Apple Festival Sermon for 9.27.09
Lectionary selected by pastor: Psalm 17:1-8a; 2 Corinthians 9:6-10; Mark 4:26-32
Please pray with me: “O Lord, I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5, 6).
From today’s Gospel: “When [the mustard seed] is sown, it grows up… and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
I have witnessed a miracle this week, the miracle of work and prayer and hospitality. Many of you came here to peel apples after a long day of work, some took days off, or simply did not go to work at all so that you could help. People came who don’t belong to our church. The Children’s Home sent two groups of boys on consecutive nights, with a staff member, to peel apples—and the Director phoned me the next day to thank me and tell me what a wonderful time they’d had. Your former pastor David Houston arrived with a whole group from his church! And after the day-long Festival, there was dinner—two seatings worth! People were still down in the kitchen cleaning up as I finished this sermon at 9:30.
Several workers introduced themselves to me as “I’m one of your parishioners who doesn’t come to church.” Well, they were here this week, drawn by something that only a community of many hands and hearts can achieve. We stretched ourselves and made Esopus a happier place. I believe that we found the will to do this day proud—that we were stretched—by something bigger than all of us.
Because I’m your pastor, I want us to know how Biblical we have been. As a Community of the faithful, it is so important for us to realize this. The passages that Marilyn and Joy read so beautifully to us describe and affirm what we have seen here with our eyes, hearts, touched, and tasted of the word of Life!
You have the passage from Corinthians right in front of you on your leaflets. In this passage, Paul shows his love of the idea of sowing and reaping, and he starts by describing us: “The one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.” How does this happen? Here are Paul’s guidelines: #1 We give, each one of us, just as we have decided in our hearts to give (NIV translation). “Hearts” is better here than “mind,” which sounds calculating, too rational, and certainly doesn’t describe our energy. #2 We give “not reluctantly or under compulsion.” Clearly this was the case. #3 In fact, our sense of well-being, of having done what was simply good—exhausting as it may have been—brings blessings “for God loves a cheerful giver.” #4 Moreover, says Paul, the Creator who orders the seasons for sowing and harvest, will also “increase the harvest of your righteousness.”
You have been doing this Apple Festival for a long time and the harvest of your righteousness has grown. I am taking nothing from you, I hope, when I involve God, our Creator, in the whole process. Here is verse 10 again from Corinthians: “He who supplied seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” Paul uses the image of sowing and reaping because it captures the interplay between God, the seed giver, and us, the harvesters. God is not only the source of abundance, but the source, the supplier, the initiator of the Grace that allows us to respond with goodness and generosity. This wonderful interplay is one reason that I start so many of my prayers by asking God to be with us and by thanking God for being with us. For me, this week was indeed filled with important human interactions. The week was also overflowing with God. Dancing in the light of God, actually, as one of our hymns puts it. I think that’s pretty awesome.
And that brings me to the gospel of Mark. Mark is telling us a story about bringing in the Kingdom. “The kingdom of heaven,” he loves to say, “is as if…” and then he fills in the blank. Guess who filled in the blank yesterday! We were living in the Kingdom, good people.
Mark’s first parable suggests that this happens slowly, mysteriously, almost without people knowing it. “The seed would sprout and grow,” Paul writes, the farmer “does not know how.” And then suddenly, there it is, something immense!
Mark also gives us a second parable of the Kingdom. How on earth, he says in effect, can we describe the Kingdom of God? Well, it’s like a mustard seed, so small, and yet when it grows, it “becomes the greatest of all shrubs.” In the Middle East, it typically grows from about two to six feet. And I’ve seen fields of it in India, spreading across the landscape like great golden saris.
As Paul’s listeners knew, this plant is both hardy and intrusive; once it takes hold, it tends to take over. What’s more, it “puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Please savor every word here: The branches of the mustard plant are strong and wide enough so that creatures can find refuge, a place that is home. This week, I felt as though I was watching mustard seeds—or maybe apple seeds—pushing up and taking over.
I saw how happy the boys were who came from The Children’s Home. I watched people really enjoying themselves. There were reunions—with Pastor Johnson and his wife, for example. There were chance encounters, serendipity all over the place. Because we drew from all over our township, I was able to meet people whom it would have taken me hours to find otherwise. I was able to have conversations with them about the town and the people here. I believe there will be harvests from these conversations for our church and for our town. And harvests of different kinds for each of us.
But I hope we will remember the outrageous nature of that mustard seed: It can shelter because it is hardy and persistent. It knows its potential for good and achieves it. Such is God’s Kingdom on earth of which we, this church, in this time and place, are a part.
Let us pray: Dear God, help us to build on our time together this week, with one another and with you. Let us not forget our energy and excitement. Let us go from strength to strength, praising you who are the course of that strength and of our abundance. Thank you for loving us as the apple of your eye. AMEN.
*** BULLETIN ***
Apple Festival Worship – September 27, 2009
Lectionary readings for next Sunday: Genesis 1:20, 22-26, 28, 31; Psalm 148; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 25:31, 34-40
Gathering
Organ Prelude
Greeting by Pastor
Invocation (in unison):
Grant us, O God, a mind to meditate on you; eyes to behold you; ears to listen for your word; a heart to love you; and a life to proclaim you; through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Entrance
*Introit #707 “Hymn of Promise”
*Call to Worship: Psalm 17
Pastor: Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry;
People: Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit.
Pastor: From you let my vindication come;
People: Let my eyes see the right.
Pastor: If you try my heart, if you visit me by night,
People: If you test me, you will find no wickedness in me; my mouth does not transgress.
Pastor: As for what others do, by the word of your lips I have avoided the ways of the violent.
People: My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.
Pastor: I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God;
People: Incline your ear to me, hear my words.
Pastor: Wondrously show your steadfast love, O savior of those who seek refuge from their adversaries at your right hand.
People: Guard me as the apple of the eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings, from the wicked who despoil me, my deadly enemies who surround me.
*Opening Hymn #170 “O How I Love Jesus”
Prayer of Dedication (in unison):
Lord, hear; Lord, forgive; Lord, do. Hear what we speak not; forgive what we speak amiss; do what we leave undone; that not according to our words or our deeds, but according to your mercy and truth, all may work for your glory and the good of your kingdom, through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Words of Assurance
*Assurance Hymn #128 “He Leadeth Me”
Greeting One Another with the Peace of Christ
Time for Children of All Ages
(Children 3 and older may proceed to Children’s Church.)
Proclamation of the Word of God
New Testament Reading: 2 Corinthians 9:6-10
Instrumental Music
Gospel Reading: Mark 4:26-32
Sermon: “Outrageous Sowing” Pastor Dora J. Odarenko
Response to the Word of God
*Hymn #83 “Canticle of God’s Glory”
Sharing of Joys and Concerns
Silent Prayer followed by Pastoral Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer
The Offering of Our Gifts
*Doxology
*Prayer of Thanksgiving
Sending Forth
*Closing Hymn #711 “For All the Saints”
This hymn is dedicated to Shirley Corder, Roger Mabie, Ethel Howard, Ann Petrizzo, Nat Ciccone and all of our Apple Festival Champions.
*Dismissal with Blessing
Organ Postlude
Monday, September 28, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Who Is the Body of Christ?
Sermon for 9.20.09
Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13–4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:33-37
Please pray with me: “Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and mind. For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you” (Psalm 26:2-3).
From today’s Gospel: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
One of the Bible verses that sticks with me from the beloved King James Bible of my childhood is “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14). I’m sure I wanted Jesus to love me, but I wasn’t so sure when it was explained that Jesus loved sweet, dear little girls. I wasn’t always sweet and dear. Thus my first real theological dilemma: Did Jesus love ME or only the little girl that others expected me to be? I didn’t need to have worried, and I’m going to tell you why.
This verse from my childhood actually comes from another chapter in Mark, but we often import the interpretation I just gave to our passage this morning. The disciples have been arguing about who will be the greatest in the Kingdom and, to put an end to their quarreling, Jesus takes a little child and tells them to be more concerned about welcoming such a child because this is the way to welcome him and to welcome God.
Sounds a bit like our last sermon? With the ante raised? Deny your own self-centeredness, Jesus said last week, and enter fully into a relationship with me and the journey into which I invite you. Is Jesus now extending that relationship to those who are pure in heart? Some of us don’t have a whole lot of little children to welcome.
And this is the point. We romanticize childhood, at least for our own children and grandchildren. Some of our hardworking grandparents or parents very much wanted a more carefree growing-up than they had experienced in the Depression. And at present, the huge development of markets for pre-teens, children, and even babies gives at least the illusion of total gratification and privilege.
In the time of Jesus, however, children were invisible, non-people. Galatians 4:1 sums it up: “Heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property.” Children who were not to be heirs were virtually slaves. Think of the African-American children on the pre-Civil War plantations. In fact, the child whom Jesus takes in his arms in this passage may well have been one of the slave children of the household that he and his disciples had entered. Mark’s language is so economical that it’s easy to miss his emphasis, but here Jesus is Rabbi. He sits down to assume the formal position of a teacher. Next he gathers his disciples around him and makes a pronouncement: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he does the “Show and Tell.” Taking a child and standing him or her in their midst, he clarifies his statement, “Whoever welcomes one such child….”
To complete the sentence by saying, “whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” is not shocking since kings and generals sent emissaries to deliver their commands. But for a child, a slave, a nobody, to represent God is something else. Children were to be with the women, and slave children had to work. To receive such ones was certainly not what a serious teacher and serious male disciples would expect. And yet Jesus gives the worthless child enormous value. The worthless child becomes a stand-in for him. “Such a one” becomes a stand-in for him and therefore a source of great concern for any of his disciples—including us.
Jesus’ “Show and Tell” gives me much to think about, to pray about, to watch in myself, whenever I am in a situation that gives any possible advantage: as teacher, pastor, family member who knows all the histories, as friend who knows all the vulnerabilities. It also gives me sure footing when I am in a situation that may provide very little advantage. There is a whole culture outside these church doors that ranks us according to birth, brains, success, personalities. Given our environmental crisis, I must also say that our culture ranks creatures and natural resources according to perceived usefulness to us and our perceived need.
Jesus sees it differently. We can take seriously the words of our hymn this morning, “God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale.” The hymn asks questions, and Jesus answers that for creatures—and our children—to praise, and to say “life,” “peace,” and “home,” “the first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Jesus is urging humble service of others, including even the oddest Other. He is urging his disciples to recognize him and God in those who are given no significance and those outside of our own safe groups, even our own safe mission projects. Jesus insists that his sphere of influence and his power transcend the security of our own community and our own church. In taking such risks, we begin to discover who is the body of Christ, who else is in this body of Christ of which we are a part.
As a corollary, it is only fair to admit that there are many children who are not protected in the way we have tried to protect our own. The notion of privileged childhood is an illusion of innocence when youngsters even in our own county are poorly fed, undereducated, under loved, and totally without adequate medical resources. We are not a society that nurtures all of our dependants, either young or old, and yet Jesus states that our discipleship can be measured by how we regard our most vulnerable.
Those vulnerable ones can be in our own families. The youngest of my cousins was always something of an odd duck. A sad fellow, really, without close friends, and so uncomfortable socially that I’m afraid I sometimes hoped I wouldn’t bump into him when we were both students at Columbia. Then one of our aunts died, leaving her money only to her nieces. Unfortunately Sandy thought that she had loved him. In his hurt, he decided to boycott the lot of us. Nothing that we did, including offering him some of our inheritance, made any difference. He refused to see us, letters were returned, phone calls rejected. He had two master’s degrees and an excellent position with a major corporation, but in his anger and isolation, he made himself an outcast, a kind of non-person. For ten years, his sister and I prayed for the healing of this breach, surrounding him with all that we knew of God’s love. We never stopped trying to reach him. Through my prayers, I found—not surprisingly—that I really longed to see him in a way that had not been the case before. And finally there was a break-through. When a second aunt died, he agreed to come from California to the funeral. When he walked through the passenger gate, we all fell into one another’s arms. Something had happened that we could not have done on our own. He finally agreed to some testing and we found that he had Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that explained much of the behavior that the family had found difficult. Our full love for him is now accepted and returned. Like the little child described in Mark, he is among us and welcomed, for himself and as a child of God.
Jesus’ teachings may demand that we do the hard work of changing long-established patterns, but that is because Jesus is challenging us to respond as he does, to respond with the fullness of God. In responding—rather than reacting—to one of those “others,” there is a wonderful exchange, a recognition of kinship. We will probably encounter some Others during the Apple Festival, but that’s all right: they are not only our guests, but God’s. Another of our hymns this morning expressed it beautifully—and in words closer to our notions of childhood: “Like a child we receive all that love can conceive, like a child we believe, Jesus comes.”
Let us pray: Dear God, confirm and strengthen us in all goodness so that in discovering and cherishing more of Your own, we may learn more of Your beloved son, Jesus Christ, and more of You, both in this world and the next. Amen.
Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13–4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:33-37
Please pray with me: “Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and mind. For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you” (Psalm 26:2-3).
From today’s Gospel: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
One of the Bible verses that sticks with me from the beloved King James Bible of my childhood is “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14). I’m sure I wanted Jesus to love me, but I wasn’t so sure when it was explained that Jesus loved sweet, dear little girls. I wasn’t always sweet and dear. Thus my first real theological dilemma: Did Jesus love ME or only the little girl that others expected me to be? I didn’t need to have worried, and I’m going to tell you why.
This verse from my childhood actually comes from another chapter in Mark, but we often import the interpretation I just gave to our passage this morning. The disciples have been arguing about who will be the greatest in the Kingdom and, to put an end to their quarreling, Jesus takes a little child and tells them to be more concerned about welcoming such a child because this is the way to welcome him and to welcome God.
Sounds a bit like our last sermon? With the ante raised? Deny your own self-centeredness, Jesus said last week, and enter fully into a relationship with me and the journey into which I invite you. Is Jesus now extending that relationship to those who are pure in heart? Some of us don’t have a whole lot of little children to welcome.
And this is the point. We romanticize childhood, at least for our own children and grandchildren. Some of our hardworking grandparents or parents very much wanted a more carefree growing-up than they had experienced in the Depression. And at present, the huge development of markets for pre-teens, children, and even babies gives at least the illusion of total gratification and privilege.
In the time of Jesus, however, children were invisible, non-people. Galatians 4:1 sums it up: “Heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property.” Children who were not to be heirs were virtually slaves. Think of the African-American children on the pre-Civil War plantations. In fact, the child whom Jesus takes in his arms in this passage may well have been one of the slave children of the household that he and his disciples had entered. Mark’s language is so economical that it’s easy to miss his emphasis, but here Jesus is Rabbi. He sits down to assume the formal position of a teacher. Next he gathers his disciples around him and makes a pronouncement: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he does the “Show and Tell.” Taking a child and standing him or her in their midst, he clarifies his statement, “Whoever welcomes one such child….”
To complete the sentence by saying, “whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” is not shocking since kings and generals sent emissaries to deliver their commands. But for a child, a slave, a nobody, to represent God is something else. Children were to be with the women, and slave children had to work. To receive such ones was certainly not what a serious teacher and serious male disciples would expect. And yet Jesus gives the worthless child enormous value. The worthless child becomes a stand-in for him. “Such a one” becomes a stand-in for him and therefore a source of great concern for any of his disciples—including us.
Jesus’ “Show and Tell” gives me much to think about, to pray about, to watch in myself, whenever I am in a situation that gives any possible advantage: as teacher, pastor, family member who knows all the histories, as friend who knows all the vulnerabilities. It also gives me sure footing when I am in a situation that may provide very little advantage. There is a whole culture outside these church doors that ranks us according to birth, brains, success, personalities. Given our environmental crisis, I must also say that our culture ranks creatures and natural resources according to perceived usefulness to us and our perceived need.
Jesus sees it differently. We can take seriously the words of our hymn this morning, “God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale.” The hymn asks questions, and Jesus answers that for creatures—and our children—to praise, and to say “life,” “peace,” and “home,” “the first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Jesus is urging humble service of others, including even the oddest Other. He is urging his disciples to recognize him and God in those who are given no significance and those outside of our own safe groups, even our own safe mission projects. Jesus insists that his sphere of influence and his power transcend the security of our own community and our own church. In taking such risks, we begin to discover who is the body of Christ, who else is in this body of Christ of which we are a part.
As a corollary, it is only fair to admit that there are many children who are not protected in the way we have tried to protect our own. The notion of privileged childhood is an illusion of innocence when youngsters even in our own county are poorly fed, undereducated, under loved, and totally without adequate medical resources. We are not a society that nurtures all of our dependants, either young or old, and yet Jesus states that our discipleship can be measured by how we regard our most vulnerable.
Those vulnerable ones can be in our own families. The youngest of my cousins was always something of an odd duck. A sad fellow, really, without close friends, and so uncomfortable socially that I’m afraid I sometimes hoped I wouldn’t bump into him when we were both students at Columbia. Then one of our aunts died, leaving her money only to her nieces. Unfortunately Sandy thought that she had loved him. In his hurt, he decided to boycott the lot of us. Nothing that we did, including offering him some of our inheritance, made any difference. He refused to see us, letters were returned, phone calls rejected. He had two master’s degrees and an excellent position with a major corporation, but in his anger and isolation, he made himself an outcast, a kind of non-person. For ten years, his sister and I prayed for the healing of this breach, surrounding him with all that we knew of God’s love. We never stopped trying to reach him. Through my prayers, I found—not surprisingly—that I really longed to see him in a way that had not been the case before. And finally there was a break-through. When a second aunt died, he agreed to come from California to the funeral. When he walked through the passenger gate, we all fell into one another’s arms. Something had happened that we could not have done on our own. He finally agreed to some testing and we found that he had Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that explained much of the behavior that the family had found difficult. Our full love for him is now accepted and returned. Like the little child described in Mark, he is among us and welcomed, for himself and as a child of God.
Jesus’ teachings may demand that we do the hard work of changing long-established patterns, but that is because Jesus is challenging us to respond as he does, to respond with the fullness of God. In responding—rather than reacting—to one of those “others,” there is a wonderful exchange, a recognition of kinship. We will probably encounter some Others during the Apple Festival, but that’s all right: they are not only our guests, but God’s. Another of our hymns this morning expressed it beautifully—and in words closer to our notions of childhood: “Like a child we receive all that love can conceive, like a child we believe, Jesus comes.”
Let us pray: Dear God, confirm and strengthen us in all goodness so that in discovering and cherishing more of Your own, we may learn more of Your beloved son, Jesus Christ, and more of You, both in this world and the next. Amen.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Must I Take Up the Cross?
Sermon for 9.13.09
Mark 8:27-38
Please pray with me: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long” (Psalm 25:4,5).
From Today’s Gospel: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
This Gospel verse gives us three directives: We are to deny ourselves, we are to take up our crosses, and we are to follow Jesus. In certain parts of the southwest and in Latin American countries, there is a tradition, on Good Friday, of walking the way of the cross in a dramatically literal way. The one staggering under the load of the cross beam is often really flogged, and the faithful, who follow along the path to Golgotha, thoroughly immerse themselves in the tragedy of Christ’s suffering.
We Methodists are less comfortable with drops of sweat and blood, at least in church. We find other ways to revere Jesus’ sacrifice. Perhaps we are more private until grand old hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross” or Spirituals such as “There is a balm in Gilead” draw out grief and devotion. Then again, while our lives are often difficult, even harsh, we may not have known the desperate poverty and oppression that lie behind Latino reenactments.
Thus, as the children discovered this morning in our time together, we have crosses in our churches, rather than crucifixes. And the wonderful symbol of our church is the cross draped with the living flame of the Holy Spirit. And yet the words of Scripture remain: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Do we shy away from what seems like an overly difficult, even unfair demand?
In fact, many of us—right here, right now—are carrying huge burdens, crosses of our own. All we need to do is to feel the tightness in our backs, the knots at our trigger points, and the tension is clear: Illness of body, of mind, of ones we love; financial, workplace, or personal difficulties; worries about our children, spouses, parents. This is the human condition, and some of us, it seems, are hit far harder than others. Most of us don’t have to look around for a cross to carry to show our devotion; it’s already there—or waiting. We are already right in the middle of that Gospel verse, sharing Christ’s suffering. The verse promises that Jesus is also sharing ours.
And those of us who are ashamed of our troubles might also remember how incredibly shameful Jesus’ punishment was. Crucifixion was not only torture, it was the death reserved for slaves, those considered worthless except for labor and profit. The extreme dishonor of crucifixion not only confirmed their status, but spelled it out publically. There were a number of times when 1,000 or more at one time were nailed on crosses along a roadway.
Second-century non-Christians considered Christians insane for associating a crucified one with God. Some Gnostics even argued that Christ—the real and spiritual Christ—had to be outside of the body of Jesus on the cross. Thus the crucifixion was not even depicted for some 250 years, or if it was, the cross was a support for vines so that it became a tree of life. The little painted cross from El Salvador that I showed to the children belongs to that category: It’s filled with hope. Animals and a plowed field and children and a teacher!
By giving such details, I’m not trivializing what I’ve said about taking up our own crosses. Our troubles are dignified by the comparison. The symbol that links us and these hapless slaves to our Lord must be taken very seriously. The troubles, mistakes, conditions of none of us are worthless. It is the Christian promise that the cross is always taken seriously by God.
Acknowledging our cross, therefore, is actually good news. But first we are to “deny” ourselves. This may be harder. Let’s be clear about what it isn’t: There is no evidence that Mark is talking about further punishment for us here—the kind of no-candy-in-Lent mentality. What Jesus is asking is for each of us to give up our place as the center of things, to let go of that tightness that whispers that all else must revolve around us. It’s what I call the ego rampant! Even bruised, the ego manages to arrange this. Psalm 25 says it so well: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.”
Sometimes we have to get to the very end of our rope before we are willing to give over pride of place, pride of ego, even pride of suffering. This is, in part, the fear of having to do it on our own and the fear of not being tough enough or strong enough or loving enough. Since Jesus is reaching out his hands to us from the cross, we must also be willing to reach out and grasp them, again and again. To do this is not to follow behind him, but to enter into relationship with him.
And then the story is not over. The third requirement, that of following Jesus, takes us beyond the tomb. New life is shown on the little painted cross in terms of this life; that would be the hope of mission, of programs for food and education. But for every one of us—so-called privileged or so-called poor—there is the hope of new strength, of renewed purpose, of healing of spirit as well as body; the promise of victory and triumph. These are Transfigurations, right here, right now; they prefigure Resurrection.
One of the crosses I showed the children is called the “tau cross” or the “T cross.” In Hebrew the letter for T is “tav” and it is the last letter of that alphabet. Just as the omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and reminds us, in our own church windows, that God is the center and circumference of all things—the beginning but also the end—so this “tav" cross reminds us that God, in God’s way and God’s time, ends all things well. This is why we are signed with the cross at Baptism. In the words of our hymn this morning: “Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, by the cross are sanctified; peace is there that knows no measure, joys that through all time abide.” Since the final word from the cross is alleluia, we cannot do better than to take up the cross that we are given, knowing that it is draped with the living flame of the Holy Spirit.
And so we pray: May our proclamation be that God is worthy of our trust and Christ of our discipleship. May we know that we are not alone. In the midst of this life, may we live as followers and heirs of Christ. May we know that we are in a world that God is endlessly creating and loving. Amen.
Mark 8:27-38
Please pray with me: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long” (Psalm 25:4,5).
From Today’s Gospel: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
This Gospel verse gives us three directives: We are to deny ourselves, we are to take up our crosses, and we are to follow Jesus. In certain parts of the southwest and in Latin American countries, there is a tradition, on Good Friday, of walking the way of the cross in a dramatically literal way. The one staggering under the load of the cross beam is often really flogged, and the faithful, who follow along the path to Golgotha, thoroughly immerse themselves in the tragedy of Christ’s suffering.
We Methodists are less comfortable with drops of sweat and blood, at least in church. We find other ways to revere Jesus’ sacrifice. Perhaps we are more private until grand old hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross” or Spirituals such as “There is a balm in Gilead” draw out grief and devotion. Then again, while our lives are often difficult, even harsh, we may not have known the desperate poverty and oppression that lie behind Latino reenactments.
Thus, as the children discovered this morning in our time together, we have crosses in our churches, rather than crucifixes. And the wonderful symbol of our church is the cross draped with the living flame of the Holy Spirit. And yet the words of Scripture remain: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Do we shy away from what seems like an overly difficult, even unfair demand?
In fact, many of us—right here, right now—are carrying huge burdens, crosses of our own. All we need to do is to feel the tightness in our backs, the knots at our trigger points, and the tension is clear: Illness of body, of mind, of ones we love; financial, workplace, or personal difficulties; worries about our children, spouses, parents. This is the human condition, and some of us, it seems, are hit far harder than others. Most of us don’t have to look around for a cross to carry to show our devotion; it’s already there—or waiting. We are already right in the middle of that Gospel verse, sharing Christ’s suffering. The verse promises that Jesus is also sharing ours.
And those of us who are ashamed of our troubles might also remember how incredibly shameful Jesus’ punishment was. Crucifixion was not only torture, it was the death reserved for slaves, those considered worthless except for labor and profit. The extreme dishonor of crucifixion not only confirmed their status, but spelled it out publically. There were a number of times when 1,000 or more at one time were nailed on crosses along a roadway.
Second-century non-Christians considered Christians insane for associating a crucified one with God. Some Gnostics even argued that Christ—the real and spiritual Christ—had to be outside of the body of Jesus on the cross. Thus the crucifixion was not even depicted for some 250 years, or if it was, the cross was a support for vines so that it became a tree of life. The little painted cross from El Salvador that I showed to the children belongs to that category: It’s filled with hope. Animals and a plowed field and children and a teacher!
By giving such details, I’m not trivializing what I’ve said about taking up our own crosses. Our troubles are dignified by the comparison. The symbol that links us and these hapless slaves to our Lord must be taken very seriously. The troubles, mistakes, conditions of none of us are worthless. It is the Christian promise that the cross is always taken seriously by God.
Acknowledging our cross, therefore, is actually good news. But first we are to “deny” ourselves. This may be harder. Let’s be clear about what it isn’t: There is no evidence that Mark is talking about further punishment for us here—the kind of no-candy-in-Lent mentality. What Jesus is asking is for each of us to give up our place as the center of things, to let go of that tightness that whispers that all else must revolve around us. It’s what I call the ego rampant! Even bruised, the ego manages to arrange this. Psalm 25 says it so well: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.”
Sometimes we have to get to the very end of our rope before we are willing to give over pride of place, pride of ego, even pride of suffering. This is, in part, the fear of having to do it on our own and the fear of not being tough enough or strong enough or loving enough. Since Jesus is reaching out his hands to us from the cross, we must also be willing to reach out and grasp them, again and again. To do this is not to follow behind him, but to enter into relationship with him.
And then the story is not over. The third requirement, that of following Jesus, takes us beyond the tomb. New life is shown on the little painted cross in terms of this life; that would be the hope of mission, of programs for food and education. But for every one of us—so-called privileged or so-called poor—there is the hope of new strength, of renewed purpose, of healing of spirit as well as body; the promise of victory and triumph. These are Transfigurations, right here, right now; they prefigure Resurrection.
One of the crosses I showed the children is called the “tau cross” or the “T cross.” In Hebrew the letter for T is “tav” and it is the last letter of that alphabet. Just as the omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and reminds us, in our own church windows, that God is the center and circumference of all things—the beginning but also the end—so this “tav" cross reminds us that God, in God’s way and God’s time, ends all things well. This is why we are signed with the cross at Baptism. In the words of our hymn this morning: “Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, by the cross are sanctified; peace is there that knows no measure, joys that through all time abide.” Since the final word from the cross is alleluia, we cannot do better than to take up the cross that we are given, knowing that it is draped with the living flame of the Holy Spirit.
And so we pray: May our proclamation be that God is worthy of our trust and Christ of our discipleship. May we know that we are not alone. In the midst of this life, may we live as followers and heirs of Christ. May we know that we are in a world that God is endlessly creating and loving. Amen.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Recognizing God's Messengers
Sermon for 9.6.2009
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125 or 124; James 1:1-10 (11-13), 14-17; Mark 7:24-37
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
From this morning’s Gospel: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
I’m sure that each of us has felt exhausted, overloaded, underappreciated, ignored, and even desperate. These emotions are the starting point for the account from the Gospel of Mark this morning, the story of the Syrophoenician woman. A similar woman also appears in Matthew, but there are details in Mark that make the situation for both the woman and for Jesus more pointed. I must add the obvious: whatever the difference in details, the appearance of a similar story in more than one Gospel suggests its importance to those living within the memory of Jesus’ earthly lifetime.
In both Gospels, Jesus enters Gentile territory after what can only be described as a grueling schedule: crowds of people, denseness on the part of his disciples. In Matthew, the woman sees him and runs after him shouting for help for her daughter. But Mark creates a special setting. There Jesus—who often seems to have the introvert’s need for withdrawal—enters a house and does “not want anyone to know he was there.” In other words, he hides. Yet even in the house, Mark tells us, “he could not escape notice.” Hearing that he is in the house, somehow—the Gospel doesn’t explain—the desperate woman gains entrance.
What we must realize is how truly shocking her entrance was. Whether the door was locked, closed, or simply an open passageway, for that day and time, the woman’s action was appalling. For any woman other than a wife to intrude upon a single man was unheard of. The fact that she was a foreign woman and therefore unclean made matters worse. This is the behavior of a prostitute…… or of a mother who is so desperate for a miracle for her daughter that nothing else matters. Once there, she is hard to ignore because she bows at his feet and begs Jesus to exorcize the demon out of her daughter.
But hers is not the only character study in this account. Many readers find the passage difficult because Jesus is so harsh. He is not the gentle “suffer the children to come unto me” Church School poster. Of course, one can say that he was only testing the woman’s faith, but this is not the only possible reading. We can also imagine that he had had a really hard, exhausting day. Now he simply wanted to be alone, without demands. And suddenly, here is this unappetizing, aggressive woman making demands that suggest that there is still more lying in wait for him. As though the Jews, crowds and rulers are not enough, is he now supposed to take on the Gentiles as well?
Perhaps this is why he speaks so rudely, comparing her to an unclean animal, a dog. His doing so is roughly equivalent to calling someone a swine—or even worse. No other supplicant in the gospel receives such treatment. But at this point, I think it is important to allow Jesus his fatigue, and thus, in fact, accept his humanity.
In response to his fatigue comes the marvelous tour de force of the woman. Jesus has used the diminutive of dog, “little dog” or “house dog,” but he also uses the verb “throw,” which suggests flinging the food out of doors. The woman throws the remark right back at him, changing the metaphor while reverently addressing him as “Sir,” actually as “Kyrie,” or “Lord.” “Sir, even the little house dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Are the children careless or do they love to slip little treats to their pets? Either way there is precedent, she suggests, challenging the exclusive right of the Jews to the mercy and love of God.
Commentators like to speak of the Greek/gentile custom of allowing pets at meals and so point to the symbolic cultural gap that is preserved in this story. I am much more interested in the woman and what this exchange can mean for us. Her keenness must come from her despair buoyed by a wonderful faith. Moreover, her wit—if that is what we want to call it—her response comes from the depths of her being as a mother, a caregiver. Her world is the household, where creatures are nurtured, loved. As a mother, she knows that love cannot be limited or selective and that to do so sours the entire home. We too deserve your mercy, she says in effect, and such is its power that even the portion that you give me will be enough.
And Jesus does respond: “Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’” Note the “then” that starts the sentence. We never quite know whether that means a time for deliberation or an instance response, but whichever way, it is equally unequivocal. These two worthy opponents have come to a rich understanding. Healing and grace result.
As so often in the Bible, I see templates for us in both characters. This is a moment in the life of Jesus in which we can fully place ourselves. In the presence of this good woman, this good mother, Jesus himself moves a little more into the fullness of his mission. His heart is stretched, I may even say graced by her. If even Jesus—who was as human as we are yet without sin—can be discouraged and then pulled by experience into a greater understanding of who his people—the sheep of his pasture—really are, isn’t there a demand that we love more fully as well? And isn’t there also hope for us when our vision is narrow? If we allow Jesus his humanity, we can be more forgiving of our own failures and those of others. And so we can pray even more fervently: “O God, grant us grace to receive Jesus Christ in every person and to be Jesus Christ to every person.”
As for the woman: She is a role model for me in assertiveness, even with God. Her faith and passion for her child are such that nothing stops her. In so doing, she must have love for herself as well. She is sure enough of her own worth to ask, to enter, to barge into the presence that she knows is holy and that she treats with reverence but firmness.
If Jesus was stretched by her, we can be too. That may include loving ourselves more fully, seeing ourselves as fully worthy. We each have that right, for ourselves as well as for our loved ones. Jesus’ response makes that clear. Our memory of this is critical on those days when others—or even we ourselves—regard our mountains as molehills, not worthy of attention, and God doesn’t seem to respond as quickly as we want.
And so we may now pray: Lord, grant us eyes to see your messengers, your presence and your peace in strange places and unlikely people, even in ourselves. AMEN.
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125 or 124; James 1:1-10 (11-13), 14-17; Mark 7:24-37
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
From this morning’s Gospel: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
I’m sure that each of us has felt exhausted, overloaded, underappreciated, ignored, and even desperate. These emotions are the starting point for the account from the Gospel of Mark this morning, the story of the Syrophoenician woman. A similar woman also appears in Matthew, but there are details in Mark that make the situation for both the woman and for Jesus more pointed. I must add the obvious: whatever the difference in details, the appearance of a similar story in more than one Gospel suggests its importance to those living within the memory of Jesus’ earthly lifetime.
In both Gospels, Jesus enters Gentile territory after what can only be described as a grueling schedule: crowds of people, denseness on the part of his disciples. In Matthew, the woman sees him and runs after him shouting for help for her daughter. But Mark creates a special setting. There Jesus—who often seems to have the introvert’s need for withdrawal—enters a house and does “not want anyone to know he was there.” In other words, he hides. Yet even in the house, Mark tells us, “he could not escape notice.” Hearing that he is in the house, somehow—the Gospel doesn’t explain—the desperate woman gains entrance.
What we must realize is how truly shocking her entrance was. Whether the door was locked, closed, or simply an open passageway, for that day and time, the woman’s action was appalling. For any woman other than a wife to intrude upon a single man was unheard of. The fact that she was a foreign woman and therefore unclean made matters worse. This is the behavior of a prostitute…… or of a mother who is so desperate for a miracle for her daughter that nothing else matters. Once there, she is hard to ignore because she bows at his feet and begs Jesus to exorcize the demon out of her daughter.
But hers is not the only character study in this account. Many readers find the passage difficult because Jesus is so harsh. He is not the gentle “suffer the children to come unto me” Church School poster. Of course, one can say that he was only testing the woman’s faith, but this is not the only possible reading. We can also imagine that he had had a really hard, exhausting day. Now he simply wanted to be alone, without demands. And suddenly, here is this unappetizing, aggressive woman making demands that suggest that there is still more lying in wait for him. As though the Jews, crowds and rulers are not enough, is he now supposed to take on the Gentiles as well?
Perhaps this is why he speaks so rudely, comparing her to an unclean animal, a dog. His doing so is roughly equivalent to calling someone a swine—or even worse. No other supplicant in the gospel receives such treatment. But at this point, I think it is important to allow Jesus his fatigue, and thus, in fact, accept his humanity.
In response to his fatigue comes the marvelous tour de force of the woman. Jesus has used the diminutive of dog, “little dog” or “house dog,” but he also uses the verb “throw,” which suggests flinging the food out of doors. The woman throws the remark right back at him, changing the metaphor while reverently addressing him as “Sir,” actually as “Kyrie,” or “Lord.” “Sir, even the little house dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Are the children careless or do they love to slip little treats to their pets? Either way there is precedent, she suggests, challenging the exclusive right of the Jews to the mercy and love of God.
Commentators like to speak of the Greek/gentile custom of allowing pets at meals and so point to the symbolic cultural gap that is preserved in this story. I am much more interested in the woman and what this exchange can mean for us. Her keenness must come from her despair buoyed by a wonderful faith. Moreover, her wit—if that is what we want to call it—her response comes from the depths of her being as a mother, a caregiver. Her world is the household, where creatures are nurtured, loved. As a mother, she knows that love cannot be limited or selective and that to do so sours the entire home. We too deserve your mercy, she says in effect, and such is its power that even the portion that you give me will be enough.
And Jesus does respond: “Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’” Note the “then” that starts the sentence. We never quite know whether that means a time for deliberation or an instance response, but whichever way, it is equally unequivocal. These two worthy opponents have come to a rich understanding. Healing and grace result.
As so often in the Bible, I see templates for us in both characters. This is a moment in the life of Jesus in which we can fully place ourselves. In the presence of this good woman, this good mother, Jesus himself moves a little more into the fullness of his mission. His heart is stretched, I may even say graced by her. If even Jesus—who was as human as we are yet without sin—can be discouraged and then pulled by experience into a greater understanding of who his people—the sheep of his pasture—really are, isn’t there a demand that we love more fully as well? And isn’t there also hope for us when our vision is narrow? If we allow Jesus his humanity, we can be more forgiving of our own failures and those of others. And so we can pray even more fervently: “O God, grant us grace to receive Jesus Christ in every person and to be Jesus Christ to every person.”
As for the woman: She is a role model for me in assertiveness, even with God. Her faith and passion for her child are such that nothing stops her. In so doing, she must have love for herself as well. She is sure enough of her own worth to ask, to enter, to barge into the presence that she knows is holy and that she treats with reverence but firmness.
If Jesus was stretched by her, we can be too. That may include loving ourselves more fully, seeing ourselves as fully worthy. We each have that right, for ourselves as well as for our loved ones. Jesus’ response makes that clear. Our memory of this is critical on those days when others—or even we ourselves—regard our mountains as molehills, not worthy of attention, and God doesn’t seem to respond as quickly as we want.
And so we may now pray: Lord, grant us eyes to see your messengers, your presence and your peace in strange places and unlikely people, even in ourselves. AMEN.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
When Scripture Seems Too Challenging
Sermon for 8.23.09
1 Kings 8:1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Please pray with me: Dear Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our strength and our redeemer.
From today’s Gospel: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
I long for reassurance and for clear answers, especially sometimes when I escape from the world and go to church. I want the “blessed assurance” we receive from the kind of grand old hymns we sang this morning. But there are certainly times when neither easy comfort nor a clear answer comes. I can be patient and trust in God’s fuller mercy and judgment. With Psalm 130, I can wait upon the Lord. There are also times when, like the disciples, I feel my heart sinking as I try to live up to Christian teachings.
Let’s be honest here: Some of Jesus’ teachings are difficult. Think of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or the even tougher version in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Here are clear directions to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” We conclude Scriptural readings with, “This is the Word of the Lord” or “Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” Have you never thought—and I mean no offense to you or to God—“All very well for you to say!” or “You really have to be kidding!” or “What is the Spirit saying to the churches?” We are, of course, at liberty not to think about it at all as we tuck into a favorite and comforting hymn.
A desire to face some of these hard moments led me to go to a retreat last weekend called “Provocative Grace,” led by the Reverend Robert Morris, an Episcopal priest from South Orange, NJ. “Provoke” is strong language since it’s roughly synonymous with incite or stir up. I can remember hearing the small arguments of my mother and my grandmother in the kitchen. Maybe about what they were cooking or how to raise me: “Don’t be so provoking, Kate,” Grandma would say. The workshop sounded like a more positive application. I was intrigued.
The weekend was held at Adelynrood, a retreat center just below the New Hampshire border in the town of Byfield, Mass. I’ve been there before and love it its calm and holy way of life. It’s run on a volunteer basis by laity, a community of women called The Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. It’s a big rambling summer-only structure with wonderful and gracious living rooms and an excellent kitchen. We sleep in tiny bedrooms that are surrounded by generous screened porches. “The Rule of the House,” as they say, wakens us with bells at 7:00 so that we can go out on those porches to pray together. Then there is morning worship. There is no conversation until the breakfast hour that follows. We sing grace before each meal. There is noon worship and then an evening service at 9—both of them also announced by bells. Then there is silence until the next day. Doesn’t sound very provocative, I must admit.
The center was built just after the turn of the last century by a group of women, one of whom, Vida Scudder, was married to my great uncle. Vida was committed to social reform, especially for the women who worked in the mills in places like Lawrence. But she and her friends were pulled together in a special way when one of them, Adelyn, while still a young woman, was diagnosed with cancer. Her friends saw it as their first priority to companion her. After her death, they decided to dedicate themselves to a ministry of presence to those who were ill and ill-treated. That decision led to the founding of their society, often known simply as Companions. They named their retreat center Adelynrood (Adelyn’s cross) in honor of their friend. Over the years, the work and goals of the Companions have profoundly shaped my priorities.
Appropriately enough, the theme of my workshop was the way in which the Jesus of the Gospels “challenges us to find and use our strengths” (18).[1] It’s so easy to think of Jesus’ sayings as rules that are almost impossible to live up to, impositions too idealistic for serious discipleship. And if that’s the case, maybe we have an excuse for giving up. We probably don’t think of God as the giant eye in the sky keeping a book with gold stars and black marks. But deep down we may still feel that since God is the boss, we need to respond with a “Yes, Boss,” mentality. Well, of course, sometimes we need to. But Morris suggests that it may be more useful to think of Jesus’ teachings as “provocations to grow step-by-step, by trial-and-error learning, into the best possibilities of our nature” (17).
This is also pragmatic given the fact that Jesus’ apparently “simple” statements aren’t all that simple. For one thing, they are filled with contradictions: “Judge not that ye be not judged,” he says. And then at another time, he says, “Judge with right judgment.” This is the maddening way wise sayings often work: “Look before you leap,” must be balanced against “She who hesitates is lost.” Obviously, the trick is to be wise enough to know when to use which, how to deal with the paradox.
In an ethical/religious context, the ticket is a willingness to enter into a discernment process so that in fact we become partners with God. Jesus tells us as much when he says, “I don’t call you slaves but friends.” Why? “Because the works I do you will do also. In fact, greater works you will do.” This is the goal of good teachers, good parents, who love admiration but really want the child to surpass them, or at least long for the child to meet them halfway. To continue only in worshipful adoration, with child-like obedience, can be to remain immature.
So maybe the partnership can be a richer exchange, and maybe this is what God longs for. As we hear in Acts, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” There is a kind of synergism to grace, a cooperation. Wesley loved to speak of prevenient or anticipatory grace, that grace that comes before our efforts. Thus our sails are filled with wind, and we also need to do a little steering. We don’t earn love, but we create a place for it to dwell.
We really need to spend quality time with God and with Jesus, practicing, tending relationship through worship, through our imagination, through various practices of prayer, such as chants and silence, through service. There’s not just one way! For years, I’ve turned to the Taize chant, “Be with me, Lord.” Reaching out, with that kind of invitation, suggests mutuality, as much as a cry for help. Falling in love can be almost instantaneous, but truly loving, Morris reminds us, takes a lifetime of growing gradually, “through challenges that unmask our blindness and resistance. Beginning in our interactions with those closest to us, [love] grows strong by facing all that would hinder or undermine its full and complete reign in our lives” (38).
Morris left us with four challenges of his own: to encounter Jesus through the Gospel, really practice going beyond. This is the real meaning of the Greek word metanoia that is usually and too succinctly translated “repent.” Two: to practice using the Gospel sayings as challenges to grow up. Three: to mentor each other as apprentices of Christ. And four: to consider why we matter to God. I hope we can explore such challenges. Together, let us allow ourselves to be incited, provoked by Grace.
Let us pray: May we walk each step
in this moment of grace,
alert to hear you
and awake enough to say
a simple Yes. Amen.
(Prayer adapted from Robert C Morris, copyright 2004)
[1] Quotations are taken from Robert Corin Morris, Provocative Grace: The Challenge in Jesus’ Words (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2006).
1 Kings 8:1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Please pray with me: Dear Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our strength and our redeemer.
From today’s Gospel: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
I long for reassurance and for clear answers, especially sometimes when I escape from the world and go to church. I want the “blessed assurance” we receive from the kind of grand old hymns we sang this morning. But there are certainly times when neither easy comfort nor a clear answer comes. I can be patient and trust in God’s fuller mercy and judgment. With Psalm 130, I can wait upon the Lord. There are also times when, like the disciples, I feel my heart sinking as I try to live up to Christian teachings.
Let’s be honest here: Some of Jesus’ teachings are difficult. Think of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or the even tougher version in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Here are clear directions to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” We conclude Scriptural readings with, “This is the Word of the Lord” or “Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” Have you never thought—and I mean no offense to you or to God—“All very well for you to say!” or “You really have to be kidding!” or “What is the Spirit saying to the churches?” We are, of course, at liberty not to think about it at all as we tuck into a favorite and comforting hymn.
A desire to face some of these hard moments led me to go to a retreat last weekend called “Provocative Grace,” led by the Reverend Robert Morris, an Episcopal priest from South Orange, NJ. “Provoke” is strong language since it’s roughly synonymous with incite or stir up. I can remember hearing the small arguments of my mother and my grandmother in the kitchen. Maybe about what they were cooking or how to raise me: “Don’t be so provoking, Kate,” Grandma would say. The workshop sounded like a more positive application. I was intrigued.
The weekend was held at Adelynrood, a retreat center just below the New Hampshire border in the town of Byfield, Mass. I’ve been there before and love it its calm and holy way of life. It’s run on a volunteer basis by laity, a community of women called The Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. It’s a big rambling summer-only structure with wonderful and gracious living rooms and an excellent kitchen. We sleep in tiny bedrooms that are surrounded by generous screened porches. “The Rule of the House,” as they say, wakens us with bells at 7:00 so that we can go out on those porches to pray together. Then there is morning worship. There is no conversation until the breakfast hour that follows. We sing grace before each meal. There is noon worship and then an evening service at 9—both of them also announced by bells. Then there is silence until the next day. Doesn’t sound very provocative, I must admit.
The center was built just after the turn of the last century by a group of women, one of whom, Vida Scudder, was married to my great uncle. Vida was committed to social reform, especially for the women who worked in the mills in places like Lawrence. But she and her friends were pulled together in a special way when one of them, Adelyn, while still a young woman, was diagnosed with cancer. Her friends saw it as their first priority to companion her. After her death, they decided to dedicate themselves to a ministry of presence to those who were ill and ill-treated. That decision led to the founding of their society, often known simply as Companions. They named their retreat center Adelynrood (Adelyn’s cross) in honor of their friend. Over the years, the work and goals of the Companions have profoundly shaped my priorities.
Appropriately enough, the theme of my workshop was the way in which the Jesus of the Gospels “challenges us to find and use our strengths” (18).[1] It’s so easy to think of Jesus’ sayings as rules that are almost impossible to live up to, impositions too idealistic for serious discipleship. And if that’s the case, maybe we have an excuse for giving up. We probably don’t think of God as the giant eye in the sky keeping a book with gold stars and black marks. But deep down we may still feel that since God is the boss, we need to respond with a “Yes, Boss,” mentality. Well, of course, sometimes we need to. But Morris suggests that it may be more useful to think of Jesus’ teachings as “provocations to grow step-by-step, by trial-and-error learning, into the best possibilities of our nature” (17).
This is also pragmatic given the fact that Jesus’ apparently “simple” statements aren’t all that simple. For one thing, they are filled with contradictions: “Judge not that ye be not judged,” he says. And then at another time, he says, “Judge with right judgment.” This is the maddening way wise sayings often work: “Look before you leap,” must be balanced against “She who hesitates is lost.” Obviously, the trick is to be wise enough to know when to use which, how to deal with the paradox.
In an ethical/religious context, the ticket is a willingness to enter into a discernment process so that in fact we become partners with God. Jesus tells us as much when he says, “I don’t call you slaves but friends.” Why? “Because the works I do you will do also. In fact, greater works you will do.” This is the goal of good teachers, good parents, who love admiration but really want the child to surpass them, or at least long for the child to meet them halfway. To continue only in worshipful adoration, with child-like obedience, can be to remain immature.
So maybe the partnership can be a richer exchange, and maybe this is what God longs for. As we hear in Acts, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” There is a kind of synergism to grace, a cooperation. Wesley loved to speak of prevenient or anticipatory grace, that grace that comes before our efforts. Thus our sails are filled with wind, and we also need to do a little steering. We don’t earn love, but we create a place for it to dwell.
We really need to spend quality time with God and with Jesus, practicing, tending relationship through worship, through our imagination, through various practices of prayer, such as chants and silence, through service. There’s not just one way! For years, I’ve turned to the Taize chant, “Be with me, Lord.” Reaching out, with that kind of invitation, suggests mutuality, as much as a cry for help. Falling in love can be almost instantaneous, but truly loving, Morris reminds us, takes a lifetime of growing gradually, “through challenges that unmask our blindness and resistance. Beginning in our interactions with those closest to us, [love] grows strong by facing all that would hinder or undermine its full and complete reign in our lives” (38).
Morris left us with four challenges of his own: to encounter Jesus through the Gospel, really practice going beyond. This is the real meaning of the Greek word metanoia that is usually and too succinctly translated “repent.” Two: to practice using the Gospel sayings as challenges to grow up. Three: to mentor each other as apprentices of Christ. And four: to consider why we matter to God. I hope we can explore such challenges. Together, let us allow ourselves to be incited, provoked by Grace.
Let us pray: May we walk each step
in this moment of grace,
alert to hear you
and awake enough to say
a simple Yes. Amen.
(Prayer adapted from Robert C Morris, copyright 2004)
[1] Quotations are taken from Robert Corin Morris, Provocative Grace: The Challenge in Jesus’ Words (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2006).
Monday, August 10, 2009
For the Life of the World
“For the Life of the World” Sermon for 8.09.09
2 Samuel 18.5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4.25–5.2; John 6.35, 41-51
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
From this morning’s Gospel: “and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
I love food. To eat, of course, but beyond that, it’s the variety that makes me happy; its diversity, color, and texture, the smell of herbs and spices, of fresh fruit and veggies. I pour over cookbooks, over possibilities I would never attempt or even order in a restaurant. I’m so impressed that other people are able to pull them off. But I also enjoy my own basic cooking and especially working with someone else in the kitchen. The give and take and sharing of space become a kind of dance. For me, the kitchen is the heart of the house, comfortable and comforting, a place to put elbows on the table and have a really good talk. When I come upon the aroma of bread baking or a simmering soup, I am drawn back into early memories of home and of the life shared there.
All of this, curiously enough, is not unrelated to Jesus’ continuing conversation in the sixth chapter of John. In today’s reading, the people that we’ve been talking about for a couple of weeks have become the Jews who object to Jesus’ claims of a heavenly Father. After all, they know his father was Joseph, and they are loyal to the teachings and law of Moses. How can there be a bread greater than the life-giving manna of the Children of Israel, a ritual greater than the Passover? Jesus is preaching powerful new stuff and we too must admit that it ends with a kicker, perhaps even for us: “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
We think of this flesh that Jesus gave as metaphor for his suffering, a way of referring to pain too horrible to consider; we may pull back from connecting that to the loaf that I pull apart on the alter. On the other hand, we know the bread from that loaf, which we quite literally ate and swallowed at the table last week, is a holy meal, “a holy gift” through which we receive Christ’s grace. Our partaking becomes a memorial of God’s “mighty acts in Jesus Christ” through the “remembrance” of which “we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ’s offering for us.” As metaphor and remembrance, the bread and the wine prompt deep devotion, change of heart and life.
On this Sunday, when John 6.51 is the appointed text, we are invited to consider how Jesus’ choice of words illumines that precious and central experience of our faith. To do so, we need some sacramental theology,[1] and that takes us back to food. Jesus is being quite graphic here. He does not say “the bread that I give is my teaching, my words that inspire belief.” He describes his self-giving in terms of his “flesh.” Next week, you will hear that his listeners are horrified.
Genesis starts with God’s command to humankind to eat of the earth, from every herb, every tree that God has so graciously blessed for our use. We must do so in order to live. And simple—basic—though it is, it is a banquet. This image of a banquet goes through the Bible: there is the Promised Land, “the land of milk and honey,” the wedding at Cana, and, at the end of life, the promise of eating and drinking “at my table in my Kingdom.” And thus we say, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
I remind us—myself included—of this because there can be a tendency to think of the spiritual life, the religious life, as one of abstinence or deprivation, the opposite of a secular life of ordinary eating and drinking. I think of those 4th century monks in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts: awesome in so many ways and yet priding themselves on making one loaf do for a year. And then there is the story of the Fall, once again a matter of food. Among all the bounty, there was one tree in the Garden of Eden that was not meant to be eaten. The choice to eat of it anyway, despite God’s command, was a choice to be independent of God’s blessings, to go it on our own.
The point, I think, is that right here and right now, God is the abundant giver. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said it so well, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God/ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/ It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/ Crushed” We turn our back on this vibrant, living world when we divide its God-bestowed grandeur into sacred and secular. We steal from the greatness of God’s world when we separate workday from Sunday. We are hungry beings, but God has provided us with abundant resources to fill that hunger and, moreover, with the ability to thank and bless God for those gifts. This is my understanding of the “dominion” that is lavished on humankind in Genesis: Receiving the world as a blessing from God, we offer it back again and again with respect to it and in reverence to God, transforming ourselves in the process. Our life, both here or hereafter, is life in and through God.
This communion with God is basic Eucharistic thinking. Again and again, we became confused about our identity and about the source and object of our hunger. To relieve that confusion, God sent his son Jesus Christ, the light that shone in the darkness and that all our mistakes couldn’t extinguish. In Jesus Christ, life in its fullness was and is returned to us. What Jesus is proclaiming to his questioners in John is that his Father, God, has sent him to be a new life that will not end. This new life-giving source comes naturally and logically in a new and far superior manna. It might be easier to say that it comes as food and drink provided by Jesus, but he is more direct: the bread that will provide life for the world, he says, “is my flesh.”
God’s gift of life-giving food to the world, not only to one people, is perfected in his son. Jesus ate and drank just as we do, but in him the stuff of this world—his life, his body that people could touch both before and after his Resurrection—was constantly offered to God. Jesus’ sacrament, the gift of his body that we receive from his hands, will lift us up and return us to the relationship that God wanted with us and originally intended. Through Jesus’ life in this world, the world that God created as food for us and as means of communion with Him is returned to us as well, along with some of the wonder and joy and loving presence of that first creation. Jesus’ flesh therefore is the living bread that nourishes the hunger for God in the way we need and long for. All our bread is in fact a symbol of this new relationship, a new way of sharing our kitchen with God, as it were, and with a wonderful diversity of others who seem so different from ourselves. The bread that we break with Christ’s blessing is the new food for our new life in Christ that will be fully realized in the world to come, but that can also be experienced far more fully than we may realize in the here and now.
Let us pray: Dear Lord, thank you for making us Eucharistic people, people of your flesh. We thank you for the bread that makes us like you, and like others. Make all our meals holy. Help us to offer ourselves to you and to others this week in the same quietness and hiddenness as you give yourself to us in the quietness and hiddenness of bread and wine. Amen.
[1] I am drawing here upon Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). Highly respected across denominational lines, Schmemann was dean and professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary.
2 Samuel 18.5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4.25–5.2; John 6.35, 41-51
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
From this morning’s Gospel: “and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
I love food. To eat, of course, but beyond that, it’s the variety that makes me happy; its diversity, color, and texture, the smell of herbs and spices, of fresh fruit and veggies. I pour over cookbooks, over possibilities I would never attempt or even order in a restaurant. I’m so impressed that other people are able to pull them off. But I also enjoy my own basic cooking and especially working with someone else in the kitchen. The give and take and sharing of space become a kind of dance. For me, the kitchen is the heart of the house, comfortable and comforting, a place to put elbows on the table and have a really good talk. When I come upon the aroma of bread baking or a simmering soup, I am drawn back into early memories of home and of the life shared there.
All of this, curiously enough, is not unrelated to Jesus’ continuing conversation in the sixth chapter of John. In today’s reading, the people that we’ve been talking about for a couple of weeks have become the Jews who object to Jesus’ claims of a heavenly Father. After all, they know his father was Joseph, and they are loyal to the teachings and law of Moses. How can there be a bread greater than the life-giving manna of the Children of Israel, a ritual greater than the Passover? Jesus is preaching powerful new stuff and we too must admit that it ends with a kicker, perhaps even for us: “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
We think of this flesh that Jesus gave as metaphor for his suffering, a way of referring to pain too horrible to consider; we may pull back from connecting that to the loaf that I pull apart on the alter. On the other hand, we know the bread from that loaf, which we quite literally ate and swallowed at the table last week, is a holy meal, “a holy gift” through which we receive Christ’s grace. Our partaking becomes a memorial of God’s “mighty acts in Jesus Christ” through the “remembrance” of which “we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ’s offering for us.” As metaphor and remembrance, the bread and the wine prompt deep devotion, change of heart and life.
On this Sunday, when John 6.51 is the appointed text, we are invited to consider how Jesus’ choice of words illumines that precious and central experience of our faith. To do so, we need some sacramental theology,[1] and that takes us back to food. Jesus is being quite graphic here. He does not say “the bread that I give is my teaching, my words that inspire belief.” He describes his self-giving in terms of his “flesh.” Next week, you will hear that his listeners are horrified.
Genesis starts with God’s command to humankind to eat of the earth, from every herb, every tree that God has so graciously blessed for our use. We must do so in order to live. And simple—basic—though it is, it is a banquet. This image of a banquet goes through the Bible: there is the Promised Land, “the land of milk and honey,” the wedding at Cana, and, at the end of life, the promise of eating and drinking “at my table in my Kingdom.” And thus we say, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
I remind us—myself included—of this because there can be a tendency to think of the spiritual life, the religious life, as one of abstinence or deprivation, the opposite of a secular life of ordinary eating and drinking. I think of those 4th century monks in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts: awesome in so many ways and yet priding themselves on making one loaf do for a year. And then there is the story of the Fall, once again a matter of food. Among all the bounty, there was one tree in the Garden of Eden that was not meant to be eaten. The choice to eat of it anyway, despite God’s command, was a choice to be independent of God’s blessings, to go it on our own.
The point, I think, is that right here and right now, God is the abundant giver. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said it so well, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God/ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/ It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/ Crushed” We turn our back on this vibrant, living world when we divide its God-bestowed grandeur into sacred and secular. We steal from the greatness of God’s world when we separate workday from Sunday. We are hungry beings, but God has provided us with abundant resources to fill that hunger and, moreover, with the ability to thank and bless God for those gifts. This is my understanding of the “dominion” that is lavished on humankind in Genesis: Receiving the world as a blessing from God, we offer it back again and again with respect to it and in reverence to God, transforming ourselves in the process. Our life, both here or hereafter, is life in and through God.
This communion with God is basic Eucharistic thinking. Again and again, we became confused about our identity and about the source and object of our hunger. To relieve that confusion, God sent his son Jesus Christ, the light that shone in the darkness and that all our mistakes couldn’t extinguish. In Jesus Christ, life in its fullness was and is returned to us. What Jesus is proclaiming to his questioners in John is that his Father, God, has sent him to be a new life that will not end. This new life-giving source comes naturally and logically in a new and far superior manna. It might be easier to say that it comes as food and drink provided by Jesus, but he is more direct: the bread that will provide life for the world, he says, “is my flesh.”
God’s gift of life-giving food to the world, not only to one people, is perfected in his son. Jesus ate and drank just as we do, but in him the stuff of this world—his life, his body that people could touch both before and after his Resurrection—was constantly offered to God. Jesus’ sacrament, the gift of his body that we receive from his hands, will lift us up and return us to the relationship that God wanted with us and originally intended. Through Jesus’ life in this world, the world that God created as food for us and as means of communion with Him is returned to us as well, along with some of the wonder and joy and loving presence of that first creation. Jesus’ flesh therefore is the living bread that nourishes the hunger for God in the way we need and long for. All our bread is in fact a symbol of this new relationship, a new way of sharing our kitchen with God, as it were, and with a wonderful diversity of others who seem so different from ourselves. The bread that we break with Christ’s blessing is the new food for our new life in Christ that will be fully realized in the world to come, but that can also be experienced far more fully than we may realize in the here and now.
Let us pray: Dear Lord, thank you for making us Eucharistic people, people of your flesh. We thank you for the bread that makes us like you, and like others. Make all our meals holy. Help us to offer ourselves to you and to others this week in the same quietness and hiddenness as you give yourself to us in the quietness and hiddenness of bread and wine. Amen.
[1] I am drawing here upon Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). Highly respected across denominational lines, Schmemann was dean and professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Gifts Beyond Our Understanding
“Gifts Beyond Our Understanding” Sermon for 8.02.09
2 Samuel 11.26-12.13a; Psalm 51.1-12; Ephesians 4.1-16; John 6.24-35
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
From this morning’s Gospel: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
Like so many of us, I’ve been picking wild raspberries. I spot a few really ripe ones, but to pick them I often have to move around the thicket, and then I see more. To get them I lift some leaves, and bending over I see others, way deep down. What started out as a mouthful ends up as a tasty dessert. And then, of course, there are all of those half-ripe ones, waiting for me—if I’m watching.
My faith life has been somewhat like that. I am blessed by some encounter or event, and that in turn leads to other. Or maybe it doesn’t—immediately.
Our continuing story from the Gospel of John this morning tells much the same story in terms of bread. In last week’s installment, the people were fed so wonderfully that they wanted to make Jesus king. This week, they notice that he’s somehow gotten to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They follow him right after him and now they’re asking questions. It’s a real exchange that can sound innocent or somewhat suspicious: “Rabbi, when did you get here?” “What must we do?” “What sign do you do that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?” And as a reminder, just to let him know that they know, “Our ancestors ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Sound familiar, this interior conversation with God: What? When? How? And “Remember the promise that we’ve heard from Scripture and from our pastors?”
I love Jesus’ initial response and it too can be read as annoyed or as loving: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” It’s true that Jesus identifies their motives—pretty base-line survival—but the double “Amen”—yes, it shall be, yes, it shall be—suggests a confidence in God’s care for his people, and therefore a rebuke motivated by gentleness and understanding of their weakness. The bread had satisfied a real need, but it was also a sign for something more lasting, something greater.
The distinction between the bread that satisfies immediately—the deep purple berry all ready to pop into my mouth—and the sign—the berry as yet unripened, the significance that will emerge—has become precious to me. This is the gift that is more than it seems and that is so often beyond our understanding, beyond our ken. This distinction has become precious to me as I put together some events in my own life.
From the time I was a child, I heard a call to ministry. But when I was small, the ministry was not open to women in the Episcopal Church and so I became a teacher, a profession I have loved. By the time I was in my late 50s, the call came again so strongly that I had to respond. Through discernment in my church, I was encouraged to go to seminary and seek ordination. I was 60 by the time I entered Yale Divinity School. I had the time of my life and did well. Nonetheless, people who knew the Bishop’s feelings about age were afraid that I might be disappointed. But I was determined.
My bishop, who had been on Sabbatical when I first started the process, confirmed the fears of my friends. He felt that the church needed candidates under the age of fifty. Unwilling to allow for exceptions, he turned me down solely on the basis of age. I tried some other dioceses, but somehow nothing worked.
It was a bleak day when I finally realized that I would never be ordained as an Episcopal priest, made none the cheerier when my Dean told me to stop banging my head against the wall. Perhaps you can imagine my sense of failure, made all the harsher by the first serious discrimination I had ever personally experienced. What was I to do with my life, with my career, and worst of all, with my burning call? I kept asking, “Why?” I knew I had been hearing God’s voice, and I couldn’t reject that.
Only very gradually, through prayer and discernment and through the enormous support of friends, did I understand that my call and ordination did not have to be the same. Through it all, I kept saying the words that Pam sang to us so beautifully last week, “Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord. I have heard you calling in the night.” I became a Methodist, entered the Candidacy process, and, God willing, will become a licensed local pastor. My call, my passion for divine service, was a sign, not to ordination but to serve God’s people in God’s church as the Conference and you are allowing me to do here.
In a sense I had been banging my head against the wall because I had limited my call through one particular set of actions, one particular path. As I stopped punishing myself, as I listened to God’s continuing voice of affirmation and love, I found myself changing my church and changing my life.
What I realized—and it was not easy—is waiting for us in the exchange between Jesus and the crowd in our reading from John this morning. “What must we do?” asks the crowd. And Jesus answers, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Greek has so many more interesting tenses than English and this verb “believe” is a subjunctive that expresses duration: We must continue to believe. We must not stop believing.
We are impatient with signs and we get confused about them. A sign obviously points to a thing, to something greater than itself. But we need immediate comfort, healing, affirmation, direction. God knows our need as Jesus knew the need of the crowd on the mountain last week. Sometimes the feeding comes very quickly. And sometimes it is a slower process, not—I think—because God wants to test us, melt us down as in a refiner’s fire, but because God’s ways are mysterious to us.
Like the crowd, I was confusing signs and things. The people thought the bread was it. I thought it, the gift, was ordination, and that without it I couldn’t live out my call. But through God’s mercy, my desire for ordination actually became a sign that pointed beyond itself to another way in which God is now letting me serve. The gift beyond my understanding was indeed the service of God’s people in God’s church—but not in the church or the process that had long seemed the only possibility.
I’ve come to feel that the journey from sign to the real gift to which that sign is pointing—whatever it may be—is proof of God’s continuing love. Not only the Gospel stories but the stories that we tell one another help us remember God’s love as both sign and nourishment beyond that sign. The bread that we will share at the table this morning is both sign and gift from our God who provides us with never-failing nourishment, with life, both here and hereafter.
Let us pray in the words that we heard last week from Ephesians: Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
2 Samuel 11.26-12.13a; Psalm 51.1-12; Ephesians 4.1-16; John 6.24-35
Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
From this morning’s Gospel: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
Like so many of us, I’ve been picking wild raspberries. I spot a few really ripe ones, but to pick them I often have to move around the thicket, and then I see more. To get them I lift some leaves, and bending over I see others, way deep down. What started out as a mouthful ends up as a tasty dessert. And then, of course, there are all of those half-ripe ones, waiting for me—if I’m watching.
My faith life has been somewhat like that. I am blessed by some encounter or event, and that in turn leads to other. Or maybe it doesn’t—immediately.
Our continuing story from the Gospel of John this morning tells much the same story in terms of bread. In last week’s installment, the people were fed so wonderfully that they wanted to make Jesus king. This week, they notice that he’s somehow gotten to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They follow him right after him and now they’re asking questions. It’s a real exchange that can sound innocent or somewhat suspicious: “Rabbi, when did you get here?” “What must we do?” “What sign do you do that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?” And as a reminder, just to let him know that they know, “Our ancestors ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Sound familiar, this interior conversation with God: What? When? How? And “Remember the promise that we’ve heard from Scripture and from our pastors?”
I love Jesus’ initial response and it too can be read as annoyed or as loving: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” It’s true that Jesus identifies their motives—pretty base-line survival—but the double “Amen”—yes, it shall be, yes, it shall be—suggests a confidence in God’s care for his people, and therefore a rebuke motivated by gentleness and understanding of their weakness. The bread had satisfied a real need, but it was also a sign for something more lasting, something greater.
The distinction between the bread that satisfies immediately—the deep purple berry all ready to pop into my mouth—and the sign—the berry as yet unripened, the significance that will emerge—has become precious to me. This is the gift that is more than it seems and that is so often beyond our understanding, beyond our ken. This distinction has become precious to me as I put together some events in my own life.
From the time I was a child, I heard a call to ministry. But when I was small, the ministry was not open to women in the Episcopal Church and so I became a teacher, a profession I have loved. By the time I was in my late 50s, the call came again so strongly that I had to respond. Through discernment in my church, I was encouraged to go to seminary and seek ordination. I was 60 by the time I entered Yale Divinity School. I had the time of my life and did well. Nonetheless, people who knew the Bishop’s feelings about age were afraid that I might be disappointed. But I was determined.
My bishop, who had been on Sabbatical when I first started the process, confirmed the fears of my friends. He felt that the church needed candidates under the age of fifty. Unwilling to allow for exceptions, he turned me down solely on the basis of age. I tried some other dioceses, but somehow nothing worked.
It was a bleak day when I finally realized that I would never be ordained as an Episcopal priest, made none the cheerier when my Dean told me to stop banging my head against the wall. Perhaps you can imagine my sense of failure, made all the harsher by the first serious discrimination I had ever personally experienced. What was I to do with my life, with my career, and worst of all, with my burning call? I kept asking, “Why?” I knew I had been hearing God’s voice, and I couldn’t reject that.
Only very gradually, through prayer and discernment and through the enormous support of friends, did I understand that my call and ordination did not have to be the same. Through it all, I kept saying the words that Pam sang to us so beautifully last week, “Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord. I have heard you calling in the night.” I became a Methodist, entered the Candidacy process, and, God willing, will become a licensed local pastor. My call, my passion for divine service, was a sign, not to ordination but to serve God’s people in God’s church as the Conference and you are allowing me to do here.
In a sense I had been banging my head against the wall because I had limited my call through one particular set of actions, one particular path. As I stopped punishing myself, as I listened to God’s continuing voice of affirmation and love, I found myself changing my church and changing my life.
What I realized—and it was not easy—is waiting for us in the exchange between Jesus and the crowd in our reading from John this morning. “What must we do?” asks the crowd. And Jesus answers, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Greek has so many more interesting tenses than English and this verb “believe” is a subjunctive that expresses duration: We must continue to believe. We must not stop believing.
We are impatient with signs and we get confused about them. A sign obviously points to a thing, to something greater than itself. But we need immediate comfort, healing, affirmation, direction. God knows our need as Jesus knew the need of the crowd on the mountain last week. Sometimes the feeding comes very quickly. And sometimes it is a slower process, not—I think—because God wants to test us, melt us down as in a refiner’s fire, but because God’s ways are mysterious to us.
Like the crowd, I was confusing signs and things. The people thought the bread was it. I thought it, the gift, was ordination, and that without it I couldn’t live out my call. But through God’s mercy, my desire for ordination actually became a sign that pointed beyond itself to another way in which God is now letting me serve. The gift beyond my understanding was indeed the service of God’s people in God’s church—but not in the church or the process that had long seemed the only possibility.
I’ve come to feel that the journey from sign to the real gift to which that sign is pointing—whatever it may be—is proof of God’s continuing love. Not only the Gospel stories but the stories that we tell one another help us remember God’s love as both sign and nourishment beyond that sign. The bread that we will share at the table this morning is both sign and gift from our God who provides us with never-failing nourishment, with life, both here and hereafter.
Let us pray in the words that we heard last week from Ephesians: Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
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