St Augustine) we become the one we trust.

Whatever the particularities of God’s call to this place or any other, it will be a matter of becoming the one we trust.  If God is our refuge and strength, then we must become a refuge, a place where strength and courage to love and serve the Lord and his people is given.

I am reminded of a traditional Dutch hymn (not in our hymnal), that begins

What is this place where we are meeting?

Only a house, the earth its floor,

Walls and a roof, sheltering people,

Windows for light, an open door.

Yet it becomes a body that lives

When we are gathered here

And know our God is near.

Our prayer this evening is that this building may continue to house a people who know their God is near, a people who listen and are willing to trust that God is still with us, and to become the one they trust, a refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Trust

 Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C): Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

If there is a word of the day this morning it seems to be “trust.”

 We prayed at the beginning of the service, “O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you . . .”

 We heard Jeremiah, declare, “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.”

 Paul says to us, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”  Faith and trust are at least “kissing cousins,” if not identical twins.

 And Jesus in Luke’s Gospel declares a future reversal for those who are poor or hungry or who weep now.  He offers no proof.  The statements call for faith, trust.

  My bishop most of the time I was in the Diocese of Washington was a man named Ronald Haines. He liked to challenge people to tell the Biblical story in ten minutes or less.

One way of doing that would be:

 God creates humankind and asks, “Will you trust me?”

 Humankind says in word, “Yes.”

 Humankind says in deed, “No.”

 So God asks humankind, whom he has created, “Will you trust me?”

 Humankind says in word, “Yes.”

 Humankind says in deed, “No.”

 This goes on and on, until at the biblical story’s end—at our end—there is just the question from the God who created us,

“I love you. I forgive you. Will you trust me?”

 And we are asked yet again to answer with our whole being.

 The Bible is not naive in telling this story, however.  It knows that neither the question nor the answer are simple. God’s question about trust, is never asked on a sunny day.  The question is always asked on Good Friday. It is always asked in the time of trial.  The Bible knows it is only worth asking then.

 So the answer to the question only matters in the time of trial, in the time of choosing, when one is tempted to put one’s trust in self alone or nothing at all.

 The Bible is not naive.  It knows full well our world of despair and mistrust.  “Trust no one.”  “In the end you can only trust yourself.”  “Look out for number one.”

  The Bible is not naive.  It knows that there is much supporting evidence for this worldview.  We live in a world that breeds despair and mistrust, where despair and mistrust appear to be perfectly reasonable, even necessary, responses.

 But, the Bible says, this world of despair and mistrust is not the world of God’s creation. It is the world of our own creation, and our response of mistrust and despair only serve to make it worse, to give strength to the whirlpool of life that threatens to suck us down.

 The Bible offers us life lived not on our own terms but God’s.  The only way to get from Good Friday, where the world around us seems to be stuck, to Easter Day, which seems an impossible fantasy, is to entrust ourselves and our world to God.

    Again, the Bible is not naive.  It knows the difficulty in this.  It knows how mysterious this God is whose story it tells.  She is the enigma of all enigmas.  He is the slipperiest of all eels.  Where to look for this God in whom we are to put our trust?  How to know this God in whom we are to put our trust?

 The Bible tells us in its story over and over and over again: we look for God in all the wrong places. We resist with all our might the answer the Bible gives. Where to look for this God in whom we are to put our trust?  We assume—because we were taught as children that God could do anything—God was the most powerful being in the world—and nobody told us this didn’t mean God was “superman.” We assume that God is to be found in the place of power.

But the Bible tells us God is to be looked for in the place of weakness—the cradle in the manger outside the inn and the cross on the hill outside the city. And it is only when we look for God in these places that the power of God to transform Good Friday to Easter Day is unleashed.

 To find God on Good Friday means to completely let go of self-dependence.  This is a tough one, especially for those of us who enjoy a measure of success in this world.  (We are all tempted to exempt ourselves from this but we should not.  If you own more than one coat, Jesus said, you are in a position of success and should be ready to get rid of it).

 To let go completely of self-dependence is a cultural heresy—anathema to everything we have been taught.  And yet if we do not do this, we shall never know God who can make new life, we shall ever be stuck on Good Friday trying to save ourselves, trying to create our own new life, and breeding more mistrust and more despair when we inevitably fail.

  We have a saying, “I’m at my wits end.”  It is a cry of enormous anxiety, marking the brink of despair.  It is the place we will avoid going at all costs, but it is the place we are most likely to meet God.  It is only when our own “wit” is ended that we can embrace and be embraced by the God who saves.

 “O God the strength of all who put their trust in you . . .”

 Nice words, whose implications are staggering.  The trust results in strength—p power—but not our own, God’s.

 We are addicted to our own strength--especially we of economic privilege--we are absolutely addicted to it.  It is why Jesus says, “Woe,” to us.  He knows that our withdrawal from our addiction will not be pleasant—it will shake us to our foundations, rattle us as much as any withdrawal from any drug.

 When Jesus says “Woe to you who are privileged now . . .” he’s talking about the “DT’s” he knows we’ll have to go through when we’re finally forced to let go of our own privilege, our own strength, when we get to the day when, as they say, “you can't take it with you.”  It will not be pretty.

 Is Jesus saying we would be better off being slaves, or poor, hungry, weeping, oppressed, marginalized, desperate?

 In a way, yes.  Not because that is what God wants for us—what God wants for us is to embrace the truth that we have been given a creation where there is enough—even an abundance—for everybody.  But we choose to believe in scarcity instead, and so choose to live in fear and dependence on our own ability to get enough for ourselves and so play games of power and privilege and relegate God to a nice old grandfather in the sky who is pleased when we behave ourselves.

 Jesus is saying those who have nothing in this world are lucky—blessed—because they already have no choice but to trust in God.  But those of us who live in the luxury of trusting in ourselves, we will face a terrible day when we can’t do that anymore—and it’s going to hurt like hell.

 But the good news is that God will still be there for us.  We will still be able to choose to trust completely.

 But why not start now?  Why not prepare? Why not experiment living in the trust of God?  It begins with a prayer and an act we do all the time but perhaps don’t fully grasp the significance of it.

 The prayer is, “God, I cannot feed myself.  I am desperately hungry and no matter how much I feed myself my spirit is restless and sometimes starving.”

 The act is to get out of the pew and open our hands and, in words from the Prayer Book, “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on [God] in your heart with thanksgiving.”

Of Signs and Seeing in Troubled Times

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, January 19, the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany:  John 2:1-11

Grant that your people, illumined by your word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory….

Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory…

The Collect of the Day gives us a lofty goal:  “that we might shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory.”  It reminds us of Jesus saying from the Sermon on the Mount:  “Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”  It reminds me also of a saying, “Saints are people the light shines through.”

The Gospel reading this morning tells us there are two prior steps we must take before we can be a light for others.  First, we must learn to look for the signs.  And second, we must learn to see through them.

John calls what happens at the wedding in Cana as “the first of Jesus’ signs.”  John does not talk about miracles, he talks about signs.  There are seven of them in John’s Gospel.  Seven things Jesus does that reveal who he truly is.

So how do we do the first step, look for a sign from God?

The Collect we prayed points us in a particular direction. We are said to be “illumined by your word and Sacraments.”  The Sacraments are a kind of rehearsal for how to look for signs from God.

What is the definition of a Sacrament?  The Prayer Book says they are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”  What does that tell us? Two things, I think.

First, signs from God occur mostly in the ordinary stuff of life. And second, signs can be seen through to see the grace of God.

That means that we don’t spend all our time looking for signs from God in the other than ordinary, or the unexplainable.  Finding God in the unexplainable, and especially using the unexplainable to figure out who God is and how he works is often called “the God of the gaps.”  The impulse is to look at what cannot be explained—the gaps in our understanding—and say, “I’ve found God.”

I don’t want to say that we cannot find God in the gaps, but I do want to say that it is rare to do so.  God likes to speak to us in the ordinary.  Hence Jesus first sign in John’s Gospel takes place at a wedding and involves water and wine.  Yes, how Jesus turns water into wine is unexplainable, but “how” is not the main point of the story.

The main point of the story is to prepare us to look for God’s signs in the ordinary stuff of life, and to be able to see through those signs to the reality of Jesus and his revelation of God.

And that’s the second step. Step one, how or where do we look? Second step, having looked, how do we see?  Or probably better, what do we look for?

Back to the definition of a sacrament:  we look for grace, or any of those things we know we can rely on God for:  mercy, forgiveness, hope, love.

We look through something and see God.  Now that’ s not as easy as it sounds, because—and here’s the tricky part—what God wants to show us is often unexpected, a surprise.  Such a surprise might delight us, but it might also bring us up short, or, at first, disappoint us or even anger us.

Later in John’s Gospel comes the famous line, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”  Some have added a phrase: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

We can’t look only for things we agree with or that are some fulfillment of a desire we have.  If we do this, usually sooner rather than later, the God we worship will look a great deal like ourselves.

Look for God in the ordinary, expect to see, often, what you do not expect to see (or, perhaps, do not want to see).

This has many ramifications for daily living.  I’ll point out one given the change we are about to experience with the inauguration of President Trump.

That people are deeply divided is a given these days.  That one side of that divide feels completely empowered by now is obvious, and many of us will find ourselves on the margins, politically and socially.

The tendency—whichever side your on—will be to increase what we have been doing for the last decade, and that is to seek the safety of like-minded people.  A certain amount of that is only natural.

But we can’t let ourselves do that all the time.  We must keep practicing on of the tenets of the baptismal covenant we renewed last week:  “I will seek and serve Christ in all persons loving my neighbor as myself.”

There’s a flip side to that work:  we must give opportunities for others to see Christ in us, a product of letting our life shine.

That is what gay and lesbian people did in The Episcopal Church.  When the majority of people wanted us to go away, we decided to stay.  And not just stay, we determined to tell our stories so that other people could see our ordinary lives.  And see God at work in them.  We did it so well that in the early nineties that one of the organizations that was against us being fully in the church issued a warning to all its members:  do not let them tell their stories.

Some folks in our community think they have one a great battle and are poised to win the war against a whole bunch of people they think are destroying the real American way of life, and the Christian religion.  Out job is to find ways to keep in relationship with them and not be quiet about who we are and the things we hold dear.  As I have always said as an openly gay priest, “They’re going to have to work hard not to like me or at least respect me.”

Now this means that we have to look for Christ in those who disagree with us also, and expect that there are ways that we need to change.

The only way I see to survive the next four years is to keep looking for and seeing God at work in others, and making ourselves available to be looked at and seen.  We have to trust God that he will be present in those attempts to see and be seen, because it is in the signs that he is known, as we practice each Sunday. 

Going Down Into the Dirty Water

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, on the First Sunday after Epiphany, celebrating the Baptism of Jesus:  Isaiah 43:1-7, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

There is one little detail in Luke’s telling of the story of Jesus’ Baptism that makes a huge difference to understanding not only Jesus’ mission, but our own.  Luke writes,

Now when all the people were baptized . . .

Full stop.  Artistic representations of Jesus’ baptism almost always have John and Jesus alone in the water. What was going on was between the two of them.  Matthew even has John arguing with Jesus that this baptism should be the other way around.

Luke paints a different picture.  Jesus is there with the crowds.  If there was a line of people waiting for their turn, Jesus was among them.  Jesus in line.  Not seeking anything special, just what everyone else was getting.

Now, you may say, yes, but it seems to indicate he was last in line.  And you’re right that is implied, but I don’t think it changes my image. If anything it enhances it.  The River must have been quite churned up by the time Jesus got in the water.  So my image is that he went down into the dirty water with everybody else.

Down in the dirty water with everyone else.  Luke’s Jesus, right from the beginning, is in complete solidarity with us. And, as a last way of emphasizing this, it is implied that everyone with ears to hear could here the voice announcing God’s beloved.  In Matthew and Mark only Jesus hears the voice.

Down in the dirty water and a voice that speaks to anyone who can hear.

In many ways this is how I have come to understand and try to practice priesthood.

All my thirty-five ordained years, like most clergy, I have been asked, “How did you know you were being called?”  I’ve never had a great story of an epiphany. Something like, “I was in a special place and I heard a special voice.”  No, my answer has always been, “I just did.”  I know, very unsatisfying.

After 35 years I don’t consider it to be an important question anymore if it ever was.  The important question for me is what am I called to do with this extraordinary gift I’ve been given?

And the answer is not to be anything special.  The answer is to, like Jesus, go down into the dirty water like everyone else and listen with everyone else for the voice of acceptance, the voice of grace, the voice of love.

If I can do or say something to facilitate your stepping into that water and listening for that voice, well, that’s what I try to do. It’s why clergy are given authority to say particular words—of acceptance, of forgiveness, of offering, and of blessing.  If you want to call the ability to do those things a ”power,” well, that’s fine.  But any power given to me is all grace.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a priest. As bad at it as I am sometimes, it is such an extraordinary gift and has become to me something like breathing.  It has been a different gift at different times in my life.  Right now it is a gift to be here with you, and also with my staff and the animals at the Shelter. I’m no less a priest there than I am here, except there I more or less keep that thought to myself.

And it’s a bit more than that. I love to be a priest of the God of mercy and grace and love.  And to be the one who gets to remind you over and over again just how loved you are—despite all the trouble life brings.

And even in that I am nothing special, because you—even you—are called in word and deed to proclaim the good news of God in Christ, the good news being said by the prophet Isaiah this morning:

Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you…do not fear, for I am with you..you who are called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

That’s not some perfect person God is talking to.  It’s you and I, down in the dirty water, the voice we need to hear.

The Christmas Surprise

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison on Christmas Eve: Luke 2:1-20

I have been stuck on the word “surprise” this Advent.  It first occurred to me preparing for the Advent classes we did this year. We pondered three questions from hymns in those sessions.

It was the first question that brought up the word “surprise.”  The question is 

Can it mean that in our endings, new beginnings you create?

    Pondering that question, I asked myself, “Are you willing to be surprised by God?”  Can the story of Jesus birth that we have heard so many times, offer any surprise?

I know it’s not a very theological word, surprise. It never appears in our Prayer Book, and only once in the entirety of the Bible.  But here it is, stuck in my brain, and so I’m going to try and to make some meaning out of it for us.

And to do so I am drawn to those shepherds.  To say that they were surprised in the middle of the night by a host of angels is a vast understatement.  They must have thought, if they could think beyond their fear, “Hold up! Wait a minute! We think you have the wrong address!’

But the angels didn’t have the wrong address.  They were right where God wanted them to be, with shepherds in the hills “watching their flock by night.”

Now some say that the shepherds’ appearance in the story is to remind us of King David, the shepherd king, into whose house Jesus is born.  Maybe, but shepherds were a long way from the great David.

And the long way had been a prolonged decline.  Shepherds were among the lowest in esteem by Jesus’ day.  The religious authorities considered them “outside the law,” which is to mean that there was no way for them to become “clean.”  One consequence was that they were considered totally unreliable witnesses.  They were thought to be inherently dishonest.

Now there’s a surprise.  God chooses as his first revelation of his newborn son, witnesses that most people—especially the civil and religious authorities—were hard-wired not to believe.

In my imagination I see them wandering into town, sheep in tow—they couldn’t leave them in the hills alone.  That they were “in haste” only makes the scene more comical.  I imagine regular citizens rushing to their homes, slamming the doors behind them. It must have seemed as if Bethlehem was being invaded by people whom no one wanted to be there.

Normally the shepherds would have been afraid to wander into town, especially accompanied by their sheep. But they had just been told the good news that they didn’t have to be afraid anymore, and they believed it.

There are many ways to be surprised by the Christmas story, but here is perhaps the biggest:

We don’t have to be afraid anymore.

Throughout history and religious traditions, God, however conceived, was characterize by one thing:  fear.  You should be afraid of God.  It is still true for so many religious types, even Christians.  In college I hung around evangelical students for a time, and the one thing they were clear about:  you cannot tell people the good news before you tell them the bad news.  You’re going to hell unless you get right with God.

That is not what is happening in this story.  The good news is proclaimed and the first word out of everyone’s month is, “Do not be afraid.”  Forget the bad news.

If God ever did want to be feared, that ended this night.  Why else come as a baby?  There is no fear in the manger scene, only love.

And that is where I end up with my word surprise.  It is not something new to my way of thinking, but I am surprised by it over and over again.

One last thing:  The angels cried out,

Glory to God in the highest heave, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!

Do not be fooled by the words “those whom he favors.”  Do not make of them some exclusivist club, people who know how to get themselves in good with God.  Think of the ones who were the first to get this message.

And be surprised that those whom God favors turns out to be you and me and everyone else.

This is the Christmas surprise:  We do not need to be afraid of God anymore.

A Charlie Brown Advent (What to do when the World goes Crazy)

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY on the 1st Sunday of Advent:  Luke 21:25-36

“The Doctor is IN,” says the sign at Lucy’s booth in the comic strip Peanuts.  Ever forlorn and confused Charlie Brown confesses to her, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything about life.”  He pleads with her, “Tell me a great truth!”

Lucy asks a question first, “Do you ever wake up at night and want a drink of water?”  “Sure,” comes the reply from Charlie.  Her voice dripping with “wisdom,” Lucy pronounces, “When you’re getting a drink of water in the dark, always rinse out the glass because there might be a bug in it!”

Charlie reflects, “Great truths are even more simple than I thought they were.” 

Perhaps it would be best if we came at this apocalyptic text from Luke with Lucy’s simplicity.  

This First Sunday of Advent is one of the most difficult Sundays for Christians in our tradition.  We are not comfortable with these texts about the second coming and the day of judgment.  They remind us too much of hellfire preaching and street corner signs of doom.

Sort of like Lucy’s curbside psychiatrist’s office, we don’t expect much good news.  Charlie usually comes to her despondent.  He does not understand life.  The pieces don’t come together for him.  Lucy’s message to him is mocking; that’s part of her role in the cartoon.  But she’s on to something, and so is Charlie.  “Maybe Great Truths are more simple than I imagined.”

So is there some simple great truth for us in this end-times rhetoric?

Jesus says some scary stuff:

There will be signs in the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused at the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding at what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

If you listen closely to those words, you can almost hear a description of the coming ecological crisis, but I think Jesus is talking more broadly than that.  He is saying

You will experience the world being turned upside down and inside out, so you do not know which end is up.  What is perfectly normal will not seem normal to you.  You will be anxious and afraid.  Your faith will be shaken to its core.

Does that sound more familiar?  We live on the edge of being out of control.  We live in moments when the pieces of our lives lie at our feet and there does not seem to be any way to put them back together.  Sometimes this happens to us as individuals, sometimes as families, sometimes as communities, even nations.  These are times that are truly confusing or frightening.

So what is Jesus' advice when such times as these come upon us?

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Stand up and lift up your heads.  A simple, great truth.  To understand it more clearly it is important to see what he does not say. He does not say:

• Fall on your knees and hang your head in shame.

• Run for the hills in order to save your life.

• Be afraid, be very afraid.

No, he says, “Stand up and raise your heads.”  Why? “Because your redemption is drawing near.” Again, it is important what he does not say. He does not say:

• Your judgment is drawing near.

• The wrath of God is coming upon you.

• You are going to get what you deserve.

No. He says, “Your redemption is drawing near.”  Redemption.  What does he mean by that?  “Redemption” is one of the words used in the Bible to describe what God fundamentally wants for us and what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection does for us.  There are many words you could insert there:  salvation, rescue, healing, liberation, etc.  The point is that the time of confusion and fear is also the time of redemption, of healing, of liberation.

Christian people learn that when trial or crisis comes, we should look not for signs of ending, but rather for signs of new life because they will surely come.  That does not mean that anger at what has happened, or grief, or any other human emotion is not appropriate for Christians. It is to say that those feelings are never the last word.

I know what it is like to be in the middle of a mess I am sure I cannot get myself out of.  Some kind of defeat or betrayal or wrong choices that seem to spell the end of my life as I know it.  There are days when I cannot follow Jesus’ direction to stand up and raise my head.

But Jesus does not put it all on me when I am so deeply troubled, nor does he put it all on any one of you.  He says, “Stand up and raise your heads.”  The “your” in Greek is plural.  During these times when it feels like the world is coming unglued and there’s no way out—this is the time when we need each other.  When I cannot stand up and raise my head, I need you to do it for me.

So what is Charlie Brown’s simple, great truth here?

When the world is falling apart and you feel like you are falling apart with it, you need not fear the judgment of God, rather, you need to embrace the mercy of God, and we never have to do this alone.  Because the greatest simple Truth is that we are always, always in this together.

All of this is summed up in a subsequent strip of Peanuts.  Charlie Brown discovers this in a subsequent strip.  The first frame is entirely black with just the outline of Lucy, stumbling in the dark.  Perhaps she has stubbed her toe on the bed.  “Curse it all!” she cries.  Next frame, still black, “Blast the blackness . . . Oh, curse, curse, curse.”  Finally in the last frame stands Charlie Brown.  In the midst of the dark, he stands in the glow of a candle.   When all Lucy could do was curse the darkness—and haven’t we all been there?—Charlie Brown knows to light a candle, the kind of thing we are called to do for one another so that we can all get through life when it feels like its ending.

And so I’ll leave you with this Advent question, that will be the topic at Wednesday’s Advent series:  Can it be that in our endings, new beginnings you create?

We Need the Stranger More Than Ever

 Sermon preached on Sunday, November 10, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  Ruth 1:18

It’s the Sunday after a consequential election, and I have been thinking ever since then of what it means to love and serve our God, to follow the Way of Jesus, in this time and place?

I’ll try to answer that question first using the story of Ruth and Naomi.  They were faced with a crisis.  All the men had died on them, which means in their day they were in a very precarious situation.  They had no protectors, no providers, no real identity.

Naomi responds with practicality.  The best thing for her foreign daughters-in-law was for them to return to their original families and start over, as Naomi had determined to do for herself.  She knew there was nothing she could do for them.  Orpah, sadly, agrees, but Ruth has a different reaction.  In some of the most beautiful words of Scripture she says

Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

The Bible is full of quietly decisive moments and this is one of them, because Ruth’s decision will alter the course of her life such that she will eventually marry once she returns to Naomi’s homeland of Judah, and from that marriage will be born the grandfather of King David.  Without Ruth’s decision, there would have been no David.

Now you would think that the Bible would make as little of this as possible since Ruth is not a Jew. She is a Moabite, a foreigner, an alien.  But now, the Bible is willing to admit that the stranger is somehow necessary for the community’s ultimate strength.

So what do we learn from this story that helps us in this present moment?

First there is the simple determination to stay together.  In times of crisis, it is easy to let ourselves drift apart and a strong part of the current climate is the need so many of us feel to separate ourselves from one another, to divide ourselves along some perceived ethnicity or culture or earned place in society or our own (not God’s) definition of citizenship.  We must resist that, inspired by those brave and decisive words from Ruth, “Where you go, I will go; your people will be my people and your God my God.”

Related to this comes the second thing to glean from this story.  We need the stranger.  Who among us does not have the blood of a stranger running through our veins?  How we treat the stranger, the alien, will become a defining issue in the days ahead, of that I am certain.

Jesus could not be clearer about this:  the stranger is your neighbor.  The vulnerable, the one in need, for whatever reason, is the one we are called to serve, and not just serve, but to know on a deep level that the one we serve is our equal.

This message was counter-cultural in Jesus’ day, as it is in ours.  We must be prepared to be counter-cultural.

In practical terms what does this mean for us, here at the Redeemer?

At the Diocesan Convention, Bishop Kara asked us to examine some things about ourselves. Some of the questions she asked us to ponder are things like, “How do people around you know what you stand for?  Who is welcome?  How are you prepared to welcome the stranger? How does the stranger know she or he will be welcomed here?”

Those questions are critical ones for churches whose future is uncertain. And now they take on an even important role in an environment where the stranger is suspect, considered dangerous and worth nothing to our continued flourishing as a people.

Again, to try to be as practical as possible, one way this is going to play out for us is in the food pantry.  We, of course, are working on logistical stuff:  getting the rectory ready, arranging for whatever we need to have food available.  But there are some deeper questions for us to ponder.

In my experience ministries like this can develop the sense that “we” are doing something for “them.”  How can we work against this? How can we operate as if “we” is doing something for “us?”

I’ll leave those as opened-ended questions.

What has happened isn’t going to make it any easier for us to be church.  But there is also an opportunity to be clear about who we are, why we think we are here, what we see as our place in the community, and how we provide a welcoming and safe place for those in our communities that are—with very good reason—frightened about what is to come.

Saints By God

 Sermon preached on All Saints' Sunday, November 3, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  Isaiah 25:6-9, John 11:32-44

Last week we heard the story from Mark’s Gospel of Blind Bartimaeus, whose persistence got him an audience with Jesus. When Jesus called him, the Gospel writer tells us he leapt up and threw off his cloak.

And I talked about how we have cloaks we must throw off if we are to encounter Jesus and be ready to receive his mercy and grace.  Those cloaks we wear are often, I said, “cloaks of acceptability,” that we think hide our vulnerability or our shame.”

Let’s continue this thought today as we celebrate the Feast of All Saints.

The prophet Isaiah tells us this is an ancient idea, an ancient proclamation of good news.  Isiaah’s vision of the last days are of all people being drawn to a feast on the holy mountain.  There God will destroy the “shroud,” the cloak, that is cast over us all.

What does Isaiah see is this shroud, this cloak.  What does it seek to hide?  It is death itself.  It is the tears that this life brings. It is the disgrace we feel in this life, the shame we carry around for any number of reasons.

There’s an important difference between what the prophet Isaiah sees and what the story of Bartimaeus included.  Bartimaeus threw off his own cloak.  Isaiah sees that, in the end, it will be God who removes that cloak, that shroud. The Lord will take away the disgrace of his people.

The Letter to the Hebrews puts it another way, in two different places. Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters (2:11) and God is not ashamed to be our God (11:16).  In both cases this is not because of anything we have done, but that God has done for us.

I need to say a word about “shame.” These days shame has a bad name.  Some of that is deserved, especially when it is the shame we too easily cast on other people. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I think it is true we could do without the need to shame other people into acting the way we want them to act, to be the person we want them to be.

But there is a place for feeling shame in any human being’s life. I do feel ashamed when I get something terribly wrong, especially when I hurt another person or creature, whether I intended to do so or not. Having no shame means having no conscience, and that can never be a good thing.

But it’s important that we understand what God’s intention is in regard to our shame.  God does not see it as the last word in our lives.  It is God’s intention to throw it off, to forgive, and to restore.

Now here is how this fits into celebrating All Saints.  Those we call saints are not people who have never done anything to be ashamed of.  We often talk about them as if that were the case.  The saints were those who got it right, who earned their status as examples of how to live a godly life.

Yet if you read their stories this is hardly ever true.  If the saints were those people who got it right, what they got right was their knowledge of God’s abounding love for them regardless of what they had done, for ill or for good.

The saints are the people who know that they could not make themselves saints, they could only seek the love of God, or, rather, to let the love of God seek them, because it is that love and that love alone, that made them right with God, right with one another, right with the world.

I suspect most of the people we have pictured around us today would have protested if someone suggested they were a saint.  They might have gone so far as to be offended that someone should call them that.

I don’t know 98% of the people pictured here, either in icons or in photographs, but I can tell you that every last one of them was wrong in believing they were not a saint.  They were right that they could not make themselves saints, Oh, very right indeed.  But they were wrong in thinking that was how it worked.

The saints of God were and are and always will be the objects of God’s amazing grace, God’s boundless mercy, God’s steadfast, unshakeable, love.

There is nothing we can do to make God love us.  There is, in fact, nothing we can do to make anyone love us. That is one of the great secrets of life.

Love is something we can only receive and let it beget in us the kind of love for God or for one another that expects nothing in return, that we totally, completely give away.

That’s how we participate in God’s project of throwing off the disgrace, wiping away the tears, and destroying the power of death forever.

Jesus called out to Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.”  It was the ultimate throwing off the shroud, the cloak.  And our response to God’s love should cause us to be making the same declaration. That is the great of those who have known God’s love, to cry out to another, “Unbind him, unbind her, and let her go.”  Let her, let him, throw off the cloak of acceptability and fall into the arms of the God of love.