Sermons from Christ Church Needham

Epiphany IV - Skip Windsor

2012-01-29T19:05:00.000-05:00

Be The Church

“In the name of God, creator, redeemer and sanctifier.” Amen.

You and I gather this morning as a church family. Many of you have already greeted friends, received maybe a handshake or a hug, or taken the children to Children’s Chapel. Others of you may have entered church quietly by arriving early to hear the choir rehearse, come through the side door without notice, or entered for the first time to be greeted by one of our ushers.

Regardless, of how you came into church this morning, you are here. And you and I are family.

I know for some people the idea of calling ourselves a “family” may have unsettling or disturbing connotations. Perhaps, it recalls an old fashion, even nostalgic, definition that no longer works. Yet, what word may we use to adequately describe ourselves? I cannot think of a better way to define church community than by using the word “family.”

I am reminded of the story of the small boy who stood shivering over a steel grate on a bitterly cold day in a western city. His clothes were tattered, torn and threadbare. A woman, appropriately dressed for the weather, stopped and engaged the youngster in conversation. Sensing he was a child of the streets, the woman took him to a clothing store and outfitted him from head to toe including cap, scarf, coat, gloves and socks.

The boy was filled with happiness and gratitude. He could not thank her enough.

As they said good-bye and walked in opposite directions, the elated lad turned back to ask, “Are you God’s mother?” The woman answered, “Oh no! I am a child of God.

Whereupon the smiling boy remarked, “I knew you were related.”

In God, you and I are relatives. Family. The words from Psalm 133:1 may be helpful when the psalmist writes, “How good and pleasant it is when kindred dwell together in unity.” Perhaps an enhanced definition of a church family would the phrase “kindred dwelling together in unity.”

So as we gather this morning on the day of our annual meeting as spiritual relatives, it is appropriate to pause and reflect about our relationship in Jesus Christ. And as a family of Christians, you and I, are here to worship together, to pray together, and to share the Eucharist together.

Electing lay leaders today remind us on such occasions that we are an apostolic community who continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, breaking bread together and being in fellowship with one another.

This morning is the usual time when the rector gives a state of the parish address. After hearing the State of the State Address and the State of the Union Address, you may be exhausted from hearing one more “State of… Addresses.” I do not think you came here necessarily this morning to hear me recite the triumphs and successes of the past year.

I do not think you want to know in more detail in my sermon about what the staff, the vestry and the ministries are doing right now. That time will come later when you will hear about those leaders and programs at the annual meeting; and, as a plug, I encourage you to attend the A/M after our worship service for there is a good story to tell about Christ Church over this past year.

For our brief time together now, I would like to reflect with you on how we can maintain and sustain the energy, the inspiration, and the spirit that has brought us this far. We ought to be mindful not to judge our accomplishments by standards less than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For it is more important to be faithful than successful.

In the Gospel lesson for today from Mark, we hear about a strange even bizarre encounter; but it is easy to get side tracked by thinking of today’s gospel lesson as just an odd, even supernatural story. This reading seems more geared for a Halloween than it does for the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany. It has all the makings of a horror story with a demon possessed man and people who are perplexed and scared.

In Jesus’ time there was no such word as pathology; and certainly the idea of being possessed was not psychological ailment but supernatural one. In Jesus’ time such people were shunned, isolated, and marginalized because they were considered outcasts and religiously “impure.” The evangelist, Mark, includes the encounter with the demon possessed man and Jesus for two reasons.

The first is that the first people to recognize that Jesus is the Son of God is not Peter and the other disciples. Rather, the first ones to acknowledge Jesus’ supernatural authority is another supernatural being. Throughout Mark, it will be supernatural figures who will recognize that the supernatural power of Jesus first. It will be a journey of discovery for Peter and the other disciples that through Jesus they will also be given authority over demonic forces to heal and to speak truth to power.

The second reason Mark includes this meeting with the demon possessed man is how others witnessed and responded Jesus in the synagogue: He speaks with authority. Notice, the writer does not recount what Jesus actually said. Mark merely states that Jesus taught them as one having authority. And the people respond to his words and to his healing as a New Teaching.

Up until this time, the people of Israel were taught first by the patriarchs and matriarchs, the lawgivers and the prophets, and the Pharisee and scribes; but now Jesus offers a new teaching that will be available directly to all people and not intercepted and interpreted only by the religious leaders.

This New Teaching of Jesus would be a reformation of the Jewish Shema taken from the Hebrew Scriptures, which commands that one should love the Lord, your God with all your heart and your entire mind; and, Jesus adds the second is similar: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

This New Teaching, this new commandment Jesus would continue to incarnate throughout his public ministry inspiring his followers to do the same even if it led to persecution, suffering, and betrayal. But he also promised that if anyone would imitate him they would find the joy and grace of a renewed and restored life in him.

In Jesus’ life and teaching he speaks of a kingdom that is for all people who come from all sections of society. It is a Samaritan who shows us how to be a good neighbor, a businessman who shows us how to use our talents, a wine stewards who shows us how to trust, an old woman who shows us how to rejoice, a host who shows us hospitality by inviting strangers into his house, the father who shows us generosity welcoming back a lost son, a tourist who shows us courage by picking up the cross. There is no seat for the mighty in this kingdom. It is marked by humility, compassion and faith.

As the family of God, you and I are given a different kind of authority through the Holy Spirit to do the work of Christ, to be the mind of Christ, the heart of Christ, the hands of Christ. I believe the challenge for Christians today is to be bold and beholden only to God. The chosen vehicle for God’s redeeming and reconciling work in this kingdom of God is the church, the laos, the laity: You.

If there were a truth to tell you this morning it would be that you are the church and Christ Church is your church. Not mine. Not Lynn’s. Not Bud’s. Not Bishop Shaw’s. Not the clergy. It is the laity. You are church. It is Jesus’ legacy and gift to you, your forebears and your children and children’s children. Christ Church cannot exist in a vacuum. In order for you to continue to thrive and do the good work you are doing you will have to own it and own it deeply.

During this season of Epiphany consider your call and remember through Jesus Christ that you are a light to the world.

Up in Maine there is a lighthouse called Two Bush; and it’s light marks the way into the Mussel Ridge Channel and Penobscot Bay. It warns the vessels about nearby shoals. It’s beacon welcomes vessels into safe harbors and returns them back to the sea. And these boats are big and small from lobster boats and yawls to supertankers and great ocean liners. The lighthouse keeps all these vessels safe so that they can go off to far off ports and deliver its cargo. The beacon light remains on. It must stay on.

Like Two Bush Light, Christ Church is a beacon of light that shines as close as Highland Street and as far away as Haiti. You, Christ Church, are the lighthouse and you are its keepers. And through your God given gifts that you share in this community more work than any of us can imagine is being done.

Although the physical presence of Jesus is not with us, He is with us and he will give us the will and perseverance, the strength and the faith, to weather any tempestuous winds or strong currents that pull us away from the self-giving love known through his life, death and resurrection.

Sometimes when I am alone in this church, I enjoy the stillness and the beauty of this sanctuary. It is the same in the chapel. But, after a few minutes, I feel a yearning. I feel as if I am missing something. I realize I am missing the sound of the organ played by Jane, the voices of the men and women in the choir, the firm hands and gentle hugs at the Peace, the children with me around the baptismal fount. Then I realize that what I am missing. I am missing you. You are the Church to me. We are the church for one other.

If I could only underscore one invitation to you it would be to be the Church. Be the church to all people. Be the church to the poor and the forgotten. Be the church to friend and neighbor. Be the church to young and old alike. Be the church to God’s creation. Be the church that points to horizons of hope. Be the transforming church. Be the church God calls you to be: The light. Community. Kindred. Family.

To maintain and sustain the good work of ministry and mission of Christ Church remember who you are and whose you are: the beloved family of God. As St. Paul writes in Romans: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to his purpose” (8:28).

Let us pray:

Most gracious and loving God, we thank you for the gift of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, who is the light of the world. We pray give us his light through your Holy and life giving Spirit to be faithful disciples in word and deed do your will in the world and to promote the well-being of all people and to be faithful stewards of your creation. Remember us for good that as we are related to you we never forget we are related to one another through your Church. All this we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Epiphany III - Lynn Campbell

2012-01-22T18:29:00.000-05:00

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people. And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”
In the name of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

If only it were that easy. If only we could walk up to someone and say, follow me, and they followed. Perhaps that works in the game of follow the leader, but other than that I don’t think it is very practical. So, what was it about Jesus that his simple words, “follow me and I will make you fish for people” were compelling enough that Simon and his brother Andrew and then James and his brother John, dropped everything to follow him. According to the gospel readings Jesus had yet to perform any amazing miracle. The sight of the blind man had not been restored, no one had been raised from the dead, and no demons had been cast out. So, what made these brothers leave their families, leave the source of their income, leave their security behind to take on a new way of life? What compelled them to make this radical change of direction?

Perhaps they heard Jesus speak, and recognized something divine in his words or in his presence. Maybe they heard him announce that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news” and found these words compelling enough for them to leave everything behind and follow the one who called them.

Have you ever had the experience of being caught up in the nets of your everyday life, your attention focused on the direction you are going- only to have that direction, that focus changed? I’m not just talking about major life changing moments; I’m talking about those smaller moments that can occur in our daily lives. I had one of these experiences two years ago while I was working as a chaplain at our Diocesan summer camp. I was supposed to meet a group of campers by the waterfront to go canoeing. As is typical for me, I was running late. I had my eyes focused towards the water and I was speed walking my way down the hill. But then something compelled me to look to the side. When I did I saw a young camper walking alone along the path. She had her head down and was kicking the dirt with her shoes with each step she took. Something in me knew I had to go over to her. I began walking beside her and asked her how she was doing. It wasn’t long before she told me how sad she felt. How homesick she was for what was familiar, for her parents and her friends. We had a good chat and I was able to work with her counselors and with her fellow cabin members to bring her more into the fold and to help lessen the feelings of homesickness. This encounter had very little to do with me. It was God compelling me to reach out to one of God’s little ones in need. I never did make it to the waterfront that day. The course of my day changed and my eyes remained much more open to the people around me.

I realize now that I had begun walking over to this young camper before I really knew what I was doing. And it makes wonder how much Andrew, Simon, James, and John understood what they were doing. Mark tells us that after hearing Jesus’ call, they IMMEDIATELY left their nets to follow him. They didn’t know what would come next. They didn’t know what would come from following Jesus. But they trusted the compelling nature of the call and the one who called.

I often think the path of discipleship for us is similar. We begin following Jesus’ call without really knowing where it will lead. We are told in scripture that the way of Jesus is the way of life but we don’t really know what that will look like for each of us. We didn’t ask to be called any more than the fishermen in today’s gospel did. Yet each one of us has been called. In our baptism we have been claimed by Jesus Christ and called to follow him. We have not been claimed because of WHO we are, rather because of WHOSE we are. Jesus’ first disciples were not called because they were the well-educated, elite, powerful members of society or because of any great acts of kindness they performed. They were simple fishermen who spent their days on the Sea of Galilee, dropping their nets into the water and hoping to catch some fish. In the same way, we are not called by virtue of our talents or excellence or education. We are called because Jesus has found us and claimed us as his own.

Jesus has found us, and extends an invitation to us. It is an invitation to love as he loves. It is an invitation to go where he went, to see with his eyes, to hear with his ears, and to love with his heart. It is an invitation to walk in the life-changing, world-changing way of Jesus. This invitation, this call to follow Jesus, comes to us each and every day. The way we live out the call will look differently for each one of us. Frederick Buechner, an author and Presbyterian minister writes, "The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” This is how he and others define vocation. We often think of vocation as being only for those of us who serving as ordained minister. But the word vocation, coming from the Latin word, vocare, simply means “to call.” Each of us has been called and each of us has a vocation. Your vocation, the place God calls you, is where your passion and deep joy meet a need and a hunger in the world. As Jesus’ disciples, we can’t solve all the problems of the world. We can’t bring about, through our own actions, God’s kingdom of justice and peace, but we can do our small part. We can use the gifts and talents God has given us to feed a hunger in the world. Not all of us are called to provide medical care to people in Haiti, to bring clothes to homeless shelters in Boston, or to knit prayer shawls for people who are hurting but each of us is called to do something.

There are so many needs in our world, so many places to use our gifts in the service of others. We need the eyes to see the hurt, the ears to hear the pain and the wisdom to discover where these pains and our deep gladness meet. It doesn’t help anyone if we are miserable in our service of others. We are not following Jesus if we are miserable with each step. This doesn’t mean we don’t experience suffering. We know that pain is part of the journey. But it does mean that deep down there is a joy in knowing we are loving God by loving others and there is a joy in using our gifts in the service of our sisters and brothers. And it is this gladness, this deep joy, that draws others in. When people see you serving with gladness in your heart, they will want to know more. They will want to share in this joy and they will ask you about it. Here is an opportunity to tell people about the one who has called you to follow him. It is an opportunity to invite others to follow Jesus. And in this way we join Simon, Andrew, James and John and become fisher for people.

I offer again the prayer from this morning’s collect and invite you to hear the words anew:

Let us pray.

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Epiphany I (The Baptism of Our Lord) - Lynn Campbell

2012-01-08T10:11:00.000-05:00

Gen 1:1-5, Mk 1:4-11

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
In the name of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Was any one else surprised to come into church this morning and hear a story about the adult Jesus? Didn’t we just celebrate his birth? The 12 days of Christmas only ended on Friday. Just 2 days ago we celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. As a church we remembered the Magi, who after seeing a star rise in the heavens, follow it to Bethlehem where they meet the infant Jesus cradled in the loving arms of his mother Mary. The “wise men” as they are known, traveled a great distance, following the light of the star, because they knew the Messiah had been born. When they came upon Mary and the child, they knelt down and worshipped him. And they offered him the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This time with the Savior of the world changed them forever. With their visit to that lowly stable, the Christ child was revealed to them and to the world. And that is really what epiphany means, to reveal, to manifest, to make known.

But now, a mere 2 days later we encounter the adult Jesus as he is baptized. This quick leap of 30 years seems a little jarring but I find it helpful to think of the baptism as a continuation of the theme of epiphany. We continue to encounter a God who desires to be known through Jesus Christ. We continue to experience the manifestation, the revelation, of Jesus Christ to all people. This morning, Jesus is made known as God’s Son through his baptism in the river Jordan. John has prepared the way for Jesus. He has preached the confession of sins and repentance to those who followed him and he has baptized them with water. Now Jesus emerges on the scene and presents himself to be baptized. Jesus, without sin, without the need for repentance, humbles himself before God and like each of us, enters the waters of baptism. And what happens as he breaks the surface of the water is probably one of my most favorite lines in all of Scripture: “And as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

God does not want to remain hidden behind the clouds. God does not stay in the celestial realm, separate from the earth God created. No, God breaks through that divide, God takes on human form, AND God speaks a word of love through the heavens that had been torn apart. And the words spoken at this awe inspiring moment? “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” God is revealed as one who loves, one who willingly shares our human nature, one who finds delight in humanity.

How many of us know ourselves as the object of God’s love, of God’s delight? How many of you can hear God say: “You are my daughter, you are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased?” I believe with every ounce of my being that God is speaking those words to you and to me. You are God’s beloved. We might be tempted to say, no, not me. I haven’t done enough to earn this love. But, remember, at this point Jesus had done NOTHING to earn God’s love. And that is exactly what makes this passage is even more amazing. Jesus hears these words BEFORE he has entered into public ministry. BEFORE he began to heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked. God simply loves. That is what God does that is what God is. God is love.

I know God’s love can seem abstract. Hard to understand or experience. I was recently speaking with someone who told me she knows she is loved by God but that she only knows it in her head. She has never felt it in her heart. She was worried that she would never really KNOW herself as loved. We talked about ways that we experience ourselves as beloved.

Perhaps you have had someone in your life who has made you feel nothing but loved. You know you didn’t do anything to deserve the love. It was just present. The first person I think of is my grandmother who died two years ago. I knew her death would be hard but I had no idea how hard. A few days after her funeral I had to return to classes at Virginia Theological Seminary where I was taking a class on Spiritual Direction. The instructor for this class was speaking about the importance of knowing that we are loved by God before we can do anything else. He spoke about the people in our lives who show us this unconditional love and used a grandmother as the example. I realized that my grandmother had always shown me this unconditional, unearned love. Her sweet voice, her gentle hands, her encouraging words, all made God’s love real for me. My grandmother’s name was “Thelma Leome Campbell,” making her initials TLC. That seems so appropriate because she always showed be tender, loving, care.

We may not hear the voice of love breaking forth from the skies, but I hope and pray we experience that love of God through the TLC of others. I also pray we can hear it deep in our hearts in prayer or when we receive Christ in the bread and the wine.

And I hope we remember this love when we reflect on our own baptism, whether we were baptized as an infant or as an adult. Just as God’s love is made known in Jesus’ baptism, so too is God’s love for us made known in our own baptism. Today we will witness this love made known in the baptism of Michael Xavier Hitron and we have the opportunity to be reminded of our baptismal commitment. In baptism we are named and claimed. We are brought into the household of God and we are brought into an indissolvable bond of love with the Creator. God has called Michael into this relationship. Today we celebrate with an outward sign, what we already know to be true, God has named Michael as God’s beloved.

But Michael’s baptism, and our own, is not simply a one time event. It is an invitation. It is an invitation to live in relationship with God, an invitation to take seriously the baptismal covenant we will all recommit ourselves to this morning. It is an invitation that asks something of us. Jesus’ baptism wasn’t just for his own spiritual benefit. It was the start of his public ministry. From his baptism he went on to share the love of God with all those he encountered, he went on to serve the poor, to seek justice for the oppressed, and to preach the good news. In our baptism we are empowered with this same Holy Spirit to do the work that God has give us to do, using the gifts God has given to each of us. As God’s beloved, we share this love with others. We do it out of love, not out of fear, guilt, or obligation. We live out our baptismal covenant, we serve God and God’s people, because we have been filled with God’s love and empowered by the Holy Spirit for this work.

These words have become more real to me this week as I prepare for my ordination to the priesthood this coming Saturday. I have been blessed to know the love of God and have felt a call to serve God and share the love of God as a priest. I’m looking forward to standing at the altar next Sunday and celebrating the Eucharist for the first time. I am so eager to share the blessing of God in Word and in Sacrament. But at the core of this ministry is my baptism. Each of us is called to live out our baptism in different ways. There are so many ways to share the love of God and our world certainly is in need of this love.

I hope and pray that Michael and all of us will hear the voice of the God saying, you are my Beloved; in you I am well pleased. And I pray that we let this love sink in deeply so that we can share it with our sisters and brothers. Amen.

Holy Name - Skip Windsor

2012-01-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

Numbers 6:22-27

Live Long and Prosper

“Live long and prosper.” For those of us familiar with the TV series Star Trek this was the Vulcan salute consisting of a raised hand, palm outward with fingers parted between the middle and ring finger. The actor Leonard Nimoy who portrayed the half-Vulcan character Dr. Spock on the original series devised the salute.

The accompanying words come from the end of Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet when the grief stricken Romeo bids his friend Balthasar good-bye: “Live and be prosperous, and farewell, good fellow” (Act III. Scene V. 42).

The format is similar to Middle Eastern greetings meaning “peace be upon you,” and its reply, “upon you be peace.” An even earlier variation can be found with the ancient Egyptians blessing that is usually translated “May he live, be prosperous, be healthy.”

The hand gesture was originally a Jewish sign of blessing that comes from the Book of Numbers accompanied by the words we heard this morning from Hebrew scripture:

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

The split finger hand gesture represents the Hebrew letter Shin which means Shaddai or “Almighty God.” Orthodox Jews use the Shin gesture during a blessing ceremony when the priest extends both hands out at a 45-degree angle as opposed to the vertical gesture we know from Star Trek.

Nimoy modified it for his character Dr. Spock to convey the Vulcan salute.

In his autobiography I am Not Spock, Nimoy writes that as a child his grandfather once took him to an Orthodox synagogue. Jewish worshipers are not permitted to look at the priest while the blessing is being given, as this would detract from the words of the blessing itself. As a child, Nimoy could not contain himself and took a look.

He writes, “The special moment when Kohanim (priest) blessed the assembly moved me deeply, for it possessed a great sense of magic and theatre… I had heard that this indwelling Spirit of God was too powerful, too beautiful, to awesome for any mortal to look upon and survive… so I obediently covered my face with my hand. But of course, I had to peek.”

The beauty of this blessing from the Book of Numbers is that it is universal: Jewish or Christian, Egyptian or Arab, fact or fiction, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial. I use it frequently in blessings because it conveys a truth that hearkens back to the original covenant God made with Abraham that the people of God would and continue to be God’s people.

By blessing, the writer of The Book of Numbers means that fulfillment of the covenant will always be manifested when people respond to God’s commands to love God and to love one’s neighbors. In the Book of Deuteronomy, God promises Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars and that their land would be abundant and fruitful.

This covenant is later ratified at the foot of Mt. Sinai according to The Book of Numbers as the Israelites prepare to journey into the wilderness as they look forward to the Promised Land. Moses’ brother, Aaron, offers this blessing to the Israelites as they leave Mt. Sinai and is so named Aaron’s blessing up to this day.

The blessing is highly stylized speaking of blessing and keeping signifying that all divine gifts are to serve the life and well-being of individuals and communities and that God’s people will be sheltered and protected from all evil and its effects. The person blessing was one who mediated the presence and power of God.

The blessing calls upon God to show the divine countenance to all people to imply God’s full and never failing presence. The shining face of God runs counter to the hiding face of God Moses was not allowed to see at the Burning bush. It means there is a smiling face of God that looks upon you and not a glaring and angry face of the divine.

Our images of God are shaped by stories and personal experiences; and sometime those images are frightful and oppressive. Here, in this blessing, we hear and receive the accepting and comforting face of God. The ancient claim of Aaron’s blessing is that God’s face shines like the sun upon all people and all of creation. Simply put: God smiles on you.

The blessing concludes with God’s peace, God’s Shalom, reaffirming God’s presence and peaceful dominion over all of creation. God’s Shalom means that God’s reign is real, life giving, and eternal. When God’s name was invoked, God would bless the people always and everywhere. For the Israelites and for Jews today, this blessing is a bridge back to the covenant God made to god’s people.

For Christians, God blesses us through one high priest, one mediator, Jesus Christ. He is the presence of God who gives his followers God’s Shalom. As we give thanks for the name of Jesus this day, we are to remember that his life is our blessing.

As we begin a new year, may God’s peace bring you health and happiness.

“Live long and prosper.” Amen.

Christmas Eve - Skip Windsor

2011-12-24T11:22:00.000-05:00

Luke 2:1-20

The Roman Soldier

My sermon this year is dedicated to our troops in thanksgiving for those service men and women returning home from Iraq this holiday season and to remember those still serving in Afghanistan and in far away lands. This Christmas sermon is called “The Roman Soldier.”

“My name used to be Marcus Regulus a centurion in Rome’s 10th Legion. Some of us are preparing to leave this foreign land after nine years of service. The men are tired and battle wearied. The insurrections in Jerusalem have taken their toll. They all want to go home – except me.

There is uneasiness in my heart ever since we crucified the man they call Jesus a fortnight ago. There was something strange and terrifying that day. Rarely do the condemned speak from the cross; but Jesus did. When he said, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do,” it was like an arrow pierced me. It was as if he was speaking to me. I was frightened. He seemed to know me better than I knew myself.

Never before have I weakened against an enemy with axe or sword. I gave commands and I took commands. But here in the shadow of the cross, I knelt down and began to tremble in front of this naked vulnerable man. Then I just blurted it out. It came from some place deep in me when I said, “This is the Son of God!”

Some wall within me crumbled. All that I knew of the world – power, riches, fame and fortune – turned to ashes. The man on the cross who I now believed was the Messiah altered whatever illusions I had about my life, whatever myths I believed about life. This understanding did not come at once. It was when I heard him speak earlier to an older woman and young man at the foot of the cross, “Woman, behold your son.” I recognized the woman from somewhere in my past.

She was older now. Her hair was streaked with gray and she was fuller and rounder; and her face was a cascade of tears. “I know this woman!” I thought to myself. As I beheld how she looked at Jesus as only a mother can, I remembered. I remembered a night a long time ago when in my youth I was witness to a great star over my childhood home of Bethlehem.

Few know that I am from Bethlehem. The Romans believe I am from Britannia but I was born in Bethlehem. My parents died after I was born and so I was raised with my mother’s family who were shepherds. My given name then was Mark and I was filled with an eleven year old’s sense of wonder and curiosity.

One clear cold night while watching my uncle’s sheep with my cousin Jacob, we noticed a strange movement in the sky. The stars quickened and began to twist and turn like a wheel on a cart. I know you may not believe this but a large group of stars began to fuse together to form one great bright shining star.

There came with the spinning star a humming sound like bees in summer. There were voices singing and the word BEHOLD filled my head and other words, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS resounded and echoed in me and around me. Suddenly there was a line of light – more like a bridge of light – coming from the great star down into Bethlehem.

Curiosity got the best of us. Jacob and I forgot our flock of sheep and followed the light into the town. There was an inn that seemed to be at the light’s end so I knocked on the door to see if anyone knew what was happening. A frightened voice growled back, “It’s late. There are no rooms left!” Jacob tugged at my tunic and pointed to the back of the inn where the light ended at a stable. We heard animal noises – cattle, sheep, and horses, even a donkey.

Coming closer to the stable we could hear the humming again. It was as if people, scores of people were singing. And there in the center of everything was the baby cradled in the arms of his mother. It was her face. It was this woman who I would see thirty years later at the foot of the cross.

Then she was younger, thinner, paler, but held the same dignity, the same, if I may say it, majesty. All I could do at that moment was kneel. Jacob did too. And we beheld the child as the humming voices continued to singing, “GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST AND PEACE TO HIS PEOPLE ON EARTH.”

How long we remained in the stable I cannot say. At first light we left as the father of the baby beckoned the mother that they must soon be on their way. It was not long after that King Herod issued a terrible order to find the first born of each family.

I did not know what it all meant; but when Herod’s storm troopers took my uncle away for questioning and beat up my cousin Jacob, I fled. I ran as far away from Bethlehem as I could. I was a coward and it would take the rest of my life to prove that I wasn’t.

I joined a caravan that brought me to the port town of Caesarea. There, I stowed away on a merchant ship bound for Britannica. While on board I was caught stealing food from the table of a tin merchant named Joseph who was from the Judean town of Arithmathea. He was a kindly man, who took pity on me and forgave me. Giving me to food to eat, Joseph allowed me to work as his servant for the rest of the voyage

In Britannica, Joseph introduced me to his trading partner, Arrius Regulus, who eventually took me in and raised me among his own children. My name was changed from Mark to the more Roman name of Marcus Regulus. In the Regulus household I learned about the glory of Rome and how it ruled the world. As I matured I forgot my past and looked forward to a life as a Roman citizen of this powerful Empire.

Still hungry for adventure and wanting to prove that I was not a coward I bid farewell to the Regulus family and when of age joined Rome’s famous 9th Legion. Over the next thirty years I proved a trusted and fearless warrior and rose easily through the ranks until I was promoted to centurion in charge of 100 Roman soldiers. There came a call for experienced centurions in Judea. Quick advancement was promised and I was more than glad to prove myself. Without hesitation, I joined the 10th Legion of Rome garrisoned in Jerusalem. There, I was promoted to primus, the first among equals.

Over the months I’ve been stationed in Jerusalem I heard stories of a promised messiah who came in the guise of a teacher from Nazareth who was doing deeds of power and teaching about another kingdom, a kingdom not of Rome but a Kingdom of God. The teacher spoke of the coming reign of God where all would be citizens of another kingdom whether they be slave or free, Jew or Gentile, male or female.

This kingdom, he preached about, would be one where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where spears would be turned into pruning hooks. News of the carpenter’s son spread far and wide so that people from all over Judea followed him. That is when the authorities became frightened and thought he would start another insurrection; and so they arrested the teacher and sentenced him to death.

I do not like executions and leave that to more junior soldiers. But, I was asked by my superiors to have my men cover the perimeter of the hill called Golgotha. I thought it would be another routine punishment. But, listening to Jesus’ words of forgiveness and seeing his mother again, I realized that I was a witness at both his birth and his death. I kneeled for the second time in my life again near the mother and the son. By giving his life, he gave me my life. Now I know, it is not his death that lives within me now. It is his birth in Bethlehem.

At Jesus’ birth my name was Mark, a shepherd boy, filled with wonder and adventure. Here now in this place of unspeakable sorrow, I remembered the star, the humming and the singing, and I realized that I am more Mark now than I am Marcus. I remembered who I am and whose I was. Jesus’ birth changed everything. What was inside the stable was bigger than our whole world.

It is all so clear to me now. I believe a sure as I stand here that the Bethlehem we seek is around us and within us. The gift at Bethlehem is that the manger lies in every human heart.

Jesus is born again and again every time we give ourselves in compassion and mercy to others just as God gives us a life to live through his Son.

My troops are pulling out of Jerusalem now and heading west to Caesarea. I go north to Galilee. There are reports that Jesus did not die but rose from the dead and that he is alive appearing to his disciples in Galilee.

I must go and find him for he is my peace. And when I find him I will praise him for his goodness and mercy.

Go tell it on the mountain, over the fields and through the plain that one of God’s lost sheep returns to his fold all because of the child who became a king.”

Bless His Holy Name,

MARK of Bethlehem

Advent III - Skip Windsor

2011-12-11T14:57:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

A Place to Stand

Time magazine recently asked several famous and well-known people to submit nominations for 2011’s Person of the Year. One of those asked was Jennifer Egan author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. She replied,

“I’ve been torn two ways and unable to choose between Occupy Wall Street and the democracy movements of the Middle East. So maybe the answer is even a broader idea: the year of the protest, fueled by individuals willing to risk personal safety to reject a status quo that is patently, brutally unfair. The final outcomes are in no way clear, but the fact that they’re happening in places as disparate as Wall Street and Libya is a defining moment in our history.”

As we close another year it is appropriate to look back on 2011 and remember those past global events that gave rise to the Arab Spring starting with a slap in the face of a pushcart vendor by a city official in Tunisia, the uprisings in Cairo’s Tahir Square, the fall of Libya’s long time dictator Gaddafi, to the Occupy Wall Street movement that stretched from Oakland to London. What they all have in common was the recognition by a large number of people, particularly by young people, who sought to have their voices heard and to have their dreams expressed. Perhaps, as Egan says what has occurred this past year may be a defining moment in our history.

I know for me that walking among the men and women at Occupy London this past October was a revelation. At one level, it seemed like something out of the 60’s when I went to protests partially out of curiosity and part out of being part of something bigger than myself. At another level, it was about sensing some societal tectonic plates shifting under my feet. Not sure what it all meant but I was positive that something powerful was moving beneath my feet or that the answer was blowing in the wind as the singing trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, would say.

From what I have heard from others about the Occupy Boston encampment there is a sense of the same kind of message about jobs and economic justice, for accountability and transparency, and for democracy and equal opportunity. The criticisms of the occupation both here and everywhere these past two months are justified and well stated about security, health, property rights, and infringement on others. Mayor Menino of Boston orchestrated Friday night’s police evacuation of Occupy Boston with reasonableness, thoughtfulness, and patience. Unlike other cities, the police of Boston and the occupiers of Boston both handled a situation that could have had disastrous consequences.

The Mayor is to have said, “I’ve met a lot of these guys, and they are sincere. But in this sabbatical they’re about to have, I hope they come up with a strong leader and a strong agenda.” As I have reflected upon Friday night’s closing down of Occupy Boston I become more intrigued with the Mayor’s use of the word sabbatical. It is essentially a religious word meaning Sabbath or day of rest and is one of the Ten Commandments for keeping a Sabbath day holy. I wonder if the Mayor and the police had that in mind as they observed the remaining crowd disperse into the darkness early Saturday morning.

The occupiers are now on sabbatical according to the Mayor. Dewey Square is clear and cordoned off for a month. Like any of us who take sabbaticals they will take time off, reflect upon their experience, recharge their batteries, and look forward to returning to their work and witness. In a sense, it is appropriate that the OWS has time to reflect, plan and anticipate what happens next. For Advent is the precise time to reflect and prepare for what is coming next.

In our Hebrew lesson this morning the prophet Isaiah speaks about a sabbatical being the time of the Lord’s favor referencing Israel’s understanding of Jubilee when slaves were freed, debts cancelled and land redistributed. The year of Jubilee was the seventh – sabbatical - year to free those in bondage, those who were brokenhearted, and those who were oppressed. This coming of a sabbatical was rooted in their sacred texts:

“Remember you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you: for this reason I lay my hand upon you” (Deut. 15:12-18). The coming of a sabbatical and the year of Jubilee commenced a time of God’s favor when human misfortune was reversed and a new beginning was proclaimed and realized.

The season of Advent for Christians is to prepare us for that time of Jubilee when God in Christ appears to redress injustice and inequity and to bring forth God’s reign of peace and dignity for all people. The discipline of Advent is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways and that God’s future will be very different from the present time.

I believe you and I are given an opportunity this Advent to reflect upon this year of protests and what it might mean for the world and for the Christian Church. At issue is not only addressing the major economic and political concerns of our generation, it is also about mending broken relationships and the breakdown of community into categories of them and us. The polarities between nations, the polarities between political parties, the polarity between the churches is the gathering darkness that must be faced and fought.

It seems to me that in the bleakness of such discord God comes among us to do something new and unexpected. I believe that the protesters of the Arab Spring and the OWS movement are telling us something that you and I need to pay attention to especially when it has to do with democracy, freedom, and justice.

And although I do not know or spent time with the Occupy Boston people others I know have; and it seems to me that when groups of people leave behind everything for a dream there is more at stake than ideology.

One person who was skeptical at first of OWS is the Episcopal priest and writer, Donna Schaper, whose church is in lower Manhattan near Zucotti Park, which is where the occupiers were encamped.

She writes in her blog that as a group of Episcopal clergy met with about a dozen occupiers she noticed “as they edged towards the theological they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could ‘appear’ to one another.”

She concludes her blog by writing, “In the end, the occupiers’ argument for physical space is that they bother people by being together. ‘We are driving the mayors crazy they said.” Then Schaper writes, “Ah. What a good thing for a movement to do.”

When I walked among the women and men, boys and girls of Occupy London, the last week in October, I saw both the old and the young, rich and poor, homeless and propertied, British and foreign. All were welcomed. We were offered food to eat. Next to the tents the doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral were closed to the public. One door opened and one door closed. I thought to myself, “Right now, for the moment, I belong here among people I have never met before and will never see again more than over in that historic church.”

And as I stood there with my wife among a motley mix of people I realized how important it is that we are able to appear to one another in our common humanity. We not only need one another but we need a place to stand with one another. I think this is what this year of protest is all about. It is for people to have a place to stand.

Turning away from St. Paul’s I saw a group of men squatting on makeshift stools talking outside of one of tents. They could have been anywhere and everywhere from Tahir Square to Dewey Square. And as I looked at them and then beyond them to the vast and various multicolored tents and heard a cacophony of voices, all I could think about was the famous quote by John Donne, the famous Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, centuries ago:

“No one is an island entire to itself; everyone is a piece of the continent a part of the main… anyone’s death diminishes me, because I am involved with all; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Advent II - Myra Anderson

2011-12-04T21:26:00.001-05:00

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.

Good Morning. This Second Sunday in Advent, in the 2011th year of our Lord, I have a confession to make:

I am not a good housekeeper.

My house isn’t dirty, it’s just messy. I admit it.

It is exactly one year’s worth of accumulated detritus.

Why one year? Because this is the time of year that I go on a mad frenzy to discard copious amounts of stuff and put everything back in order. My rule is, I must de-clutter before I can decorate for Christmas. Few things give me greater joy than preparing my home for the Christmas season. The reward for my efforts is great indeed.

In today’s Gospel, I’m fairly certain John the Baptist in his locust-infested hair shirt didn’t have 21st century housekeeping in mind.

The Gospel of Mark begins with a promising statement:

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Good news! Who couldn’t use some Good News these days?

But wait, there’s a pre-amble. Mark takes us back to the prophet Isaiah:

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord, MAKE HIS PATHS STRAIGHT.’”

In other words: we have the promise of the Good News, but we have some work to do first.

We often think of the Season of Advent as one of patient anticipation. We encourage each other to find quiet moments in the chaos, to reflect on the wonder of the season, blah, blah…

Today’s Gospel and Epistle are anything but quiet. There is a sense of urgency. Mark, via John the Baptist, calls us to action, and Peter in his epistle tells us the day of the Lord will come like a thief. God is patient with us, but he’s still coming.

John the Baptist, as God’s advance man, is calling on God’s people to repent of their sins, and baptizing them in water to wash those sins away.

Repentance: THAT is our task for Advent. Clean your house. And not just once a year, unfortunately for some of us. Peter tells the early Christians they are to strive to lead lives of “holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” We have a role in bringing that day about, God expects us to get busy.

We revisit this story every year at Advent. So this is an on-going ritual, this practice of repentance. Our baptisms years ago didn’t cleanse us once and for all. Life intervenes, and often. Every day stresses or extraordinary events tend to pull us away from God.

And repentance is not about guilt, or at least, it’s more than that. The original Greek word is “metanoias” – meaning a change of mind or direction. It’s not just ritual confession and absolution every week. Mark and Peter are telling us that we have to change our behavior, change our way of thinking, change the world around us, if we are to make the Lord’s path straight and usher in His Kingdom.

As Christians we often look at our lives as a journey, one we take together to help each other find the way. We can look at this call to repentance as a sort of mid-course correction. And we will have many along the way.

It brings to mind the GPS system in my car. Let’s call her Siri. When you put in your destination, Siri finds the best way for you to reach your goal (in theory – let’s just go with it for now). But let’s be honest: if it’s a long trip, things are likely to go awry. You’re going to run into road blocks, traffic jams, and if you’re a man, you’re going to be sure you know a short cut.

So you deviate. And what does Siri do, in that slightly seductive voice that’s meant to be comforting, but is actually annoying?

“Recalculating…”

And have you ever noticed, she doesn’t always set a new route. She often leads you back to the original path. “Turn right, turn right, turn right…” and lo and behold, you’re on the highway again. Or she finds another route to get you to your destination, if you’ve strayed too far.

But ultimately, it’s about reaching your destination.

And our journey is ultimately about ushering in the Kingdom of God. That’s our destination as Christians.

John the Baptist tells us about Jesus, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” We celebrate the baby on the 25th of this month, we commemorate the beginning, but it’s really about the end. It’s the baptism by the fire of the Holy Spirit that prepares us for what Peter calls the “new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.”

We know from Mark’s opening proclamation something really good is happening. Peter’s epistle tells us to wait with penitence and hope. It’s not too late he says. God’s grace is there for all who seek it and accept it.

Good news already, I’d say.

May we all take this season to examine fully the course of our lives, and to seek those mid-course corrections that allow us to receive the fire of the Holy Spirit, reach out to the world around us, and make straight the path of our Lord.

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.

Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King) - Skip Windsor

2011-11-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

Matthew 25:40

The Face of Jesus

Today, the Last Sunday in Pentecost, concludes the Christian church year. For the past year, we have followed the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection according to the Gospel of Matthew. Through Matthew, we heard stories of how Jesus was born in a stable, baptized in the Jordan, tempted in the desert, preached the Sermon on the Mount, called the disciples, healed the sick, raised the dead, taught with parables, spoke truth to power, broke bread with his friends, prayed, suffered, died, rose from the dead, appeared to his followers, and ascended into heaven. Given all this information from the evangelist, do we really know any better now who Jesus is?

The desire to know Jesus continues to be a perennial quest. From the moment he died, succeeding generations have wanted to see the face of Jesus. Great artists like da Vinci have sought to paint his face at The Last Supper. The Shroud of Turin draws people to see the image of a face scored into the cloth that was supposedly wrapped around him at the resurrection. Modern scholars known as the Jesus Seminar continue on the search for the historical Jesus discerning with the newest biblical tools to understand who this man Jesus was.

Searching through the four Gospels and reading through the letters of Paul, one will not find a physical description of what Jesus looked like. The evangelists were more concerned about what Jesus did than what he looked like. St. Paul was more concerned with what his death and resurrection meant for him than did Jesus’ earthly life. The famous doctor, Albert Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest for the Historical Jesus that details the history of the quest for the historical Jesus. At the end of the book, Schweitzer essentially gives up and writes in his epilogue that to see the face of Christ is to essentially look into a well and see reflected off the water the Jesus you want to see.

Some biblical scholars see this conclusion as the funeral oration of the quest for Jesus. According, to our Gospel lesson for today, I believe, it is the beginning not the ending of the quest for Jesus.

We conclude our readings from the Gospel of Matthew today. We move to Mark’s gospel next week as we begin a new lectionary reading cycle. It is noteworthy that Matthew 25 ends this Christian Church year because it not only sums up Jesus’ ministry and mission, it also tells us about who Jesus is and where to find him. “I was hungry and you gave me food… I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink… I was a stranger and you welcomed me… I was naked and you clothed me… I was sick and you took care of me… I was in prison and you visited me…” To look at verse 40, Jesus tells us what he looks like: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

An ideal picture of Jesus that epitomizes Matthew 25 is by Fritz Eichenberg of Jesus standing in a breadline with other hungry and cold men and women. We have a copy of the picture called “Christ of the Breadline” hanging on the wall in our upper parish hall. It was presented to our Shelter Cooking ministry by the Cathedral’s Monday Lunch program for our ongoing partnership in serving the homeless of Boston. Looking at the picture, we see Jesus identifying with the hungry that are standing in line waiting for something to eat. In Jesus’ time the least, and most blessed, were those who were poor, who were meek, and who hungered for righteousness. The hungry, the homeless, the poor, the thirsty, the imprisoned are among us today in places like the Cathedral on Mondays, at St. Francis House, in shelters, in nursing homes, in the tents of Occupy Boston, and in MCI Framingham.

The gospel reading is a moral mandate for us all. It is a theology of care that we are called to live and to proclaim. Theology is a fancy word that essentially means a faith that seeks understanding. To care includes loving one’s neighbor and God; and one’s neighbor extends to all people. It is a theology of radical inclusion. Jesus is crystal clear about this requirement for Christian living: There are to be no outcasts.

If we cannot act on our faith, if we cannot put our words into action, if we cannot make our lives matter for others, then we truly are the “goats on the left hand of God.” God is not going to judge us on the wealth we have amassed, the knowledge we have attained, or the fame we have acquired. God is going to judge us on what we have done for others.

To be a theologian (and you all are theologians!) of care requires, I believe, three things from you and me: To have a helping hand, to have a generous mind, and to have an open heart.

To have a helping hand is to help simply. Caring for others starts with you. Making sure that you are healthy in body, mind and spirit. If you are OK then you can help others be OK; and caring for others starts and ends with prayer; and in between prayer it can be as simple as cooking a meal, driving someone to a doctor’s appointment, bringing canned goods on the third Sunday of the month and placing them into our new shopping carts. Being a helping hand can move and grow in breadth and scope like pitching in at Circle of Hope, volunteering for prison ministry, anointing the sick in a hospital, or partnering with an inner city ministry like Ecclesia ministry. To live and minister simply, allows others to simply live. It is to be the helping hand of Jesus.

To have a generous mind is to do the right thing at the right time. A generous mind neither helps others without calculation nor anticipates merit. It is not about buying God’s favor to rack up points on a heavenly scoreboard. As St. Paul writes we are justified by faith and not by acts. Yet, if God so loves the world that God gave us a Son, and therefore a Life to live in Him, then our thankful response is to go and do likewise by loving our neighbors as ourselves. A generous mind does not draw attention to the messenger but points to the message that is embodied in Jesus Christ. As theologians of care, we are invited to a ministry of meekness that neither boasts nor draws attention to one’s self-but to the work of Jesus. It is to have the generous mind of Jesus.

To have an open heart is to know that God’s reign is characterized not by mighty deeds or works of power but acts of love, mercy and compassion especially to those in need.

Attentiveness of one’s own gifts and compassion for the needs and cries of others is to have an open heart. Frederick Buechner, the Christian writer, writes, “Compassion is sometimes that fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live in somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy for you, too.” This is to have the open heart of Jesus.

The words in the prayer book at baptism underscore the importance of becoming theologians of care when the priest or bishop says, “Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.” Heart. Will. Spirit. Gifts. All are from God to equip us for the works of ministry. And people will know that we are Christians by our love.

Today is Pledge Sunday. It is our harvest day as we anticipate and celebrate later this week the holiday of Thanksgiving. We will gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. We also ask the Lord’s blessing upon Christ Church. For it is the occasion to commit and pledge us to the work of Jesus’ ministry and mission in the world. When we pool our financial resources we can do so much more than we can do alone. The beauty of community is that together we can be the hand of Jesus, the mind of Jesus and the heart of Jesus. And by doing the work of Jesus together, we will find him anytime, any place, and in anyone.

I am reminded of the story about Dorothy Day a leader of the Catholic Worker organization. One day she was walking down the street in New York City with a companion and she approached a homeless person and began talking warmly with him as if he was an old acquaintance. Her companion asked her how she knew the person. Dorothy looked surprised and replied, “Didn’t you recognize him?”

“He was Jesus.”

Pentecost XVII - Skip Windsor

2011-10-09T13:20:00.000-04:00

Invitation to Hope

Have you ever attended a dinner party wearing the wrong attire for the occasion? You may come wearing a black cocktail dress and other women are wearing slacks or blue jeans. Or you may come wearing a dinner jacket and tie and the men are wearing sports coats and no tie.

When you stick out from the crowd like that, there is a sense of stupidity, embarrassment, or even anger. “How could I have missed getting the word about the dress code?” would be something that I would say. Then the response might be either to leave or to take off the tie or to act naturally. But, at the end of the day, honestly, it does not make any difference what you wear to a dinner party. The only damage done is to one’s ego.

But what you are to wear to the heavenly banquet matters to God according to today’s Gospel from Matthew. In the Parable of the Feast, Jesus concludes his story of the king giving a feast for his son by throwing out a guest who was not properly dressed for the occasion.

Imagine the guest sitting there in the banquet hall with his cup of coffee and cinnamon bun balanced in his lap. He is not sure what to do except just to watch others help themselves to the food. Then suddenly the king walks in and mingles with the other guests. The man was unaware that the king is throwing a party for his son. The king comes over and makes small talk with the man sharing a father’s delight in his son. The man is silent and expresses no interest in the king or his son. So the king sends him away. He loses his chance to remain at the banquet because of his silence.

Although the parable of the king inviting guests to the dinner is a familiar one included in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the part about the misinformed guest who comes without a proper robe is unique only to Matthew.

To our modern sensibilities this action of seeing out the door the invitee seems hard hearted, inhospitable, and even cruel. After all, the guest was invited after so many others said no to the king’s invitation in the first place. It is hard to fathom that in God’s graciousness as manifested in Jesus Christ that our Lord would include such a scene in this parable. If tolerance and inclusiveness are hallmarks of our Christian faith then this parable flies in the face of all we profess and all we believe.

Perhaps, we have to view the story as just that: a story, a parable. The definition of a parable is that “it is a metaphor or simile, drawn from nature or the common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”

If you have been sufficiently teased into active thought by the strangeness of this parable then Jesus has done his job as a masterful teacher. As many of Jesus’ parables, he begins with the simile, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” And he begins today’s parable the same way.

God’s kingdom is different from the kingdom of the world Jesus says. Whatever is troubling you, you will be relieved. Whatever sorrow you face, you will be comforted. Whoever reviles you, you will be glad. For it will be according to Jesus the meek who will inherit the earth. And to those first hearers of Matthew’s Gospel this was music to their ears.

Those early Christians were a small band of women and men who found in Jesus someone who forgave them, loved them and promised them hope that all their tomorrow’s will be better than their today’s. And their “today” was filled with persecution and fear, isolation and banishment. Matthew’s hearers were Jewish-Christians who had left behind their old faith to follow a man who they believed was the promised Messiah foretold by Isaiah and the prophets. Like the early Israelites, Jesus was the new Moses bringing people out of slavery into the promised land of freedom and peace.

Like anyone who comes into a new religion or new denomination, they were not sure how to act. They had lived with the Law. They knew the Torah. They prayed like their ancestors. But they were unsure of how to be together in community. Assailed from all sides, jeered by pagans, and threatened by the Roman principalities and powers, these fledgling Christians needed all the hope and love they could get.

When Matthew the evangelist was writing his gospel in 75 AD, he is remembering what Jesus said and did about forty years before. A generation has passed and some have forgotten the Master’s words. Matthew helps them remember. “Remember the words of Jesus.” “Remember his parables.” “Remember the one about the feast and the guy who forgot to wear a robe to the banquet.” “Remember.” “Re-member.” “Reassemble for yourselves Jesus’ message of hope and new life in Him.”

Some rejected God’s call through Jesus Christ. Some still do. Many will be too busy. Many will be called but few will be chosen. That is the crux of the first part of today’s parable. But, the second part about the guest, and unique to Matthew, is that it is not enough just to show up, one must also be dressed for the occasion. The person without a garment is the one who answers the call but makes no effort to show by their behavior that they have truly responded.

The apostle, Paul, writes of the proper attire to wear to the feast in God’s kingdom: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves in Christ” (Gal. 3.27); “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col. 3.12); “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13.4).

To come to the feast we are to wear the robes of righteousness. It is not enough to follow the Law, or to state you are a Christian. God invites us to put on Christ. We are to emulate his compassion in an unloving world. We are to imitate his forgiveness in an unforgiving world. We are to carry his light in the dark places. We are to live in his hope in a world of despair.

To put on Christ with the clothes of righteousness is to live everyday as Christ would want us to do and to do the things he would want us to do: to be grateful, to be forgiving, to teach and heal others, to speak the truth to power, to remember and care for the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. As John of Patmos writes in his letter of Revelation to the seven churches of Asia Minor, “Fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Rev. 19.8).

It is said that half of life is showing up. To some extent that is true especially about your coming regularly to church on Sundays. Thank you! Keep it up!

But, the Gospel today says that that is not good enough for Jesus. Presence is good. Participation is even better. He does not want just a part of us. He wants all of us just as he gave himself totally to us. It is not enough to be just present; rather, you and I are on the guest list to participate with Christ, in Christ, and through Christ in his continuing and enduring ministry of reconciliation and transformation in the world.

With so many characters in the Bible, we never hear more about the misanthropic guest at the feast. I would like to imagine that he finally saw the light and came out of the darkness with a clearer understanding of the king’s delight for his son. I would like to think he was more afraid that whatever ounce of hope he had had to enjoy the party or to have a chance for a better life would be lost if he spoke to the king. If he had now a second chance he would speak up to the king and enjoy his gracious hospitality.

The guest at the king’s feast reminds me of Middle Eastern story about a man named Harry who rode the train everyday to work. One day, as usual, the conductor asked Harry for his ticket. He fumbled around in pants pockets, his coat pockets, and in his briefcase.

Finally, the conductor said, “Harry, I am sure you have the ticket. Why don’t you look for it in your breast pocket? That is where most men keep it?”

“Oh no,” said Harry, “I can’t look there. Why if it wasn’t there, I would lose hope.”

Why if it wasn’t there, I would lose hope.

The invitation to hope was extended to the guest by the king at the feast. It was as near as his heart. Clothed in Christ, we are invited in faith to the feast of God. This invitation to hope is always present. It is always as near as our heart.

And now may all thanks and praise be given to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pentecost XVI - Chris King

2011-10-02T00:04:00.000-04:00

A Journey in Faith

I want to begin by extending my sincere gratitude to the community of Christ Church and Rev. Windsor for inviting me to share fellowship with you today. It is my hope that these few words will provide an insight into what one young and searching Christian has found through direct confrontation with suffering and need and in the call of Christ to serve the poor.

The spiritual understanding of pilgrimage necessarily entails a desire to seek Christ in a more intimate and profound way. Long, arduous journeys were made by Jesus’ disciples to spread the Good News of joy and salvation to all of humanity. These paths were wrought with struggle, rejection, and persecution. Yet, these humble servants forged on in hopes of reaching the hearts of God’s children and thereby change lives. Many years later, the sacrifice and devotion of the apostles to their mission serves as a foundation in the Christian tradition upon which we too can be vessels for God’s enduring and transformational love.

Another component of pilgrimage, often, is the going away, leaving behind the security and comfort of one’s own home and embracing the unexpected and sometimes terrifying world that one may wish to avoid. What must Simon Peter and Andrew have felt when they were called to leave everything and follow Jesus? What gave them the courage and strength to answer this call and “immediately” drop their nets to follow a man who was seemingly a stranger to them?

For many years, I have wrestled with this question and the notion of responding to Christ’s call to serve his people. As Christians, we yearn to know God’s perfect love and rejoice in the beauty of the world he has given to us. We want to walk with Christ and feel his nurturing embrace when we succeed, but especially when we fail. We may pray for his presence to be manifest in our lives, but this desire requires a great leap of faith and surrender to his will. And many times, God’s will calls us to places that are unfamiliar and challenging.

It was such a calling that led me to the children at Amistad Mission in Bolivia, where I have lived two of the past four years. As a young adult, I wanted to see and embrace the face of Christ in the disenfranchised and suffering and feel our unity through him. What I found while I was in Bolivia proved to be much deeper than I could have imagined. To put this journey into perspective, Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, where much of the population survives on less than $2 a day. Nearly half of the population is under the age of 18, and it is these impoverished conditions that lead many families to abandon their children to overcrowded state-run orphanages, where three or four babies share a single crib.

Amistad Mission provides an alternative to these orphanages through a loving Christian home, called La Villa, to over 70 abused, abandoned, and orphaned children, divided among eight houses with a mamá and tía as primary caretakers. La Villa provides support for the medical, spiritual, educational, and emotional needs of these children to confront and overcome their traumatic past. From the time that I arrived in 2006, I was overwhelmed by the joyful smiles and radiant personalities of the children who greeted each staff member, visitor, and caretaker every morning. Their beautiful brown eyes met you with the deepest sincerity, holding onto the present moment and giving you their undivided attention. I worked with the children to teach reading and English classes and helped to develop a microenterprise with the existing bakery. Walking into La Villa each morning, my heart would race with excitement to see the children and greet them with a “Buen Día” and big hug. How majestic was God’s grace in the lives of these precious ones!

My time with the children of La Villa continued in delight and shared merriment for several months. However, on Dec. 21, 2006, a most unexpected turn occurred while I was sitting alone at night in the office building, following our annual Christmas celebration. It was a night that would change my life forever.

Two women from the child placement agency came to the office door and desperately explained they needed shelter for six brothers who had been living on the streets for the past two weeks while their mother was dying of cancer in a local hospital. The women had visited many orphanages throughout the day, but not one could accommodate all six brothers. I called three of the mamas to come speak with these women. Upon hearing the boys’ story, one of the mamas said resolutely, “We will make room for the children in our homes.” Shortly thereafter, the boys entered, young children who had endured great suffering and been left with two options: La Villa or the streets. Their tattered clothing, dirty bodies, and empty stares revealed a brokenness that pained the heart. The youngest boy, Ariel, barely two, was barefoot with a bandage trailing behind his torn foot. He limped to the center of the room, apart from his brothers, and slowly looked up at each of us in turn. His body trembled and urine began streaming down his leg, as he wept in silence. Looking into Ariel’s dusty and forlorn eyes was the closest I have ever felt to knowing the presence of the suffering Christ in my life. One of the mamas, Teodora of Casa Copacabana, bent down and wiped the tears from Ariel’s face, saying, “You are with me now. Do not be afraid. You are safe.”

Five years later, that fateful night burns bright in my mind. Ariel, now 6, is one of the happiest children in La Villa, and he tells you each day, “Que te vaya bien en todas partes.” “May things go well for you in all of your life.” Here is a child who was once on the verge of death beaming with well wishes for all who greet him. When I think of “the least of these,” Ariel serves as a reminder of God’s redemptive grace and ability to heal any illness or hardship in our lives. As a community of faith, we are called to join together to support one another’s walk with Christ and proclaim his presence in our neighbors, entering into God’s arms “like a child.”

So I ask, where do you see the face of Christ in your life? Who are the people and what are the moments that fill you with his love and make you stop to give thanks? For some it takes a pilgrimage to a distant land to understand how universal Christ’s presence is to those who are open to receiving him. Others encounter this truth in daily interactions with a close neighbor, family member, or friend. In both instances, we are blessed to see the face of Christ in another, who might be 4,000 miles away or sitting next to you today.

Perhaps the notion of pilgrimage has more to do with the journey of the heart than it does with the physical journey to a far away place. Perhaps if we can release ourselves to join in the glorious dance of Christ’s love, we will find comfort in his arms. But in order to do so, it seems we must open ourselves to being vulnerable, not knowing when or whom God will call us to serve. May we hope to have the strength of Christ’s first apostles to answer this call. AMEN.

Pentecost XV - Lynn Campbell

2011-09-25T19:51:00.000-04:00

“It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

You’ve got big shoes to fill!

That was the line I heard over and over again as I began my job at St. Francis House, a homeless day shelter in Boston. I was beginning as the Manager of Volunteer and Pastoral Services, a position that had been held by Br. Dan for nearly 20 years. If you’d met Br. Dan you would understand why I regularly heard that I had big shoes to fill. Br. Dan, a Benedictine monk, is truly a man of God. His gentle and loving way had earned him the trust of every staff member, volunteer and guest of St. Francis House. The Rule of St. Benedict, the rule of life followed by Benedictines, states that the brothers should welcome each guest as they would welcome Christ. Br. Dan practiced this welcome with everyone he met. God was at work in Br. Dan, enabling him to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.

I’m sure I’m not the only one in the church this morning who has heard those words: “You’ve got big shoes to fill.” Maybe those shoes were worn by an older sibling, a parent, a colleague, or boss. I wonder if you experienced those words to be as paralyzing as I did. Br. Dan had been called back to his monastery, and I had been entrusted with this new ministry, but I felt trapped. I was trying to fit into shoes that were not mine. Finally after weeks of hearing about these shoes I had to fill, and of trying to impersonate Br. Dan, I had a realization. Those are not my shoes to fill. I am not Br. Dan. I had my own shoes and I had to figure out how to walk the path ahead in whatever way God was calling me to walk. I had to trust that God was at work in me, enabling me both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.

We certainly have much to learn from the spiritual giants around us. I hope I learned to embody some of the compassion that Br. Dan showed to everyone, rich or raggedy, homeless or housed, loved or lost. But, in order to be genuine, I needed to stop trying to impersonate Br. Dan. It is easy to fall into the trap of trying to impersonate someone else, of trying to convince the people around us that we are someone that we are not.

By virtue of our baptism, we have life in Christ Jesus. We are members of the one body of Christ and are capable of participating in the work of God in the world. We do not need to impersonate anyone, because the person of Christ is within each of us, just as we are in him. As we celebrate the Eucharist each week, we become even more deeply aware of this truth. We are already mystically united with Christ, and this strengthens and grows in our participation in Eucharist. I remember being struck the first time I worshipped with the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist at their monastery in Cambridge. The priest held up the consecrated bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, and announced to the congregation: “Behold what you are.” And we responded: “May we become what we receive.” We are the Body of Christ.

This morning in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians we heard the words, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” These words call us to imitate Jesus. To strive to be like him. A alternative translation, one that is more in keeping with the theology of Paul, would read: “Let the same mind be in you that you have in Christ Jesus.” -That you have in Christ Jesus. This translations acknowledges that we already participate in Christ. If this is the case, then the call to each of us is to be who we already are rather than trying to be someone we are not.

Paul gives us some insight into what it means to have life in Christ. He tells the people of Philippi, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Ultimately in these words we can hear Jesus’ commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). This is possible because we share in the life of Christ. It is not a call to try to walk in shoes that are not our own. That would be like a child who tries to walk in her mother’s shoes. We will trip and fall. Rather, it is a call to be true to who you already are.

This is not an easy mission. We follow in the way of the one who gave all that he had, even his very life. God emptied Godself in order to take on human form in the person of Jesus. And as a human being, Jesus humbled himself and was obedient to the will and work of God. Emptying oneself. Humility. obedience. These are not easy words to hear, must less to live into. Yet we know the end of the story. By following the will of God, by living into the person he was, Jesus was exalted. Resurrection came from Crucifixion, life from death. In giving of ourselves we will experience new and abundant life in Christ

One of the amazing thing about being a Christian, is we don’t do this work alone. We don’t try to follow this path as a lone ranger. We practice the self-giving love of God in community and as sharers in the one Body of Christ. I don’t normally point to the Greek translation of a word, but this morning I think it will be helpful. I started this sermon with the final sentence of today’s passage from Philippians: “It is God at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” The “you” is not singular. In the Greek it is plural. God is at work in all of you, in us, in this community, in the Body of Christ throughout the world.

This morning after the 10am Liturgy we will host a ministry fair. It is an opportunity to learn more about the diverse ministries of Christ Church and to sign up to become involved. When I look at the number of ministries stemming from this congregation, I know God is at work here. We are striving to make apparent the life of Christ that is within us. The hunger for all to be fed, at Shelter Cooking in Boston, and at this altar, the desire to teach our children and youth about the Christian faith, the impulse to serve this community as a leader, all of this stems from our life in Christ.

We each serve in different ways, using the unique gifts that God has given us. It might be through this congregation, or it might be at work, at school, or with an organization you believe strongly in. If you haven’t yet found a ministry in which to get involved, I urge you to prayerfully walk around the ministry fair, talk with the leaders, and find way to get involved. If you have been on the peripheries of a ministry, maybe it is time to step up as a leader. How ever you serve now, or decide to serve in the future, connect with the life of Christ in you. Connect with the hunger, the desire, the impulse with in you to will and to work for God’s good pleasure. Put on your shoes. Be who you already are. Amen.

Pentecost XIV - Robert T. Brooks

2011-09-18T12:10:00.000-04:00

“Are you envious because I am generous?” Matthew 20:15

“Envy,” a friend of mine says, “is the sin of the church.” The sin of the church, not one of the sins,
but the most prevalent and insidious one. Envy is one of the 7 deadly sins, and is defined as “sadness, sorrow, or grief about another’s possessions insofar as they surpass, or are thought to surpass, your own.”
Envy happens when I think the other guy got a better deal than I did, and it makes me crazy to think about it. When I was a kid, it was about my friend’s new bike (the one I wanted but didn’t have). When I was a little older, it was his new car (much better, I thought, than the old 1936 Ford I was driving). Later still, it might have been his fancy new house. In all these instances, I’m upset because he has more than I do, or at least it looks that way to me.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” Consider the story Jesus told his friends about the laborers in the vineyard. The workers who were hired early in the morning, those who had shown up at dawn,
those who lived by the old maxim that “the early bird gets the worm,” those who had spent a full twelve hours in the scorching sun- these hard-working laborers picked grapes all day long, only to return to the paymaster to find out that others, ones who had worked just nine hours, or six hours, or three hours,
even those who worked just one hour, were to be paid exactly the same wage as were those who put in a full day’s backbreaking work. It was these workers, the diligent, long suffering ones, whom the master names as envious.

But don’t these long suffering, hard working farm hands have a valid point? After all, why should someone
who worked a fraction of the time they did be paid the same wage? Its’ just not fair, they said. It’s not equitable. After all, it was HOT out there, and we worked hard all day. Why should they be rewarded just the same way we were?

Why? Because the owner of the vineyard is generous. Because those who worked the twelve hour day
had been treated fairly from the beginning, and were paid exactly what was promised to them.

The hard working farm workers were bothered, not because they had been disadvantaged, but because others had been given a gift which they did not appear to earn.

These workers made a misguided comparison between earning a living and being given a gift. They made the mistake of confusing that which was earned and that which was given. And, being the ones who worked the hardest, they complain about those who have received a “freebie.” As is the case with all the parables Jesus used, this story illuminates, or draws a picture of, the way it is in God’s kingdom. But it also illustrates what the kingdom ISN’T. And what the kingdom isn’t is a place where we earn our way in.

The dangerous thing about the workers who toiled in the fields all day long is their attitude. They think they deserve better treatment from the boss because they’ve worked so hard and long. Their theological problem is what we call “works righteousness,” an attitude that says “The more I do, the harder I work, the more God will love and reward me.”

But that’s not the way God works, and that’s not the way the kingdom works. Salvation is the gift we’ve received from God, salvation is not something we earn. Yet we are so often tempted to try to earn our way into God’s favor, to work our way into the Kingdom. This is what “works righteousness” is all about. So when someone else receives the gift of God’s favor and goodness, when someone who doesn’t appear to deserve it receives this gift from God, then envy is the inevitable and all too common response. Envy, the sadness, sorrow, or grief about God’s demonstrated love for another, about God’s gift of grace to someone else, insofar as it surpasses, or appears to surpass, our own.

Let me give you an example of envy, the sin of the church. A comment I’ve heard frequently over the years is this: “You see Mr. and Mrs. Jones over there? Why, they haven’t been here for months! I’m surprised they even dared show up at all!” What’s usually not said, but what’s often meant by such a comment is this: “Those people aren’t REAL Christians. They’re certainly not as worthy as those of us who come here every week.”

These statements, and the attitude and opinions that underlie them, are paraphrases of the comments
of those who worked a full day in the vineyard; “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” Envy in the church could be about attendance, or about involvement (like I work on three committees, and you don’t so I’m more deserving of God’s favor than you are), or about the size of my pledge compared to yours. Envy shows up when the old timers thumb their noses at newcomers, or when the able-bodied disregard the needs of the disabled, or when adults resent the presence of children in church. The ease with which we can think of examples of envy in the church is why my friend was so accurate when he said “envy is the sin of the church.” It was envy, you see, that motivated the faithful ones in Jerusalem to hand Jesus over to trial.
(Matt.27:18 “Pilate realized that it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to be crucified.”) Envy was the sin of the faithful 2,000 years ago, and it continues to be the sin of the church today.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” Consider Jonah, the reluctant prophet, called by God to preach repentance to the Assyrians at Ninevah. Jonah thought them so despicable that he ran away and booked passage on a ship bound for Tarshish, only to be thrown overboard, swallowed by a fish, and then miraculously regurgitated onto the beach. Only then did Jonah agree, reluctantly, to do as God had commanded.

And a miraculous thing happened there at Ninevah. Jonah entered the city, a city so large that it took three days to walk through it, and he warned the people of God’s anger with them. The miraculous thing is that Jonah only had to say this once, just inside the city walls, before the people of Ninevah listened, paid attention, and repented. They proclaimed a fast, and everyone in the city dressed in sackcloth.

Given his spectacular success, you might expect Jonah to have been jubilant, or at least satisfied. But what was his reaction to this turn of events? He was angry, like a petulant child who sulks in a corner. Jonah went off and sat outside the city, feeling sorry for himself.

Why? Because he was envious of the Ninevites. Jonah was unable to accept the fact that God could be gracious and merciful to the Assyrians, the ones who had treated God’s people, Jonah’s people, so brutally. What Jonah really wanted was for God to punish the Ninevites. His fear was that he would succeed in his vocation as a prophet, that the people of Ninevah would repent, and that God would forgive them. And when they did repent, and God did forgive them, Jonah was envious.

Perhaps the saddest part of Jonah’s story is its ending. The story ends with Jonah, sulking in his booth outside Ninevah, still angry, despite the fact that Jonah himself understood that it was God’s steadfast love
that motivated God to send Jonah there in the first place. Jonah understood how infinitely forgiving God can be, yet he resisted to the end. Listen to what Jonah had to say: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

How tragic. Jonah would rather die than live, he would rather die than forgive. This, my friends, is the fruit of envy. Envy begets despair and hopelessness. Envy begets spiritual death.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” Envy is an example of trying to prevent God from being God. Envy is my attempt to prevent God from being generous, to be gracious, to be merciful with others, while at the same time demanding that God be fair with me. But God is generous, no matter how hard we try to get in the way. God is gracious and merciful, no matter how much we try to deny it.

The Right Reverend Lyman Ogilby, a towering man who was Bishop of Pennsylvania, was talking about stewardship with our vestry some years ago. “Never restrain a generous impulse,” he said. “Never restrain a generous impulse.”

Bishop Ogilby’s statement was in the form of a challenge, a challenge to let God be God, and to allow God’s grace and generosity to become part of our lives in that parish as we expressed our own generosity.

And his was a statement about our humanity. The reality that we see in Jonah’s sullen response to God’s grace, the envy and jealousy of the vineyard workers in Jesus’ parable, these are reflections of our inability
to live peaceably in God’s creation, these are indications of our own brokenness.

At the same time, Bishop Ogilby’s challenge, to “never restrain a generous impulse,” was an acknowledgment that we human beings, made in God’s image, do have the capacity to be generous, as God is. We do have the ability to be gracious and merciful, as God is. We who have been offered salvation in Christ Jesus can show our thanks, in and through our own generosity.

So as you consider your ongoing outreach efforts at Christ Church, as you approach the beginning of your stewardship campaign this fall, I ask you to remember the parable of the workers in the vineyard. As you consider your support of God’s work, here and elsewhere, I ask you to remember the story of God’s graciousness in Ninevah. As you make your commitment to this work, I ask you to remember the bishop’s challenge to “never restrain a generous impulse.” In the days ahead, I ask you to consider this: are you envious because God is generous, or are you generous because God has been generous with you?

Amen.

Pentecost XIII - Skip Windsor

2011-09-11T01:03:00.000-04:00

The Shadow of the Cross

Let us pray: Be with us, O God, and give us the Spirit of Christ. Amen.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

After American Flight 11 hit the North Tower in New York city, after United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, after the twin towers fell, after almost 2800 people died in the carnage, and after people began to clear through the debris and detritus of lower Manhattan, a reporter asked the then vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church– and the current Bishop of Florida - Sam Howard about what happened on 9/11.

Howard replied, “For years we lived in the shadow of the Twin Towers, now we live in the shadow of the Cross.”

Remembering 9/11 is similar to remembering the assassination of President Kennedy or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We may not recall a birthday or a summer vacation very well but there is something galvanizing about a frightening and unexpected global event. As we observe the tragic and horrific events of 9/11, many of us can recall where we were that clear day in September a decade ago.

Ten years ago and two days, the Rev. Debbie Little, founder of Ecclesia Ministries in Boston, asked me to take the September 9th Sunday service for her on the Boston Common. She said she would be away that weekend to do a broadcast on Tuesday about Ecclesia for the Episcopal Church’s media division in New York City.

On Tuesday morning, on September 11th, at around 8:35 in the morning, Debbie called me from her taxicab, to ask how the service went on the Common the day before. We talked for a few minutes and then she said she had to hang up and would talk later because she had arrived at her destination in lower Manhattan at Trinity Church, Wall Street. When she left the cab and walked into the Trinity Church, it was then that the world exploded into thousands of pieces.

My son, Ben, called me minutes later and said, “Dad, turn on your TV. Something terrible has happened in New York. A plane has hit one of the twin towers!” Turning on TV, I became one of millions of people to witness the terrible events of that day. As it began to sink in, and I thought about friends I knew in New York, I thought of Debbie there at Trinity Church less than two blocks away from what we now call “Ground Zero.” I tried calling Debbie back. No reply. I tried again. No answer.

All morning, I kept trying to reach Debbie; and it was not until early afternoon that she called me back saying she was safe with others down at the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. She told me her odyssey of leaving the smoke filled basement of the church helping a young mother get to safety. With her were other clergy who were scheduled to speak for the recording including Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would later write a book, Writing in the Dust: After 9/11, about his own experiences of that day.

Later on, Debbie called again and said she was walking north from the Battery along the East River with others to escape the massive cloud that had shrouded them all. She recalled that when she walked out of the cloud into the bright sunshine of mid-town New York it was as if she had walked into another world. In the clear air, she saw people drinking coffee, watching the TV monitors, and going places just like another day that was so different from what she had just experienced. I asked Debbie if she was OK and had a place to stay. She said she was OK and that she called a friend in the City and was going to stay there for the night.

I trembled with Debbie. I trembled with everyone else. I trembled that day for a world turned upside down. Today, I still tremble, as I believe so many others do. But, what gives me hope this day is what Howard said in the aftermath of 9/11 about standing in the shadow of the Cross. It is through the cross, God turned an upside down world right side up. Through the cross, God became one of us so that we could become one with God. Through the cross, we believe that God weeps with us, comforts us, and leads us from darkness into light.

Abraham Lincoln once said that when he did not know what to do in difficult times, he fell on his knees. There are times in everyone’s life we have to let go and let God. When the ground rumbles, when the foundations shake, when the world comes crushing down, and when there is no where else to turn, we can look to the Cross; and in front of that symbol of life and death and resurrection, we, like Lincoln, have no where else to go but on our knees.

The Christian writer, Phyllis Trible, reflected upon the events of 9/11 and said once at a conference held at Trinity Wall Street several years later that there were two 9/11’s. One was the 9/11 event of terrorist attacks by radical Muslims and that the country had been victimized and violated requiring a violent response that led to the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.

The second 9/11 took a different route for those who were there at “Ground Zero.” There were documented acts of unparalleled bravery by firemen, police, and first responders. There were strangers helping strangers. There were men and women of different faiths praying together. There were public street workers and corporate lawyers working as one carrying people to safety.

Bound together by their common humanity, and brought together under the most egregious circumstances people came together to help one another. For Trible, she said that those on the ground that day responded entirely differently because, to use her words, “they were burned through with compassion.”

The 20th century Indian political and spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, said that, “An eye for eye makes the whole world blind.”

As a country we have sought retribution for 9/11 in a certain way; and whether it is the right or wrong way, we know more lives have been lost. Will there come a day when there will be peace among all people regardless of religion, race or creed? Is it possible, as we remember the dead and reflect upon the consequences of that dreadful day, that something good can come from the ashes of despair? Can we forgive but not forget?

The Gospel Lesson for today speaks about forgiveness and reconciliation. Peter asks Jesus how many times must one forgive their neighbor? Jesus uses hyperbole to say seventy times to clarify “always” and reinforces his point with a story. Jesus cleverly uses the parable of the unforgiving servant whose debts are forgiven by his king but he in turn does not forgive others indebted to him to make the point that if God forgives us we are obligated to forgive others. Forgiveness does not imply forgetting but does ask that we let go of the spiritual and emotional toxins of hate. As Jesus leads his followers further into discipleship, Jesus teaches them how to pray offering words that you and I say every Sunday: “Forgive us our trespasses we forgive those who trespass against us.

As we gather as a nation to observe the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 and its aftermath, we are invited to consider whether there is work left undone and whether the compassion that was burned through us years ago still needs to be burned deeper into our hearts and minds.

As we live through this day of remembrance, we live with the hope to see tomorrow, another day, a new day, on Monday, January 12th. The work of repentance and forgiveness, reconciliation and peace, will continue. And it will continue from generation to generation. May this day not be merely a number and a month on a calendar but ignite us into acts of reconciliation and peace and burn within us as an eternal fire in the heart that trembles, trembles with hope for a better, more peaceful, world.

Pentecost X - Edwin C. Pease, Jr.

2011-08-21T00:32:00.000-04:00

The Press

There’s a lot of pressure upon us and upon our children – call it worldly pressure, for lack of a better term.

We see it in the political arena. People relentlessly attacking other people, accusing them of things both true and false. Where I would like to see people in politics sit down and say, “There are things in this country that need fixing; even though you and I disagree, let’s sit down and see if we can work out a reasonable solution.” Instead, there is all-out attack on the character of the opponents.

We see the pressure in business. We know our suppliers, our fellow workers, and our customers. It would be wonderful to see if we could work out mutually beneficial arrangements both for the business and for the people involved in it. But what so often happens is brutal, with people focused completely on winning, completely on making the most money without regard to human dignity. People will say, “It’s business, nothing personal.”

We see the pressure in advertising—the really cool people dress a certain way, eat certain foods, drink certain liquors, invest for retirement with certain firms, take a lot of pills.

We see the pressure in the children’s lives at school. As an example, a counselor working in a school reported that one day a little girl came running into his office crying. He asked her, “What’s the matter?” She said between sobs, “On the playground, Billy called me ‘stupid’”. The counselor said to her, just because somebody calls you stupid doesn’t mean that you are stupid.” “By the way,” the counselor said, “I think you are a giraffe.” She said, “No, silly, I’m not a giraffe”. The counselor handed her a book that was on a table beside him and she took it in her hands. He said to her, “Do you always take everything that somebody hands you?”

St. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world…”

The Press and the Sign

I call this pressure, “The Press”. How can we get out from under The Press? It seems as if we can’t get out by ourselves. But God who loves us has worked tirelessly for millennia to rescue us. Stories of God’s tactics for getting us out of The Press are recorded in Scripture: the flood, the tower of Babel, the Ten Commandments, the prophets. God finally decided to intervene, not by sending a messenger, but by coming here in person. God broke into our world beginning with the birth of the only Son of God, Jesus Christ, a silent wondrous gift placed reverently into the hands of humanity. God has rescued us from everything that holds us locked into place: not just by the birth of Jesus, but by Jesus’ ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. In church language we say that Jesus in all aspects of his life among us is the Sign that God has broken into our world, and saved us from The deadly Press.

We say of this intervention is that it is final. Beginning with Jesus’ birth and going on from there it is clear that there is a destination, and events are on the move toward it, and that what is most important is to attach ourselves to God and get on that journey.

Why did God do this? God did this because God knows and loves each one of us personally. God can see each one of us growing to maturity, discovering and using for the good of others the gifts and talents that God has given us. God can see us all working together in a ministry of reconciliation with all people and with God.

When through participation in the faith community such as this congregation, and through the study of scripture, we understand how God sees us and what God has done for us, a kind of renewal takes place within ourselves.

St. Paul says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable, and perfect.

The Buddy and the Sign

Jesus is a sign well known to us, but not well known outside the church. For those people who know nothing about Jesus Christ, what sign is there that God has broken into this world to rescue the people?

The sign for all people is the Church: not a building, but the living community of people that has been gathered together by God. The Church is living; it is visible; and it is always under construction. Those who participate in the life of the Church, those who commit themselves to it are constantly forming the church, and are constantly being formed by their relationship to God.

This morning’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans is a great example. It was probably written in the late 50s – not the 1950s, but the 50s, period. It’s a very early document of the church, and yet it has important information in it for us today.

It is the kind of letter that is meant to be read aloud to the assembled congregation. When we listen to the words of scripture, we should be listening primarily as a congregation, rather than as individuals.

Let’s listen together to a few words from this morning’s reading:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1).

What does it mean “to present your bodies”?

The word "present" in this context means to make ourselves visible—not hiding from God and from our fellow human beings.

"Bodies" is used in the sense of words like “somebody”. When we say words like “somebody” or “anybody”, we usually pronounce the b,o,d,y part of the word so that it sounds like “buddy”.

Our “buddies” taken together are a living sign meant to be seen by other people. The “buddy” spelled b,o,d,y, is the whole person, the physical body, the mental part, and the spiritual part all combined into one.

Paul says, “I appeal to you…brothers and sisters…to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”

Our “buddys”, as in the word somebody, are what we are to present together as a congregation so that people can see the sign.

The Living Sign and the Living Sacrifice

When you hear the word sacrifice in the religious context you might think of people who believe that they can influence God by killing animals. Or you might think of sacrifice as giving something up, something that is already scarce to you. Months after the Second World War ended some things were still in short supply. I remember seeing a photograph in a magazine of a British housewife holding a small bar of soap. The caption said that this housewife was sacrificing what was left of her personal bath soap so that the family laundry could be done.

But what sacrifice in the biblical context, in the context of the Church means is “to make something holy”. Our sacrifice is to present our bodies as a congregation to all people and to God. This is not a minus, this is a plus. It enriches our lives far beyond the day to day concerns about The Press. It is exciting, because we get to do the most worthwhile work there is—to bring people together with each other and with God. Being made holy is becoming whom god made us to be.

We become transformed into the living sign of God’s saving work in the world. We bear witness to the journey we are on. The destination is reconciliation with all people and with God and a life lived by all in a close relationship with God.

Living Stones and the Stone Building, a footnote

Just a footnote about actual church buildings. Often these are made of stone. The congregation is the sign of God’s work in the world. The building is a marker pointing to the sign. When people look at this building, see its lights, see people going in and coming out, they might say, “There is the possibility of transformation for all people from deadly conformity.”

The first letter of Peter says (Chapter 2) Come to [Jesus], a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Pentecost IX - Edwin C. Pease, Jr.

2011-08-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

How many of us have been in a situation in which you have to ask someone for help. As a child having to ask your teacher permission to leave the class to go to the bathroom. Wanting to return something you bought in a store. Asking one of your parents for something you want, or asking your boss for a favor or a raise. Going through customs at the border.

There’s a lot of tension in these moments. You may get brushed off. You may get told “no” before you even get through asking.

People have learned some coping methods for dealing with possible rejection, some more successful than others: the gruff approach, r the persistent whining approach, or when asking your question you imply in the wording that the person would look really bad if they refused you, preparing to stage a tantrum if you are refused.

So many of us come from a place in which we feel that we are further down on the food chain to the person whom we are asking for help. I think this applies not only to our requests to people for help, but also in the ways in which we ask God for help.

For all of those who have difficulty in asking for help, we have this great treasure in the story of the Canaanite woman asking Jesus for help.

A preacher named Todd Weir has listed some of the obstacles faced by the Canaanite woman in asking Jesus for help.^[1]

She is used to being overlooked. Even in the gospel lesson she does not get a name.
She has broken several social taboos. She is a Gentile approaching a Jew, and the boundaries between Jew and Gentile in Jesus’s day were enormous.
She was a woman approaching a group of men. Think about the current rigid male and female boundaries that exist in some Middle Eastern states today—women in birkas, constricted to the home, she risked much to talk to Jesus in public.
Jews were wary of the residents of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon from which the woman came. In that day the poor rural Jewish peasants of Galilee grew food for the rich Gentile cities like Tyre and Sidon. We do not know the social class of this Canaanite woman, but she would have been seen as coming from the culture of people who oppress the Jews.

Everything was working against her as she came to Jesus, shouting, as the text says, with her request for help for her daughter. Weir says, “It must have been quite the spectacle to have her throw herself at the feet of Jesus. Disciples and spectators alike must have been embarrassed to have her there… Maybe now we can better understand [Jesus’] original negative response, when he says, ‘Let the children be fed first (referring to Jews) for it is not fair to give the children’s food to the dogs.’”^[2]

Here she is, turned away by God. We can sympathize with her. “How could Jesus compare anyone to a dog or say a thing like that? This story hits us in a place of fear that maybe God finds us to be really annoying. We don’t belong, we don’t deserve the bread, others are more important.”^[3]

Her response is immediate: “Yes but even the dogs under the table deserve the crumbs.” And then Jesus gives her the help she needs.

It’s wonderful to read a story like this in which God changes his mind. People are used to thinking of God as one who never changes, but in this case, God does. There are other places in the scriptures in which God changes his mind. There is the story of the person who came in the middle of the night to knock on the door of the person who owned the bakery to get bread for his family. The story ends by saying that God may answer your requests, not because God wanted to but because you were persistent in asking. You showed God that your request was important to you.

The most important thing about this encounter is that the woman believed in God. She had faith. She did not let any feeling of inferiority in herself get in her way. She did not let any concern that others might not approve of her keep her from asking for what she wanted. She may have had these feelings and concerns but if so she was able to override them and make her request plainly known. She was singleminded!

She approaches Jesus not as someone who devalues herself, and of course, not as someone who feels superior. She approaches on a level of equality. This may seem odd. How can a person be on equal footing with God?

First, it is because of faith. Her faith, to use the words of the scholar Alfred North Whitehead, was the vision of something that stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts.” It is a vision of life in its completeness in the presence of God.^[4]

Second, it is God’s acceptance of us flaws and all. God is most forgiving and accepting. God has made us worthy to stand before him. By God’s grace we have a relationship with God, and can make our requests to God, just as the Canaanite woman did. God’s grace makes it possible for us to view life in its completeness in the presence of God.

In her case her daughter was healed. In some cases, requests for healing are not answered in ways that we would like. No doubt many have prayed for healing for Jim Windhorst. But because we have this relationship with God we are better able to receive “no” as an answer to prayers, than we would be if we thought ourselves to be outsiders or inferior. We know that it is impossible to understand everything about God. We know that God was present at the death of Jim, and was the first to shed a tear at his passing. And we know that even when our prayers receive “no” as an answer it is far better to have our living and dynamic relationship with God than it is to live without God.

The Holy Communion which we will receive this morning is a sign of God’s care for us, and especially of the permanent bond between us and God. One that cannot be broken by anything. We know that God listens to our prayers and answers them. May we rest in God’s love and acceptance. And when people come to us with their requests may we listen to them as God listens to us, and give to them as God gives to us, because we embody God’s love and acceptance.

__________

^[1] The Rev. Todd Weir: Matthew 15: 21-28 "Overlooked and Under-Considered" for Sunday, August 14, 2005
^[2] Ibid.
^[3] Ibid.
^[4] C. Hoffacker, A Matter of Life and Death, p.77

Pentecost VIII - Lynn Campbell

2011-08-07T15:26:00.009-04:00

Matthew 14: 22-33

Risky Business

How many of us are risk takers? Often taking risks is seen in a negative light. It is sometimes seen as irresponsible, as a sign of immaturity, or simply impractical. We don’t want to take risks for fear of what we might lose. We fear losing money, losing face, losing friends. But in this mornings Gospel reading we are reminded that to be a Christian, to be a follower of Christ, is to be a risk taker. And I want to be clear- I don’t mean pointless risks like jumping off the roof or out of a boat if you don’t know how to swim. The type of risks I’m talking about here are risks that will bring you closer to God, risks that allow you to participate in the in breaking of God’s kingdom.

Today’s gospel reading of Jesus and Peter walking on water can lead to all kinds of bad theology. I’ve heard it argued that if you simply have enough faith, God won’t let harm come to you. Or, if you believe strongly enough in Jesus, you will never know fear. This simply isn’t true. These false understandings of fear and faith are not of God. No life of faith is completely free of fear or doubt. Even the saints felt them. But, with just a little faith, we can do amazing things with and for God even if it is with some fear. Jesus tells us we can move mountains with faith the size of a mustard seed.

The disciples know fear. They are terrified of the figure they see walking on the water towards them. Can you blame them? Last weekend I was sitting with a friend on the Vineyard staring out at the waves in the ocean. We tried to imagine sitting in a boat in those waves and seeing a man approach. We agreed we would have joined the disciples as they cried out in fear! But Jesus sees their fear and calms them saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” It is I.

These are same words God speaks to Moses as he reveals his identity in the burning bush. These words signify the presence of God. These words, spoken in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, identify Jesus with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. Here the disciples catch a glimpse of the one they are following.

So, with renewed courage, Peter challenges Jesus to command him to walk on the water. Jesus simply replies, “Come.” With these words, Peter steps out of the boat, eyes focused on Jesus, and begins to walk. We know that it isn’t long before Peter loses his focus and beings to sink.
But, as always, Jesus is ready to reach out and to save him.

Why did Peter take this risk? Why did he attempt to walk on water? I don’t know if he was trying to prove his faith in Jesus or to test him. Whatever the reason, he took a great risk in stepping out of the boat. And this risk might, at first glace, seem to have been a failure. But is it? Yes, Peter did take his eyes off Jesus and begin to sink. But this led to Jesus reaching out to save him. Because of Peter’s risk, the disciples and all of us see the saving power of Jesus. We have an illustration of Jesus reaching out to humanity to save us. Once Jesus and Peter were safely in the boat the disciples worship Jesus and pronounce that he truly is “the Son of God.” Peter’s risk leads to a confession of faith by all of the disciples. The disciples were different people after this encounter with Jesus, the Son of God. It is not that they never falter, fail, or fear again, but they know Jesus’ power and presence in their lives.

I am not a very brave person. It is easy for me to let fear get in the way of doing God’s work. The fact that I’ve been able to take any risks in my life is, for me, proof of the presence and power of God. When I was a sophomore in college I decided to travel to Mexico as part of an immersion trip sponsored by the campus ministry office. It was an opportunity to meet people in Mexico, to learn of their joys and their struggles and to gain a better understanding of the poverty and oppression experienced by so many in Latin America. I was scared. I didn’t know any Spanish and I had never really seen poverty. I had no idea what God had in store for me and my companions on this journey. What I experienced changed me.

I won’t forget the women and men I met in Mexico. They are the real risk takers of this story. I met women whose husbands have left them and their children. They had no money for food. No future to provide for them. So dozens of women came together to create a cooperative. They make beautiful handcrafts and sell them to tourists and to partners in the United States. Their risk brought them new life and new opportunities. And they told me that they knew God’s presence in their labors.

And I won’t forget Fernando, the man I met who traveled hours each day from his tiny hilltop village to sell the baskets he and his family weaved. Each morning before he left he prayed to God for protection and guidance. With the money earned he could buy food for his wife and kids. Witnessing God’s presence in the poor and seeing the effects of unjust systems ignited something in me. Stepping on the plane (even with all of my fear and doubt) changed the direction of my life. I experienced God in the love, courage and generosity of the people I encountered in Mexico. Their faithfulness, even as they walk in the troubled waters of this world, encouraged me to call out to Jesus and to seek to follow him more closely.

Sometimes it is only by looking back over our lives that we can see the value of taking a risk. Maybe it was the first time you volunteer at a homeless shelter or traveled to an unknown place. Perhaps it was when you first walked into this church or stepped up as a leader. It doesn’t have to involve leaving the country, but it does involve leaving your comfort zone. One step can lead to another and then another and before you know it God is using you in ways you couldn’t have even imagined. I’m sure many of you have stories to illustrate this. I’d encourage you to share these stories with one another. They are stories of God at work in the world. As you reflect on the risks you have taken, I also invite you to consider what risk God is calling you to make. What step will lead you and others into deeper knowledge of Jesus as the Son of God? What risk will further God’s work in the world?

Being a disciple is risky business. Stepping out of our comfort zones is not easy. Venturing into the troubled waters of the world is sometimes scary. But how else do we proclaim the love and mercy of God and participate in the building of God’s world of justice and peace? To be closer to Jesus, to see and share is his love, we sometimes have to venture out of the safety of the boat whether that boat be our homes, our circle of friends, or the pew you are sitting in right now. There will be times when we feel like we are sinking, but do not fear. Call out to Jesus. Let others help. Hear Jesus’ words to us this morning: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Amen.

Pentecost VI - Lynn Campbell

2011-07-24T11:28:00.002-04:00

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

In the name of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was in college I played on our school’s volleyball team. Being on the team felt like a full time job. I was in the gym at least once a day, ate dinner each night with my teammates, and traveled the east coast for games. We were in training and it took complete focus. If I or another team member didn’t do our part, the entire team suffered. Being in training affected every decision I made during that time in my life.

All of us are in training for something much more important than any sports team. We are in training for the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells his disciples, “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of this treasures what is new and what is old.” Trained for the kingdom of heaven. What exactly does that mean? And what is this Kingdom we are in training for? We are told what it is like. It is like a tiny mustard seed that when hidden in the ground and properly cared for will grow into a large shrub providing shade for the people and a home for the birds. It is like a fine pearl, that because of its great value, the merchant willingly sells all that he has in order to posses it. It is like yeast that is carefully mixed with flour and allowed to leaven. As is often the case in scripture, we don’t have an easy answer. Rather, Jesus engages our imaginations. We are invited to reflect on what this kingdom of God is like, while knowing that it is certainly far better than anything we could imagine.

We know that Jesus has inaugurated the Kingdom of God. We know it is of great value and is slowly breaking through the ground, slowly rising. The kingdom is here. Yet we also know that the kingdom is not fully present. If we have any doubt of this, all we have to do is look at the news and see the terror experienced by those in Norway on Friday. Hatred and violence are still alive. The kingdom of God is already present, yet not full realized. So, we continue to pray, “they kingdom come” and we continue to be a people in training for the kingdom. In his book “God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Times” Archbishop Desmond Tutu articulates what it is we are in training for, what God has initiated. He writes of his hope for a church and a society in which:

“people matter more than things, more than possessions; where human life is not just respected but positively revered; where people will be secure and not suffer from the fear of hunger, from ignorance, from disease; where there will be more gentleness, more caring, more sharing, more compassion, more laughter; where there is peace and not war.”^[i]

What a beautiful illustrations of the Kingdom of God. THIS is what we are in training for. THIS is what we are called to make real.

As Christians we do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting passively for the bread to rise or the seed to grow. We are invited to plant and nurture the seeds, to mix the yeast into the flour, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. We are called to do our part to bring about God’s kingdom of justice and peace. It is in Christian community that we train for this work of kingdom building. How are we, as individuals and as members of Christ Church, being called to contribute to the Kingdom of God that is already present, yet not fully realized?

The Rev. Stephanie Spellers, a priest in our Diocese, recently wrote an article that sheds light on this question.^[ii] She argues that the church is called to be a community that embodies, proclaims, and serves the Kingdom of God. Through our participation in Christian community we are saying yes to embodying, proclaiming, and serving the Kingdom. We are saying yes to the desire to be part of bringing about a church and a society like the one Archbishop Tutu describes. At Christ Church we embody the Kingdom in our worship each time we welcome a stranger, recognizing the face of Christ in that person. When we treat one another with respect, when we cross boundaries and enter into relationship with someone we perceive as different, when we practice the reconciling love of God, we are embodying the Kingdom. When Skip invites everyone to share in the Eucharistic feast, we are embodying the Kingdom. We don’t do this perfectly, but we are in training to embody the Kingdom with greater authenticity.

As people who embody the kingdom, we are also challenged to proclaim it. This isn’t just the responsibly of those of us in the pulpit. It is a responsibility we all share. The life-giving message of Jesus, the dream of God’s world of justice and peace, is good news. It is good news that we are compelled to share with people outside the walls of the church.

And as a community we are called to serve the kingdom. We are challenged to put the work of justice and peace building at the center of all we do. As we hear in Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” We do this in our work in Haiti and in Boston. We do this through our ministry with shelter cooking and each time we bring a meal to a fellow parishioner who is sick.

This really just scratches the surface of what it means to embody, proclaim and serve the kingdom. It is my prayer that as a community of faith we will engage more deeply in this mission and discern together how God is calling us to live more fully into dream of God.

I want to close with an illustration of just one of the ways in which members of our congregations are embodying, proclaiming, and serving the kingdom. Many of you know of Susan Retik, a resident of Needham, who lost her husband in the attacks of 9/11. In her grief, she did not turn in on herself, but instead turned to the women of Afghanistan. Susan co-founded Beyond the 11th, an organization that empowers widows in Afghanistan who have been afflicted by war, terrorism, and oppression and who have no means to feed, clothe, or shelter their children. To raise money for this organization Susan began “Beyond the Bike,” a bike ride that honors all the victims and rescuers who lost their lives on 9/11 but also celebrates the countless acts of courage and humanity that have marked the decade since.

Two of our parishioners, Janine McGuire and Katie Chiappinelli, are in training for this event. Janine will bike the 270 miles from Ground Zero to Boston and Kate will join the bikers for the last 25 miles. These two women are examples of what it looks like to be in training for the Kingdom. They, along with the many other bikers, are embodying the kingdom with each petal of their bikes, they are proclaiming the possibility of a more just world and they are serving the kingdom through the money and awareness they raise. They are crossing the cultural, political and religious boundaries that exist between us and the Afgani people and they are carrying God’s reconciling love into the world. They are doing the work of the Kingdom.

The kingdom is something we are all in training for- it doesn’t matter our age or our physical abilities. I know I can’t bike 270 miles, but there are so many other ways God is calling me and God is calling each of you to embody, proclaim and serve the kingdom. I pray that we will each find new ways of being in the world. I pray that together we discern new ways of bringing the message of Christ’s reconciling love into the world, so that God’s kingdom will come.

[i] Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 63.
[ii] Spellers, Stephanie, The Church Awake: Becoming the Missional People of God.

Pentecost IV - Lynn Campbell

2011-07-10T14:22:00.000-04:00

Isaiah 55:10-13, Mt 13: 1-9, 18-23

Today’s Gospel reading is a familiar one to many of us. So familiar, in fact, that it’s easy to tune out. It’s easy to sit back and passively let the words fall on us with little active engagement with them. We might be tempted to start thinking about the grocery list or what we are going to do after church this morning. That is the danger with familiar stories. But it also goes against the very words and message of Jesus’ parable. This story from the Gospel of Matthew is often referred to as the Parable of the Sower. But it also seems to me to be the Parable of the Soil. The soil and the sower. The one who receives and the one who shares. It is a call to hear and understand the word of God and to share it abundantly with others.

On Friday I was at my aunt’s house in New Hampshire. I was outside admiring her beautiful garden filled with wonderfully alive plants and flowers. I pointed out my favorite- a blue hydrangea tucked back in the corner. She explained to me, who knows nothing about gardening, that she has been trying to get it to flower for years with no success. She finally determined it must be because of poor soil. So she took her hoe and started to do the slow work of breaking up the soil. Then she bought some cow manure and mixed into the soil. Now, the hydrangea is blooming beautifully for all to appreciate.

It took some hard work before the soil was ready to bear fruit. But in time, it did. And the same goes with each of us. I imagine that we all have some hardness in us, maybe from past hurts or present pain, that needs to be broken open. Maybe “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth” threaten to strangle the word of God in us, just as it did with the followers of Jesus 2000 years ago. If so, it is time to open our hearts to the life-giving power of God in our midst- to seek some “fertilizer” to add into the mix of our lives. It might be some time of quiet reflection, a walk along the beach, reflection on the weekly scripture, or looking with wonder at creation through the eyes of our children. All of this allows the seeds of God to sink deeper into us, so that it will take root and grow abundantly.

God’s word sowed in each of us is active. It doesn’t just come to us to rest passively. It is a creative force within us and the world. Isaiah in today’s first reading compares the word of God to the rain and snow that falls to the earth and does not return to the heavens until it has watered the ground allowing new growth to come about. Like the waters from heaven, the word of God does not return to God empty. In the words of Isaiah, “it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” We need to trust that these words are true. The seeds of God, the word of God, are at work in us and the world. The seeds of God, taking root in us, require us to act with urgency and with love. Hearing leads to understanding and to action. We are called to join God is the life-giving work of being a sower.

At first glance the sower in today’s Gospel doesn’t appear to be a very good farmer or example to us. What kind of farmer flings seeds carelessly, without concern for where it will fall? It seems wasteful to throw seeds into soil that is hardened, thorny or shallow. The gardeners in our midst this morning, I’m sure, would tell us this isn’t the way to produce a fruitful harvest. But our ways are not God’s ways. We are finite; God is infinite. We act with fear; God acts with hope. We see scarcity; God sees abundance.

It is not our responsibility to judge the worthiness of the soil before throwing the seeds of God. We share the seeds of God’s love and mercy as freely as they were shared with us. Even if it seems like a lost cause. It might be these “lost causes” that end up truly hearing and living out God’s word. I think of Oscar Romero a man who served as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador in the late 1970s. Romero was caught up in the “lures of wealth.” He enjoyed the comfort and influence that came with being friends with the rich and powerful. It wasn’t until the assassination of a fellow priest, who worked tirelessly for the rights of the poor, that Romero began to both hear AND UNDERSTAND the Gospel message of justice and peace for the first time. The seeds that had been planted in Romero began to bear fruit in his advocacy for the poor of El Salvador. The people around Romero hoped and prayed the seeds of God would take root in what appeared to be thorny soil and they did. Many came to see themselves as beloved children of God who deserve to be treated with dignity because of Romero’s work. Romero heard and lived out the word of God and shared it with others. Sadly, in 1980, Romero was also assassinated for his decision to stand with the poor.

The seeds of God are not given for our personal benefit. They are shared with the world for the benefit of the world. They are the seeds of the Kingdom of God that is in our midst. So, not only do we take care of the word of God within us, we work to share it with others. By doing this we participate in the creative, live-giving mission of God. We help to bring God’s work of building the kingdom of justice and peace to fruition. And, ultimately, that is what the work of sowing seeds is all about. It is about God’s vision for the world. In the words of today’s collect I pray that we “may know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.

Easter VII- Lynn Campbell

2011-06-05T19:26:00.002-04:00

Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11

As many of you know, my parents live in Delaware. Thankfully I’m able to get home every few months to spend some time with them. Most recently I spent Memorial Day weekend with them enjoying the beautiful beaches of Delaware. No matter what we do while I’m home, the visit always ends the same way. I hug each of my parents tight, not wanting to let go. I know I’ll talk with them while I’m here in Massachusetts, I know we will e-mail and send cards. But that isn’t the same. There is something about being physically present to one another. We want to grab hold of the one’s we love. I imagine those of you with seniors graduating from high school and preparing to leave for college can relate this feeling of wanting to hold on.

Today marks the last Sunday of the Easter season. This, the 7th Sunday of Easter, is sandwiched between the Ascension which the church celebrated this past Thursday and Pentecost, which is next Sunday. Here we are, caught up in this time between Jesus ascending to the Father in heaven and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Ascension, and this short time leading to Pentecost, is a time in our church calendar that is too often brushed aside with little notice.

For 40 days following the Resurrection, Jesus is physically present to his disciples. He reinforces his teaching about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He continues to show them the way forward. He tries to prepare them for a time in which he would no longer be present to them in the same way. I’m sure his physical presence was a comfort to the disciples, especially after the fear and pain of the cross. I imagine that the disciples wanted to grab hold of Jesus- keep him with them even if for just a little while longer. He was their friend, their brother. And as we know, the physical presence of those we love is important.

In this morning’s lesson from Acts, we hear the story of the ascension, we hear of Jesus who is lifted up to heaven as the apostles watch. I wonder if they felt a sense of abandonment or sadness as they watch their friend disappear behind a cloud. But before ascending, Jesus shares some final words of promise and commissioning. Listen to these words. They are spoken to us, who gather together some 2000 years later, just as truly as they are spoken to the first apostles. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Although Jesus will not be present with them in the same way, he does not leave them abandoned. He promises them the Holy Spirit and he commissions them to a life of witness.

After Jesus ascends into heaven, Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that the disciples return to the upper room where they join together with some women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. They come together and they pray. In the Gospel of Luke we also learn that the disciples praise God in the Temple. They come together, they pray, they praise God, they prepare their hearts for the coming of the promised Spirit.

So, like the disciples, we have been given the gift of time to ready our hearts for the coming of the Spirit. We have a week of anticipation, expectation, and preparation. We anticipate the coming of the Holy Spirit, we expect this gift, and so we prepare our hearts to receive it. I have heard this time of the church year compared to Advent. Advent is also a time of anticipation, expectation and preparation. We do so to ready our whole self for the gift of Jesus, born to us as Immanuel, God with us. Now, we are readying ourselves for the gift of God’s Holy Spirit.

With Pentecost on the horizon, we join with the disciples in preparation for the coming of the Spirit. We take on the posture of anticipation. We prepare for the coming of the Holy Spirit with the expectation that God WILL do something and we WILL be more deeply empowered to do the work God has given us to do.

But, do we really expect the Spirit to come anew and renew our lives? Do we want this? The Holy Spirit has the power to form and transform us. If we are open to the Spirit, she will call us and form us into new ways of being church, new ways of being in communion with one another and with the wider world. The Spirit will call us into the world to be witness to Jesus Christ. It is worth asking ourselves, are really open to this transformation? Do we want to invite the Spirit into our lives, even if we know we will be changed? If our answer is yes, then we must be ready to be drawn deeper into relationship with God and to participate in God’s mission of building a world of justice and peace. These are question we ask ourselves as individuals but they are also questions for us as a Christian community. I invite you to sit with these questions this week. It is one way of preparing for next week’s important celebration of Pentecost.

In today’s Gospel reading we overhear Jesus’ intimate prayer to his Father in heaven. In this final prayer before the betrayal that will lead to his crucifixion, Jesus prays that we may all be one as he and his Father are one. Jesus prays that our communion with one another would mirror the communion which Jesus and the Father share. During this time between the Ascension and Pentecost we pause to hear Jesus’ prayer for us. We pause to reflect on Jesus’ desire for us, that we become one with each another in order to create a world in which God’s reconciling love and truth is known by all. This is only possible with the power of the Spirit.

I don’t like change. I tend to like things to stay the way they are. I like to be comfortable. But the Holy Spirit is not about keeping things the same or making us more comfortable. Jesus does not send us the Holy Spirit so we can continue to live as we always have. It takes prayer and it takes community to be willing to open our hearts to the catalytic power of the Spirit. It might make us a little nervous, but it is also amazingly exciting. The Holy Spirit makes possible our work in the vineyard. The Spirit makes it possible to be co-creators in bringing about God’s dream for us and for the world.

If nowhere else, we experience this each week as we gather to celebrate Holy Eucharist. During the Eucharist Prayer as the priest prays over the bread and wine, she or he calls on the Holy Spirit to come upon the bread and the wine so that they may become for us the body and the blood of Jesus. Jesus becomes present to us in a real and profound way. By the power of the Holy Spirit the bread and wine are forever changed so that WE might be forever changed. The work of the Spirit allows us to enter more fully into communion with God and with one another- that we may become one as Jesus and the Father are one. THIS is what the Spirit is capable of doing in our lives and in the world. Perhaps this week would be a good time to imagine, with God, what the Spirit wants to do through you for the life of this particular community and in the world. I believe this will help us come ready to be renewed by the Spirit next week.

As we prepare to celebrate the Eucharist together this morning and as we enter into this week of preparation before Pentecost, may we find time to explore what we expect and anticipate will come with the renewal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. May we open our hearts and our imaginations so that we can be ready to receive anew the power of the Spirit in our lives.

Amen.

Easter IV - Skip Windsor

2011-05-15T09:36:00.025-04:00

1 Peter 2:19-25

The Face of Christ

Let us pray: Almighty God, sustain us through your Holy Spirit. Let our words be more than words so that what we say we will do in deed and set our hearts on fire to serve your people and further glorify your Holy Name. All this we ask in the name of your Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Not long ago, the Bishop of Connecticut, Ian Douglas, was at the Episcopal Divinity School to speak to students and alums about the current state of The Episcopal Church and his new role in the governance of the Church.

According to a clergy colleague, Bishop Ian talked about visiting congregations and reported his conversations that went something like this: “Oh, bishop, we’re so glad you’re here. We want you to help us grow.”

“Why,” asked the Bishop?

“What?”

“Why do you want to grow?”

“Well… isn’t that what we are supposed to do?”

“Well, why?”

“Well… so the church can have more members.”

“Why?”

“So the church can grow.”

“Why?”

“Well, more members means more pledges and more pledges means we can grow.”

The Bishop went on to say that the church – the people – does not exist to tend to itself but to care for others; and that the mission of the church is being about the business of catching up with what God is already doing in the world and to join God’s mission in the world.

“The ministry of the church is to be about the business of catching up with what God is already doing in the world.” Now that is quite a mission statement!

I do not think anyone here would disagree that a church that adds more members to the shared life in Christ is doing a good thing. Jesus’ charge in the Great Commission reinforces such community growth when he gives the command to the disciples to baptize all people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and that is exactly what you and I are celebrating this morning

Today, we will witness and celebrate the baptism of Elyn Grace into the Household of God. She will be our newest Christian and it is a time to rejoice. As Elyn grows and matures, she will learn about God and what it means to be called a Christian. Sometime in the future, if it is God’s will and hers, she will re-affirm her baptismal vows in confirmation.

My hope is that she will see her confirmation not as a graduation that relieves her of her Christian responsibilities; but she sees confirmation as an inauguration. Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and through the power of the Holy Spirit, Elyn will see herself as an ambassador of Christ sent forth to be a healer, reconciler and witness of God’s love.

In this ceremony of baptism, you and I are going to re-affirm our own baptismal vows prior to her baptism. The words, taken from the Creeds, are the tokens of our Christian faith; and as we recite together our Baptismal Covenant, it is an apt time for us to reflect upon who we are and whose we are.

The famous theologian, Karl Barth, once said the word of God is not in the Bible but to be discovered through the Bible. In scripture, we know that God sent forth his purpose through the divine spirit at creation, through Abraham and Sarah to a new homeland, through Moses out of Egypt, through the prophets and sages of Israel, and through Jesus who said, “Just as the Father has sent me so I send you.”

Through salvation history, God is seen as a missionary God. God is a sending god. God sends forth people to be missionary people. If they are to be followers of God they are to be a sent people. It is said that ‘the church exists by mission just as fire exists by burning.’

Mission is central to the life of the church because mission is central to God. And the mission is not to draft or recruit people into “our denomination” nor bolster church membership; rather, it is to alert and awaken people to God’s purpose in the world.

You and I live, move and have our being as the Church – the Laos, the people of God - in order to try and make the Kingdom of God more real, more visible, to the world. As God’s hands in the world, we are to help transform people into a new life in Christ. We are able to do this because the Church is the place where God’s love is expressed and shared.

To see ourselves as a sent people, a missionary people, by a sending God is to be freed from the worries and attachments of trying to be “like the world” with business plans, gap analysis, and marketing plans. As St. Paul writes, “we are in this world but not of this world.” To be mission people is a counterintuitive life that threatens the current ethos of a secular society and startles the top-down governance of the institutional church.

I believe it requires seeing ourselves as empowered by God as a sent people that frees us from spending time and energy in the wrong places.

In the dynamic tension between church maintenance and church mission, Jesus’s mandate is to valorize mission.

If we can do that first and foremost then the church will have the human and financial resources to maintain the buildings, to strengthen programs and meet the expenses needed to keep the lights on.

Jesus’ call to us as the sent ones of God belongs to us all by virtue of our baptisms. It is the mission of the church – the mission of you and me - to seek and serve Christ loving our neighbor as ourselves. I believe if we can rediscover a renewed sense of mission we will be a transformed church; and one that is relevant and meaningful for the people of today. As Dr. Elwin Semrod of Harvard Medical School once said, “people will return where they find help.”

I have this image of the missionary church. It is not of a big cathedral; nor is it of soaring towers. It is not of committee meetings nor strategic plans nor even an Every Member Canvass. For these things merely serve as a means to an end. Rather, the picture of the church I have is of people formed of one flesh in Christ, weaving a circle, threading hands. Not standing still. Moving. Dancing. They are men and women, boys and girls. They are people like you and me.

They rejoice being together in community –helping, serving, caring, and forgiving one another – but they do not look inwardly. Rather, they face outwards; ready to be sent forth, looking for others in need and being in solidarity with the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. This is the missionary church. It is the face of Christ.

Shakespeare once wrote that we are the stuff dreams are made of. As we prepare to witness and celebrate Elyn’s baptism and re-affirm our own, let us dream the good dreams of God; and with God’s help, we shall grow in faith, grow our church, and grow more and more into the full stature of Christ.

Easter III - Stan Hitron

2011-05-08T23:54:00.000-04:00

A Lesson Plan for Knowing the Risen Lord

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you oh God, our creator, redeemer, and sustainer.

“Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

The Gospels tell of Jesus’ many talents: Prophet, Healer, Miracle Worker, Redeemer. But he started his illustrious earthly career as a teacher. He showed this aptitude for His Heavenly Father’s profession at the early age of 12 when he was found in the temple by his worried mother in the midst of the scribes and elders brilliantly explaining the Scriptures to them. When his mother chides him for disappearing on her, he reminds her, “I must be about my Father’s business.”

So being in the teaching business myself, I know that it is not enough to know your subject matter, present it to your students, and have them recite it back to you on a test. A good teacher tries to create transformative learning experiences, learning that creates a permanent change in the learner. In our scriptures for today we have outlined for us a lesson plan on how we can have the transformative learning experience of knowing that Jesus is Lord, He is present in our lives, and that He is here, as today’s psalm says, to free us from the “cords of death.”

In today’s Gospel, Cleopas and his companion first encounter Jesus as a teacher. As a teacher myself, I think I understand Jesus’ frustration at how slow His pupils can sometimes be, a frustration that is expressed throughout the Gospels. How often over the three years of Jesus’ earthly ministry do we read of situations where after all the explaining and demonstrating, parables and miracles, his erstwhile followers, his students, still don’t get it. I know how he feels. In my somewhat less illustrious career of nearly 30 years, how often have I thought, “They’ve read the text, heard the lecture, seen the demonstrations, tried to apply the concepts themselves, yet – where’s the transformative learning?”

So it is no different in our Gospel for today with Cleopas and his companion when Jesus, the risen Lord, joins them on the road to Emmaus. They fail to see beyond the events of the past weekend. They’ve forgotten or not really comprehended the Scriptures and Jesus’ lessons. They have witnessed Jesus wonderful life, but also the terrible and disappointing passion and death of the man as Cleopas says, seemed “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” one whom they thought was the Messiah, the one ordained by God and promised throughout scripture as Luke says, “to redeem Israel.” Instead of a glorious triumph by this mighty prophet, Cleopas laments, “our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.” ––Bummer— what a way to run a revolution! So we are told “they were sad” sadder probably than usual for a Sunday morning, this first day of the work week when promise of the weekend yields to the now greater drudgery of the weekly grind.

Like a good teacher, however, after a brief moment of frustration at “how foolish [they] are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” Jesus, probably for the umpteenth time, as Luke tells us “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, . . . interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Still Cleopas and his companion’s “eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

I see this failure to “recognize him” akin to another obstacle to learning that teachers encounter. No matter the subject matter, no student enters a class as a blank slate. Everyone has assumptions and preconceptions that are difficult to get to clear out to make room for the new learning. Resurrection, now there is a new concept, something up to this time no human being could conceive of or do. Cleopas and friend had their own preconceived notion of the Messiah: “a prophet mighty in word and deed” one who is “to redeem Israel,” not a man who is handed over to crucifixion by his own people, dies a horrible, humiliating death on a cross, and is buried.

But Jesus was making some progress with these students, for as they arrived at Emmaus and He was about to part from them, they urged him to stay and have dinner with them, “We’ll treat,” perhaps Cleopas said. There was something in the way this stranger explained God’s promise throughout scripture and how it all pointed to this man Jesus whose work they knew and whose terrible death was such a disappointment to them. Cleopas tells the Apostles back in Jerusalem that the fellow traveler’s words “set our hearts burning within us.”

It is again as a teacher that I try to understand what’s going on here. How does Jesus, the teacher, get Cleopas so excited that he wants to keep this stranger around a little longer to learn more? To really understand that the scriptures point to a miraculous resolution to Jesus passion and death, the student of scripture must be fully engaged with a burning desire to understand the promise to God’s people of the Old Testament and the good news of its fulfillment in the Gospels. This initial desire to know can come from us. And as students we can strive to empty our minds of preconceptions to make room for the new, transformative learning. We can also strive to have faith in Jesus, the teacher, who will lead us forth, the meaning of the Latin root of the word education, to realize the Truth that will set us free. We need Jesus as our teacher because like a good teacher Jesus knows how to engage his students in the learning.

Jesus’ method is explained in our first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles. It’s called the Holy Spirit, and it is what filled Peter and the others on Pentecost and gave them the courage to preach to the multitudes gathered in Jerusalem. Peter tells the crowd how by repenting and being baptized they, “will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” which had just come to the apostles as tongues of fire. Cleopas and his companion are getting a little taste of what is to come on Pentecost. Jesus’ explaining the scriptures to them had the same effect as the Holy Spirit did on Pentecost. It set their “hearts burning within them.”

So we have the text, the teachings of the scriptures, and by repenting and being baptized, we can be filled with the Holy Spirit to truly ugrasp these teachings. However, as today’s Gospel shows Cleopas and his companion needed more than an insightful understanding of Scripture to have the transformative learning experience of truly knowing the risen Jesus, the “Word made flesh” that transcends the Jesus of history and the written text. Their burning hearts drove them to want more. If only this stranger they met on their road to Emmaus would agree to remain with them a bit longer. “Let’s have a meal together and get to know each other a little better,” they thought.

Today’s psalm reminds us of the centrality of the sacramental meal of the Holy Eucharist as a way to know the risen Lord and what His death and Resurrection mean for us. The speaker in today’s psalms is thanking the Lord for responding to his pleadings to saved from death. The speaker expresses his praise and thanksgiving for God’s saving mercy. In a similar way in the liturgy of Holy Eucharist, we call for God to save us and we respond to the saving experience by thanking Him for his mercy.

The words of today’s psalm could be a summary of the human condition that the sin of Adam has put us in:

The cords of death entangled me;
the grip of the grave took hold of me; *
I came to grief and sorrow.

But

Then I called upon the Name of the LORD: *
"O LORD, I pray you, save my life."

We all fear the cords of death, but we are told that there is a way to escape them.

Some of the language in this psalm is very familiar for we hear it every time we celebrate the liturgy of Holy Eucharist and partake of the bread and wine. Every Sunday, as today’s psalm states, we “offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving.” And partake of “the cup of salvation.” And as it happened for Cleopas and friend so it also can happen for us. Perhaps by not naming Cleopas’ companion Luke is inviting us to put ourselves in this narrative of discovery. As Cleopas’ companion, we too can have our hearts set afire and our eyes open to recognize the living Jesus who is even now at this moment and will remain our companion on our road through life.

Every time we celebrate the liturgy of Eucharist we can travel the road to Emmaus with Cleopas arriving at our own transformative learning experience. We can hear Jesus explaining the promise of the Scriptures. We can confess our sins, and like the multitudes on Pentecost, receive the Holy Spirit and in repeating Jesus sacrificial act and partaking of “the Body of Christ, the bread of heaven” and “the cup of salvation” we can experience the transformative learning that took place so many years ago in Emmaus. As with Cleopas Jesus, the risen Lord and our Redeemer who has freed us from the “cords of death” is “made known to [all of us] in the breaking of the bread.”

Easter Day - Skip Windsor

2011-04-24T20:53:00.002-04:00

Colossians 3:1-4

A Happy Thing

O God, open our hearts to your word – a word that passes swiftly and faithfully from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the life. Amen.

A grandmother told me not too long ago about the time she took her five-year old grandson for the first time to a carwash. As the car entered the enfolding darkness, sprayed with brightly colored soaps, soaked with high pressure hoses, and blasted with drying fans, the grandson looked up at his grandmother with a worried look and asked, “Grandma, is this a happy thing?”

“Is this a happy thing?” I think these words may capture something of what the first disciples were thinking when Mary burst into the upper room and told them that the tomb of Jesus was empty. At first, they may have thought it a bad thing until they received different messages and came to realize for themselves that this was indeed a happy thing.

Easter is a happy day because you and I celebrate a happy thing: Jesus lives! Today is the celebration of our hope in Jesus Christ. The faith of the Christian Church is dependent upon the resurrection. All hinges on the belief that “Christ is risen”. To be clear it was St. Paul who used the words, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” expressing the belief shared by all the earliest Christians.

Each Gospel tells a different resurrection story and each writer gives it his own particular slant. Angels, earthquakes, strange appearances, missing bodies all mark the events of the empty tomb. Our reading selection from John’s Gospel today renders a vivid account of fits and starts, running and stopping, love and loss, recognition and mistaken identity. It is a gripping narrative. It is grand story telling; but is it real?

Did Mary actually meet a gardener? Does it matter whether Peter and John actually saw Jesus’ linens folded neatly into two piles in the tomb? What matters, I think, is that Mary, Peter and John left behind their old lives, their frightened selves and became a transformed people. Somehow, in an odd and mysterious way, the resurrection of Jesus was not just about him. Rising from the dead was not done as some selfish act of God to liberate God’s son.

The resurrection of Jesus was about, and for, Mary, Peter, John and all the disciples. No longer was Jesus a “he:” some separate entity distanced from them. Now, Jesus became part of them. He and they were as one: still separate persons but intensely and mysteriously unified. “No longer,” as St. Paul writes, “do I live but the Christ within me.”

The late Peter Gomes of Harvard’s Memorial Church writes that you and I are called to be “Easter Christians.” We are to put off and set aside the old life and put on Christ. We are to put away anger, wrath, malice, and slander and to put on kindness, humility, and compassion. Gomes is realistic enough to note such biblical mandates come with a sobering reproach:

“The great trick in our intellectual world is to think of something we want to do and then imagine it to be so impossible as not to be able to do it which relieves us of the responsibility of trying to do it.” Gomes believes that these attributes of wholeness, integrity and authenticity are waiting to be summoned forth so that we can walk a new life as a resurrected people.

In our epistle lesson for today from Colossians, the apostle Paul writes, we are to take off the old and put on the new.

I am reminded of the story told by the Christian author, Max Lucado, called “Take it off? Take it all off.” It is the story Bob, who was born into the land of coats and was persuaded by various people to wear a variety of coats, depending upon which color of coat they were wearing themselves.

Bob got so good at changing coats so swiftly, depending upon whom he was with, that he became very popular. But, one day, Bob met a man who wore no coat, and who advised him to take off all his coats and “let the world see who you truly are.” So Bob was left to ponder the question, “Take them off? Take them all off?”

The advice of the man in the story is the same advice Paul offers in his Epistle to the Colossians. Using his words from another biblical translation called The Message,

Paul writes: “If you are serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with things right in front of you. Look up and be alert to what is going on around Christ – That’s where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life – even though invisible to spectators – is with Christ in God. Christ is your real life” (Col. 3:1-4).

To take seriously the resurrection of Jesus is to see our lives differently. To paraphrase the poet Emily Dickinson we are to see it slant. To live into this new life in Christ, which may be invisible to others, is to seek a change of consciousness from being merely observers of an unfolding story but participants in the continuing narrative of salvation.

In the beginning God created the world to have a relationship with creation. This love was to become visibly manifested; and this love was shown most exquisitely through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God took this risk to love; and the resurrection is God’s invitation to us to take the same kind of risk of love in our lives today.

Resurrection is not written in books alone. We are eyewitnesses to it everyday:

We see resurrection when one small black Anglican bishop and a long imprisoned man say no to apartheid and dismantle a country of oppression re-creating a new world of liberation and justice.

We see resurrection in the rescue of 33 entombed Chilean miners who were buried alive for 69 days

Resurrection is known when the organs of a brain dead man are given to three people who are able to live now because of him.

I see resurrection in the hopeless face of a Haitian girl who thought she would never walk again but brightens as she takes her first steps because of the compassion and ingenuity of a physical therapist

I see resurrection in a terminally ill woman who spends the remaining days of her life teaching a special needs boy how to live with strength and courage by her own brave example of compassion.

I see resurrection in a lost boy who was bewildered and beleaguered by drugs and alcohol that died to his old self and lives now a new life by selflessly serving his country.

Resurrection is about experience as much as it is about belief. Signs of resurrection surround us daily if we have the eyes to see. Easter is not a past event but is the event of our lives.

At Easter, you and I rediscover that behind the universe is a God who brings love, hope, and promise to everyone. Death is not the end because Christ is risen. In this sure knowledge, you and I live not just with a hope but live in the Body of Hope with the one we call Savior: Jesus Christ.

This is a happy thing – a very happy thing!

Maundy Thursday - Holly Hartman

2011-04-21T21:06:00.004-04:00

On Maundy Thursday, we at Christ Church practice the ancient ritual of foot washing.
You can see in your bulletin that you’ll have the opportunity to participate in this right after this
homily. If you choose. I hope you do choose.

Why do we do this? Presumably, we want to emulate Jesus. The humility, love, and act of
service that Jesus displayed when he surprised his disciples during their Last Supper together to
perform this act.

At first, the disciples bristled. “You will NEVER wash my feet”, Peter says. But Jesus
admonishes him that unless he allows this humble, pious act to occur, then Peter will “have no
share” with Jesus.

Most of us, bristle, too, when it comes to foot washing. “You will NEVER wash my feet”, we
think or even say out loud, when it is offered on Maundy Thursday. Feet are smelly, ugly, dirty.
It’s awkward. It’s embarrassing. It’s uncomfortable. Instead of identifying with Jesus, we
identify with Peter in this story. Peter was embarrassed to have Jesus, his master, treat him as if
the roles were switched and Jesus was the servant instead. Jesus’ message was to reassure Peter
that there is no greater or lesser person in the eyes of God. Everyone can serve, and everyone
can be served.

I am certainly not going to shame you into having your feet washed tonight, or even try to
convince you. But I do want to share a story with you that changed my own feelings about foot
washing.

A few years ago, I was in Haiti on a mission trip with some members of my sponsoring church,
St. Paul’s in Dedham. It was October of 2008, and our trip took place just after a series of
powerful hurricanes had afflicted the country. I was walking to church on a Sunday morning,
along the unpaved road in the rural village of Juampas. With me were three young adult Haitian
friends- Jothson, Pascal, and Kerline. All three of these people are very close to my heart. They
speak English quite well, and always serve as our translators many times. I have been a guest at
their homes.

The dirt roads were full of big ruts, and there was mud everywhere. We were all dressed up for
church, but I was wearing sneakers because I knew I couldn’t navigate those ditches and mud
puddles without them. Kerline, however, a beautiful 21 year old woman, adeptly negotiated
around the ruts in her high heels.

We came to a place in the road that was covered with water. In order to continue on, we had to
walk from rock to rock in the puddles. My friends held my hands, but I still managed to slip off

a rock and land in the water. With mud up to my ankles, now, I wondered how I could ever make
it to church.

My young friends laughed at my plight, and without a word, brought me over to the nearest
house- a hut, in our standards. As if pre-planned, a homemade cane chair appeared in the yard,
and they sat me down. Kerline took my shoes off and headed over to a pump to wash them.
Jothson went to fetch a bucket of water, and seeing my distress, patted my shoulder, laughing,
telling me not to worry. Before I knew it, my young friend Pascal was washing my feet. As he
squatted down and tenderly wiped the mud off each foot, I said to him “Pascal….you remind
me of Jesus.”

You see, I thought I was there to serve the Haitians, and in true biblical reversal of roles, the
Haitians were serving me.

Having your feet washed is not a comfortable thing. Washing someone else’s feet is equally as
disconcerting. So, why do we do it on Maundy Thursday?

We do it, of course, to remember that Jesus commanded his disciples to love one and serve one
another. The act of washing their feet before they ate their last supper together was the most
humble way he could demonstrate the radical love and desire to serve them that he had. John
13:1 ? tells us that Jesus “showed them the full extent of his love.”

We, too, are to love and serve each other

Palm Sunday - Lynn Campbell

2011-04-17T19:41:00.005-04:00

Mt 21:1-11, Philippians 2:5-11, Mt 27: 11-54

Today, Palm Sunday, we begin again. Whatever your Lent has been, this is now Holy Week, the most sacred week of the Christian year. We are invited to make the choice to enter more deeply into the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem and ultimately to the cross. We are called to let go of our fears and our false loves and to instead walk with Jesus in his suffering.

Offering any reflection on Holy Week, especially after the reading of the Passion narrative, is a daunting task. How can words ever adequately reflect the mystery of Jesus’ death on the cross? For me this is a time in which words fail to satisfy. I think our Church, in her wisdom, also knows this to be true. So, on this Holy day and during this Holy week, we are offered other ways – a liturgical path – on which to enter into the great Mystery of our faith.

We are embodied people and we need external signs to help us take in the importance of this Sunday and the importance of this truly Holy Week.

As you walked into the sanctuary this morning, you knew something was different. The altar hangings have changed from the purple of Lent to this beautiful deep red, we were given palms to hold, and we have palms rather than flowers on the high altar. The liturgy even started in a way that is different from any others.

And the scriptures, the stories for this day. We don’t just hear them. We experience them. We move quickly from the passionate and hopeful shouts of “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” to the condemning shouts of “Let him be crucified!” Palm Sunday always gives me the feeling of emotional and spiritual whiplash. I can never seem to make sense of the shift from Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem to his death on the cross. But in my confusion, I can imagine how extraordinarily difficult it was for Jesus -- how painful, how horrible -- to reconcile that his journey had come to this.

We don’t just think about this journey in our minds or our words. We come to know this reality with our bodies. The Church offers us ways to enter more fully into this Mystery of Jesus passion and death. We do this later in the week with the liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. In the powerful liturgy of Maundy Thursday we remember the Last Supper shared with Jesus and his disciples. And as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, we will wash one another’s feet as a symbolic act of love and service to our sisters and brothers.

On Good Friday, through Scripture, prayer, and music, we will meditate on the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. We will sit still, grieving, scared, with Jesus who, in the words from today’s letter of Paul to the Philippians, “emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Holy Week is not like every other week. Life is different this week. We intentionally journey with Jesus, in our prayer and in our actions, to the darkness of the grave. Perhaps you will do this through attending the Holy Week liturgies this week or maybe through your own prayer and meditation with Scripture. Whatever path you choose, please choose one. Allow your heart to be transformed by the humility and obedience of Jesus to the will of God. Empty yourself of those things that keep you from walking with Jesus. Open yourself to become a new creation.

As Christians we know that death does not have the last word. We know that love overcomes fear and the life is victorious over death. But we cannot experience this new life and love without journeying with Jesus to the cross. May God be with us on the journey.

Lent II - Skip Windsor

2011-03-20T22:46:00.008-04:00

Ps 121; John 3:1-17
Born Again

This morning I would like to reflect with you on the Gospel lesson from John. I would like for us to consider what it means to be “born again” and how it has implications for our understanding of Christian freedom and human responsibility.

If you were to ask me who was one of the most unforgettable people I have ever met, I would have to say it was a wandering Scotsman who I met as a boy while living in London in the late fifties.

I met the Scot one Saturday afternoon with my friends. We were sitting on a bench when an older gentleman wearing a kilt and a “tam o’ shanter” cap approached us and asked if he could sit down. He told us he was traveling all through the British Isles telling everyone how Jesus Christ had changed his life.

He showed us his Bible where his name was inscribed on it along with some dates underneath it. The Scotsman explained that the first two dates were the date of his birth and the date of his death. Underneath these dates was the same year as his purported death with just a hyphen after it. He said the third and final date was the date when he was born again. Puzzled, we asked him what this second birthday meant; and he replied that he had been “born again” in the Spirit.

I remember thinking at the time “what happened to this man that caused him to change his whole life and begin to wander the globe telling anyone, including a bunch of eleven-year old boys like us, that Jesus saved him?” The longer and lingering question for me was, “How can this be?” From time to time when I read this gospel lesson I remember “The Wandering Scotsman” and his being born again and my question of how can this be? It is the same question that Nicodemus asks of Jesus.

This encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, calls “The Gospel in Miniature.” It seems to summarize the Gospel of Jesus for Luther because of what Jesus tells Nicodemus about the mysterious movement of the Spirit. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus reveal the truth of faith about how we experience the Triune God if we are open, obedient, and prepared to receive God’s grace and power.

In John’s Gospel we know that Nicodemus is of the Jewish ruling class. He is a member of the seventy man Jewish tribunal called the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of his people. Next to Roman rule, the Sanhedrin was the most powerful governing body in Judea.

This influential ruler comes to the popular rabbi by night not to question Jesus about the desirability to change but whether there is even a possibility for such a man to change. Nicodemus is faced with the perennial existential problem of one who wants to change but who has no power to change himself. Jesus tells him, “Truly, truly, I say to you unless one is born anew, they will not see the Kingdom of God.”

The expression “born again” is not new to us. We hear in certain Christian groups that we must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of God. I am reminded of the story Bishop Barbara Harris tells of being accosted in an elevator by fundamentalist, charismatic, Christian who asked her if she was born again. Bishop Barbara replied no she wasn’t born again because the first time was hard enough! Yet, behind the grilling and questioning by some of whether we are “born again” to their liking, there is an important gospel truth worth reflection. According to the evangelist, John, who was an eyewitness to this encounter, Jesus is speaking about personal transformation whether it is sudden or gradual.

Being born again, means a person undergoes a powerful spiritual conversion that alters, changes, and transforms him or her to such an extent that they believe they are a new person. Such an experience happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus and to St. Augustine in the garden. The feeling of conversion is described as a dying and a birthing at the same time. Jesus says to Nicodemus this spiritual transformation is not by human will but by the will of God through the Spirit.

I believe this is what happened to the Scotsman. The Spirit changed him. I am sure each of us knows someone who experienced such religious conversion. But what about the rest of us? Are you and I missing out on something big or does being born again simply imply less about us and be more about the nature and grandeur of God. Should not our focus be away from our own self-diminution and more about how the greatness of the Holy Spirit works in our lives? Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus holds the answer and why Luther believes it to be the Gospel in miniature.

Night covers Nicodemus. Not only is he spiritually blind; but also he is afraid to be seen. The encounter is a perplexing one with back and forth questions and answers. Then Jesus delivers the punch line: “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen; but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

We know little about Nicodemus after his conversation with Jesus. The evangelist, John, tells us little more about him; except, one more time when he comes with Joseph of Arimithea to claim the crucified body of Jesus. What conversion happened to him that brought him from darkness into the light? Like the journey of any soul, intimacy with God, is as mysterious as it is personal. The Scotsman never told us boys of his conversion experience. The only thing he wanted to share was his transformed life in Jesus Christ.

Another Scotsman, theologian William Barclay, likes to tell the story of a workman who had been a drunken reprobate and was later converted. Barclay writes that the Scotsman’s working colleagues did their best because of his conversion to make him feel like a fool. “Surely,” they said to him, “You can’t believe in miracles and things like that. Surely for instance, you don’t believe that Jesus changed water into wine?” “I don’t know,” the man answered,” “whether he turned water into wine but I do know that in my own home he turned beer into groceries.”

I remember once listening to a woman who is in religious orders. She told me that she was asked about a friend what it the one attribute that lies above all others in the heart of Jesus. I thought to myself maybe it is compassion or loyalty or courage. She said what lies in the heart of Jesus is freedom. Freedom.

The more I have pondered the sister’s answer about freedom the more I believe Jesus is calling us to freedom this Lent. If we believe that the world is in God and not the other way around (of God in the world) then everything is susceptible to the power of the Spirit: life and death, sin and forgiveness, doubt and faith. All is in God. In other words, God is with us, in us and around us. What Jesus told Nicodemus is ‘there is more to God’s world than Rome, the Sanhedrin, Jerusalem or even himself.’ Once, Nicodemus became open to the Spirit, God guided him and gave him true freedom; and the gift of this lesson is that the Nicodemus’ promise is our promise, too.

For many years, I actually thought the wandering Scotsman was slightly crazed; but, as I have grown older, I think of him more and more because I believe he is one of the freest men I have ever met. He was a ‘born again Nicodemus.’ Although, many of us may not claim to be born again like the wandering Scot, I think conversion takes place progressively in God’s good time and not our own. Our sole response to God’s call is to be open. By lifting eyes up to God and knowing God is the keeper of our lives, we find new life and are born again. Therein lies our true freedom. Amen.

Ash Wednesday - Skip Windsor

2011-03-09T21:59:00.000-05:00

“The Sent Ones”

Ash Wednesday is more about subtraction than about addition.

The Imposition of ashes reminds us that what remains when everything else in our lives is taken away is our mortal bodies. And Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality.

In the burial service at the Committal, it begins with the words, “earth to earth, dust to dust…” What you and I think is permanent is really provisional and impermanent. In the little known and little used liturgy in the prayer book, The Rite of Reconciliation, a portion of the confession reads, “We are formed of dust in the image and likeness of God, and redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The epistle lesson today from the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians begins with the words, “Be reconciled with God.” These words, I believe, ought to be our watchwords for us this Lent. We should be about the enterprise of reconciliation.

This work of reconciliation requires the stripping away of the false self, the petty insecurities that haunt us everyday. It means being open and vulnerable to God’s mercy and forgiveness. To be reconciled with God is to be redeemed, restored, and renewed in the likeness of Christ. In Christ, we are to be reconcilers with God. To be reconciled with and in God is to become, as the apostle Paul writes, “friends of God.”

Reconciliation is something we do – something that shapes and forms us through God’s grace and mercy. In the process of being reconciled in God through Christ’s example, you and I become “a new creation.”

The way to journey this Lent is through reconciliation. The cross of ashes on our foreheads reminds us that all things are possible through God in Christ. Through Christ, we become a new creation to be ambassadors and witnesses of God’s reconciling power and love with others. As reconcilers, we do not sit still, but go forth as representatives of Christ into the world.

As Paul writes, as ambassadors of God’s reconciling love and mercy, we are “the sent ones.”

The truth of these words became most clear to me while I was in Haiti last week. We baptized a one-year old girl named Lovemica. She was born in Leogane after last year’s earthquake and was not expected to live. But she did. This year we baptized Lovemica; and the words in baptism took on new meaning as we consider being made “a new creation” in Christ as the sign of the cross was made on her forehead, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

Marked and sealed. Being Christ’s own forever. As marked and sealed in Christ in baptism, we are not only one in Christ, and together, part of Christ’s body in Haiti, in Needham, in the world, but are to be the sent ones to be instruments of God’s reconciling power in the world.

This Lent, consider what “subtraction” is happening in your life and how it adds to your spiritual life as a reconciler, a friend of God, in the world. Paul says that as new creations in God, we are the sent ones to do God’s holy will. How will God be using you this Lent? Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of reconciliation. Now is the day to become a new creation in God in Christ. Amen.

The Last Sunday After Epiphany - Myra Anderson

2011-03-06T08:34:00.000-05:00

Take my lips and speak through them. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased…”

We end the season of Epiphany where we began it back at Jesus’ baptism. All the same elements: big cloud, booming voice; all the same words: my Son, beloved, well pleased. It’s like bookends to the miracles, stories and revelations that happened in between these two episodes.

But this time, you’ll notice, there’s more. God follows up this time with a command: “Listen to him!”

Listen to him.

In today’s Gospel passage, Matthew takes us up the mountain with Jesus, Peter, James and John. Jesus is transfigured into this dazzling epiphanic vision. Also making a brief but critical appearance are Moses and Elijah, the lawgiver and the prophet from the Old Testament. Moses and Elijah have been the main players in the Jewish religion up to this point. They appear with Jesus, and Peter is basically convinced, and who can blame him, that this is the “Son of Man coming into his kingdom.” Jesus had told the disciples about this, and here it was. Peter wants to preserve it forever.

Enter the bright cloud and booming voice, and the big pronouncement: “This is my Son, the Beloved.” This is the Messiah, this is me, God, in human form, just like was foretold.

And then the Voice includes a kind of passing of the torch: “Listen to him.”

Actually, given what happens next in the narrative, the emphasis was probably more like this: listen to HIM. When Peter, James and John stop trembling in fear and finally look up, there is no one standing there but Jesus. Moses and Elijah are gone. We’re left with one authority, and this one comes directly from God. Jesus is the way now, listen to HIM.

I would be dishonest if I did not confess to you today that I have struggled with this Gospel and with this sermon. I am looking forward to the rest of you entering into the wilderness journey next week, because I’ve been here for a while.

My first reaction to this narrative was, “Really? Did this really happen? And does it matter?”

All of the theological commentary I came across is emphatic: this happened, and it is critical to the Christian faith. It is in all three synoptic Gospels. The transfiguration establishes the divinity of Jesus, establishes his authority, and points the way to his death and resurrection: it ends with Jesus saying (in his usual style), “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

But there’s a rational side of me that can’t help but view this with a bit of skepticism. Peter was obviously dealing with this same skepticism in his letter to early followers that we read from today. He is adamant that he and others were there to see Jesus in all his glory on that mountain and to hear the affirming words from the bright cloud. He says to them, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

It was also obvious in my research that this was one of the stories, along with the Virgin Birth, the miracles and the Resurrection, that provides the most fodder for atheists and skeptics – Christianity’s detractors. It is the kind of fantastic supernatural tale that makes non-believers roll their eyes, or even sympathetic people dismiss as mere theological metaphor. That’s a very comfortable take on it for many of us. Yet Peter wants us to believe him that this really happened.

So where do we sympathetic skeptics go from here? What do we need to believe, and does it matter? I fear it matters immensely. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

And Peter warns us, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts

Those words: “be attentive to this”. In other words, “listen.”

As we enter into the Lenten season, we should be praying for the day to dawn and the morning star to rise in our hearts as Peter promises it will. And I think what today’s readings are telling us is that to have a prayer of that happening, we must acknowledge, as Peter did, that Jesus is who he says he is, who God told us he is. We must choose to believe. At the beginning of the Gospel reading today, we are told that the events on the mountain took place six days AFTER Peter acknowledged Jesus as Christ. The revelations on that mountain top were not news, you see, they were a confirmation of what the disciples already believed or thought they believed, and of course, so much more. But they started with that acknowledgement that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. Belief, or faith, first – revelation followed.

I will tell you what I believe this day. I believe with all my heart that the grace of God and the peace that we all seek is there for us. I have witnessed it in the lives of many people, many of you, and in the good works and faithful service of the people in this congregation and others. We just have to be open to receiving it. We have to believe it is there for us.

We have to be attentive. We have to listen. As we enter our Lenten wilderness journey together this week, may we heed the first imperative the newly transfigured Christ gives to his disciples on the mountain:
Get up and do not be afraid.

May we all be eyewitnesses to his glory.

Epiphany VIII - Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris

2011-02-27T10:02:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 49:8-16a; Psalm 131; I Corinthians 4:1-5; Matthew 6:24-34

The good news found in today’s gospel lesson can be summed up by a quote from Augustine of Hippo (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) one of the spiritual leaders of the early Christian church. He said “if you think you understand it, its not from God!”

The good news about this passage from Matthew is that it is not easy to understand and actually raises more questions than it provides answers! The bad news—or maybe better described as “the Hard News” is that, like all profound truths that Jesus taught, living into this gospel observation that we “cannot have two masters..One cannot serve God and wealth” is one of the hardest lessons that Jesus repeated in many ways over and over again. The fact that it is such a hard thing to think about makes me pretty sure that Augustine was right—this is one of the things that comes from God and if we are to be faithful, we had best wrestle with it in our lives; and our lives should reflect our love of God more than our love of wealth.

Questions immediately come to mind when I hear this lesson---does this really mean –when we do not worry about what we are to eat or how we are to dress and trust that God will provide for us as God does for the birds adorned with glorious feathers and the lilies and wild flowers of the fields that God will provide for us so gloriously also? Is there some magic formula of faith that gets us designer clothing?—or even clothing at all? gets us shelter? gets our shelter heated and our stomachs full of nutritious food? No! Of course not. Alas..

Faith is not magic and neither is God. Loving God more than money does not give us our heart’s desire—but what happens when we find ourselves loving God more than wealth, our deepest desire is changed.

Loving god more than wealth does not mean we will win the lottery and all things of financial concern will vanish! It does nt mean that our job will be perfect and neither will our marriages of children! (though of course our grandchildren will likely remain perfect!) No, loving god more than wealth still requires us humans to work hard..at our jobs at our relationship ships at the art of living—Loving God we must care not only for ourselves and our families but to work just as hard to make sure that others—less blessed, less fortunate, less lucky than we are given -----from the sweat of our brow—as a sign of our love for God—they must be given shelter and food and safety and ..Whatever else we can provide. And if we truly love god more than wealth—doing so will becomes our desire.

There is a not-so-subtle nuance in this tension between loving god and loving wealth—and the nuance has to do with how we answer the question: “where is our priority?..Wealth or God?” What do we truly desire? I think perhaps that if Jesus would come among us today he would admonish the ones of us who use all their energy and resources and education and time and focus to make money, one who enjoy the successes and privileges of success and wealth. —Even, if they like the Pharisees, attend church each Sunday, pray regularly, give generously to the poor as evidence that they do indeed love god. I think perhaps that Jesus would see that their priority is not in loving God but in the passion they have for succeeding and having the material proof of that success…

or maybe not.

I think—and I could be wrong because I do not know the exact mind of God, (like everyone else I can only assess God’s mind by heeding the clues I have of god from my prayers and what I have learned from scripture.) So based mainly upon my understanding of scripture, this passage and the others like it—I believe that Jesus would ask us to consider the focus of our lives. I believe that Jesus would ask us to firmly establish our priorities and desires in ways that diminish the self centeredness of our lives and our own sense of entitlement. I think Jesus is asking us to set serving others as our priority and as a measure of our devotion to God.

It is hard to do—I really do think it is very hard to do—and so like Augustine, I think this hard ask is truly from God.

Were Jesus to sit with us this morning I can imagine that Jesus would instruct us about what loving God looks like as Jesus did with his entire life—and it seems to me he might tell us that we would be wise to prioritize how we spend our time, our money, our education, our experiences, where we invest in relationships and networks and how we use all those resources. I believe Jesus is admonishing us as he was admonishing those with him that day on the mount, to consider what we love, what we are passionate about. Is it wealth, the making of it, the making more of it? or is our love God whom we serve by serving each other, the poor, the hungry—even, a the Prayer Book says, this fragile earth our island home?

In fact I think that is the very HARD reality of this lesson—perfectly good people can be seduced by wealth very easily. It is much more difficult to be totally focused on God and serving God than it is to be focused on the making and stock piling of wealth.

Most of us are not very good at either one! Most people—even in our relatively wealthy country and in this fairly wealthy community can always imagine having more wealth. Or can imagine using one’s wealth more wisely or working harder to figure out how to gain more. And, I would observe that most people do not expend the energy loving God that they spend worrying about wealth or how the increase of wealth might happen to them or for them or what they can do to make it happen—especially in this economy. Jesus saw that imbalance between thoughts of wealth and thoughts of God in the first century Palestine community—and I believe he would see it in us today. I think that is why he confronted the people with this little conversation about setting priorities between wealth and loving God.

Jesus saw as we see that wealth and love of God are essential to each human being—for it doesn’t matter how much one loves god if one doesn’t take care to earn enough wealth to care for one’s family. Likewise, if one has all the wealth in the world and relishes each dime spent and each overindulgence seems a righteous entitlement for having earned the money—it is very difficult for one’s soul to then know god.

A balance must be struck—to work hard and earn money is a good thing—as long as that working hard is not for the sole purpose of getting more and more, —not the priority of one’s life—not the obsession of one’s life. Loving God must be the priority of one’s life. The how we love our work and how we love our money is often a measure of how we love God. That is what makes this such a hard lesson to hear…to really know our own heart and our own priority is not easy—for most human beings are very adept at fooling themselves in the hope they are fooling the world—and even God.

To really set one’s priorities, to know how to balance our love of wealth and our love of God takes rigorous, intentional, self reflection and constant vigilance—and “watch dog like” self monitoring to measure one’s own heart and intention. I can imagine that Jesus might –after telling us that we cannot have two masters—suggest we follow him into the desert and do that self examination. I can imagine that he would encourage our passion for each other and for God by encouraging us to serve others. I can imagine that he would say –“this is a hard lesson. It is from god, but it is not impossible because Jesus will walk with us as we try to temper our passion for wealth and flame our passion for God. Amen.

Epiphany VII - Skip Windsor

2011-02-20T09:13:00.000-05:00

Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18; MT 5:38-48

The Second Mile

In Wednesday Morning Bible Study, we have read a number of books in the Bible ranging from Ruth to John, First and Second Samuel to the Book of Revelation. Each is a narrative about the relationship between God and God’s people. Common questions always arise in our classes such as: Who is God? Why is there evil? And how are we to live? The questions of an ancient people are questions for modern people today.

Through our Sunday morning worship readings, you and I are able to do a kind of Bible study catching sketches from Hebrew scripture and the New Testament that help define how our own personal stories relate to the narratives in the Bible. So, it is ironic that the one book that we keep saying we ought to study in Wednesday Morning Bible Study, the one book that is quoted as much as any biblical book in other books, and the one book that is least understood by Christians in the Bible is Leviticus.

In a way, it is by chance that Leviticus is even being read today. It is only included once in the three year lectionary cycle in Year A, which is this year, and only on the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. Depending upon the moveable day of Easter, and therefore, Lent, there are some years we do not reach seven Sundays in Epiphany. So, it is with some cause for amusement to congregations that for many preachers it will be their first, and maybe only, time to preach on Leviticus. Your preacher this morning falls into that camp!

To give you a short introduction to Leviticus requires a bit of background. It is a compilation of God’s laws given by Moses to the Israelites while they roamed in the desert for forty years and provides more words of God than any other biblical text. It is a set of “Holiness Codes” that the Israelites are to abide by. The word “holy” is used more than 100 times to refer to God describing God’s complete “otherness,” totally above all things in heaven and on earth. God’s holiness pervades the divine being and gives shape to God’s attributes. God’s love is a holy love. God’s mercy is a holy mercy. Even God’s wrath is a holy wrath. God’s very being is completely absent of any trace of sin.

In Leviticus, God calls Israel to be a holy people instructing them to be distinct and separated from other nations by giving them specific regulations to govern their lives. For many modern readers it is like a book of “do’s and “don’ts.” There is no narrative structure to speak of; and the admonitions about not eating shellfish, etc. seem antiquated and out of date. To decry Leviticus in this way is to miss the primary purpose of this book, which is to call men and women to holiness.

According to Moses, God has chosen them and set them apart giving them standards so that the world would know that they are God’s chosen people. In the lesson for today, God speaks through Moses saying they are to be holy and that they are not only to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness but also to treat one another as God’s chosen ones.

I am reminded of the story about an Abbott who led a conflicted monastery. The brothers never got along. They bickered. They fought. They were always mean to one another. The Abbot thought to himself: “This is no way for a group of Christians to act.” So the Abbot went to the wisest Christian he knew. The man was a hermit who had lived by himself for years in the mountains high above the abbey. The Abbot asked for the hermits help; and so the hermits came down to the abbey and said to the Abbot, “let me live with the brothers for one week and I will tell you what the problem is.”

When the hermit’s visit was over a week later, he told the Abbot what he discovered. He said that the Risen Christ has returned and that the Lord is in this abbey living among them as one of the monks. That evening at their weekly Chapter meeting the Abbot told all the brothers that the Lord was one of the monks among them. From that day on the monks became more respectful of one another; and day by day, they became more joyous with one another until the reputation of the Abbey as a holy and peaceful place was known throughout all the land.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” These important words from Leviticus form the basis for part of Jesus’ words commonly known as The Golden Rule: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind; and the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. According to Moses and Jesus, holiness is not some abstract idea; rather, it is to be a normative and regulative principle in everyday life. Personal holiness is attained not by detachment but by engagement. Holiness is found not just in cloisters but also on corners of every street. Holy means to be wholly given to God by totally serving and empowering others.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Mount by increasing the voltage of what is said in Leviticus. He says it is not enough to care for just your neighbor and people like yourself. He says we are to love our enemies and even pray for them. It is easy to go the first mile. In the first mile, we can treat people like us, friends like us, with forbearance and forgiveness. In the first mile, we can make sacrifices that hurt but do not burn. In the first mile, we can change our ways but not be transformed.

To go the first mile is to do what is required. But, to go the second mile is to love without return, to be struck but not to strike, to give until it hurts, and to know that an eye for eye will only make both people blind. The second mile is where excellence happens, where transformation occurs, and where we move into the realm of holiness. We do not only have to look to those icons of goodness like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi, we only have to look for people who daily fulfill their obligations in the simple and common details of life whether they are an emergency nurse who takes a second shift for a sick friend, or a mother who takes care of a neighbor’s child, or a teacher who stays after school to teach an extra class of algebra to a student. Holiness is not hidden in high places but hides in plain sight.

The path to holiness begins this way: Ask yourself what you want others to do for you, then turn it around, take the initiative and go do it for them. This is second mile stuff – it is to live outward, not inward. I believe that Jesus’ exemplified going the extra mile for others. He did not just talk the talk on The Sermon on the Mount but walked the talk as he set his face towards Jerusalem and the Cross. He is the perfect example of spiritual leadership.

During the past two weeks, the vestry of Christ Church, is seeking to define qualities of spiritual leadership that all Christians are called to manifest through baptism. Given our changing world, the pastoral needs of the community, and the material requirements and financial demands of the church, your vestry realized that first mile ministry is not enough to sustain in the long run the vibrancy and vitality without leadership that will go the second mile.

I believe we are being called to a Second Mile Ministry to go the extra mile for our church, for our community and for the wider world. As a center for mission, Christ Church is blessed with many resources to be shared with others. It will require us to not look inward but outward. It will require us to ask discerning questions of one another and ourselves. It will require us to shift from being tourists on a trip to pilgrims on a journey. And I do not think it is something new but something very ancient that goes back to our forbearers who stood with Moses seeking to do God’s will.

The Book of Leviticus continues to serve as a guidepost to be holy people for a holy God. May we walk in the paths of righteousness doing justice, loving mercy, and walking the extra mile with our God. Amen

Epiphany VI - Skip Windsor

2011-02-13T19:54:00.014-05:00

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Choose Life

The Hebrew scripture reading from the book of Deuteronomy is a message for today. It speaks about choosing life over death. “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live…”

These words from Moses form the culmination of his farewell address to the Israelites before they are about to enter the land of Canaan to begin a new life. For forty years the nomadic people have wandered in the wilderness, escaped the tyranny of Egypt, turned away from God sometimes, bridled at the leadership of Moses when things were uncertain and dangerous, and longed for a haven that seemed too distant and too obscure.

Now by living on the plains of Moab they are about to reach the Promised Land and leave their failures behind. It is a liminal moment in their lives. They are leaving their past to live in a promised future foretold to them by Moses. But, in our lesson for this morning, Moses reminds them as they camp on the cusp of a new beginning in a new land that how they live today, and the choices they make today, will determine their future.

Today is no different. We are modern nomads moving into an uncertain future. How we live now and the choices we make now will determine our future. This is a self-evident truth for individuals, for communities, and for nations. It is certainly true for us in Needham today. We only have to look back to the past week and acknowledge with sadness what has befallen a Needham family and how all of us are so affected by the tragic death of one so young. As we seek answers that will never come easily, as we seek meaning in the clouds of our own worries, and as we seek to discern light in the midst of darkness, we are faced with the same choice asked of people in every generation who have faced trails and tribulations: “How are we to live?”

According to God, speaking through Moses, we are to choose life, accept life and create life. The great Lawgiver admonishes the Israelites not to be governed by their past wayward actions but to move into a future defined by God. Rather, Moses exhorts them to live into a renewed and restored relationship with God. The consequences of past sins, while severe, are not to be the final word of God. Rather, the God of Moses, the God who called Abraham into covenant, and called the people out of Egypt into a land of promise is a God of second chances.

To choose life is to be renewed, restored and forgiven.

About a month ago, a friend of mine, a gay man, asked me about repentance and forgiveness. He said that he knew his sexual orientation all his life. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice but who he was. God created him; yet, all through his life he has experienced isolation, prejudice, and loneliness. “Why would God want to do this to me?”

And then he asked me a question that still lingers in my heart and mind, “Instead of me repenting for who I am shouldn’t God be repenting for making a world so filled with hate, oppression, and prejudice?” In other words, he asked me about God asking us for our forgiveness for creating a world where young people die, where gays, women, people of color are marginalized, and where evil people do sinful things and bad things happen to good people.

The question scalds. It burns because there is no easy answer. We are left with the lament of the psalmist, who cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The question lingers with us in times of desolation and loss.

The poet, Rilke, writes,

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”

You and I live the questions. I also live with the question by my friend who asked me: “Does God repent for making a broken world?” My response to him is my response to you this morning in the midst of the emotional trauma we have experienced this week and will continue to feel in the days ahead.

Perhaps God did repent. Perhaps, God saw that not all was good at the beginning. Perhaps, God decided to repent by re-creating a the world with a new creation by God giving us a Life through God’s son, Jesus Christ, who lived, suffered, and died like one of us.

It is in the mystery of the incarnation, where God repents, and even more loves, by taking the risk to become human and to experience the pain and the loss, the sorrow and the pity, as well as, the comfort and consolation, the joy and the triumph, of living a life. We may live under the shadow of the Cross of Christ. But, in faith, you and I live in the light of His resurrection

To choose life is to choose Jesus Christ. It is to choose one who became one of us so that we could become one with Him in this life and in the next. Through Him, we not only choose life, we also accept the life given to us and to put into practice the same grace with others as we have received from God through Jesus Christ. To choose life is not only to accept life but also to create life.

It means that God is still in process of creating a new world no longer defiled but blessed; and it our responsibility to be co-creators by building and strengthening our relationships with one another. As co-creators with God means that nothing stays the same except God’s abiding love that never changes and is eternal.

As co-creators, we are to take responsibility for our lives. No longer can we blame God for we are already a given and forgiven people through Jesus Christ. We cannot be merely observers but active participants in a holy hope to be instruments of God’s justice and peace where there is no place for hate, no place for war, no place for oppression.

It is time again to speak to one another about the importance of life and death, to speak about the forgiving God is a forgiven God, and to speak with conviction that the life, death and resurrection of Christ is the life given to us through God’s risking and vulnerable love. The truth is God gives us a Son; but even more than this, we are given a Life through Him that is hallowed and blessed. Let us take heed to the words of Moses,

“Today, I have set before you life and death… choose life so that you and your descendants shall live.”

Epiphany V - Lynn Campbell

2011-02-06T11:59:00.001-05:00

Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20

“You ARE the light of the world.” In the name of the one God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.

You are the light of the world. I’m sure many of you have heard this phrase and this gospel story more times that you can count. But one of the amazing things about reading and praying with Scripture, is that God often has something new to reveal to us. Time and time again, we have the opportunity to delve deeper into the distinctive richness that is God’s Word to us.

The words from day’s gospel take me back to a song I often sang as a child growing up in Catholic school- and a song I sang many, many, many times this summer while working at the Barbara C Harris summer camp. We sang this song with gusto and hand motions. I’ll spare you my singing, but I think you know the words: “this little light of mine, I’m gonna to let it shine. this little light of mine, I’m gonna to let it shine, this little light of mine, I’m gonna to let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine”. “Hide it under a bushel? NO! I’m gonna let it shine.” And on and on and on. The kids loved this song, just as I remember loving it has a child. There was something in the lyrics that I understood as a child. But there is even more that I get now as an adult.

You ARE the light of the world. We ARE the light of the world. As a child I didn’t doubt these words, but as an adult I certainly did. How could I be carrying the light of Christ? Surely I haven’t prayed enough, worked hard enough, or given enough to others to have such a light. Maybe if I just try harder. But that is not what today’s Gospel reading says. You ARE the light of the world, Jesus says. Not, you will become the light of the world, not, keep trying and eventually you will be the light of the world. No! You ARE the light of the world. This is a reality of our nature as beloved children of God. This truth is absolutely amazing and also a bit daunting. All of a sudden, it isn’t just a fun song from our childhood, it is a real call from God. We are commissioned to let our light shine for all to see so that they may see our good works and give glory to God.

Our first reading from Isaiah gives us insight into what it means to be a light in the world. In this reading we see the people of Israel, who have returned to Jerusalem from their exile, struggling with a city in need of rebuilding after its destruction and a way of life in need of renewal amidst the chaos and violence of their land. They fast and pray, yet God does not seem to hear or take notice of their plea for help. But God is present, God hears their supplication, but then points out the error of their ways and calls them to a new way.

God calls the people of Israel to the difference between the ritual practice they are offering, and the faithful practice that God asks of each of them. While they carry out the rituals of their faith, they continue to oppress their workers, and to fight with one another. There remains a large gap between their seeking after God and Gods ways AND their actual way of life.

“Is this not the fast that I choose”, says God, “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them… Then your light shall break forth like the dawn…”

Being a light in the world, letting our light shine, asks us to take seriously the needs of others. It calls us to practice acts of justice, love, and mercy. It calls us to respond to the needs of others and to dismantle systems that cause the need in the first place. Being the light of the world challenges us to spend less, so we can give more, consume less so we can share more, conform less, so we can transformation more. THIS is how we let our light break forth into the world.

I’ve been blessed to have a handful of people in my life who have illustrated what it looks like to let our light break forth like the dawn. Being with them is like seeing the sun break through the clouds after days and days of snow and ice. Kim McElaney is one of these people for me. She was my campus minister and mentor while I was a student at Holy Cross. People were drawn to Kim, they were drawn to the light that seemed to come through her gentle eyes and her loving way. She was a woman of great prayer, even had a room in her house dedicated to prayer. Every day, she entered this room and opened her heart to God. And day after day she opened her heart to the people around her. She had a great love for the people of Mexico and Kenya. She often traveled to these countries to get to know these sisters and brothers better and to find ways that she can work for justice and peace in their land and in our own. She was the first person who helped me to see the connection between our Christian faith and the work of justice. She knew that she could not worship God without also caring for those who experience injustice.

People wanted to be around Kim, to share in what she had found. She stood like a lighthouse, shining the light that was given to her by God, and pointed people not to herself, but towards a deeper encounter with God and God’s people. Sadly, Kim died last year from cancer. But, her light, Christ’s light that was in her, continues to be seen in the world today. Many people live out the gospel in a deeper and more profound way because of the influence she had on them. She let God’s light break forth in her own life and encouraged others to do the same.

I hope there have been people in your life who have shown you what it means to let your light shine. But even more than that, I hope and pray that each of us discovers anew that we ARE the light of the world.

I know there are times when we do not feel the light within us. Perhaps you feel that way right now. I invite you to spend some time in prayer this week focusing on the light that IS in you. Trust God. The light is there. Ask God to help you recognize it. In prayer, imagine that light shining within you. At first it will start out small. Maybe just a faint light. Each day imagine the light becoming larger- taking over more and more of you. And then ask God how you are being called to let this light break forth from you. Ask how you are called to mend broken relationships, to work for justice, to practice kindness and to walk humbly with God. In the words of Isaiah: “If you remove the yoke from among you,… if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like noonday.” You, my sisters and brothers, ARE the light of the world. Let it shine.

Epiphany III - Skip Windsor

2011-01-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Let us pray:

“Where we cannot convince, let us be willing to persevere. Where we cannot be strong, let us be willing to endure. Where we cannot redeem, let us be willing to hope. We know that we cannot do everything, but help us, O God, to do something, for Jesus sake. Amen.”

On behalf of the men, women and children of Christ Church, I welcome our friends and neighbors from Carter Memorial United Methodist Church and their pastor, Gary Shaw, to our worship service this morning. You have traveled a much further distance than coming from 800 Highland Avenue to 1332 Highland Avenue.

We are grateful that you would leave your home church and come to worship with us; and this generosity of spirit is not lost on your brothers and sisters but most appreciated here at Christ Church.

When Caroline Edge and I first talked about and thought about our annual joint service in 2007, we did not know what we were getting ourselves into; nor, did our two communities know where it would lead. It truly was a “leap of faith.” From that moment on we have held three services (and this is the fourth) alternating between Carter Memorial Church and Christ Church allowing us to worship together in what our two denominations call “Interim Eucharistic Sharing.”

I prefer to call us “partners in faith.” Not only do we worship together, sing together, play softball together but we are also in business together: selling CD’s together! For those among us who do not have a CD they will be on sale after our service today!

I am grateful to Millie, Pam, Vera, our organists Jane and Aaron, and our joint adult and bells choirs for their fabulous and inspiring body of work contained on the combined Carter Memorial Church-Christ Church CD.

As our two communities gather together this morning, I would invite us to offer a hearty round of applause to our adult and bell choirs for their musical gifts, their generosity of time and talent, and for a marvelous offering to us and to the wider community. +++++

This is an appropriate Sunday to worship together since it comes during the week of the Prayer for Christian Unity which is book ended between two major feast days of the Christian Church: The Confession of St. Peter on January 18th and the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25th. Since 1908 these eight days in January are reserved as a time for special prayer for Christian Unity. For the past 50 years, a theme has been chosen and materials prepared co-operatively by ecumenical groups and circulated internationally. This year’s theme is based on the text from The Acts of the Apostles 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

Prayers for Christian Unity serve to remind us that the early church was one church; and it is a call to us to renew our desire for unity among Methodists and Episcopalians and all Christian churches and for us to return to the essentials of our faith and life together. As we remember the first Christians and seek to renew our Christians ties with one another, it is helpful to always keep in mind that there is more that unites us than divides us in faith. Given the theme for this year’s prayers for Christian unity, we can discern that there are at least four pillars upon which we can agree as partners in faith.

The first pillar is the apostolic teaching of the Word. Before the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were written towards the latter part of the first century, the apostles’ teaching and their own personal testimony guided those fledgling Christians about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These young Christians not only listened to the apostles’ teachings but also were devoted to them and to their words and witness. For a world in trouble, doubt and fear, this was Good News; and from this Good News was born the gospels so that successive generations would come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ and how this power was given to the Church in the person of the Holy Spirit.

The second pillar is fellowship. We are knit together believing there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. We come together in community to share our time, talent and treasure; but, more than this we come together to share our joys and sorrows, our nightmares and our dreams, our burdens and our strengths. It is a ministry of our hospitality and presence where we greet and meet one another standing on common ground knowing that we are bound together – one to another – through the Holy Spirit. In the early church all who believed shared all things in common selling their possessions and goods, distributing to all, as any have need (Acts 2:44). The Romans would say about these 1st century Christians, “See how they loved one another,”

The third pillar is Holy Communion also called the Eucharist. It is the primary sacramental act of the Christian Church. By breaking bread with one another we become friends; we seek forgiveness; and we commit ourselves to one another. It is also a celebration of thanksgiving. It memorializes Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and commands them to continue this table fellowship in remembrance of his life, death and resurrection for we are called to be a sacramental people: offered, blessed, broken and given as Christ’s body to the world. As we are fed and nourished in Holy Communion, we are called to go forth to fed and heal and hungry and broken world.

The fourth pillar is prayer. Prayer is the source of our power being empowered by the Holy Spirit to go out and make disciples and to seek and serve Christ loving our neighbor as ourselves. Through prayer we come to know the creator, redeemer and sustainer better. Through prayer we are bound together into a holy host to love and care for the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. And through pray we come to see and know how we are being called into the world for common mission and a unified ministry of the baptized. We are given the Lord’s Prayer to share and to pray together so that in praising God, seeking God’s will, asking for our needs, for forgiveness, for deliverance, and for hope we will increase in faith.

The Word. Fellowship. Holy Communion. Prayer. These are four pillars that we claim from the apostles’ and from the first church that saw itself as one community. As Methodists or Episcopalians or Roman Catholics or Protestants, we can claim these pillars of unity as we seek to proclaim the Good New of Jesus Christ in the world today. I like to believe that what you and I do as the communities of Carter United Methodist Church and Christ Episcopal Church in worshiping together is to incarnate, in our own small, way the dream of Jesus who prayed that all of us might be one.

In the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus calls the first disciples, James and John and Andrew and Peter, to a great adventure in mission. Through divine guidance, Jesus confirmed the truth about a kingdom ministry that would be shared. He would not do it alone but called a diverse hardworking group of people to go with him. Those Jesus called first were fisherman whose ruddy looks, calloused hands, and salty personalities would be counterintuitive to the principalities and powers of his day. They had no experience in evangelism or stewardship. They had neither education nor credentials. Yet, they went and followed Jesus to help share in his mission to make the reign of God visible to all people for all time.
They did not know where it would lead them but they trusted Jesus and so left behind their nets to become fishers of people.

You and I are called to leave behind our old nets and netting and to undertake a great adventure in mission. In service to God and to God’s people, you and I can do so much more together and than we can do separately in proclaiming, teaching, and healing. As difficult as it sometimes can be being in dialogue about matters of governance and ministry between our two denominations, there is far more that unites us than divides us. I am grateful for this day. I am grateful for the gifts we share and the ministry we share in Needham; but most of all I am grateful to God in Christ who gives us the Holy Spirit who moves us and beckons us forth in common mission and purpose.

Epiphany II - Holly Hartman

2011-01-16T22:05:00.000-05:00

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.

When I was a young mother, I participated in a book group with members of my church. We discussed books that usually had to do with spirituality and parenting. One of the members said something back then that I have thought of many, many times. She was talking about how to explain certain religious concepts to her children, and said something like this:

“The things I hate about church is the use of the word ‘sin’. Sin makes it sound like we are evil. I don’t like the way it is said so much in worship. How can I explain it to my kids when it makes me feel so bad?”

None of us really knew what to say to that- She was right, of course,- the word “sin” DOES appear very prominently in our liturgy. We are a penitential people; we are asked, very clearly, to “confess our sins” before we partake in the Eucharistic Feast.

This bothered the young mother, and she was afraid that her kids would see themselves as “sinners.” And none of us at that time had the ability to help her with this. We all sat there in silence, and then, probably changed the subject to a more comfortable topic.

Unfortunately, some time passed, and we didn’t see this family very much anymore except for Christmas and Easter. I knew they were still church members but they quietly slipped away from being active in parish life. I often wondered if perhaps the comment that young mother made was more significant than we had realized. What exactly was she struggling with when she talked about her discomfort with the notion of sin? What was she looking for? It’s a question worth asking.

In the Gospel of John this morning, Jesus has just been identified by John the Baptist as the Son of God. There is no ambiguity about this anymore, the way we have seen in other gospels- it is clearly stated here that the Messiah whom we’ve been waiting for is indeed Jesus. It’s Jesus who is the Annointed One, the One who was pre-destined to be our Saviour. The disciples who have been following John the Baptist now turn and begin to follow Jesus. And one of the first things that Jesus does in this newly “outed” state of his is to ask them “What are you looking for?”

The significance of this question is enormous. What ARE we looking for in our spiritual faith journey? How many of us, like the young mother I knew, have questions along the way that we struggle with, maybe even voice, but never receive an answer? What are we looking for, and how can we find it?

By asking this question, Jesus issues his followers an invitation. An invitation to seek. An invitation to turn to Jesus and to ask the difficult questions that are naturally part of any spiritual journey. An invitation to examine some very difficult concepts that one must engage in in order to fully live into this Christian life that we are called to do.

If we don’t ever ask the question “What are we looking for?”, then we run the risk of either blindly accepting what we are told, making for a rather superficial spiritual life....or worse, denying that we even have questions, conflicts, struggles with our faith journey.....again, not living an authentic Christian life. If we don’t voice this question in one way or another, then we lose a sacred opportunity to explore the ways in which God might want us to follow Jesus. I believe that a Christian community- a church- is a place where we can offer each other the gift of sacred listening- that is, allowing each other the space to ask difficult questions and to seek the answers together as a people who have committed themselves to following Jesus.

Looking back, the group of young mothers didn’t really have the tools to be able to help our friend with her concerns about sin. We listened, but by saying nothing, might have made her feel badly for even asking the question. I am speculating now, but I believe we missed the opportunity to help her -and ourselves- seek and find some answers about this notion of “sin”, for example, that may have helped her feel more connected to our community and more able as a young mom to help her children with their faith journey.

I am not suggesting, of course, that we all need to be Bible scholars or enlightened spiritual gurus, but I do think that by asking the question “What are we looking for?”, we can begin to find some answers that will deepen our understanding of what God, through his son Jesus Christ’s example, is calling us to be.

Let’s go back to the concept of sin. On one hand, I can understand how it might be off putting to label ourselves as “sinners”- and in some circles, this word is used intentionally to promote guilt, which is turn, acts as an agent of control to make people think about things in a certain, narrow way.

On the other hand, however, with some discussion and wrestling with this word “sin”, we might realize that acknowledging our sins is really, in fact, acknowledging our humanity.

Yes, we, as human beings, are sinners. We ALL make mistakes that hurt other people and ourselves. It’s perhaps an unfortunate yet very expected part of our human condition, and we cannot avoid - we “err and stray from God’s ways like lost sheep, by what we have done and by what we have left undone”, over and over again, in ways both small and large, every day of our lives.

But instead of despising ourselves for our “sin”, the invitation from Jesus is one that comes out of love. There is hope. The Gospel reading this morning speaks to this hope. God has sent us a “Lamb of God”- Jesus, of course- to “take away the sins of the world.” We don’t need to be isolated and ashamed when we commit acts of sin. We don’t need to deny them. We take comfort in the knowledge that there is someone- Jesus- who’s job it is to redeem us of our sins.

Within this softer context, perhaps the mother that I knew so long ago at another church, may have been able to eventually find relief and even joy in the act of confessing her sins- aloud and in community, together on Sunday mornings- acknowledging and accepting her very human state and asking for a new start- before partaking in the Eucharistic Feast.

I haven’t been at Christ Church very long- just about four months now- but I see many places in this community where people are given opportunity to ask difficult questions and to seek answers together. One such place occurs every Sunday, between the services, when people are invited into the Memorial Room to discuss the mornings readings. I haven’t been to the Wednesday morning Bible Study but imagine that a similar discourse occurs there. The intercessory prayer group, which meets monthly after church to pray for those in need, is a place where church members speak very openly about their struggles and their faith. I am hoping that, within a short time, a women’s retreat, a book group, and perhaps a group for young mothers will also be places for open seeking and sharing one’s spiritual journey with others.

I pray that this community of Christ Church will continue to strive to be a place where her members, her People of God, will know what it means to ask the question “What are we looking for?” and will know how to seek each other out to find answers together along the way.

Please pray with me.

God, Thank you for sending us your Son. Our Messiah, our Annointed One, our Lamb of God. Thank you for giving us each other and for always reminding us of your steadfast love for us and desire to follow the ways of your Son.

Jesus, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Jesus, bearer of our sins- have mercy on us. Grant us thy peace. Amen.

Epiphany I (Baptism of Our Lord) - Timothy Kenslea

2011-01-09T18:59:00.000-05:00

Why do we get baptized? My guess is that many, even most, of us here today have been baptized, as two new young members of our church are about to be. I doubt many of us gave it much thought at the time—especially since we probably had as little to say about the decision to be baptized as these young people did.

We do know that baptism has been one of the central sacramental traditions of the church from its beginning. All of us are familiar with some sturdy conventional interpretations of the meaning of the rite—interpretations that are rooted in scripture.

In Matthew’s gospel, just before today’s reading, John the Baptist refers to the baptism he administers “with water” as being “for repentance” (Mt 3:11). Many of us have learned to associate baptism in that way with cleansing from sin. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells them to consider baptism a kind of initiation rite, in which the newly baptized “clothed [them]selves with Christ” (Gal 3:27).

In the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus, though, Jesus gives us another way to think about baptism. Matthew’s account, which we heard today, is particularly instructive. Matthew’s is the only gospel that records a remarkable conversation between Jesus and John the Baptist. I imagine it taking place in a kind of stage whisper. John expresses real surprise: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replies, “Let it be so now.” He adds an assurance that this will be the way for them — for both of them —“to fulfill all righteousness.”

We know, when they had this conversation, that Jesus and John knew of each other — in all of the gospels, John the Baptist gives his followers the promise that “one who is more powerful than I is coming after me” (Mt 3:11). We have reason to believe that Jesus and John knew each other, maybe even quite well. Matthew doesn't tell us this, but Luke — the other gospel that recounts Jesus’ nativity, infancy, and childhood — tells us that their mothers are relatives (Lk 1:36). So John, who sees his baptism as one of repentance, expresses surprise. The roles should be reversed, he insists. Jesus does not need to be cleansed from sin; nor does he need to put on Christ like a garment.

So why does Jesus go to John to be baptized? What are we, the baptized and the about-to-be-baptized, to make of the example of Jesus, as we try to follow it, in this case?

I think it’s important, in trying to understand Jesus’ baptism by John, to remember that this is not just baptism with water, but baptism in a river. To be baptized by John, Jesus steps into the waters of the River Jordan.

Rivers exert a powerful pull on our imagination, still. I started to make a list, off the top of my head, of references to rivers in popular culture. I stopped counting songs after I came up with Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell, the Talking Heads. It’s the river of life, the river of dreams; it’s the river we go down to, we’re drawn to; it’s the river we want to be taken to, the river we wish we could skate away on. Anyone who grew up in my generation remembers Michael, rowing that boat ashore on the deep, wide, chilly, cold Jordan River. Fans of the Broadway musical can never forget how Old Man River just keeps rolling along.

A river forms the backbone of what’s arguably the greatest American novel, in which Huck Finn travels along the Mississippi on a journey from immaturity almost all the way to responsible adulthood, and his friend Jim makes his journey from slavery, to freedom, back to slavery, and finally back to freedom for good.

But rivers had, if possible, an even more powerful hold on the imaginations of people who lived at the time of Jesus. When I think, as a history teacher, of all the things rivers meant in the ancient world, two things stand out: A river is a highway, calling people forward on a journey; and a river is a boundary, challenging people with the prospect of what's on the other side, if only they dare to cross.

At the start of the long journey that will take him to Calvary — to the cross and the tomb and the stone rolled away — Jesus steps into the river to be baptized by John, “to fulfill all righteousness.” When he steps out of the river, a voice from heaven calls him “my Son, the Beloved.”

Jesus is calling us to follow his example in baptism. What does this mean for us? In this light, it means to embark on that journey, to cross over that river with him, to break down those boundaries—whether they separate nation from nation, race from race, or class from class.

How are we to do this? This is why the choice of today’s second reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, is so felicitous. The connection is not just that Peter mentions Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. Peter also gives us a powerful example of what we, as baptized people, are called to do.

Peter is such a complex, engaging, sympathetic, flawed character in the gospels. He stands for us. Witnessing the Transfiguration, his response is almost comically enthusiastic: “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three [tents] here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (Mt 17:4). He fell asleep during the Lord’s dark night of the soul at Gethsemane (Mt 26:38-46). And of course, what we always remember most about Peter is that on that night of Jesus’ arrest and torture by the Romans, he denied that he knew Jesus — three times — just a few hour after insisting, “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you” (Mt 26:35). And this from the man Jesus said would be the rock (Mt 16:18) on which he would build his church!

But here, in the Acts of the Apostles, we see a different Peter — a transformed Peter. To place today’s reading in context: Peter is on a journey to Cæsarea. He crosses over an unspoken boundary when he preaches the good news to the Gentiles there. “We are witnesses,” Peter says of himself and his fellow disciples. “[We] were chosen by God as witnesses.”

Peter and the other apostles had experienced a different kind of baptism at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4) — not a baptism by water, but a baptism “with the Holy Spirit and fire” — the one that John had told his followers the one who came after him would bring (Mt 3:11).

Empowered by his baptism by fire, and by the experience of seeing, and eating and drinking with, the risen Lord, Peter — even weak, flawed, self-important Peter —is able to proclaim his startling message. His fear has left him. His testimony about Jesus is simple and clear: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

As it was for Peter, our baptism is not just a ritual of initiation or absolution. It is a call to us, flawed as we are, to follow Christ, and to be witnesses to his message of salvation. However we fulfill that call to be witnesses, may we have Peter’s ultimate humility in recognizing that it is a journey not of our own choosing but of God’s. May we recognize that in our baptism we are chosen and empowered by God to go on this journey, to break through boundaries beyond our imagining—we are called by Jesus to follow him, and step into the river.

Advent I - Skip Windsor

2010-11-28T07:01:00.000-05:00

Matthew 24:36-44
What Time It Is

It’s happened already. No sooner than the turkey is gone and the pumpkin pie is eaten, the perennial Christmas songs begin playing on the radio, providing background music at Starbucks, and filling the mall’s walls with sounds of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Feliz Navidad.” Like everyone else, it is easy to get in the swing of things and accompany Johnny Mathis on the radio when he sings, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire with Jack Frost nipping at our noses…” After hearing Burl Ives and Jose Feliciano’s continuous voices awhile, one wonders where are the Christmas songs? The real Christmas songs like “Come all ye faithful,” “It came upon a midnight clear,” or “Hark! The herald angels sing.”

In previous generations, children grew up singing songs about the birth of the Christ Child, about star struck shepherds, about choirs of angels, and about kings bearing gifts. If not in church, where? There are few public places today where a youngster can hear the Christmas hymns like the ones contained in your hymnals in front of you. And the irony of it all is that we are nowhere near December 25th yet. It is still November. There is still a month to go before Jesus is born. So, today’s lesson from Matthew comes like a shock of flowing ice water over us making Jack Frost looking quite pale in comparison. Here we hear Jesus as a grown man. He is fully into his public ministry. He has already called the disciples, provoked the principalities and powers, and preached the Sermon on the Mount.

Now he is telling his followers to be ready. “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, only the Father.” The key word is this sentence is “that.” That day means when there will be a reckoning. When things that were up will be down and when those things that were down will be raised up. Even Jesus declares not to know the day when will be the coming of the Son of Man. Only God knows. This warning shot comes over the bows of the commercial ship we call “Christmas.” Jesus is warning his disciples to pay attention to the signs that are all around them that something, someone, is coming. The irony of ironies as we begin a new Christian Year is that the early season of Advent speaks not about Bethlehem and birth but about the return of the Risen Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, in the fullness of his glory. This is definitely not the message from Macy’s. It is the message from the Father.

Placing the Gospel lesson about End Times at the beginning of Advent is not to highlight our lassitude but to live with awareness of the expectations and obligations of God’s reign. This is not to put the fear of God in us or place us on heightened alert like some imminent terrorist attack. Rather, it is to mark a way of living and embracing the unexpected in ways that grounds our interactions and relationships on a daily basis. I am reminded of the story of an innkeeper on Nantucket who as a little girl helped her parents in the summer to greet and befriend the guests of the inn. She remembers a set of elderly sisters from Boston who came every August and never ventured forth but sat out on the porch and read their Bibles. Year after year, the sisters came in August, sat on the porch, and read their Bibles. Finally, when she was much older, the future innkeeper’s curiosity got the best of her; and she asked them why they read their Bibles year in and year out. She never forgot what they said. They said, “We are cramming for finals.”

Advent is about cramming for finals not knowing when the final exam is going to be. A gardener tends to her garden all the time. She must weed, water, and till being patient but ready at all times. A soldier on duty must be alert and every watchful to protect his troops. A lifeguard must be vigilant watching the people in the water but also the shape of the waves, the movement of the current, and the impending rain clouds. Just as a gardener, a soldier, and a lifeguard are watchful and need full attentiveness so you and I need to be attending to our spiritual lives. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is telling his followers about being attentive to the obligations of being a disciple and living up to the expectations of those who wish to follow him. In the midst of the demands of daily life as people nurture their families, cultivate their careers, and sustain their health, Jesus asks the disciples to be attentive to their relationship with God.

Stephen Covey in well-regarded book on management called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People speaks in one chapter about time management. He proposes that people live in four spheres or quadrants: urgent and important, urgent and not important, not urgent but important, and not urgent and not important. Some of those categories are obvious: a random telephone solicitation is not important and not urgent; a hospital emergency is urgent and important; deciding what tip to leave after lunch is urgent but not important (except to the waiter!); and going to exercise is important or not urgent. Covey believes that the one people need to work on most is the important but not urgent sphere of our lives. It is here where we decide about our health: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And it is in this quadrant where Advent lives.

Imagine instead of counting calories you could count your blessings. Instead of fretting about your food intake you could consider your spiritual intake in worship, prayer, contemplation and reading. Instead of worrying about tomorrow you could be nurturing what surrounds you today. The invitation of Advent is to live where you will be most healthy in body, mind and spirit. It is the season to take stock of what is really important in life. It is the time to walk in the light of the Lord. It is the time to make connections with God and with one another. As we are already being commanded to consume this holiday, we are invited to go another way and to share with others God’s gift to us through Jesus Christ. It means that as we take care of ourselves we are to take care of others as well. If we become more attuned to the spiritual and material needs of others, we will not worry about tomorrow for in today there plenty to consider, reflect and do.

Just as we think about the holiday shopping season not being about the Nativity of Jesus, and Advent not being just about his first coming but his second coming, too, so Advent is not just about ourselves but about the welfare of others. Christian ministry and mission never take the day off. In the most recent edition of Newsweek magazine, the lead article is about the food divide between the rich and the poor. It details how income divides what people can afford and what they cannot afford. According to the article by religion editor, Lisa Miller, 17% of Americans live in households that are “food insecure.” Such insecurity arises when a family runs out of money they cannot buy food. It is also linked to other economic measures like housing and employment. In America food has become a premier marker of social distinction about who can afford to buy healthy food like fish, lean meats, grains and vegetables and who cannot afford it; and those who cannot buy more processed foods because they are cheaper and taste good. The USDA cites that in the last three years food stamps have risen 58% and women and children, who are on food stamps, tend to be more overweight than who are not. The current debate about buying soft drinks with food stamps brings this whole justice issue into sharper clarity.

The rise of food activists and the advent of the food movement have raised the awareness not only of this economic and social divide among Americans but also how we are to think about how to distribute locally grown and organic food to the least of our brothers and sisters among us. Deeper involvement in conversations with Big Food, public school diets, food pantries like ours in Needham, local community farms and food co-ops, are ways to demonstrate choices and alternatives to sustaining healthy lives and the healthy well being of others. An Advent call to watchfulness is a call for us to shift our consciousness and to see food as a shared resource rather than as a consumer item.

In this season of consumerism, Advent is the herald’s call to us to consider our obligations as followers of Christ to build up the Kingdom of God right now. These obligations are not high and mighty; rather they are about compassion, togetherness, intimacy, and even to the most simple of pleasures to break bread in healthy ways with our neighbors in need. As a community of faith we are formed and informed by Jesus Christ to be healthy people to help make a healthier world.

So as we begin a new church year and are at the advent of the Advent season consider your life. Consider not what the future holds but rather what holds you today. For if we listen to the still small voice within we will hear something far more merry than we hear on the radio, far more joyful than any gift, and far more hopeful than anything we can imagine or pray for. So be watchful and be glad. For salvation is nearer to us than we ever knew.

Pentecost XXIII - Lynn Campbell

2010-10-31T21:47:00.000-04:00

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10
Climb a Tree!

When was the last time you climbed a tree or looked down from a great height? For me it was this past summer while serving as a chaplain at the Barbara C Harris Summer Camp. I was there to help with bible study and the twice-daily worship, to provide pastoral counseling to the campers and the staff and be a calming presence to homesick kids. But there was another part of the job that was unexpected. It involved joining right in with the kids no matter what activity they were doing that day. Some how the kids convinced me to do the high ropes with them. I awkwardly climbed a tree and walked across a rope that were entirely too high and too narrow for my liking. It is one of my best memories from camp- even if I did wake up the next day with sore muscles and a massive bruise on my leg!

Climbing a tree is something normally reserved for kids. Certainly not an activity for dignified adults. This was just as true in Jesus’ time as it is now. People were not often running through town and climbing trees. But that is exactly what Zacchaeus in today’s Gospel story did. Now, Zacchaeus was a tax collector, the chief tax collector. His job required maintaining a certain reputation and perhaps a level of fear in the people of Jericho. In first century Palestine the Roman government contracted with private individuals to collect taxes. As long as the government got its proper payment, the tax collector could charge whatever amount he wanted. As you can imagine this made the tax collectors quite rich and quite unpopular. They were seen as thieves and traders. Devout Jews would have avoided all contact with these known sinners. As the chief among these tax collector Zacchaeus was not on many people’s top ten list of favorite people.

But none of that mattered to Zacchaeus on the day Jesus passed through Jericho. Everyone in town had probably heard about this man named Jesus and wanted to see him. People talked of him raising a widow’s son from the dead, they curing Simon’s mother-in-law and the paralyzed man who was lowered to Jesus from the top of a roof. And just a few weeks ago we heard the story of Jesus healing the 10 lepers. Pretty unbelievable stuff. A crowd gathered in Jericho to see this infamous man pass by. Maybe they would witness or be a recipient of one of his miraculous actions. Zacchaeus was one among many in this crowd. Scripture tells us that he was short of stature and not able to see over the growing crowd. If he wanted to see Jesus he was going to have to do something.

So, he decides to climb a tree. As a professional businessman Zacchaeus took a risk by running through the crowd and climbing the sycamore tree. Imagine it. It probably looked a bit ridiculous. There is no graceful way to climb a tree. I can imagine someone in the crowd pointing at Zacchaeus and laughing. But he isn’t thinking about the people around him. Their jeering doesn’t bother him. Instead there is a sense of urgency and need that drives him to put his reputation aside and climb the tree.

This summer I realized that climbing a tree has the potential to change our perspective. Once over that initial fear of being so far above the ground I began to look around. In the distance the cabins, the chapel, and the fields were visible, as were groups of happy kids running around laughing and having a wonderful time. I could see the beauty of the campgrounds and the great attention paid to its care. There was something about seeing all of this at once that opened my heart to God’s presence surrounding me in nature and in each of those campers. Climbing to new heights can be both terrifying and amazing. Whether it is on a high rope course, a mountain peak, or in our imagination, we get a new perspective on life. It opens us to new ways of seeing and experiencing God. Was Zacchaeus similarly struck by this changed perspective, by the people he saw and the landscape that surrounded him?

Regardless of what urged him to climb that tree or what happened once he was nestled onto a branch I’m guessing Jesus’ words nearly knocked him out of the tree. “Zacchaeus,” Jesus calls, looking right up at him. “HURRY and come down; for I MUST stay at your house TODAY.” Jesus calls him out by name. Jesus looks up, over the crowds and into the tree and calls him down. It is almost as if Jesus is looking for him, as if he came to Jericho for Zaccaeus.

There is a sense of urgency for Zacchaeus and for Jesus. Zacchaeus must see Jesus and Jesus must go to the house of Zaccaeus TODAY. It can not wait. Jesus is entering Jericho. His journey to Jerusalem is coming to an end. We know that he is walking towards his passion and death. He’ll soon be nailed to the wood of a tree, he’ll soon be crucified. Time is running out. He must get the message of God’s saving love to everyone open to hearing and receiving it. And Zacchaeus is ready to hear and receive it.

Zacchaeus, as the chief tax collector, is a man marginalized from his own Jewish community. He may think no one is desperately seeking him. But Jesus is. Just as Jesus calls Zacchaeus by name, he calls each of us by name. We may need to change our perspective in order to hear his voice. Maybe what we need to do is climb high into a tree in order to see with fresh eyes and to hear in new ways. A new perspective comes by making time in our busy lives for God, by venturing to new and unsettling places, by reaching out to people in need in our Christ Church community and beyond. Many of us have also experience a changed perspective through unexpected moments of joy or sorrow. These moments are important because they break us open in new ways and open us to the voice of God. And it is this voice that leads us on the journey of discipleship.

When Jesus looks at Zacchaeus he doesn’t see a sinner without hope of salvation. He sees a beloved child of God. From the vantage point of the tree, Zacchaeus experiences the loving expression on Jesus’ face. He hurries down the tree and with happiness welcomes Jesus to his home. Without hesitation he gives away half of his possessions to the poor and vows to repay four times what he has defrauded anyone.
The crowd watches this happen and grumbles to one another. How can Jesus seek out this known sinner and go to his house? To this crowd Jesus announces the good news of salvation. “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham.” A son of Abraham, a member of the community, a member of the family of God.

Jesus seeks out each one of us, and calls us by name. And this doesn’t happen just once in our lifetimes. It happens over and over again. Being open to these encounters will change us, as it changed Zacchaeus. These encounters will call us to mend broken relationships, to risk knowing and being known in community, and to move out of our comfort zones in service of God’s kingdom of justice and peace. They’ll lead us deeper into community and deeper in our relationship with God.

And for all this we give thanks. We give thanks to God. And we remember the words of Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians where he writes: “We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing.” We give thanks for our changing perspective because these changes open the way for our faith in God to increase and for our love for another to grow abundantly.

Trinity Sunday - Skip Windsor

2010-05-30T22:33:00.000-04:00

Romans 5:1-5
Earn This!

Today is Trinity Sunday and is the only Sunday in the Christian year given over to a theological doctrine. No wonder many preachers try to escape this Sunday from preaching. The only clergyman I know who likes to preach on Trinity Sunday is Peter. Since he has preached the last two Trinity Sundays, it is only fair that I take my turn in the pulpit today.

As we celebrate Trinity Sunday today, I am reminded of the story told about Sir Winston Churchill who was a member of Trinity House, London, and a service organization dedicated to the well being of sailors. He was invited to France for a special occasion dressed in the Trinity House uniform, which puzzled the French. One Frenchmen got up the courage to ask Churchill what the uniform was he was wearing. Churchill said: “I am an elder brother of the Trinity.” To which the astonished Frenchman replied: “Mon Dieu!”

We also celebrate Memorial Day this weekend and pause to remember our nation and our fallen warriors who died in service to our country. This weekend we will see many American flags and red ribbons festooned throughout many cemeteries honoring the valorous dead. The Holiday began soon after the Civil War and was originally called Decoration Day as a time to decorate the graves of the dead with flowers. Originally, May 30th was chosen because flowers would be in bloom; and today, Memorial Day is officially the last Monday in May. Tomorrow, on this weekend, we remember and honor those who gave their lives for our country and for our freedom.

At first glance Memorial Day has absolutely nothing to do with Trinity Sunday. One is a secular holiday and the other is a feast day of the Christian Year that follows on the heels of Pentecost. Memorial Day is concrete. It is about real people – veterans, fallen heroes, war and peace. Trinity Sunday, on the other hand, is abstract. Some would even say obtuse. It has little to do with ethical decision-making nor personal values nor courage nor honor and nothing about nations and peoples. Many preachers will avoid mixing the two occasions and will probably preach about The Trinity since no one knows anything conclusive about the Trinity anyway - including the preacher!

However, a careful reading of our epistle lesson today from Paul’s Letter to the Romans which addresses suffering and sacrifice reveals themes related to martyrdom, freedom, and service. The Apostle Paul is writing to a small mixed Christian community in Rome. Their diversity is both their gift and their burden. Some are Jewish Christians and some are Pagan Christians. It would be like putting Lakers fans in a room with Celtics fans and calling them all Americans. Paul wanted to teach them that all people are awakened to the grace of God. Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ each person – male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free – has a personal relationship with God and with one another.

By being reconciled with God and with one another Paul points out that God does not want us to simply enjoy only a one-on-one relationship with him but to enlist all Christians to God’s service by building up the reign of God and working for his kingdom. And this will put all kinds of pressures, problems and sacrifices on the disciples requiring sacrifice, endurance and hope even when there seems to be nothing happening. According to Paul, since we are awakened to God’s grace and love we can boast in our sufferings and live with patient endurance. Believing in a God graced world, we have all the gifts we need to grow and mature into the full stature of Christ regardless of the changes, challenges and chances of life.

The poet Goethe writes that character is cumulative. And Paul is saying the same thing: The journey of faith is grounded in day-to-day decisions. Christian character is formed through the cauldrons of suffering, sacrifice, endurance and hope. Whatever comes our way in life we are given a model of faithful endurance through Jesus Christ. Through his sacrifice that gives eternal life, Jesus invites us to look beyond our own self-interests to the greater good of others, to offer thanks for our blessings and to glorify God who gives life and sustains life.

Through the eyes of Paul, particularly from today’s reading in Romans, Memorial Day is a vivid reminder of the sacrifices mad by others on our behalf. It is also the occasion for us to re-commit ourselves to the greater good living out in action and deed the words of Matthew 25: “When I was hungry you fed me. When I was naked you clothed me…” Because of the sacrifices of others, Memorial Day is the occasion to shed of our narrow self-interests for the greater good of family and friends, church and community, the nation and the world.

In this current age of personal, corporate and national self interest where material goals are to pay less taxes, to make more money, to blame the other guy, and to be indifferent to the fragile ecosystems of our earth, air and waters, Memorial Day invites you and me to balance our self interests with the wider interests of our planet and its people. Right now, you and I are witnessing the greatest environmental disaster in our country’s history. We are engaged in another kind of war. Who is to blame for the mammoth oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? We can point fingers; but at some point we have to take personal responsibility for what has happened given the world’s great need for oil.

Our immediate responses are anger and frustration. Anger will not change a society let alone change a planet. Our moral response is manifold and includes environmental initiatives with less dependency upon fossil fuels, more for wind, solar alternatives, and increasing and diligent collaboration with other cultures and nation on environmental sustainability. In the midst, environmental degradation and pollution can we still hope? Can we have a dream of the earth that is healthy again? It will require a new way of living. It will require both sharing and sacrificing. It will require a commitment to environmental sustainability that will call into question how we use the earth’s resources with one another. It will demand a universal vision of how to live as a global community. It will require prophets and sages. It will require the wise and the courageous. As faithful people, you and I are called to dream the good dreams of God in an age of nightmare.

Those who came before us were dreamers and visionaries. Those who served our country in time of war held dreams of a better country and a free world devoid of oppression and fear. Our fallen warriors sacrifices to the greater good in time of war can serve as inspirations for us who are locked in multiple wars right now: the war for the environment, the war to fight terrorism, the war to combat poverty.

In the motion picture Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks plays a WWII officer in charge of a squad of men who are given orders to find a Private Ryan and to return him safely home because all the rest of his brothers were killed in the war. After finding Ryan behind enemy lines, Hanks and his squad of soldiers must defend a bridge in a French village until reinforcements arrive. In the climatic scene of the film, the soldiers defend the bridge against the Germans and the officer played by Hanks is mortally wounded. As he is dying Private Ryan comes over to him after seeing that most of the men who “saved” Ryan are casualties. The officer’s last words to him are: “Earn this.”

If you go to a cemetery this weekend and you see an American Flag by a grave or some gently arranged flowers nearby and feel the breeze of the wind gently blowing near you, perhaps you will hear the faint whispers of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and air men and women saying “Earn this.” We have our freedom because of them. We have a remarkable country because of them. What we stand for is because of them. You and I can earn “this” not just by honoring them tomorrow on Memorial Day but also by living up to their values of sacrifice, patriotism and courage.

These are the values Paul speaks about in Romans. These are the values of a Christian when Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

In the name of God, creator, redeemer and sustainer. Amen.

Easter Day - Skip Windsor

2010-04-04T08:35:00.000-04:00

Luke 24:1-12

The Fire in the Equation

The Lord is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed!

Not long ago, my son, my grandson and I visited the Museum of Science in Boston. Among the live exhibits, the three of us watched the lightning show in the Theatre of Electricity. We enjoyed a thrilling display of sparks, lightning bolts, and loud cracks that kept everyone wide-awake including dozing grandfathers!

For those of you who have never experienced the Theatre of Electricity you have to imagine that you are sitting beside the Wizard of Oz. There are complicated elongated panels with funny looking dials and brightly colored lights. There are coils that seem to snake around the podium that glisten silver.

There are two large domes called the Van de Graaf generator which produce sparks that travel to two smaller grounded spheres. The sparks fly when the voltage on the domes get big enough to ionize the air turning the generator from an insulator into a conductor. When that transformation happens it happens very quickly -- like 1/1000 of second. Bang. Zap. And it’s over. Everyone is wide-awake!

After the show, while my grandson wandered over to the mammoth control panel monitored by the Wizard of Oz, my son and I started talking about those things beyond our comprehension: electromagnetic fields, the force of gravity, black holes, the Big Bang. We concurred that there are some things that just cannot be explained away. I am reminded of a cartoon of two professors with one of them pointing at a blackboard scribbled with complex-looking equations. In the middle of the blackboard instead of an equal sign it has the words, “then a miracle occurs.” And the one professor is pointing at the words saying to the other one, “Can you explain this a little bit better?”

Today as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Easter is the miracle in the equation. It is the “Something” that cannot be explained away. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes, that the miracle of Easter stands in the middle of a second Big Bang. It serves as an eighth day of creation when the atmosphere was divinely charged and the world was irrevocably changed.

Williams thinks of Easter as the fire in the equation; and I think that is an apt description of Easter as fire. It is about the Light: the light of creation, the first ray of daylight, and the radiant light of the Paschal Candle. The fire in the equation for us is the risen Christ. When He rose from the tomb truth, goodness, and hope rose with Him.

If Easter is about truth then Easter is about you and me. What we profess as truth shapes our understanding of things – even things such as resurrection. The Easter story is about the disciples’ initial understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. Was it true? And what truth shaped them to become the people they became?

In today’s Gospel reading from Luke the evangelist writes uncharacteristically even hesitantly. For those familiar with Luke’s Gospel know that he is a consummate storyteller. Only Luke includes the Parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. Only Luke highlights Jesus as a man of prayer and valorizes women as much as men in both his Gospel and in The Acts of the Apostles.

For those who read carefully the Easter text this morning you will find Luke use the word “but” five times. Like a boulder in the middle of the road this obstinate conjunction causes one to pause and take note. The narrative demands us, like the evangelist, to see that there are two competing stories being told at the same time. The stories are odds with one another.

One story recounts that the man Jesus, who some claimed as the Messiah, died –End of story. What happened on the cross crushed all their hopes and all their dreams. There was a hopeless finality to Good Friday. This was, and is, the rational and empirical story of Jesus of Nazareth. He lived and died a failure.

And this joyless and hopeless story is the enemy of the Easter Story. And yet it is a narrative that some people acknowledge today: Jesus was only a kind rabbi from Nazareth. He was a good and godly man and, at most, an interesting footnote in history. For some today, He is worth studying but not worth knowing.

The other story embedded in Luke is that something happened like an electrical charge that changed everything. Luke the physician, the man of science, is writing like one who can hardly believe the truth – But when they went in the tomb they found no body. But the men said, “He is not here but has risen.” But Peter saw the linens lying by themselves.

Luke the physician, the meticulous historian, surrenders all rational thinking to the truth as witnessed by the disciples: “Christ is alive!” “Remember how he told you in Galilee, remember how he told you on the holy mountain, and remember how he told you again before his entry into Jerusalem that he would die and on the third day rise again?” By remembering his promises, the disciples experienced a resurrection in their own lives that transformed them forever. All that Jesus spoke to them was true.

The second gift that rose with Jesus was goodness. All that Jesus said about the first shall be last and that last shall be first, about the meek shall inherit the kingdom of God, about loving your neighbor as yourself, and about being with His followers to the end of all time, was all true. His resurrection was his vindication about All that was good, all that was true and all that was beautiful was going to last forever through Him.

Tom Long, well-known preacher, tells the story of a young boy who was a great fan of both Capt. Kangaroo and Mister Rogers. The boy faithfully watched both television shows and one day it was announced that Mister Rogers would be paying a visit to the Capt. Kangaroo show.

The boy was ecstatic. Both of his heroes, together on the same show! Every morning the boy would ask, “Is it today that Mister Rogers will be on Capt. Kangaroo?”

Finally the great day arrived, and the whole family gathered around the television. There they were, Mister Rogers and Capt. Kangaroo together. The boy watched for a minute, but then, surprisingly, got up and wandered from the room.

Puzzled the father followed him and asked, “What is it, son? Anything wrong. “It’s too good,” the boy replied. “It’s just too good.”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the news of the empty tomb, the news of the resurrection, the victory of Jesus’ victory over death is just to good to be true, too good to grasp all at once. Yet, we do not have to apprehend the gift of Easter all at once. The spiritual life is one of progressive revelation knowing that the goodness of God never ends.

And if God’s goodness is endless then Easter is also about hope rising. You and I live in a body of hope. It is an energizing field. It makes for a spiritually charged atmosphere bigger than we are. God gives us more hope than we can handle.

In the Risen Christ we are embraced in an electromagnetic field of love that connects us to all things and to all people. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we find that the power was within us all along – As Jesus said many times to his disciples, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” By Him, through Him and with Him, we are born to a new life that is ever new, ever fresh, ever young and ever connected.

After the monsoons and flooding we have experienced this past Lent, we look with hope to sunnier skies, drier basements and warmer weather. Might not that hope just be a glimmer of Easter? Signs of resurrection are all around us.

Looking outside on this beautiful Easter Day, it is worth concluding this Lent season and commencing this Easter Day with those famous words of the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who wrote, “Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.”

Let us pray:

Almighty God, on this Day of Resurrection, you give us more hope than we can handle. We thank you for the promise of truth, the joy of goodness, and the gift of hope. This and more we ask through Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Amen.

Epiphany IV - Skip Windsor

2010-01-31T16:24:00.000-05:00

The Timeless Virtue

We gather this morning at this one service to worship together as a church community. Afterwards, we all are encouraged to attend the church annual meeting downstairs in Fellowship Hall. During the meeting, we will vote for new lay leadership, listen to reports from members of the staff and vestry, learn about new emerging ministries, and hear about the financial condition of the church.

This past year was a difficult one for everyone. Institutions failed. People lost their jobs. Families tightened their belts. Liquidity was scarce. For many, it is still difficult; and tough times lie ahead for many. The same is true for churches everywhere. Christ Church was not immune from these storms either. As you will read in the annual report, the vestry cut the budget by over 20%. Parishioners dug deeper into their pockets to ensure that vital ministries stayed in place. For this, we can be thankful. Because of your generosity and our expense cutting, we maintained a balanced budget and even carried a small surplus forward into this year.

We turned a corner in 2009. Average Sunday attendance is up 4% while the national church saw attendance decrease. Our average pledges have increased from approximately $1750 to $1850 matching the national church average. We are blessed to have scores of newcomers join our church community who are bringing diverse gifts and talents with them. Several new ministries are emerging at Christ Church such as The Party People and The Energy Efficiency Committee. Our affiliate, Circle of Hope, continues to make strategic partnerships with temples and churches in Needham and is adding an arm for kids that will draw in another generation to learn about social justice and outreach.

Good things are happening. God is taking us places we never thought we would go. Yet, with these important ministries occurring, we must ask ourselves where are we going as a church? What does 2011 look like for us? What about the next five years? Where will we be? Where do we want to be? In the strategic planning report handed to the vestry in April, there were provocative questions raised. In the heart of the report were these comments,

“As a parish we will need to decide as we go forward whether we are satisfied with the current reduced programming levels or whether we can devise a plan to “grow” our financial base in order to support our prior level of activities. possibility would be to increase non-financial participation in the church so that we could do more with less income.”

I do not think anyone here today would disagree with me that we want to grow as a church. The question becomes more of one about what kind of church we want to grow into? As I look around the diocese, I see 188 churches seeking to discern their mission in a rapidly changing culture and society. No longer will new wine fit into old wineskins.

The tectonic plates of the world are changing everyday. The language we speak. The communications we use. The people we meet. The climate we experience. The institutions we count on. All is dynamic. We must define our mission if we are to grow and flourish in a rapidly changing world. Being clear about our mission will determine what kind of church we will become in the next five years.

We do not have to create a mission. There is no need. We have one given to us. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Christ gave it to His disciples as His last command. It is called The Great Commission,

“And Jesus came and spoke to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.’”

Go. Make disciples. Baptize men and women in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. I believe at Christ Church we do go out in the world to do ministry: in Needham, Boston and the wider world. I believe we do make disciples by inviting people to join our church and become part of the community. I believe that we do baptize bringing young children and adults into the Household of God.

But, to carry out the Great Commission is not simple. Not today. There are obstacles along the way as we seek to serve Christ loving our neighbor as ourselves. And the one I wish to highlight this morning is a rising factionalism and partisanship in the wider church and in the public square. I would call it the “New Tribalism.”

The tribalism of community I am talking about is analogous to our North American Indian tribes, who manifest a certain culture, and ethos based upon a common, shared, and collective memory. Such collective memory formed around the narratives and stories of a people gives the tribe, and each member of the tribe, a sense of identity, as well as, provides a context for making meaning about their lives and their shared destiny.

Tribalism still exists today. You and I are from tribes. Whether we call it the Windsor, Baker, or Jensen tribe, or the Needham, Westwood or Newton tribe, or the Episcopalian, Congregational or Unitarian tribe, or the Democratic or Republican tribe, or, yes, even the Red Sox or Yankee tribe, in some way we come from a tribe and more than one tribe. Shared language, common memory, and an understood sense of values forms the basis of tribalism. Tribalism defines and differentiates us from others and helps us to know who we are.

The New Testament tells us that Jesus was descended from one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus was a Jew, and more specifically, was a Nazarene Jew. In today’s Gospel lesson from Luke, we hear about Jesus’ rejection by his hometown people. His tribe rejects him. The late comedian, Rodney Dangerfield’s signature remark, “I get no respect,” would be one way to sum up today’s Gospel lesson.

Jesus came from Nazareth. It was his father, Joseph’s hometown. In today’s reading from Luke, Jesus is recognized as one their own. A local boy who was a skilled carpenter who later took over his father’s business after Joseph died. So when the local boy comes back to teach instead of to carve, the people become intrigued even complimenting him saying, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son who is doing remarkable things in Capernaum? He’s come home to do those same amazing feats here with us in Nazareth!”

Their acceptance quickly turns to anger and unrest when Jesus announces to them that no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. And adds a truth about what ultimately is at stake when he speaks to his townspeople: He recalls two examples in Israel’s history that hearken back to the earlier prophets – Elijah and Elisha – who reached beyond the people of Israel to welcome those who were most representative of the marginalized “Gentiles” or non-Jews. Elijah went to the unnamed widow in Sidon and Elisha healed the Syrian leper known as Naaman. The widow, in spite of famine and poverty did not give up on God or the words of the prophet Elijah. Naaman, who at first was reluctant to follow the words of the prophet Elisha, washed himself seven times in the Jordan and was healed of his leprosy. Both the widow of Sidon and the Syrian Naaman represented the “extreme other” to those in the synagogue crowd. Jesus used these two examples to drive home the point that the Good News of God in Christ was intended for all tribes – Jew and Gentile alike.

The life of Jesus was devoid of personal factionalism. It is true he was an observant Jew and identified himself as a rabbi. Yet His arguments and preaching were always against the Jewish and Roman authorities that sought to divide communities: poor from rich, Jew from Gentile, women from men. He opposed those in authority because of their narrow-minded self-interests. What Jesus was calling people to was a higher unifying loyalty that transcended all tribal and partisan loyalties: Loyalty to God.

Through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus shows how God is with us in the world. When we see how Jesus forgave sinners, invited the despised, healed the sick, spoke to the doubtful, and prayed to God, we apprehend not an idea but a real person who sought to reconcile all people together in their common humanity under the banner of love.

In the Epistle lesson we heard today from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the familiar words take on a familiar resonance. We hear it read at weddings. But, a deeper reading leads us to note that Paul is making a diatribe against the cliques and factions that fought for turf in the Corinthian church. He presents the ideal virtue of a Christian community: Love. While some church factions valorized spiritual knowledge and prophecy, Paul says that even these gifts will pass away but love, love will abide. It defined the ideal of the Church. It defined the life in the Kingdom of God.

Inspired by the words of Paul, The words by the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross-comes to mind, “In the twilight of our lives, we will be judged on how we have loved.”

Jesus’ call remains as fervent and persistent now as it did in his own day. You and I are called to a universal discipleship where compassion eclipses tribalism. This discipleship leads us to act on our faith in love and in action. Being disciples of God does not make us refugees from the issues of the day. Rather, it makes us go deeper into the injustices, the prejudices, and the problems of our time.

In the end, because of the world’s great needs, there is more that unites us than divides us. In Christ, we are called to be the Beloved Community of God. Each of us together forms the Body of Christ and “Who is our neighbor?” extends as far as our love.

The concreteness of this virtue of love I find most exquisitely in the Holy Eucharist. Through God’s sacrificial love in Jesus Christ, we become the Body of Christ. But, at Christ Church, I find the symbol of Christian love in another place, too, in this sanctuary.

There is never a moment before I leave this sanctuary when I don’t stop to gaze upon this majestic glass cross before us. It is truly unique and brightly beautiful. When the morning sun comes through the glass the colors of the cross seem to dance across the floor. I find it very comforting, inspiring and reassuring in times of concern or worry.

But there are other times, more times these days than most, when I see the cross as a prod. Prodding you and me forth fulfilling Great Commission to go. “Go. Go out from this place. Make disciples. Put my love into action and equip the saints for the work of ministry.”

My hope for us as we look ahead this year is that we may we never lose sight of the Cross and may we always give ourselves over to love.

Let us pray:

O God of unchangeable power and grace, give us the vision to see you and to serve you with Christ-like love. We do not know what a new day will bring but let us be ready in body, mind and spirit to heed your call. Let us go forth from this your church renewed and restored for the work of ministry. All this we ask in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Epiphany II - Peter Tierney

2010-01-17T12:34:00.000-05:00

Poured out for Haiti
Psalm 36:5-10; John 2:1-11

“How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.”

Last week, I announced that I would be preaching about spiritual gifts today, but some things have happened between last Sunday and this morning, and God sometimes has a way of telling us that we need to change our plans, no matter how well thought out. One of the ways that God uses to get our attention is when we encounter the same person, or idea, or thing multiple times in a short period, seemingly coincidentally—and that is what happened to me while planning for this sermon. I had looked at the readings for last week and this week some time ago, and decided that I would preach two sermons on the Holy Spirit, so I wasn’t planning to talk about today’s Gospel reading at all. Now, Pam and I sat down to plan the music for this service a few weeks ago, and it was Pam’s idea to use the music in our hymnal with Jewish roots for nearly all the hymns in this service, in honor of the wedding at Cana, which was of course a Jewish wedding. When I told Pam earlier this week that I wasn’t preaching about the wedding at Cana, she looked a little disappointed—that was sign number one. A day or two later, I happened to be reading a book, and the author referenced the story of Jesus changing water into wine—sign number two.

On Tuesday night, we received the word about the earthquake in Haiti. By Wednesday morning, reports of the full extent of the destruction had begun to reach us, and we heard directly from Fr. Kesner Ajax, who visited us here at Christ Church two years ago. It was when Fr. Kesner reported that the Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince had been reduced to rubble that I knew for sure that a sermon on spiritual gifts would have to wait. Because, you see, the walls of the sanctuary of Holy Trinity cathedral in Port-au-Prince were painted with the most amazing, brilliantly colored murals of biblical scenes, but these biblical stories were painted in a distinctly Haitian style, with Haitian people and with elements of Haitian culture—clothing, tools, customs—woven seamlessly into the paintings as a way of saying that the biblical world and the Haitian world are one: the days of Jesus are today, just as real for Haiti as they are for ancient Israel. These murals were national treasures—exquisite examples of Haitian religious art. I was in that Cathedral, looking at those murals just this past September, on our mission team’s first day in Haiti—a Sunday—and for me, the most beautiful and powerful and moving of those paintings was the mural depicting today’s Gospel story—Jesus’ miracle at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee. When I heard that the Cathedral had been destroyed in the earthquake, and I realized that no one else would ever see that mural of the Wedding at Cana, I knew that God wanted something different from me in this sermon than what I had planned.

The Russian author Dostoevsky wrote of Jesus’ miracle at the wedding of Cana that “It was not people’s grief, but their joy Christ visited. He worked his first miracle to help human gladness.” By sustaining the wine at the wedding, Jesus allowed the celebration to continue when it might have been cut short for lack of the cup of gladness. But isn’t this a strange and alien story for us to hear today, of all days, when the suffering of Haiti lies heavy on our hearts? Do we not need Jesus to visit our grief now and the grief of an entire nation? What is there to celebrate, when destruction has erased the Wedding of Cana from the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral? What need is there for wine, when the people of Haiti are desperate for the water that Jesus started out with? Our hearts cry out: “Turn it back, O Lord, and give them the water to drink!”

The joy of the wedding feast does not fit our mood or our circumstances, and it might be completely out of place, if it were not for the ambivalence that marks Jesus’ mood in this Gospel. Jesus is reluctant to work this miracle, he is not ready to give the sign—when his mother tells him that the party has run out of wine, he says to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Jesus knows that as soon as he gives this sign, as soon as he does this wondrous thing, his feet are set on a path that will lead him to his hour. That hour is the hour of the Cross, the hour of his death. The road that begins in Cana of Galilee is the road that ends at Golgotha—the wine that Jesus gives to the wedding feast is forever linked to the wine poured out from his body when the spear pierces his heart: “This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Even in the joyous celebration of the wedding feast, there is a whiff of desolation. Our lives are rarely marked by a pure and unadulterated joy—they are a mixture of celebration and sadness.

But the reverse is also true, that joy and hope can linger and remain and grow, even in the most desolate and seemingly desperate times. When Jesus is hanging on the Cross, the life nearly gone from him, sensing that he has been abandoned by the God he has called Father all his life, he cries out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It is a cry that we can imagine echoing through the streets of Port-au-Prince today. But on Jesus’ lips, this cry is more than a sign of desolation—it is a quotation from the 22nd psalm, the first line of that most piteous and heartbreaking of the songs of Israel. The psalm goes on, “Why are you so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? Oh my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” That is how the 22nd psalm begins, but I want you to hear how it ends, because the rest of the psalm could not have been far from Jesus’ mind. After rehearsing many unanswered pleas for God to save, the psalm takes a turn, declaring faith in God despite the certainty of death for the sake of the future. The final verses of the psalm end, “My soul shall live for God; my descendants shall serve him; they shall be known as the Lord’s for ever. They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.” On Jesus’ lips, the desolate cry of the 22nd psalm is a statement of faith and hope, a cry from the heart that although God may not spare us from the time of trial, there is a future for the peaceable kingdom, there is a hope for generations yet unborn.

The God we worship is not a remote and distant God, sitting in the heavens passing judgment from afar. The God we worship, the God we remember today in our holy meal of bread and wine, is the crucified God, the God who has taken the pain and suffering of the world onto himself, and poured out his blood for our sake. The God we worship today is the risen Lord, the God who overcomes Death. Our God encompasses all things, from the joy of the Wedding feast to the suffering of the Cross to the triumph of the Resurrection. Our human lives are a mixture of these things—joy and suffering, desolation and consolation, and the lives of the people of Haiti are the same, even today. They are lives of faith and hope, even today.

You do not need to believe my word alone about this--I want to share you testimony from Haiti. These words are taken from an e-mail sent to us by Suzi Parker, a Presbyterian missionary who with her husband John is running the guesthouse in Leogane that Christ church’s team stays at when we are going to Lazile. That guesthouse was seriously damaged in the earthquake—John and Suzi’s apartment was destroyed. Suzi writes, “At night we sleep in the yard behind the hospital where the bandstand was. It has fallen, as has the Episcopal school. There are two to three hundred people who sleep in that field at night. They sing hymns until almost midnight, and we wake up to a church service, with hymns, a morning prayer, and the apostles’ creed. The evening sky is glorious. In the field, there is a real sense of community. I have never understood joy in the midst of suffering, but now I do. The caring I have seen, the help we have received from the Haitians, the evening songs and prayers are wonderful. The people will survive, though many will die. Please pray for us. And pray that we and the hospital can be of help to the people here.”

The psalmist says that in God is the well of life, and in God’s light we see light. But sometimes we do not see the light, sometimes all we can see are the shadows and darkness, and we have only the memory of what it is to see God’s light. Sometimes God hides. And in those times, having faith and hope means trusting that the shadows falling on us are the shadow of God’s wings covering us to protect us from a greater darkness, for there is no shadow without a light somewhere to cast it. I pray that this is so for the people of Haiti and for the people who are traveling to aid them—people of great faith and hope. “How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings. Continue your loving-kindness to those who know you, and your favor to those who are true of heart.” Amen.

Epiphany I - Peter Tierney

2010-01-10T12:29:00.000-05:00

Burning with the Holy Spirit
Isaiah 43:1-7; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

"John answered all of them by saying, 'I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.'"

Here, in the words of John the Baptist, we are first introduced to the difference between the baptism that John administered and the baptism that Jesus administers: the baptism of John is a baptism with water, but the baptism of Jesus—the baptism of the Christian Church—is baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Now it is true that Jesus honors the baptism of John by being baptized himself with water by John’s hands, and also by making baptism with water the sign and means of Christian baptism, but make no mistake—even though Christians are baptized with water, the essential part of Christian baptism is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself emphasizes the importance of being filled with the Holy Spirit when he teaches, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

In the book of Acts, once the apostles hear that the new converts in Samaria have not received the Holy Spirit, even though they have been baptized, they send Peter and John to pray for them and lay hands on them so that they will receive the Spirit. The conversion of the Samaritans is not complete without the presence of the Holy Spirit with them, and the author of Acts suggests that the reason the Samaritans had not received the Spirit was because “they had only been baptized in name of the Lord Jesus.” The connection between Christian baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit is so strong that even though baptism in the name of Jesus alone was permissible in the very earliest days, it came to be seen as deficient, and the practice of baptizing in the threefold name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit became the universal practice of the Christian Church.

So, all of that tells us that Jesus and the followers of Jesus baptize with the Holy Spirit, or call upon the Holy Spirit to complete the action begun in baptism, and it also tells us that Christians should value the presence of the Holy Spirit, but it doesn’t do much to tell us why the Holy Spirit is so important. What’s so great about the Holy Spirit anyway? What has the Holy Spirit done for us lately? I am convinced that one important clue that points us toward the answers to these questions lies in the other thing that John tells us Jesus will baptize with. Jesus baptizes, not only with the Holy Spirit—but with fire!

What does it mean to baptize with fire? Fire is not an element in Christian baptism—we don’t light babies on fire before dipping them in the font. You may have heard the expression “baptism by fire” used to describe the circumstances when someone is thrown into a particularly difficult situation that becomes an extreme test of their abilities. This idea of a trial by fire is one of the most frequent ways that fire is mentioned in the New Testament. Fire as a means of testing the purity of metals, fire that cleanses and cauterizes and purifies, fire that judges whether something is durable and will endure—that is how the New Testament speaks of fire.

Fire is also closely linked with the Holy Spirit and with the presence of God. In the Old Testament, God leads the people of Israel out of Egypt and through the desert in a pillar of fire by night, and when they reach Mount Sinai, “the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel,” and it was out of this fire that God spoke the Ten Commandments to Israel. Again, in the Acts of the Apostles, it is no coincidence that when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles at Pentecost, it appears in the form of tongues of fire. Fire is a sign and a symbol of God’s presence—which is one reason why we keep a flame constantly burning in our sanctuaries.

So we have these two aspects of fire connected to each other: fire as a sign of God’s presence, and fire that tests the mettle of what it surrounds. The Holy Spirit is a fire that both tests and purifies the people that it falls upon. The Spirit is the spirit of truth, and so it tests and divides truth from falsehood; the Spirit is the spirit of righteousness, and so it tests our actions, revealing what is good and what is wicked in the things we do and empowering us to do the good. Above all, the Spirit is the spirit of love, that burning fire of love that draws us together and tests our bonds to God and to each other, refining those relationships to make them even more truly beautiful and pure reflections of God’s own infinite beauty. The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Elsewhere in his Gospel, Luke records a somewhat cryptic sentence spoken by Jesus, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” The fire that Jesus is speaking of is this fire of the Holy Spirit, a fire that is meant to burn in the hearts of his disciples, a fire that will rage throughout the ages and test the world that God has made, burning away what is false, and wicked, and against God’s will for the world that he made in love. This is a fearsome fire, an awesome and terrible and relentless fire, a fire that Jesus means to share with those who will take up their cross and follow him. Jesus came to set each and every one of us on fire—he wants you to burn with the Spirit of God. There is an urgency and a great power in God’s mission, it is the same urgency that fire has as it latches onto anything that will burn and keep the fire going. This mission, the mission that Jesus shared with his disciples is the mission to love God and our neighbor truly, it is the mission to share the good news of God’s forgiveness in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and this mission that is powered by the burning flame of the Holy Spirit, which is given to us in baptism.

God wants us to burn with this mission; Jesus wants to set us on fire for God’s mission, the Holy Spirit has been sent to reach into us and draw forth our greatest energies and efforts to further God’s work in the world, to light a fire in us that will shine out and proclaim that God is here! God is here in us and between us and around us!

Next week, I will be preaching about some of the specific ways that the Holy Spirit acts in the Church to further God’s mission by granting spiritual gifts to disciples of Jesus, but for now, I want to leave you with one last observation—this time an important difference between fire and the Holy Spirit. Fire, as we know it, consumes the fuel that keeps it burning, until nothing is left. The Holy Spirit is not that kind of a fire—it does not rely on the power and the energy that is within us, but rather unlocks the depths of our energy, focuses it and sets it free. It is not so with other kinds of spirits—we can all think of examples of people who, caught up in a passionate spirit for human endeavors, end up consumed by that Spirit. Think of athletes who focus so much on sport that they destroy their bodies or lose their love for the game, or neglect their other commitments and relationships. Think of politicians who enter public life with the best of intentions, but succumb to the lure of power and influence. Think of financiers and investors who start who start off in business to make a living, but the pressure and the desire to make more and more money takes over and overrides their judgment and their sense of right and wrong. Think of religious zealots, who begin by following the leadings of the Spirit, but come to confuse their own thoughts and prejudices with the mind of God. In all of these cases, people are consumed by the fires of their own passions—but it will not be so if we are burning with the true Holy Spirit of God. Jesus wants us to burn, but he does not want us to burn out. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit and acting in accordance with God’s will, the work may be strenuous and difficult, but it will not be draining and tiresome, it will not burn us out.

God promises that when his people walk through the fire, they shall not be burnt, and the flame will not consume them. This is a promise that extends to the fire of the Holy Spirit as well. The image to remember is the image of God speaking out of the burning bush to Moses—what astonished Moses and got his attention was that the bush was not consumed by the flames. So it will be with us, if we have received the Holy Spirit of God—we will burn with a shining light that does not consume us, and God will speak out from us—perhaps in words, but also in our deeds. And in the power of the Spirit, we will find that God has given us the most rewarding work and the most blessed gift we will ever know.

Christmas Day - Peter Tierney

2009-12-25T12:20:00.000-05:00

Christ our Freedom is God’s Christmas Promise
Luke 2:1-20

2010 will be a census year for us, with all the multitudes of the United States counted. The registration that caused Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem was another kind of census, but while our census serves an important purpose in the life of our nation and our government, I can assure you that Caesar’s census had nothing to do with determining proportional representation in the Roman Empire. No—the Emperor’s purposes for counting the people in the empire likely had more to do with questions like “How many people do I rule over?” “Where do most of them live, and are they being taxed accordingly?” “From where can I raise more legions, and where do I need to send the legions that I have recruited?” Caesar’s census was about control, about measuring power and the means to maintain power. To the mighty Roman Emperor, the little child born in Bethlehem was just another statistic, another jot on the tally sheet of subjects dominated by the power of Rome. There are nations today where census taking is more akin to the Roman census than it is to the U.S. census, where people are counted in order to be controlled. The world Jesus was born into was a dangerous place, and our world can still be dangerous—the boots of tramping warriors and the rods of oppressors have not passed away from the world, and the yoke of oppression still lies heavy on the shoulders of many people. The world of Jesus’ day needed a savior, and our day too looks for this salvation.

God has promised, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that all oppression will be cast off, that the rods of unjust rulers will be broken, that people who live in darkness will see a great light. God promises that a savior has been sent. But God’s answer to the Caesars of the world is not the answer the world expected in Jesus’ day, and I daresay it is not the answer you and I would come up with if left to our own devices. Against the legions of Caesar, against tyrants of every age, God sends—not a strong and sturdy warrior, not a second Samson—but an infant, born in a stable. God’s answer to all the abuses of power in the world is a newborn infant, wrapped in bands of cloth, crying for his first meal at his mother’s breast.

It makes no sense to the human mind, and Jesus’ birth passed almost without notice in his own day—on that first Christmas, the Emperor Augustus was not quaking in fear that his empire would crumble and fall because of this baby. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Before the yoke of rulers and injustice can be broken, there is another enemy to be confronted, another form of oppression to be cast off—and that is the enemy within, the disorder of our desires; the passions that cause us to seek our own advantage over the needs of others, the selfish and self-centred impulses that we all feel and struggle against. The first enemy that Jesus comes to overthrow is the enemy that God and the Church have named sin—the tyrant of our hearts that seeks to rule over us and bend our will away from godliness and upright living, the enemy that encourages laziness when we can get away with it, undue pride in our accomplishments, anger against our neighbors, and envy of others’ good fortune.

Against the oppression of sin, the infant Jesus is the perfect conqueror, for what is more likely to inspire us to want to live a better life than a newborn child, with all the potential and promise of a new life? What parent doesn’t want to be a better person for the sake of her child? We may not always be able to live up to those noble aspirations, and children can be an aggravation as well as an inspiration, but the newborn Christ-child embodies the hope for new life in all of us. In the baby Jesus of the Christmas crib, the grace of God has appeared; and when Christ is born in our hearts, he inspires us to live lives that are upright and self-controlled, concerned with others needs and God’s desires before our own.

Once Christ has won the victory over sin—our spiritual oppression—the victory over tyranny and worldly oppression cannot be far behind, because the one relies on the other. Tyranny and corruption cannot last in the face of honesty and righteousness, the unjust ruler always relies on the self-interest of allies and subordinates. If someone can’t be bought or bribed or rewarded for loyalty, then the only tools that remain for the tyrant are threats and violence. But Jesus has overcome that power as well—not only as a child, but as a man. We have gathered here not only to celebrate Christmas, but to share the Easter meal—our holy communion—in which we remember that Jesus died for us and rose again to live forever and to share his eternal life with those who believe in him. And if we have been given the gift of Jesus’ life, then death can have no hold over us, unless we allow it. And if the followers of Jesus do not fear death, then what power do the tyrants of the world have anymore? Their rod has been broken, their oppression is lifted, because it is an illusion and a fantasy compared to the love and mercy of God. The world remains a dangerous place, but no matter what happens to us in this life, we have the confidence of new and greater life in Christ’s gifts of grace and love.

For the sake of one innocent life, God has redeemed the world. Jesus Christ, born today, is the victory over the enemy of our souls and the enemy of our bodies, he has overcome both sin and death, and he will share his victory with us if we trust in him and follow him as our lord and our God. God has kept his promise, he has sent us a savior: Christ the Lord. So come and worship, come and worship, worship Christ our newborn King!

Christmas Eve - Skip Windsor

2009-12-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

Luke 2:1-20

In the Shadow of the Manger

Every year at Christmas, we hear the story of Jesus’ birth according to the Gospel of Luke. As an historian Luke is very careful to place the Nativity of our Lord within the context of world history. We hear about the rulers of the time and the evangelist is explicit in making the point that the birth of one small child in Bethlehem occurs in the midst of timeless turmoil – war and rumors of war, economic disparity, and persecution and oppression.

It is in this historical context that Luke writes the immortal words of hope: “Today a Savior has been born! He is Christ the Lord” (2:11). Our Christian faith tells us that God came into the world in an unexpected way – God did not come into the world as a prince but as a pauper. God did not come into the world as a powerful warrior but as a vulnerable baby. God did not come into the world to be the leader of the principalities and powers but to save and rescue the world from sin and death. God came to be with you and me.

The 20th century poet, Robinson Jeffers, writes:

For an hour on Christmas Eve
And again on the holy day,
Seek the magic of past time,
From this present turn away.
Dark though our day,
Light lies the snow on hawthorn hedges
And the ox knelt down at midnight…

Caesar and Herod shared the world
Sorrow over Bethlehem lay,
Iron the empire, brutal the time
Dark was that first Christmas Day,
Light lay the snow on the mistletoe berries
And the ox knelt down at midnight.

Each and every Christmas, we hear Luke’s story and again are reminded that the Creator God condescended to take on human form and came into the world as a homeless child. When we sing the familiar words of the carol, “Away in the manger,” we sing sweetly the words, “Away in a manger no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus, laid down his sweet head.” Yet, behind the words and behind the holiday sentiment stirs an enduring reality that God came to be identified not with Augustus Caesar but with the lost and homesick, the homeless and the exile.

The mystery of Christmas is about the majesty of God who loves us so much that God became one of us in Jesus; and the simplest way for me to understand this mystery is to share a story with you.

Once upon a Christmas Eve, a man sat in reflective silence before the fireplace, pondering the meaning of Christmas. “There is no point to God who becomes man,” he mused. “Why would an all-powerful God want to share even one of His precious moments with the likes of humanity? And even if he did, why would he choose to be born in an animal stall? No way! The whole idea is absurd! I’m sure that if God really wanted to come down to earth, He would have chosen some other way.”

Suddenly, the man was roused from his ruminations by a strange sound outside. He went to the window and saw a small gaggle of Canadian geese frantically honking and aimlessly flopping about in the snow. They seemed disoriented and dazed. Apparently, they had dropped out of exhaustion from the flight formation of a larger flock on its way from north of Newfoundland to the warmer climes of the Gulf of Mexico.

Moved with compassion, the man tried to shoo the poor geese into his warm garage; but the more he shooed the more they panicked. “If they only realized I’m only trying to do what’s best for them,” he thought to himself. “How can I make them understand my concern for their well-being?” Then, this thought came to him: “If for just one minute, I could become one of them, an ordinary goose, and communicate with them in their own language, they would know what I’m trying to do.”

And suddenly, he remembered Christmas and a smile came over his face. Suddenly, the Christmas story no longer seemed absurd. Suddenly, he pictured that ordinary-looking infant, lying in a manger, in the stable in Bethlehem, and he knew the answer to his Christmas question: God had become one of us to tell us He loves us and to point us home.

As I have reflected upon this story, the more I think it is a parable of Christmas.

Like the birds that have flown south for the winter, we tend to migrate to those places where we will find warmth and comfort, healing and hope. Like them, we seek a resting place of peace. Like them we are also frozen with fright by the events that assail us. And like them, we have a yearning for home.

At such times, when we, like the birds of the air, seek to fly yearning to be free, it is God who also yearns – yearns to be with us and share in His creation. The wonder of Christmas, the mystery of Christmas, is that God left heaven to be with us.

So God came down from heaven to Bethlehem to be born in a manger with the ox and the ass, the shepherds and the sheep, to be with us. A Merry Christmas, a happy life, and good fortune are not why God comes to be with us. God loves us more than this.

God says, “I do not wish to take away people’s desires or even their emptiness. Rather, I wish to share their desires and their emptiness by being by their side. I want to fly with my flock, to help them seek what they mostly deeply need.

“I want to help their yearning to reach into the farthest corners of heaven and to help them find part of heaven that is already within themselves. I desire to embrace with my wings all the ill-winds of death, all the winds of doubt and despair that buffet them; and I will transform them into currents of love.”

This Christmas Eve, we join hands and hearts around the manger of Jesus. The light from the manger gives sight to the world. It is a place that holds not only a little baby but cradles the whole world. The real manger on this Christmas Eve is the human heart. That is where the Christ of Christmas is born and known to be real and true.

For the enduring invitation of Christmas for us is how we will cast the shadow of the manger everyday. Its outline is traced by the way we live our lives with generosity and compassion not only at Christmas but everyday of the year. As it is written in the Letter of Titus, “We are a people who are zealous for good deeds.”

Shortly, we will depart from this place. We will go with family and friends out into the night. We will return to our homes filled with bright lights and trees, good food and presents. Let us take with us the meaning of this night. Let always keep Christmas in our hearts.

The life we live is in God. The life we praise is to Jesus – just as the words from the Christmas carol, O Holy Night, remind us:

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave our brother.
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
With all our hearts we praise his holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!

Let us pray:

God of light who breaks into the darkness of the world each day, break into our hearts anew. As we learn to live in your light, help us to serve you in holiness and righteousness. Guide us in the way of peace. All this we ask in the name of Christ, the light that we pray.

Amen.

Pentecost XXIV - Skip Windsor

2009-11-15T08:09:00.000-05:00

(This sermon was preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, Massachusetts.)
Proper 28-B, Mark 13:1-8
A New Hope
Let us pray: Be with us, O God, and give us the Spirit of Christ. Amen.
I bring you greetings from the people of Christ Church in Needham. I also want to thank your canon pastor, Steve, for his hospitality and my gratitude to your Dean, Jep, for suggesting the idea of making this pulpit exchange between us last summer. Our two communities share in the vibrant and important Monday Lunch Program when people from Needham come the second Monday of the month to work with members of the Cathedral and to serve a healthy lunch to the men and women who come off the streets for a meal every week.
It is a pleasure to return to the Cathedral where I began my ordained ministry here over twenty years ago as the Cox Fellow. My wife, Kathy, and I have very fond memories of our time here being supported by wonderful people such as Gloria Watt and Dorothy Dottin, as well as, those who have gone before us and abide in the nearer presence of God: People such as Rose Burke, Pearl Blackman, Blossom Frederick and Jeanne Sprout.
As I look around today, I can remember back to important moments in our ministry together: Ordinations, Episcopal elections, baptisms, marriages, and funerals. But, with the passing of the years, I see many changes in the Cathedral congregation and in the Cathedral itself. One of those changes, I have appreciated is the addition of the Labyrinth in the floor of Sprout Hall.
From time to time, when I’ve come to a Monday Lunch program or have attended a meeting in Sprout Hall, I am always aware of the Labyrinth and what it represents about the pilgrim’s journey towards God. I have had the privilege of seeing the real one at Chartres Cathedral in France. It is approximately forty-two feet in diameter, inlaid in the stone floor. The most majestic stained glass windows in the world surround it. Blues. Greens. Yellows. The light seems to dance off the floors.
Like downstairs, the original Labyrinth is normally covered with chairs for worship services. On occasion, the sextons of Chartres will move the chairs for a couple of days so that visitors can walk the Labyrinth finding a serenity and peace given to thousands of men and women over the centuries. I remember vividly several decades ago when I traveled from Paris to Chartres and saw the majestic Cathedral for the first time. It stands strikingly above everything else on a hillside among miles of wheat fields. Only when a traveler gets closer does one know there is a whole city that surrounds it.
Seeing Chartres Cathedral for the first time has always reminded me of those early pilgrims who saw the ancient Temple in Jerusalem for the first time singing those familiar words from Psalm 121,

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills ---
From whence cometh my help?
My help cometh even from the Lord,
Who hath made heaven and earth.

I think every Cathedral such as St. Paul’s or Chartres is a reminder of the Temple of Jerusalem where people would make their pilgrimage to their “Mother Church.” I know that many Anglicans who have come from the islands of the Caribbean and West Indies over the decades have made St. Paul’s their home because it is the mother church of the diocese. Many of us around the diocese would consider St. Paul’s our Cathedral; and, I suspect that the early pilgrims of Jesus’ time would consider the Temple their temple.
The gospel lesson today from Mark is instructive about the true nature of cathedrals, churches and communities. The evangelist recounts how Jesus and four of his disciples – Peter and Andrew and James and John – leaving the temple precincts and going across to the Mount of Olives gives them a panoramic view to see the full measure of King Herod’s power and wealth. As the disciples look with awe at its sheer majesty, Jesus remembers all of them had just come from inside the Temple and had witnessed a poor widow drop all she owned into the treasury. What is to be more important: buildings or people? This question is one of the underlying themes of today’s gospel text.
“Wow!” “What a building!” “ Just look at the size of those stones!” They exclaim. Perhaps, they were seeing the beautiful buildings of the Temple for the first time just like my first visit to Chartres or someone’s first visit to Washington, D.C. or New York City. And then Jesus pours cold water on their enthusiasm predicting, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” If ever there were a double take in scripture this would be one of those moments. Did they hear what they thought they heard? Say again?
The disciples ask Jesus when it will happen; and he tells them all these stones will fall but to know the time and hour when they fall is unknown. Not much later, those stones did fall. The Romans destroyed the marvelous Temple in 70 AD tearing it down stone by stone, rock by rock, until there was nothing left. Seeing the Temple leveled must have seemed like the end of the world to the people of Jerusalem. For them, the Temple symbolized the presence of God. And now their Temple was destroyed and it seemed to them that God was gone from their sight.
But, God did not abandon them. While the greed of the Temple treasurers was destroyed and the idolatry of Herod was decimated, there came up from the smoke and ashes, debris and detritus, a new hope to claim the hearts of faithful people. The destruction of the Temple was a signal that the place where people and God met had shifted from a place to a person. Sitting on the Mount of Olives with Jesus that day, the four apostles would later come to know that the temple of God was not made of stones on the temple mount but right in front of them, close as a heartbeat, in the person of Jesus.
Jesus was the new temple; and if it was true then, it is true now. In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle writes that the Spirit of God dwells within us. So many times when people think of a cathedral or a church they think of a building.
In Needham, people will ask me, “Where is your church?” And, I will automatically, but incorrectly say, “At the corner of Rosemary Street and Highland Avenue.” What I should say is that the church is the people, the Laos, who are the true stones that make up Christ Church. The spirit dwells within the people of churches and cathedrals. No matter how beautiful a building, the Spirit rests upon its people.
I love to tell the story of the time when I was the Cox Fellow here at the Cathedral. As you know better than any congregation, you host most of the diocesan services and that some of these services are filled with pageantry and beauty. The music soars. The choir is angelic. The readers are eloquent. And the clergy are wearing their most resplendent vestments. One time we had such a service. It was simply stated -- a magnificent service. The bishops in their mitres, the Cathedral clergy in their purple cassocks, and the deacons and sub-deacons looking like angels it looked like we just came out of central casting. After the service, I asked Mazie Graham what she thought of the service; and I never forgot what Mazie said. She said, “Skip, remember this. You clergy may look like the flowers but we laity are the roots.”
My brothers and sisters of the Cathedral, you are the roots of this diocese. Because of your hospitality, we have most of our special diocesan services here. Because of your vision, we have outreach programs like the Crossing that are engaging the emerging church. Because of your compassion, thousands of people who are hungry and homeless are fed. One of the reasons I wanted to preach today is to tell you that this Cathedral, as venerable as it is, and its ancient stones erected in 1818 and consecrated as a cathedral by Bishop Lawrence in 1912, is not the Cathedral. No. You are the Cathedral along with those who came before you and those who will come after you. I know I speak for countless clergy and laity around the diocese who would echo my sentiments saying you are the roots of the Cathedral and therefore have the deepest roots among us anchoring us as a diocesan community.
I come to visit you today both as messenger and scout. As messenger, I offer greetings from the people of Christ Church. I also come as a scout to return to my church and my deanery telling them about the good work you are doing every day, every Sunday, in this location on Tremont Street and beyond.
Through our baptisms, we all are members of the Body of Christ and carry within us the Spirit of God. Each of us is called to special ministries according to the gifts given us by the spirit. Christ Church has a special ministry given us as a community. It is not about the size of attendance or how big the pledges are. Ministry is more than numbers. And as I have reflected on the Cathedral and its ministry and the people I have known here, I believe part of your ministry is to show the rest of us in the diocese how to do the right thing.
I am reminded of television series aired in 2004 called Angel: Down Under when the hero finds himself trapped in an underwater tomb and fears that no one will find him. After he is finally rescued he tells a friend,
“Nothing in this world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh and cruel. But that is why there’s us. Champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from. What we have done or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were what it should be, to show it what it can be.”
Brothers and sisters of the Cathedral, you live as though the world, were what it should be, to show the rest of us what it can be.
Keep it up and God bless you. And now to God, be the honor and the glory. Amen.

The Feast of All Saints - Sally Bingham

2009-11-01T20:28:00.000-05:00

John 11:32-44

Good morning and thank you for having me with you this morning. I bring greetings from the Bishop of California, Marc Andrus who installed me as a Canon last year largely because he couldn’t get me to shut up about the responsibility that Episcopalians have to care for Creation. I am often referred to as the Diocesan Loose Canon. I do not deny that I will blast you with stories and facts of environmental destruction that may just (to use a metaphor) knock you over. And I do go on about it if given the chance. I am a seeker of the truth and I do my very best to speak the truth.

But before I go further, I want to recognize that this is All Saints Day when we honor the Saints that have gone before and set the example for us to be good Christians. If you hoped for a sermon this morning that would address ALL the Saints you will be disappointed, because I will reference only one Saint-the patron saint of the city from which I come, San Francisco. Yes, St. Francis who loved all creatures great and small and treated the trees and plants with respect because they were created by God. While Francis is often referred to as an environmentalist, I don’t think he was. I believe that contrary to the folklore about him, he really was a man trying to recreate what it means to be human. He wanted to be as much like Christ as would be humanly possible and for him that meant defining the human purpose on earth. As he understood it, humans were created to care for all that is. It wasn’t the Sierra club that called earth good, first it was God.

Francis set out to set an example for us just as jesus had. He provide a voice for the poor, the underserved and the creation-all that needed a voice, but didn’t have one-all that was overlooked or beaten down by wealth- some segments of society then and now suffer the consequences of others irresponsibility. Often, it is the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor. Francis dedicated his life and ministry to trying to restore balance to a broken world that had fallen into dark times.

There is another reason that I am mentioning St. Francis and it is because I met Kathy and Skip Windsor in Assisi and together we explored the basilicas, caves and olive groves where Francis preached to the birds and gave food to the poor. Without that meeting-in St. Francis’s home town- I wouldn’t be here with you this morning. It was the beginning of a long and close friendship.

Back to my concern for Creation and I want to make it clear that Creation is what we are part of. God created us with special characteristics so we could look after the world he had made, but we are nontheless part of the Creation. The Creation often referred to as the environment, is not something out there------- it is here, it is us. We are the Creation. Understanding that deeply will help us change some of our behavior because we will connect how we treat the environment and how we treat each other as a reflection of how we feel about God. Furthermore it is in our own best interest to treat God’s creation with care. Harming it only harms our own ability to look after ourselves, not to mention everything else that God created.

I do have a passion for stewardship of God’s Creation and I believe that we, (you and I) the people in the pews who profess a love of God should be leading the charge to protect God’s Creation. And we should lead by example, just as Jesus and Francis did.

I know that are still folks in our church that are suspicious of environmentalism with the notion that the subject is political and doesn’t belong in church. I am often asked.

What does religion have to do with the environment, or isn’t the church getting involved with politics if we take stands on ecological issues. You already know my response ….. we, people of faith should be leading the environmental movement.

How can we sit in a pew and profess a love for God and praise the creation without wanting to protect it.

Unfortunately the environmental crisis HAS become political in part and it is too bad that happened because it is a far deeper issue than just politics. It is a scientific issue and I mention that particularly because I believe that contemporary scientist are the prophets of today- scientist like the ones that received last year’s Nobel peace prize. But care for creation is far deeper and far more important than politics or science, it is a spiritual issue and one that must be addressed by the faith community. How we care for Creation, today will dictate the future for many generations to come. It has become a matter of life and death: a matter that humans are the only ones in position to do something about. We created the problem and if we are going to keep this planet healthy for over 6 billion people to live on safely, we need to work hard to make real changes.

We have to have a healthy environment if we are going to survive as a species AND, as is becoming increasingly clear, if we are going to have a healthy economy we must have a healthy environment, too. For our society to be stable, we need three strong pillars for support. One is the economy, one is social/political stability and the third is a healthy environment. They share the weight equally, so if any one of those pillars collapse, the entire structure will fall. And right now, one of those pillars is on the verge of collapse.

The threat to our environment is largely due to an unhealthy reliance on fossil fuel for energy in this country and around the world. We are overly dependant on coal, oil and gas for our electricity, our transportation and our heating and cooling. The burning of these fuels is upsetting the balance of nature; the balance that God set into place in the beginning. We are witnessing the rise in temperature due to the rise in carbon dioxide that traps gasses from leaving the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is by far higher than it has ever been.

We are standing on the edge of two worlds. The one that God created and the one that humans are making. And the one we are making is not sustainable.

It is as serious as life and death. So I ask you to reflect back to the Lazarus story. Jesus chose to give life to his friend because he was a healer and I suspect that Jesus would choose to heal the planet, too.

Our readings this morning and the story of St. Francis are lessons in recreation, new birth, starting over - A new vision of heaven and a new earth.

There is something in the parable about Lazarus that I found

interesting. When Jesus called him out of the tomb, he asked for help from the others. Move the stone he said. Untie him and let him free. He didn’t do it for them, they had to participate in the action. They were part of the healing and had to act with Jesus to restore life.

We are in that kind of situation now. We need God to give us the courage and the will to restore balance in nature and to bring back life where things have already died. But we must participate. We cannot sit back and see if things work out. God will not do it for us. David Orr from Oberlin College says this well. To be optimistic is to assume that everything will turn out all right in the end, but hope is different. It is a verb with your sleeves rolled up. You have to be invested in the restoration

God asks us to roll up our sleeves and get to work. It won’t happen on its own.

The ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the leader of the 300 million Greek Orthodox has called environmental degradation a sin. I have to agree. If you love God and you believe that God created everything and called it good, then God loves the creation. God so loved the world, HE gave his only son……….Then isn’t it reasonable to think that insulting the creation, like taking tops of mountains to get coal is insulting to God. There are other ways to get coal that won’t destroy mountains, valley, rivers, streams and everything that lives in them. This can be said about deforestation and fishing with huge nets that capture and kill everything in its way when only fishing for one species. Wasting valuable life and resources. You have heard the expression-What would jesus do- well what would Francis do?

I don’t want to leave you with the idea that nothing is being done. There are thousands of people all over the world who are working hard to restore balance. Lots and lots of Francises who care as much about creation as they do themselves.

There is lots of good news.People are actually buying smaller more energy efficient cars, they are building houses at a more reasonable size. Recycling is becoming a normal thing and not a bother. It’s not everywhere, but I travel a lot and I am experiencing change. You may have a local coffee shop that gives a discount if you bring your own cup. Often there are signs in take out restaurants next to a paper napkin container that say--- Paper means trees- use only what you need. I have been to many hotels that suggest you leave your towels on the floor if you want clean ones, but if you think you could use a towel a second time, hang it up. Same with changing sheets. These efforts save water and energy. They are all steps in the right direction and will have an impact on how people behave. It simple raises consciousness. You can learn more about how to save energy and money at the Adult Forum this morning. Where you will hear from Vince, Clayton and Michael. People want to do the right thing, but often don’t know what to do. I say, just think before you do anything.

Think about justice and fairness for ALL of Creation, not just humans when you are making decision. It is people of faith, people who go to church and love Christ who can serve as models. It is up to us to show the way. We say we love God and love our neighbors then shouldn’t we demonstrate that behavior?

When you leave today, think of the healing messages and how Jesus could restore life, but he asked for help. If we have the faith in ourselves that we can heal this planet and we have the courage to make the changes we need to make AND a God beside us who is a healer- we will succeed. Indeed, as people of conscious and as Christians, there is no choice but to try.

And I will close with one last comment. Neither Jesus or Francis came to show us how to die, but rather to show us how to live.

amen

Pentecost XIX - Skip Windsor

2009-10-11T07:33:00.000-04:00

Mark 10:17-31
Let us pray:
Be with us, O Lord, and give us the Spirit of Christ. Amen.
We have before us in Mark’s Gospel what I would call a “Kingdom Question.” This morning’s lesson poses the important question about who will and who will not inherit eternal life.
The story lays out an unresolved tension that has no easy answers; yet, the encounter of the rich young man with Jesus was so important to His first disciples understanding of eternal life and membership in God’s Kingdom that it is included in all three Synoptic Gospels.
We do not the young man’s name and we never find out. He is one of those mysterious figures who appears in the Gospels and then disappears never to be heard of again. Yet what is remarkable about this particular young man is that Jesus loved him. There must have been some quality of character, some remarkable potential in him, that Jesus saw and so wanted him to join Him as a disciple or possibly even as one of his apostles.
The story is clear at the outset. A young man filled with expectation comes up to Jesus and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus refers him to six of the Ten Commandments relating to how to treat one’s neighbor. Respectfully, he says, “Teacher, I have kept all these commands…” What more is there? He has followed the Law, been obedient, cared for other people and done well. Jesus acknowledges the man’s respect and sees the potential within him and loves him for it. Coaxing him, Jesus says you have only one more thing to do and that is to give away all your possessions. Imagine the shock and chagrin that came over the young man’s face when Jesus informs him to give away all he owns.
I suspect there was a long silence at this moment. Picture if you will the picture now: Jesus looking upon the man with tenderness and sadness. The disciples witnessing this encounter wonder what the man would do. And the young man, thinking to himself that Jesus is asking more than he can give: I can’t give away my security, my freedom, my influence, and my identity…
Despite Jesus’ promise of a heavenly treasure, the rich young man could not bring himself to part with his possessions and goes away grieving. All that he thought he was, all that he believed made him who he was, he could not part with. The question of eternal life has now become a matter involving everything he possesses. Knowing that the disciples have followed this conversation carefully, Jesus tells them that wealth is such a barrier to eternal life that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.
As you and I reflect upon this Gospel text, it is obvious that Jesus is saying that you must give up all your money and wealth to enter the Kingdom. I remember once someone telling me that the US government is coming up with a new revised and simpler tax form. All one has to do is report their gross annual income on the first line; and the second line reads, “send it in.” Please do not misunderstand me. Under no circumstances do I want you to equate the KOG with the IRS! The seeming point, that on the surface, wealth and eternal life do not go together.
Years ago, I heard a true story about a newly married couple who lived in Vermont. They lived a righteous life on a simple farm and one might call them children of the sixties or “hippies.” One day, the woman’s aunt died and left them one million dollars. Equating wealth as morally decadent, the couple decided to give it all away: every dollar, every cent. About a year later the IRS came knocking on their door and said they owned back taxes on the one million dollar gift amounting to about two hundred-fifty thousand dollars. They did not have it. They gave it all away. To settle with the IRS, the couple had to sell their farm and all there possessions to pay the government. They became penniless and eventually divorced. It is a sad story without a happy ending. What would have happened if they had been responsible with their newfound wealth? What if they set aside enough for the taxes and given the rest away? It would have been OK.
This story of the Vermont couple is instructive to the Gospel message for today. Jesus is not talking about the immorality of wealth. Jesus had plenty of followers who were wealthy like Joseph of Arimathea and Mary and Martha. Jesus is talking about not about how much one owns but how one is attached unnaturally to their possessions. Jesus is speaking to his followers to act responsibly with one’s wealth by managing it wisely and by not becoming too attached. Jesus later instructs them that to follow him there is a cost to discipleship: Do not be overly attached to worldly things replacing those things for God for it will cost you your soul.
The economic global crisis has brought into sharp relief the Madoff’s of the world. That by amassing fortunes at the expense of others is indeed to lose one’s soul. We read in the paper of wealthy people unhappy, directionless, and living a life devoid of meaning. In this way, Jesus is saying that for wealthy, selfish, people a camel will get through the eye of the needle before them. As Frederick Buechner, the Christian author and novelist, writes, “a checkbook does not solve the big problems: How to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in life.”
What Jesus is saying is that if you want to inherit eternal life and enter the KOG shed all of your earthly attachments. For one’s life and one’s resources both spiritually and materially is about relationships and about sharing. Plumbing the depths further in this text we come to a fundamental question unrelated to dollars and cents, houses and cars, club memberships and second homes. What Jesus is asking of the rich young man, his disciples, and you and me, is where does God fit in to your life?
While the rich young man did keep six of the Ten Commandments, the Gospel lesson does not say whether he kept the other four commandments of which three relate to God. And the one command that underscores this whole passage is the first one, which exhorts all faithful people to have no other gods before the Creator.
You and I live a god-cluttered world. It is a world in which sports athletes are treated like gods. Movie stars are considered “goddesses.” There are the gods of distraction and seduction, of power and influence, of ambition and novelty, and the choice is up to us all to decide what gods, what ultimate concerns, are manufactured by man and what are created by God.
More simply put, these false gods’ maybe detractors from the life-giving time we spend with God in prayer or worship. It may be a frame of mind where God is a choice among other choices. What Jesus is saying is that God is not a choice but is the choice. The Creator God, who made heaven and earth, who created the moon and stars, who brought the people out of bondage into freedom, who came into the world to be one of us, who rose from the dead, who gifted the Holy Spirit to the apostles, and who lives and reigns today, does not, will not be relegated to third place… nor second place.
Over and over again, Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God and that God’s reign is being built with or without our help. It is coming. In some ways, it is already here.
We can see signs of the kingdom being built wherever people put God first in their lives, where people share their wealth and resources with the least, the last, the lost and lonely, and where yearning hearts find a freedom and peace that the world cannot give.
As I said at the beginning of this meditation, this is a hard text. Not because it means that we have to give up all we possess to be a disciple of God. It is hard because we have to be responsible with what we have making sure we share it with others by either tithing or offering our time, talent and treasure. It is hard because we have to let go of our attachments to the false gods of culture and society and place God the creator, redeemer and sustainer first and foremost in our lives.
Remembering back to the rich young man it is instructive for us to consider that perhaps he went away sorrowful but eventually changed his mind. Perhaps, the hopeful words of Jesus took root in him when he remembered what Jesus said that for God all things are possible. Perhaps, the love Jesus had for him was stronger than anything that the world could give him. We will never know; but we know on this side of the Resurrection that new life grows in places we never expected. Such divine love changes everything. Such love changes the world. Such love changes you and me.
And now to God be the honor, the glory and the praise. Amen.

Pentecost - Skip Windsor

2009-05-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

Acts 2:1-21
One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism
It doesn’t get better than this. We gather this Pentecost morning to baptize Charlotte, Sophie, Adelia, Scout, Andrew, Patrick, Angelina, and Abigail. We come together from near and far to share in the joy of family reunions and the gladness of witnessing God’s love for these children.
You and I are participating in a remarkable, even revolutionary, thing this morning. What is remarkable is that everyone is here on time! Everyone is up, dressed and ready by 10 a.m. What is revolutionary is that eight families come together in hope and gladness to have their children blessed by God through water and the spirit.
These children being baptized will not know for some time what is happening to them today. They will not know that on this day of May 31, 2009 that there were gathered scores of people whose hearts were filled with love and gladness for them. They will not know for some time that Christians call this festival day “the Birthday of the Church.”
It was the day when the Holy Spirit breathed on the huddled and dejected apostles and made them brave enough to go change the world. It was the day the Christian Church was born. They may not know for years that on this day they became “Christians” and were marked as Christ’s own forever.
It will be up to you – parents, godparents, grandparents, family and friends – to tell them what happened today. It will be up to you to share with them biblical stories of God’s people. It will be up to you, and all of us, to tell them about the peoples’ covenant with God that took them from slavery to liberation and of God’s redeeming love through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It will be up to you to walk with them on their life long spiritual journey reminding them that love is stronger than hate, that service is better than being served, and that faith casts out fear.
Someday in the future, if they so wish, each of the newly baptized today, will make the baptismal promises and vows on their own. Years from now, each of them will be old enough to ask the questions and honor the answers for themselves. But, in the meantime, as they stand under the shadow of your wings, I hope you will remind them of this day – the day we gathered as the Church with smiles on our faces. The moment we were filled with the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t get much better than this.
I have no doubt you will be asked questions about God. They might want to know where heaven is; or why bad things happen. Someday, they might ask you what is baptism; and you may want to say that baptism is not only a single event that happened once upon a time on May 31, 2009; but it is also a life long journey of blessing, promise and discovery.
The children’s baptisms today serve as a reminder of our own baptisms. We belong to a diverse world-wide communion that is African and Japanese, Indian and Hispanic, southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere, male and female, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor. Many thousands upon thousands of Christians of many tongues and languages are celebrating today through baptism, Eucharist, scripture and song this great Christian festival of Pentecost.
May you enjoy and savor this day with gladness knowing that the Household of Faith called the Church needs and prays for you. Believe that the Holy Spirit will enable and empower you for the work of ministry to serve the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. Be of good cheer and remember who you are and whose you are continuing to live more deeply into your own baptismal vows with faith, hope and charity.
This is indeed that day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it! It does not get better than this!
And now to God – Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – may all honor and praise be given. Amen.

Easter II - Thomas Moore

2009-04-19T18:09:00.000-04:00

May the words of my mouth and the mediation of our hearts empower us to grow in knowledge and love of you, Oh, Lord, our strength and redeemer. AMEN.
DOUBT… DOUBTING THOMAS... Me, a Thomas. Is there a message in your invitation to be the guest preacher on this, today’s Gospel?
Message or not, my wife, the Reverend Helen Moore, a seminarian classmate of your rector, and I are honored to be with you here at Christ Church, and thankful for special time with Kathy and Skip. As today’s Psalm reads, “Oh, how good and pleasant it is when sisters and brothers live together in unity.” It is indeed good and pleasant to be here, Skip. Thank you.
A year ago, I became the first lay Executive Director of a 150 year old Episcopal foundation, one with an anachronistic name, The Society for the Increase of the Ministry, or S.I.M. An anachronistic name, yes, but a very relevant, significant ministry. Since 1857 S.I.M. has supported Episcopal seminarians—financially, pastorally, and by advocating for seminarians within the councils of the Church.
When initially contacted by a recruiter, my first thought was: “What an anachronistic name!” Followed by a second notion: “Scholarships for seminarians a worthy cause, certainly, but a seeming narrowly focused mission for a national organization.” Then, a more profound reflection, “Could this be of God?” I had my doubts.
In our Spiritual Journey, Helen and I have discovered that if opportunities arise, “out-of-the-blue”, we best pay attention… despite our doubts. We best be cautious about leaning unto our own understanding. As for doubts, we best use them to push us to think—spiritually think…to explore and to question our limited vision.
Prayerful examination of the S.I.M. opportunity led to a deeper “seeing”—seeing that seminarians are far more than just theological students, checking off a major obligation on the path to ordination. Seminarians are the future leaders of our Church. Seminarians thus will be shaping our Church in the future. Seminarians are critical to the future of the Church we love. Realizing S.I.M.’s potential as a catalyst with significant impact on our Church’s future made accepting this responsibility…getting beyond doubt…arriving at an “ahah” moment… somewhat like, well (not to be overdramatic), putting my hand in Jesus’ side. It was then that the idea of a call became tangible, and I could see. Then that I could believe. Then that, beyond doubt, S.I.M.’s invitation to lead as Executive Director was God’s call.
Of course, moving beyond doubt is not a once and forever victory. It’s one thing to believe and another to follow and implement. Soon this Doubting Thomas was looking for a sign—further confirmation of this call—to come from my initial fund raising letter. It came in an “out-of-the-blue,” amazing blessing. The first donation of my S.I.M. tenure was from your rector, whose gift recognized the support S.I.M. provided Miranda Hassett, your seminarian assistant here a few years ago. I can’t tell you, Skip, how much opening your letter meant… to me and to the commencement of my ministry at S.I.M.
In today’s Gospel, the doubt-plagued disciples are hiding in the Upper Room. They are a timid little band, terrified because their dream had evaporated. “We had hoped,” said they, “that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel.” Where there was once hope… now it’s “doors…doors locked for fear….” Once in the streets speaking publicly with Jesus to the countryside, now they spoke in whispers among themselves. All Hell was breaking loose around them, and in them. Surely, emotionally battered; surely, plagued with questions; surely, beleaguered by doubts…until, until they saw the Lord for themselves, and silent fear was transformed into proclamation of the Good News. But Thomas was not there.
Why was Thomas missing from the Upper Room’s first gathering? Was it fear…hopelessness…a feeling of betrayal…embarrassment that Thomas had cast all his trust on a dreamer? Or was Jesus’ brutal death was so overwhelmingly real for Thomas that he couldn’t imagine anything beyond Jesus’ crucifixion. Whatever the reason for Thomas’ absence, he would not again risk belief in the intangible.
Should we condemn Thomas…or should we bless him? Doubting Thomas speaks what we dare not. Thomas’ candor grants us permission to be as openly human as he was. Thomas manifests what it is to shrink from life’s disillusionments but ultimately move beyond doubt in search of truth. Thomas spoke the truth of his limited vision, out loud, neither claiming to understand the un-understandable, nor to believe the unbelievable. Belief in the disciple’s reports was too risky a choice for Doubting Thomas; he demanded tangible confirmation. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Thomas’ doubt was certain, but then he did return. Ultimately, Thomas did not let doubt shut him down. Instead, doubt opened him to: not surrendering in his pursuit of truth; not quitting on God when it felt as if God had quit on him; to risk seeking the Risen Christ in new ways. Perhaps Doubting Thomas could be better understood as Searching Thomas.
Doubt is fundamental to human existence. It’s not doubt that thwarts our faith; it’s how we respond that either increases or prevents growth in faith. Doubt can be a positive change-agent. There is more potential for embodying faith in the one who faces doubt than there is in the one who glibly repeats the unexamined creeds of others. “An unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. Doubt can be dynamic or doubt can be debilitating. Dynamic doubt engages one to confront the questions of life. Debilitating doubt holds God at arm’s length, eventually leading to self-absorption and stagnation. Dynamic doubt is a spiritual friend; debilitating doubt, one of Satan’s favorite tools. Author, theologian Frederick Beuchner puts it well: “How could God reveal himself in a way that leaves no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”
Today we have perspective unavailable to Thomas. Today we know that ultimate reconciliation took place on Calvary when the One martyred by the world forgave the world. Yet the Doubting Thomas in us still needs to know that Jesus is not a God who just stands above it all but stands with us all. Thomas teaches us not to let fear, disappointment, and uncertainties drive a wedge between God and us. Thomas shows us what it is to walk away for a moment but return for a lifetime.
God wants us, like Thomas, to move through times of doubt to moments of decision. Doubt in hand, Thomas chose to name his doubt and live into the questions arising from the seeming absence of Jesus. Getting beyond doubt and confronting life’s questions ultimately led this man called Thomas to one of the most profound confessions of faith in all the Gospels. When we feel the absence of Jesus in our lives, we’re tempted to doubt. May we, like Thomas, choose to confront our doubt, seek to find Jesus and reach that point of professing his presence: “My Lord and my God!” AMEN.

Easter - Skip Windsor

2009-04-12T22:09:00.000-04:00

1 Cor. 15:1-11; John 20:1-18
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
We come to church this morning braver than we think. We gather this Easter confounded with many thoughts. Some may be thinking about how their Easter Dinner is going to go with family and friends today. For others, they may be thinking about how the story of the Empty Tomb relates to their own empty 401 (k) Plans. Still others may be remembering someone that they have lost who is near and dear to them. And, still for others, who are pondering more immediate things, are thinking, “Maybe I should time how long this sermon is going to be?”
Easter is all about God’s action for the World. This may be surprising to many since we like to think that we do everything ourselves; but, the Christian experience should tell us otherwise: the more we think about it the more we come to realize that it is all God’s doing – God’s work – We did not make up the Easter Story. We received it. So, you and I are invited by God in Jesus Christ to share in his victory over death. We are invited to “come and see.” We are offered a new way of being in relationship with God and of forming a new community of living in the belief that death has been overcome, that death itself is dead.
If you want to see beyond the vale of death to see the promise of eternal life, if you want to believe that there is more to this present life than what you know, and if want to be brave enough to step away from the conditioned coordinates of the world, then you have come to the right place. This is the moment to “come and see.”
The first thing to know about Easter is that it is not easy for poets and writers, for scientists and theologians, or for you and me to unravel with any certainty the mystery of the resurrection. One of the best examples of the problem is contained in the well-known Easter poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter “ by John Updike. Updike identifies the issue of the bodily resurrection of Jesus head-on in the first lines,

Make no mistake: If he rose at all
It was as his body;
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
Reknit, the amino acids rekindle
The Church will fall.

Everything hinges on the word “if.” What if it did happen? What if it did not happen? The tension in our gospel lesson for today is whether Mary saw the dead, and now alive, Jesus and believed; or whether she believed it and then saw the Risen Christ.
The earliest known Christian writing on the resurrection comes from The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians. According to Paul, we can trust with confidence at least four truths: Peter and some other disciples found an empty tomb. Secondly, Peter and the other apostles came to believe that after Jesus’ death they had encountered him alive and well. Thirdly, days and months later, Jesus appeared to as many as 500 followers. And finally, Paul personally believed he encountered the Risen Christ.
In all these events, it is recorded that these once frightened and beleaguered disciples were changed – transformed -- into a brave and resolute community of faithful men and women who would risk their lives to share with Jew and Gentile, men and women, slave and free, rich and poor, the good news of Jesus Christ.
I am reminded of the story of a group of miners who were part of the California Gold Rush of 1849. They found a large deposit of the precious metal, but wanted to keep the discovery to themselves. They pledged that none of them would share their secret when they returned to town to get their supplies. And they kept their promise. Not one of them said a word about their find. But when they set out for their claim a few days later, they were surprised by a large group of people following them. “How did you know we had struck pay-dirt?” they asked. “No one said a thing,” they were told, “but you all used to be such a grouchy group when you came to town, and this time all of you were smiling.”
Evidence in the Resurrection is not simply whether Jesus came back from the dead but how his presence affected those whose lives were inalterably changed from fear to joy. This change is exquisitely revealed through Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden. Their give and take conversation in John’s Gospel is instructive for us: He calls her woman. He calls her sir. He responds by saying her name Mary. She reacts with joy saying Rabbouni. He asks her to share with her brothers the good news. She goes to the disciples and announces to them: “I have seen the Lord!”
The conversation between Mary and Jesus in the garden forms an outline of how the Christian faith can work. At first, we may understand Jesus as an historic figure who was a healer and a teacher. We come to learn The Lord’s Prayer and to appreciate The Sermon on the Mount. Reading the New Testament, we can see how Jesus affected people, how he healed and taught and how he stood up against the principalities and powers.
Like all wise prophets, we can appreciate Jesus as a wisdom teacher. Over time, perhaps through prayer, through proximity to the sacraments, we come to develop a desire to know Jesus more deeply in a personal way as friend and companion. This closeness leads to an intimacy where we feel we are known by name. The feeling, “I am not alone,” is more than re-assuring. It forms the ground of our being.
This sense of being known – truly known – leads more deeply to an open heart and a ready mind to see how Jesus’ life, death and resurrection holds a profound and abiding truth about healing, forgiveness, and redemption.
Then, there comes a moment –unbidden- when we know that Jesus, our friend, is more than just a friend. We come to know him as our Savior.
Easter means there are many things we cannot see or fully comprehend. We see glimpses. The tip of an iceberg is just that, the tip. I know there is another side of the moon even though I have never seen it. You may watch a baseball game and see the nine players on the diamond. Each is ready for the pitch; and the ball is struck by the batter that forms into a triple play that transcends the game into a thing of beauty. We only see a glimpse of what is truly there. Music and art have the same transcending arc when one hears Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or views the paintings of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or Jackson Pollack’s “Summertime.” Easter confirms for us those intimations of deeper realities. Faith means that we see only the tip of glory.
The mystery of Easter is faith first, miracles second. It is by assent that one comes to see the meaning of the resurrection for our own lives. If Mary was transformed, if Paul was transformed and if John was transformed then we, too, can be transformed. The resurrection is not merely about eternal life but about sharing in that life right now. The resurrection is about a new life and a new world made up of both the living and the dead. It is also a world of the brave yet to be born who already carry within them the seeds of love planted long ago by God through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I once knew a young woman in hospice. And I would call her brave. She was cancer-ridden with not much time left to live. Her family stayed by her side. They told her how much they loved her and how much God loved her and that there would come a time when she would soon see God and know the absolute fullness of God’s love. She responded that she knew she was surrounded by love. Not too much later, she fell into a coma.
Days later, her parents were beside her bed and in the very last lingering moments of her earthly life, she suddenly came out of her coma, opened her eyes to a bright sunny day, looked outside of her room onto a beautiful garden, and smiled.
Some of you may ask is there a God like that who is our friend and not a stranger? It is a fair question in our day and age. So I have to answer you the best I can: I believe so. I know that the God who raised Jesus from the dead, who is the Savior of my life, will not let those we love ever go from His presence either in this life or in the next.
And now to God we give the praise, the honor, and the glory. Amen.

Lent IV - Skip Windsor

2009-03-22T19:44:00.000-04:00

Num. 21:4-9; Eph. 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
Let us pray:
O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered, be with us now and give us the Spirit of Christ. Amen.
In Tracy Kidder’s best selling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti, there is a quote by Dr. Farmer that frames this morning’s meditation:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat and I am not going to stop because we keep losing. I don’t dislike victory… We want to be on the winning team, but not at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
This morning, I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the meaning of the long defeat and how this idea relates to our Christian life and faith. As many of you know, who have read Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer is borrowing the phrase from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when the Lady Galadriel tells the hobbit Frodo Baggins about the long struggle against the evil forces of Sauron saying, “Together through the ages we have fought the long defeat.”
Explaining what he meant by these fatalistic words, Tolkien stated in a letter that he was a Christian and so he did not expect “history” to be anything but a long defeat – though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory. For Tolkien and for Farmer and, as a matter of fact, for many Christians, the term “The Long Defeat” implies to those who use it that since the battle appears hopeless, any progress, or even a single life saved, can be viewed as a victory. The expression is used in some circles to denote the struggle against the ill effects of poverty and injustice and that is where I want to begin.
As most of you know, I returned last week from Haiti. I went with thirteen other parishioners and friends who brought their medical skills and education to many of the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. During the week, our International Mobile Medical Team saw upwards of 800 men, women and children.
While we were there, several women were seen who were very ill with pre-eclampsia, a child with whooping cough was diagnosed and referred, a man who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head was learning physical therapy to move his arm again, and an elderly woman was given better sight because of the eyeglasses we brought. In Lazile, where our parish partnership is located, a child came to our clinic whose nearly severed finger was re-attached because of the skills of one of our young medical residents. Looking back, I could not help but think of these Haitian lives that were affected because our doctors were there.
Each time we go to Haiti from Christ Church, the truth of Farmer’s thoughts about ministry and mission among the poor as a long defeat seems more apt. The problems in Haiti are enormous. It is hard to know where to begin. I think most of us know a little bit about this country that is so close to the United States:
It is a nation of about 9.8 million people. It’s GNI (per capita per person) is $560 per person – or less than $2 dollars a day.
The wealth gap is enormous with 1% of the population owning 50% of the country’s resources.
Life expectancy for men is 59 and for women it is 63.
Out of 10,000 births, 620 women die compared to 11 in the United States.
Less than 25% of the water supply is drinkable. Less than half can read a word.
The list goes on…
So much of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal’s are focused on eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 in places such as Haiti, Africa, and other less developed countries. To review, these goals are:

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
Achieve universal primary education.
Promote gender equality and empower women.
Reduce child mortality.
Improve maternal health.
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
Ensure environmental sustainability.
Develop a global partnership for development.

Looking at Haiti and how far they still have to go, it does seem like a long defeat with such lofty global goals seeming further and further out of reach. And, yet, while we were there seem to be these small glimmers of victory. We saw men and women with the Roman Catholic Twinning project helping to construct a school, manage a medical clinic and build a clean water well and irrigation system. We found out that the hospital where we stay in Leogane is going to re-open in April with 40 beds. We learned about the national immunization program through UNESCO to help fight measles. Some of us met an American Fulbright Scholar who teaches at Yale who will come to Haiti this summer to execute a strategic plan for effective hospital administration for the Leogane hospital. This list goes on as well. Different people from diverse places are all taking a piece of the problem in order to make a difference where they can and when they can in Haiti.
In our gospel lesson for this morning, we heard some of the most well known and beloved lines in scripture from John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that all who believe in Him will have everlasting life.” Martin Luther called these words as the “gospel in miniature” because it says it all about God’s purpose in the world through Jesus Christ.
I think I saw the numbers “316” once on the scoreboard at a Broncos football game in Denver. The area code for Kansas is 316. But, despite its popularity, what is not so well known is the context in which these words from John 3:16 are spoken.
They are spoken at night. They are words spoken by Jesus to Nicodemus. They are words of power to a powerful man too afraid to be seen by his peers. But, before Jesus says those well-known words, He talks about healing and refers to the ancient story of Moses and the disconsolate Israelites in the desert who have become disheartened and hopeless. Jesus reminds Nicodemus about how God told Moses to make a brass icon of a snake and place it on a pole so all the people could see it and become healed from the bites of venomous snakes.
Just as the snake was lifted up for healing, Jesus says, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for all not only to heal but also to save; and God will do this because God so loves the world. Later on, Nicodemus will come to understand this divine love and will risk his own life to ask for the body of Jesus so that it may be placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimithea.
Along with countless other people around the world who go to Haiti to help assist and heal, we carried aloft the healing arts of medicine; but, more importantly, we found among the people of Haiti an inspiring faith in the midst of so much poverty. Holding up the Cross of Christ, the Haitian people are giving hope back to us who live in the United States to re-commit ourselves to the work of ministry and mission. It is their hope that gives us hope. On this trip, I found my faith renewed by the extraordinary acts of generosity the Haitian people give to one another.
On our last day in Haiti, we went to an orphanage of 73 children. A Haitian woman and her Argentinean husband founded their orphanage eight years ago. They moved back to Haiti from Argentina in order to help make a difference in her hometown of Port au Prince. Little did they know how they were going to give back.
Several weeks after they arrived they brought home a baby who had been left in a trashcan. Three weeks later several babies were left on their doorstep. Since then, this remarkable couple has taken in numerous babies and children to feed, cloth, and shelter-seeking funds for food from where ever God will provide.
I am reminded of the story of St. Theresa of Avila who told some businessmen that she was going to build a convent with ten pennies. The men scoffed at her saying she couldn’t build anything with ten pennies. She replied with ten pennies and God’s help she could build anything.
It may be true that to counter poverty and illness in the world is a long defeat; but, if we can carry in solidarity with the people of the world -- where there is no America, there is no Haiti, there is no Africa, where there is no China or Iraq – a hope for healing and reconciliation among all people then, perhaps, the dream of the MDG’s can be met. It begins where we are. We start from where we are. It starts here. It is here at the foot of the cross. The cross is where the long defeat will end in victory – victory over poverty, victory over illness, victory over sin and victory over death.
Thanks Be to God.

Lent III - Peter Tierney

2009-03-15T17:31:00.000-04:00

“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

I’m not sure what place wisdom has in the world we live in today. I don’t see many signs that our society values wisdom very highly. You certainly don’t hear the word mentioned very often—I rarely hear public figures described as wise in a serious way. At best, it’s used as a compliment--“Thank you for your wise words--without much serious consideration given to what actually qualifies as wisdom. And when was the last time you turned on the news and heard the anchor say, “And now, to help shed some light on this subject, we’ve invited Dr. So-and-So, a very wise person, to join us.” No—who do we hear from on the news? Experts! We live in a world that values expertise over wisdom, and woe to the expert who makes a mistake or turns out to be wrong! Is there anyone more readily condemned and ridiculed than the mistaken expert? After all, the expert isn’t supposed to make mistakes, they are supposed to have complete mastery of their field—that’s what makes them an expert! And I think this is the chief difference between wisdom and expertise: what makes somebody wise is knowing what they do not know; what makes somebody an expert is knowing everything about something. The wise person doesn’t expect to know everything, but the expert has to, because the moment you slip up, you cease to be an expert.

Now if I am right, and our world does value expertise more than wisdom, then that means that we have a particularly low tolerance for failure. The expert is not allowed to fail, and if they do, then we’d better find a better expert to solve our problems or answer our questions! Failure is not an option in the world of experts. There is no mercy for the expert, there is only the relentless demand for accuracy and success. We see this manifested in so many ways—in the demand for excellence in education, in the unforgiving expectations we have for healthcare; in the standards that govern workplaces.

Now, this situation should strike all of us who have come here to a Christian church this morning as very peculiar, for a couple of reasons. First, if you search through the Bible, you will find it chock-full of references to wisdom—praising wisdom, talking about the wisdom of God, holding up wisdom as a great virtue—but the only experts you will find are experts in war, and the attitude toward them is ambivalent. The Bible doesn’t have much use for experts, and it doesn’t ever suggest that expertise in anything is a virtue more valuable than wisdom. Second, and more importantly, we are gathered here to remember and celebrate a colossal failure. Jesus, the reason we are here today, ends his life on a cross. Jesus’ death on the cross is the central fact of his life—he doesn’t establish a school to preserve his teachings as many teachers do; he doesn’t lead a social revolution that successfully installs lasting justice and peace; he doesn’t successfully expel the Roman soldiers from the Jewish homeland, as many of his followers wanted him to do. Jesus doesn’t do any of the things one might reasonably expect a savior to accomplish; instead, he dies a criminal’s death on a cross.

There are some people who would like to make Jesus into some kind of expert. Some want him to be a religious expert: if we could just get into the same kind of groove as Jesus, then we can find our way to God. Others want to think of him as a moral expert: if we could only follow Jesus’ teachings, we could make the world a better place. These approaches fly in the face of what St. Paul says, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” The approaches to Jesus that turn him into an expert have no place for the cross, because they forget that Jesus’ relationship with God and his teachings led him into a confrontation with the religious and political powers of the world—the experts of his time—and that confrontation ended in his death. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that the world is going to snap into focus and resolve all of its problems. We follow Jesus because we see in his death and resurrection the clearest instance of God’s overwhelming love for the world despite its cruelty, its failures, and its weakness, and we cannot help but dedicate ourselves to telling people about that love.

No wonder Paul calls this proclamation foolishness. When someone comes to the Church asking what we have to offer them that they cannot find anywhere else, we are compelled to point to a 33 year old man nailed to a cross and say, that’s what we have. To a world of experts, this is indeed foolishness. But to those who value wisdom, who understand that they do not already have all the answers, they may see that the foolishness of the cross has something to offer them, that the message of Christ’s death and resurrection contains the power and wisdom of God, that God’s foolishness, written large on the cross, is wiser than what human wisdom can devise for itself.

The message of the cross is that God does not despise the weak, or the foolish; the sick or the helpless; God does not have contempt for failure or for the people who fall short in life. Instead, God chooses to become one of those people; God chooses failure, by the world’s standards, and makes it into the way of salvation for the world that rejected him.

The world of experts has no place for foolishness and weakness. Every problem must be solved, every ignorance banished, every sickness cured. The world of experts is a world that will settle for nothing less than perfection right now. But in the Gospel of Jesus Christ we have been given a message of hope that runs counter to the message of the experts; and we have a duty to proclaim that message. Through the cross, God tells us that the world is not first a problem to be fixed, but a place filled with people who need to be loved—and if we love the world despite its weakness and its failings, then that love will do more than our expertise and our human wisdom can ever hope to accomplish.

There is a place for experts in the world; they make valuable contributions to our society, and their work is necessary for advancement and achievement. But we must not allow the principles of expertise to be the only way we view our world, and the people in it. We need the foolishness of the cross—the foolishness of God’s merciful and compassionate love—which is wise than human wisdom, and stronger than human strength.