Sunday, June 12: Putting our Whole Selves In

Sunday, June 12: 1 Kings 2:1-21a; Psalm 5:1-8; Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3

Did you ever wonder if the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about? Yes, you put your right arm in, but pay attention to the big climax of the song:

You put your whole self in….you take your whole self out….you put your whole self in….

I think it just might be what it’s all about---all least what this Christian living is all about….you put your whole self in…and then you second guess and you take your whole self out….but then you get realigned and you put your whole self in….

That’s what it’s all about. Putting our whole self in. Researcher and storyteller Brene Brown calls this whole-heartedness.  Brown has been doing research by listening to stories of people who have been able to remain whole in the midst of the tragedies and struggles of this life.  People who don’t lose their joy or hope or laughter---even when the reality of life is bone-crushingly difficult, sad, or just plain indifferent.

Brown says that whole-hearted people--- people who demonstrate resilience, redemption, and restoration---these whole-hearted people share three traits: courage, compassion, and connection.

We see an example of this kind of person in today’s Gospel.  That woman.  Only known by her gender and her label: a sinner.  This whole-hearted person of God sees the Jesus in front of her, and even though the voices in the room whisper Sinner; she steps forward, kneels at the feet of the One whom she loves, and she tends to Jesus.  

With boldness, she proclaims God’s truth of love and forgiveness by washing the feet of Jesus with her tears of thanksgiving.  She wipes his tired, dusty feet with her hair—ministering God’s justice with compassion---and then she anoints this Chosen One, this Jesus, with expensive oil.  Probably costing her all that she has---and she kisses him.  She kisses his feet. The healing of human touch. Courage, Compassion, Connection.

Your faith has saved you; go in peace.  Her faith---her belief and trust in Jesus put into action---saves her. 

And this is what saves you, what saves me---putting our belief and our trust in Jesus into action by tending the Jesus we see before us. When we live our faith, we are freed from our prisons of self-centeredness and restored to our true nature as one made in the image of God, as one who lives in community. Earlier we prayed: “that through your grace, we may proclaim your truth with boldness and minister your justice with compassion.”  This is our calling as the church—we are to proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister God’s justice with compassion.

And frankly, beloved, after considering the events of just the past two weeks when I have been away, God’s truth and God’s justice often seem hard to come by in our society. 

When people seeking national positions of power speak words of racism and many around them continue to show support because the candidate’s other viewpoints work in their favor…….this, my friends, is not God’s truth nor God’s justice.  I am not preaching politics.  Not election politics anyway.  I am talking about politics in the true definition of the word: a discourse on the common good of all people. This is what the word politics actually means—discussing and considering what to do, how to be, how to govern for the common good of all people.  Jesus is all about politics ---Jesus is always political—always pointing us to what to do, how to be, how to govern and live together for the common good of all people.  That’s Gospel.  No, I’m not preaching election politics---I’m talking Gospel here.  As the church, we are to proclaim God’s Truth that racism: racist words, beliefs, systems, and privileges—have nothing to do with God’s Kingdom or how we are called to live.

At the conference I attended, I was sitting next to a woman whose son is attending UCLA when we learned about the shootings there. Praise be, he was not hurt. But, haven’t we had enough?  Aren’t we beyond tired of hearing about more shootings, more death, more gun violence?  If we as the church will not proclaim God’s truth and minister God’s justice, who will?  In these situations, it is hard to know what to do as a disciple, but we can proclaim and minister by tending to the wounded and the grieving, by refusing to support a system that allows for this escalation of violence, by carefully choosing our words in conversation and in social media, by deciding who and what we support with the Gospel in mind.  Because somehow, as God’s people, we must WITH BOLDNESS declare that God’s truth and God’s justice is no where to be found in gun violence.  The book of Genesis tells us the story of Cain killing Abel and the LORD declares to Cain: the earth cries out with your brother’s blood.  Beloved, the earth is still crying out with our sisters’ and brothers’ blood.  It is time to proclaim; it is time to minister God’s justice.

And at another prominent school, Stanford, we hear of the young man who finds an unconscious woman and rapes her.  And we hear those who say, “She was drunk; she should have known better; she put herself in harm’s way.”  The only one to blame for rape is the rapist.  Never the victim.  Yes, foolish choices, stupid actions---but no person, no action, no foolish choice deserves the violence of rape.

And because we believe Genesis 1:31: God saw all of Creation and declared it very good.----then to minister God’s justice with compassion means we are called to demand rehabilitation and restoration for both the victim and the rapist.  We are called to demand a justice system whose prisons and jails actually do the work of rehabilitating and seeking to mend the brokenness of those behind their walls.  God’s justice isn’t about punishment for punishment’s sake; it’s about restoration and rehabilitation. We dare not find ourselves simply wanting to punish this young man; we are called to seek his rehabilitation and reconciliation. When we seek to punish solely from man’s sense of justice instead of God’s sense of justice, we find ourselves perfectly happy with treating human beings like animals instead of like God’s created.  When we treat human beings like animals, we get what we created----not what God intended.

We see this warning in the Old Testament story.  Ahab and Jezebel are not seeking the common good of all people.  They do not seem to know God’s truth or God’s justice; they know their truth and their justice: I can take what I want when I want it, no matter the cost to anyone else.  I can make decisions purely for the self-preservation of my power, my privilege, my position.  This is the opposite of God’s truth and God’s justice.  And the moral of this Old Testament story isn’t that God’s going to get ya….the moral is that when we act for our own self-preservation instead of living for the common good of all people---there are disastrous results in our relationship with God and disastrous results for ourselves.  In the end, it will destroy a person---even if he is a King and she is a Queen.

We are an apostolic community.  Every Sunday we pray: We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.  To be apostolic means to be sent.  To be sent out.  To take church outside these walls and into our everyday lives. Being the church by the words we choose, by the time we take to listen, by connecting a need of someone to a resource we know or have, by using God’s truth and justice to determine our actions and choices, by stopping to see the Jesus right in front of us. Being apostolic means we are never not the church; we are called to put our whole selves in.

Being the Church cannot be relegated to a building.  Being the Church cannot be relegated to Sunday mornings.  Being the Church cannot be relegated to our private lives.  Being the Church is our primary task in this world—our main identity: we are agents of God’s Kingdom 24/7.

Recently I read a novel called The Eagle Tree. The main character is a young man with autism, and he is obsessed with trees: climbing them, learning about them, reading about them.  He talks about Aspen groves and how all the trees in the grove are connected underground. So, if a tree on one side of the grove isn’t getting enough water, then it effects a tree on the complete other side of the grove. 

Beloved, we are an aspen grove.  If a part of God’s creation or one of God’s creatures is wounded, is broken, is hungry, is thirsty, is condemned, is outcast, is oppressed….then so are we all.  Our future---our wholeness---depends on the health and well-being of every single other person.  No exceptions. We are one another’s business.  Even when our good, Midwestern sensibilities tell us otherwise: we are each other’s business.

This week, remember this woman in today’s Gospel.  This whole-hearted woman condemned by society’s standards and yet her faith, her belief and trust in Jesus put into action, saves her, brings her peace.  Keep in your mind that image of how she gives all she has to tend the Jesus in front of her; tattoo it on your heart. 

We are the Church. It is time to proclaim God’s truth and minister God’s justice with Courage. Compassion. Connection. That’s what it’s all about.

Sunday, May 29th: Limping along....

1Kings 18:20-29; Psalm 96; Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10

Beloved, I am confessing to you today that I am (according to the prophet Elijah): “limping with two different opinions.”  For at least the past 35 years, I have been limping along between these two opinions: I want to be skinny, but I don’t want to change my eating habits or lifestyle.

Instead, I continue to hope that some doctor or doctors will create a magic pill that I can swallow once a day---and bingo!  I’ll be skinny.  No matter what I eat or how much (or little) I exercise!  In fact, just this week I heard about a pill you can swallow and then a balloon inflates in your stomach so you feel full and eat less….and voila! 

(Sigh.) I don’t think I’m willing to actually swallow a balloon.

Anyone else feeling my pain? Limping with two different opinions?

In the leadership world, this is known as treating an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical challenge.  An adaptive challenge is a problem that requires the learning of new ways (yes, that is code for having to change), and an adaptive challenge can only be solved by the people with the problem.

A technical challenge is a problem that simply requires current know-how and is resolved by authorities (doctors using science to make a magic pill!)

Applying a technical fix to an adaptive challenge never works; it never provides a sustainable, long-term solution.

I think the church, our Intercession community but also the greater Episcopal Church, is limping along with two different opinions as well.  It’s hard to miss the shrinking numbers of people who belong to a church, the growing number of people who think church and Christianity are not relevant or necessary in their lives, the shrinking budgets and the growing headaches. 

In response to these realities, the church--both our local Intercession community, and the greater Episcopal Church---says: We want to grow! We want to flourish! Yet at the same time, we resist change: “This is how we have always done it! This is who we are!”  We want to keep the status quo but somehow get a different outcome.

We’ve grasped onto all sorts of solutions, I too have been tempted by them: better marketing, just the right Sunday school program, choose the most exciting priest, provide the coolest worship service, bring in some drums and a projector screen.

Friends, these are all technical fixes to an adaptive challenge.  The challenge that lies before us as the Intercession Faith community AND the greater Episcopal church is a challenge that requires new ways of being and only the people with the problem can meet the challenge.  There is no authority (priest or Bishop) with the current know-how (worship style, program, or marketing) who can bring about the transformation needed for the Church to achieve its mission to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

And I get it.  This requires real, life-altering change in Gospel proportions. But, I am not convinced it is actually change that we are afraid of.  I believe it is the loss that goes along with change.  Because change always requires a loss, a death if you will, of something.  We have to behave differently, think differently, live differently; this means we have to let go of ways we behave now, let go of ways we think now, let go of ways we live now.  And for most of us, the status quo is working---at least for us it is. And if we are concerned only with self—what works for us—then there is no urgency to change.  But if God’s mission to restore ALL people to unity with God and each other in Christ is our first priority, our highest command, then the urgency to change heats up quite a bit and we are empowered to move into action.

As members of the Living Body of Christ, agents of God’s mission, we are not allowed to consider our faith to be a private matter. The Gospel tells us and shows us that we are each other’s business, and that we have much to learn from “outsiders,” like today’s Centurion.  This is communal work, not private.  Yes, our faith is personal, but never private.  The true freedom that Jesus’ life and sacrifice has granted us is the freedom to move out of our self-centered prisons and instead, to live lives that are other-centered, focused on the good of all, not first and foremost on our private benefit.  As Eleanor Roosevelt said: “When every one does better, than everyone does better.”  This is Gospel.

But’s it’s not the message of our society. Our culture tells us that we have to look out for ourselves; our society tells us national borders matter more than God’s call to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  Our culture does its best to convince us that, of course, we must be pragmatic and sensible; we only have so many resources---even if it means people go without shelter, food, clean water or medicine.  We are led to believe that somehow our pragmatism is to have a greater value than Jesus saying to us: Feed my sheep, Tend my flock, whatever you do (or don’t do) for the least of these, you do unto me.

How long will we go about limping with two different opinions?  The two limping opinions we hear in the Old Testament story are:  believe in society’s “gods,” society’s values OR trust in God’s commands.  Today it might be heard as: follow the American Prosperity Gospel or follow the Good News of Jesus.  Often, not always but often, it is impossible to follow both.  This leaves us with an adaptive challenge---a challenge where only learning new ways by the people who have the challenge placed before them can resolve the problem.

I believe that together, as the people of Intercession Episcopal, we can rise to meet this adaptive challenge.  We can learn new ways.  We can live in ways that fulfill God’s mission to restore all people to unity to God and each other in Christ. But not by living the ways we are already living.  Intercession and the Episcopal Church have a rich history of being faithful and of having flourished in the past. But if we are painfully honest with ourselves, we are no longer fulfilling God’s mission to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  Not for a lack of desire.  Not for a lack of wanting to be faithful.  But, we cannot fix this adaptive challenge by asking the authorities to use their current know how to resolve the problem.

We are the church.  We are God’s people who are called to learn new ways in order for God’s mission of the restoration and reconciliation of all people to flourish.  Because the truth is:  if the ways we have known and trusted are the path we are called to continue to follow, we wouldn’t have the challenge that lies before us.  We would, indeed, be flourishing.  If we are willing to recognize and name the truth that we are not flourishing, and if we are willing to actually learn new ways in order to flourish, then God’s mission for God’s people can be lived out here—amongst us---restoring the lives of all those with whom we are connected.

Of course, not without loss. Not without cost. Not without sacrifice. Not without commitment. Not without desire. Not without heart. Not without participation.  No priest can fix this. No program will save us. 

But God can. And God will.  God is giving us all we need to live into abundance and wholeness. Either we believe in resurrection---that death can, and does, blossom into new life---or we choose to live and move from the fear of loss that new life inevitably requires.

Let us choose Resurrection. Let us choose the Truth that Love Wins. Let us choose the Gospel message that death and loss cannot, and will not, defeat us. It is time to quit limping. It is time to follow God and God’s mission----whatever the cost.

Open to the Light: the tomb opens

The Great Vigil of Easter

“May we open

and open more

and open still

to the blessed light

that comes.”[1]

Are we ready? Ready to move from the darkness into the light? From our brokenness into wholeness? division into unity? death into life?

Voices around us shout: Be afraid. Shut the enemy down. Bomb them. Deny them. Crush them. We cannot be safe if they are allowed to exist.

Are you ready to move from darkness into light? From death into life?

So, what then shall this resurrection mean? We all long to be freed from our prisons: from the fear, anxiety, grief, shame, loneliness, depression, greed, self-preservation, materialism, self-centeredness, pride, vanity, and despair that often confine us.

Listen, beloved, have ears to hear this love story of God’s, this story written to us, for us, by the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

Easter proclaims: There is One who has the key to open every prison door. One who opens the way to freedom and life.  Not without cost. Not without price. Not without death. This One, this God, this Jesus defeats death with death. And in this sacrificial act of love comes life. New, full, rich and abundant life.  A life of wholeness, a life of unity, a life of light. 

The Good news is that we do not have to physically die in order to taste the Feast at God’s banquet table.  But we are called to the Cross.  We are called to sacrifice the ways of life we carry around which deny God’s dream, which deny the Light.  These ways and words, these behaviors and choices that are really darkness, they must be abandoned.

Are we ready? Ready to put an end to shutting out God instead of opening to the Spirit---to leave behind behaviors of independence, self-preservation, individualistic prosperity, blindness and deafness toward the common good?  Are we willing to shout no to those Voices that urge us to live in fear instead of hope, willing to rise up and say yes to God, yes to the Light—even and especially in the face of the darkness?

If we are, when we say yes, then we begin to walk the freedom road, the road to wholeness. Even when it seems the world has dimmed the lights to a dark and foggy mist, we remember: God is in control. God has the final say. Easter proclaims: Grace wins. Love wins.

In the song “Awake My Soul” Mumford and Sons sing:

“In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die

And where you invest your love, you invest your life.

Awake my soul….For you were made to meet your maker.”

It is time to wake up.  To rise.  It is time to invest our love, invest our lives and shine the light of Christ into the darkness of the world.  Let us cast our darkness upon the cross and receive new life.

Are we ready?

“May we open

and open more

and open still

 to the blessed light that comes.

---

[1] Jan Richardson

Death to Life; Live Beloved

Good Friday

In order to be a people of the Resurrection, we must first be a people of the crucifixion.  Stinks, doesn’t it?  Certainly, not how we would have planned it.  But it is our reality.  The reality that life comes with grief and struggle, woundedness and betrayal, blood, sweat, tears, and death.

Because all this nastiness is a part of our lives, and there seems to be no human way to avoid it, Jesus entered our humanity and shared it.  In order to show us that there may be a different way to survive it.

Jesus shares in our grief: Eloi, eloi, lema sebachthani (My  God, My god, why have you forsaken me?)

Jesus shares in our struggle: carrying the cross after being beaten and whipped, dropping it  along the way.

Jesus shares in our woundedness: his pierced side flowing with blood and water.

Jesus knows what it means to be betrayed as his beloved Peter denies knowing him at all.

Jesus’ blood, sweat, and tears fall in droplets to the dusty ground below the cross.

Jesus shares in our death---even his divinity does not save him from it.  Because we die, so does he.

Why?  Why such passion? Why such drama?  Why didn’t God simply put a stop to it and shout from the heavens: Hey, y’all: I love you.  Don’t worry.  I got your back.

I do not know.  Mystery. I only know that before the Resurrection comes the cross.

Perhaps God knew that we would have to be shown in order to trust.  That in order for us to believe there is a different way to live, in order for us to wrap our heads around such grace, we require to have it lived out before us.  Possibly, we need to witness mercy so as to understand our pain doesn’t have to lead to striking out at our fellow humans.  That our betrayal and being denied justice doesn’t have to lead to retaliation.  That there is more to us than the sum total of our wounds, our bruises, our leaking, open sores.  There is more to us than our jeering, our mocking and name-calling, our throwing of stones. We need not follow the voices that tell us we must isolate ourselves from our enemies, bomb them, kill them, demonize them.  In fact, the cross calls us to forgive them.  To show mercy, not retaliation.

Perhaps God is hoping that this act of Jesus, this loving sacrifice and forgiveness, will open our eyes to whom we are created to be, to how we are designed to live.  Maybe Jesus’ walk to Jerusalem will free us to understand we do not have to move from fear, that there is another way to journey:

Instead of vengeance----mercy.

Instead of terror----compassion.

Instead of violence---grace.

Instead of division----connection.

Instead of walls----bridges.

Instead of  betrayal----shelter.

Instead of blindness---seeing.

Instead of condemnation-----healing.

Instead of shame-----hospitality.

Instead of hatred-----love.

Today we are called to take up our own weapons of destruction—as individuals, as communities, as families, and as nations. We are to acknowledge the crosses upon which we nail the Body of Christ each and every day: the nails that are our words, our apathy, our self-righteousness, and our certainty. 

The new life we seek, the resurrection for which we long, can not be entered, cannot be lived, until we sacrifice these very parts of ourselves that deny who we are and whose we are---the beloved people of God.

Let the stone in your hand symbolize one thing, just one thing---one thing within yourself that needs to be put on the cross.  One thing that prevents you from fully entering and sharing God’s love.  Maybe it’s a resentment. Or a fear.  Or a belief that someone is less deserving than you.  Or that you are less deserving.  Maybe it’s an attitude of indifference or a pattern of self-centeredness or the desire to always be right. Maybe it’s the excuse that you just don’t have the time.

Whatever it is, today Jesus shows us we can let it go; we can give it up, sacrifice it and live.  Live fully and abundantly in the shelter of God’s love, mercy and delight.  We can place it on the cross and be freed. Freed to love and be loved. Resurrection is a gift we are invited to receive.  God is doing a new thing.  Let us allow death that we might live. Truly, fully, abundantly live. Live as the beloved.