Triad Pride Prayer Service, Non-Lectionary

A non-lectionary sermon (!)
(Yes that means I chose these readings myself!
And Yes that means I chose a psalm that is not otherwise in the Lectionary
Because it is "difficult" to preach on!)


Isaiah 49:14-21
Psalm 55

Preaching with Triad Pride, 2009
Greensboro, NC

"Lift up your eyes all around and see;
They all gather,
They come to you."

-From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah

In the name of God, who made us, and saves us, and will not leave us alone, AMEN.

In the Summer of 1982 we were terrified.
Many of our friends and lovers were deathly ill
And news reports telling of a new gay cancer
Were confusing and contradictory.
Some in the media talked of GRID
Which stood for Gay related immune deficiency
And the CDC even referred initially to 4-H disease
So named because it seemed to affect
Hemophiliacs, Haitians, Heroin-addicts, and Homosexuals.
In the hospitals, we were confronted with equal amounts
Of fear and confusion, but there
it was also paired with stigma and bigotry.
Our resources were not apparent to us.
But there was a number you could call for support
And this number linked directly
to the home phone of Rodger McFarlane.
That Summer, Rodgers tiny New York apartment became
The hub for a deluge of desperate phone calls
That were then directed to the medical, legal, and counseling
Resources that were so desperately needed.
McFarlane had placed himself in the critical center
Of a gathering, ominous storm.
Earlier that year, he had walked into the headquarters
Of the newly formed Gay Men’s Health Crisis
Which then consisted of a handful of men
One of whom, Larry Kramer, seeing that government and medical
Response to the growing crisis was stalled at best
had issued a rallying cry
For gays to come together to provide a quick retaliation
To the new disease.
McFarlane, who worked as a rehabilitation therapist in the local hospitals
Found himself in a position to lend his expertise of the system
To those whom the system was avoiding.
He also lent his organizational skills-
Finding the appropriate office space for the rag-tag group of young men
And building up the structure of a professional non-profit
And, perhaps most importantly
He lent his home, and phone
To what would ultimately become the Information Hotline of the GMHC
A hotline that to this day
continues to provide counseling and support to persons with HIV/AIDS
McFarlane was later appointed the first paid executive director of the GMHC
As with most gay organizations since the dawn of time,
There were some disagreements about how to run things.

Ultimately, Larry Kramer was too extreem for the group.
His political agenda involved going after the mayor of NYC
And other public and health officials for not responding to AIDS
As the epidemic that it was.
A favorite practice of his became outing public figures who he felt
Avoided assisting the AIDS crisis because they were closeted.
He left the GMHC, calling it politically impotent.
In 1987 he founded ACT-UP, a radical gay activist group
Which promoted grass-roots efforts to raise awareness about
And demand immediate and proper treatment of HIV/AIDS.
In the early history of HIV/AIDS
Rodger McFarlane was the pragmatic counterpoint to Kramer’s rage.
Through steady funding efforts and organized programs
The Gay Men’s Health Crisis became the working model
For community based health-care support for every city in the nation.
Essential resources like the Hotline were joined by the Buddy system
In which people of all genders, gay, lesbian and straight
Volunteered to To give their support and bedside care
To AIDS patients in hospitals and at home
Who had otherwise been entirely abandoned by friends, family members, and lovers.
City after city adopted these necessary and intimate practices of care
To make up for the care which many medical communities were reluctant to provide
To gay people.
As McFarlane himself cared for 100s and 100s of friends dying of AIDS
These practices would become his lasting legacy
Particularly, McFarlanes legacy is documented
in a book called The Complete Bedside Companion
In Which he guides family members and caregivers
Through all the necessary medical, legal, and emotional points
Of a loved one’s approach toward death.
Earlier this month, Roger McFarlane took his own life.
A statement released by his family and friends said that McFarlane
Could no longer continue dealing with heart and back problems
Which followed a broken back in 2002.
He was 54.
In him we have seen one of our greatest heroes, one of our most giving Advocates,
a true cause of the Pride our community gathers to celebrate at events like these.

Rodger McFarlane was and Larry Kramer continues to be
well acquainted with the rage, abandonment, and betrayal
that we read of in Psalm 55.
Though the two men had very different approaches to using that rage
In the world.
"Hear my prayer, O God,
do not hide yourself from my petition.
Listen to me and answer me;
I have no peace, because of my cares.
My heart quakes within me,
and the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling have come over me,
and horror overwhelms me."
Many of the psalms express their fear of the enemy
And plead to God for the safety of escape
or to rain his righteous destruction upon the forces that close in-
But Psalm 55 is heartbreaking in its focus.
"For had it been an adversary who taunted me
then I could have borne it;
or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me,
then I could have hidden from him.
But it was you, a man after my own heart
my companion, my own familiar friend.
We took sweet counsel together
and walked with the throng in the house of God."
This kind of betrayal is familiar to us.
It recalls the childhood friend whom we might have confided in
Only to find them spreading rumors about us the next day at school.
This kind of betrayal recalls the Church of our upbringing
Who formed us in a relationship with the abounding love of God
Only to instruct us later in shame, and degraded worth.
We have been betrayed by Presidents and other politicians
By family members and employers
But this litany pales in comparison to the experiences of those
in the first deathbeds of AIDS.
Beds where many were left to die alone
Abandoned by family members, friends and lovers
Who feared the stigma and contraction of the unknown disease
Betrayed even by their own bodies
Which had promised such sweet assurance of being Beloved
In a hateful world
Only to deliver with poison instead.
The psalmist,
confronted with similar terrors, cries to God to hear his prayer:
“Listen to me, and answer me.”
Kramer issued similar petitions,
In every extremist, galvanizing, media hogging way he could
not to God,
But to those about him: to wake up to the realities of their
Second-class citizenship in the American goverment and medical community.
The psalmist,
confronted with similar terrors, cries to God for escape,
“Oh that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.
I would hasten to escape
from the stormy wind and tempest.”
For many,
McFarland and his army of volunteers
Embodied the presence necessary
Not for escape
But for grounding their experience of death
In real company, and real care that would have otherwise been absent.

It is the Summer of 2009, and we are disappointed, angry, grieved
But much of the terror is gone.
We grieve the passing of Roger
While we celebrate his abounding gift of life to us
We grieve yesterday’s court ruling in California
While we celebrate the victories we’ve claimed in Iowa, Connecticut, Maine
40,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS appear in this country each year
Some of us live with HIV
Or are caring for friends and family with it
But the operative word here is "live"
We live with it.
The early days
When everyone we knew was dead or dying are gone for us.
As is the urgency with which we fought the system for our care.
A lifetime has passed, it seems, since then,
And most of us either feel confident that our people
Are getting the services we need.
Or simply do not possess the language to address and question it
Having missed the universal pervasiveness of its inception in the 80s.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah
We hear of a new day emerging for Zion-
The Holy city of God.
From the darkness of her abandonment.
Zion cries out, “The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.”
And the Lord to show her otherwise
Directs her gaze beyond herself:
“Lift your eyes all around and see;
they all gather, they come to you.”
And there before abandoned Zion
There before Zion of the solitary deathbed
Before Zion who saw no aid in her darkest hour of trial
Is the vision
Of all her multitude of children
Now grown, now thriving, now full of life.
“Who bore me these?” she gasps
“I was bereaved and barren;
I was exiled and rejected.
Who brought these children up?
I was left all alone, where have they come from?
This land we thought was devastated is now bustling with life.

We, in this room tonight
Are the very same blessing of life
given by God to a formerly barren land.
And as you go to events this weekend
I challenge you to look around yourself
And see in the festive faces of your friends and community
the children which the Lord brings home to Zion.
We, no matter what our age, or gender, or orientation
We are the children AIDS has made.
We are survivors who took benefit
From the medical rights fought for by ACT-UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis
We are among those who took the earliest cues of the movement for chastity
We are among that generation born after AIDS
Who were educated by the public initiatives like Triad Health Project
that taught us to value our own safety in relationship
Our very life
Is the gift of God and years of righteous anger and back breaking work
For justice.
We, in this room tonight,
Are the very same gift of life.
Reared up and remaining from this most desolate time in our history.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah,
God presents this gift of new life to bereaved, abandoned Zion
As if her own children were exquisite jewelry to put on
As if the gift of generations were a wedding garment
To bind up Zions wounds.

And now God is giving us to be the same.
God is blessing us with more life
That we may honor with that life
The struggles which came before us.
How we will show that honor to our forebears
To activist caregivers like Rodger McFarlane
Cannot be given too high a priority in our current agenda.
The fullest expression of gratitude for all we have been given
Can only come as we acknowledge their outrage at injustice
And their immediate response to a need for basic care.

Our current excitement over equal marriage laws
Is very important
Getting many people involved in the work of justice for the 1st time
But it cannot remain an end unto itself
It must be the gateway for more.
We must not forget the continued injustice and need for care
In those places which are beyond our separate units of companionship.
There is still non-discrimination legislation to pursue
Adequate sexual health curriculums to advocate for
And new populations in our own country
Going through the same motions with AIDS that we did two decades ag
Our forebears waged a war on ignorance and death itself
And we must seek out the dying and unknown
if we are to honor that fight that gave us life.
Even as we expend our vast resources on wrestling our right to marry from conservative America
Our kindred around the globe are still wrestling for their lives.
In Iraq, recent feelings of openness led many gay people to
Congregate in public spaces
Only to be slaughtered one after another,
often with their families consent.
In Iran being gay is a crime
Frequently punished by decapitation.
Where boys are lined up, hooded, and hung.
Libiya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Ghana.
What little AIDS leaves alive in our world
Hate and murder are in full force to swallow up.
Our government- or any government- has yet to speak out on
this kind of violence.
Of forebears waged a war on ignorance and death itself
And we must seek the dying and unknown
if we are to honor that fight that gave us life.

In this room,
I am sure there are many veterans of this fight
Even as there are those among us just beginning.
Begin with Psalm 55 if that feels right
Begin with the betrayal and the outrage
Listen closely to it
And see if you can discern where it is coming from.
Begin with this group of people gathered here
With the people you will see tomorrow or the next day
And look at them with the startled eyes
Of a Zion once in ruins,
Who never had expected to see such joy, such life
In such a barren land.
Begin with the booths you are sure to find this weekend
Triad Health Project, Equality NC
Begin with their email listservs and contact your representatives
When they tell you to
Begin with Google,
Look up Southerners On New Ground
Look up Changing Attitudes Nigeria.
Begin wherever you can
And DO whatever you can
To place yourself as the exquisite jewel you are
Upon the body of this people
Who have survived- who have THRIVED.
And May the God of All Justice, Of All Strength, All Comfort, & All Joy
Grant us the power and Spirit that was in Christ
The power that was in Rodger McFarlane
To be present to the unknown and the dying
And to carry them with us to a place of safety and new life.
AMEN!

Year B, Easter 7: Flipping Coins

Year B, Easter 7
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19

"Happy are they whose delight is in the law of the Lord.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
Bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
Everything they do shall prosper."

-From Psalm 1, and from the Acts of the Apostles:

"[The disciples] prayed and said, 'Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship.' And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthais."

In the name of God, who made us, saves us, and will not leave us alone, AMEN.

How do we discern the will of God?
How do we know what God wants from us?
What God wants us to do in the world?
We ask ourselves this question frequently
And for good reason.
Every day when Christians pray
Our Father in Heaven
Hallowed be your Name
it comes quickly followed by the words
Your kingdom come
You WILL be done.
Not OUR will, God, but yours.
The idea that we are acting on behalf of,
or at least in tandem with the will of God
weaves itself in and out of our everyday decision making.
Not only at the highest Church level
Where our meetings convene with prayer
And elaborate committee systems are constructed
To ensure some kind of divine consensus
But at the individual level as well.
Who hasn’t stood at the brink of a big decision
A job offer, A new home, A medical choice
Without wishing to know if this is what God wants for us.
Hell, some of us can’t make it through the grocery store
Without wondering if God wouldn’t prefer it
If we purchased the paper products with the highest
post-consumer waste percentages for the sake of
greening God’s good Earth.
Most of us are just lucky if we don’t go so far as to take it upon
ourselves to determine what God wants for others too,
But the risk is there, and real-
Because we Christians consider ourselves
To be veritable experts on discerning the will of God.

In fact, when we gather together we make discerning
the will of God one of our greatest priorities.
In less than two months the national Episcopal Church
will gather for its triennial General Convention
And representatives from all over the country and beyond
Will gather
To try and discern collectively
What God wants for the Episcopal Church.

How do we do it?
How do we know what God wants?
How do we discern the will of God?

Most of us pray
When we have a big decision to make.
We might read scripture
We might consult our friends and advisors
And listen to them carefully for the
right-sounding path to emerge.
But this entirely rational sounding method of discernment
Is occasionally replaced by what we might call more
hasty approaches.
“Give me a sign!” our people have been known to cry
Perhaps when faced with a dining room table full of bills
Unsure of which one will garner our resources first.
And in those moments
Something as chance as the flicker of the light overhead
Might be readily snatched up as the “sign” we needed
To know that the electric will take prirority this month.
We all know the logic.
God obviously wanted me to go shopping today
Because this parking space just happened to appear up front.
God has obviously ordained his blessing on the young man
I met last week, because we both drive the same car
And so on.

Once, when I was fifteen,
I was trying to discern whether or not God had made me gay.
It was starting to become apparent
That there was something about my growing body and mind
That did not fit in with the expectations I had been raised with
And I was terrified.
One afternoon, I closed myself into my room and prayed:
“Dear God,
Please don’t make me gay.
There is so much work I want to do in this world
So many good things that I want to do for you
And if I’m gay, that will just be one more thing
that will get in my way and mess everything up.”
Then, I got out a quarter and said,
“So God, I’m going to flip this coin,
And if its heads, I’ll know that you want me to be gay,
And if its tails, I’ll know that you haven’t made me this way.”

When the coin landed on tails
I decided that God wanted to speak through the best out of three.

While this may seem like an almost endearing way
For an adolescent to determine God’s will for him
Its a little more disconcerting to us modern readers
When essentially the same method of discernment shows up
In our reading from Acts this morning.

This morning we find the disciples
having just returned to Jerusalem from their last earthly
parting with Jesus, who,
After commissioning them to continue his work
in the world, then departed from it by means no less grand
than flight.

The newly minted Apostles have a great amount of work
before them
And first on their agenda is replacing Judas among the twelve.
In other words, the Apostolic Church is not yet days old
And already there are issues of polity and hierarchy to be
dealt with:
Who will be IN the inner circle of leadership
And who will be OUT.
The choice is between Joseph called Barsabbas also known as
Justus; and- Matthais.
(If you ask me, any candidate alternately known by any one
Of three names at any given time
kind of has the cards stacked against him from the outset.)
Both men nominated for the job seem to be equally qualified.
We are told that both were present for each stage of
Christ’s earthly ministry, all the way from
John’s baptism to Christ’s ascension.
So who would it be?
We, the modern readers, are left to wonder
If there wasn’t enough time for panel interviews
Or at least some background reference checks;
Because ultimately, instead,
the Apostles make their choice by praying to God
to make his will known,
and then casting lots: throwing dice.
The first major decision of our infant church
Is here embarrassingly reduced to what we might see
As a matter of chance at least
And a heretical use of divination at the worst.
Incidentally, neither of the two men are heard from again
in the Bible,
Matthais at least is granted his own feast day
in our calender of saints
As for Joseph, called Barsabbas, known as Justus-

I would propose that he be appointed as the patron saint
Of anyone who has ever gotten the short end
Of a Church discernment process.

It would be funnier if there weren’t such a gruesome ring
of truth to it:
For while the mission of these disciples
would lay the groundwork for a global church
And while many and diverse means of discernment
Would be employed in that process
At times, it seems,
When it comes to discerning the will of God. we as a Church
Act with little more finesse and grace
Than a couple of adolescents in an attic
Hovering over a Ouija board.
As a corporate body that claims to carry out the will of God in the world, our discernment of that will has been at times as chance an encounter as rolling dice-
as arbitrary as casting lots.

What else can you call the selective reading of scripture
That has put our Church in a position
Where we claim to embrace the broad reach of Christ’s
welcome to the world
But fall short of consecrating bishops
Or blessing unions that pose a threat to the broader
global culture we are aligned with?
What else but an arbitrary condescension to the ties
we have chosen to maintain.
What else can we call the news that came out this week
Of the Church run schools in Ireland over the past century
Residential schools in which tens of thousands of
Irish children were sexually, physically, and emotionally
abused by priests, nuns and the laity

Where, the report states, “A climate of fear, created by
pervasive, excessive, and ARBITRARY punishment
permeated most of the institutions
where sexual abuse was endemic.”
What else but a Church whose moral alignment in the past
century has been capricious even as it pretends to be
absolute.
There are less extreme examples of course, which in the end
are no less harmful.
There is the level of commitment we as a Western Church
Are willing to make to serve our brothers and sisters
in Africa, in South America, at home.
Any work that falls short of the extreme example of Christs
complete solidarity with the poor
But allows us to give what we feel we are able--
Allows us to maintain the arbitrary balance we’ve determined for ourselves
Between what we are willing to part with
And the degree to which we wish to staunch the swell of
poverty, pollution, war, and other by-products of the
capitalist system that keeps us secure.
What is the line between feeling like we are contributing
As much as we can
between FEELING like we are GROWING as much as we can
And what God really wants of us
What, but a line drawn by chance encounters
along the path of least resistance.

We would like to think better of ourselves.
We would like to think that we are making these decisions
That we are moving forward as a Church and as individuals
By prayerfully considering the will of God.

But the truth is that we are human and deeply flawed-
Even with the Spirit of God surging through us.
And at times we are as fearful as those first disciples must
have been
When their master finally left them to make all the big decisions
alone.
And the truth is that it doesn’t take a popular, virulent atheist
To see that in fumbling through discernment
our Church has been responsible for some of
the most egregious offenses to human dignity our world
has known.

But the amazing thing
The unbelievable thing,
is that God in Christ founded this feeble, flawed, institution of ours,
to be the earthly body of his word and work ANYWAY.
Knowing that the disciples who had followed him in all his
earthly travels were faulty in their own right,
simple fishermen trying their best to grasp at
the mystery shared in Christs presence:
Peter with his doubts
And the rest with their misunderstanding
KNOWING these disciples as human complete with human
faults
Jesus prays ANYWAY in the Gospel we read
To send them into the world as he himself has been sent by God.

Given the flawed and failing nature which the disciples have
demonstrated thus far in the narrative
THIS is a remarkable trust.
“Holy Father” Jesus prays in the Gospel
“protect them in your name that you have given me
so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Every year at Advent and Christmas, we marvel at the mystery
Of the incarnation
The mystery that God would make his presence known
In the vulnerability of human flesh, a child no less.
But the mystery,
the AUDACITY, of God’s incarnation continues here as well
In this prayer of Jesus, in his commissioning of the disciples
In his willing departure from the work which he began.

Some handful of back broken human souls
Who, for all the breadth of their mission to the world
Stood, for a moment at least, around a game of dice
To determine the direction of their next steps.
This is who Christ chose to make his mission to the world incarnate- enshrined yet again in the vulnerable flesh of humanity- us, the Church.

And how then are we, the Church, to choose what is right
To discern the will of God in our work.
How are we to participate in the inbreaking of God’s kingdom
Rather than the theologically sanctioned violence which
is so easy for us to slip complicity into?

With closeness to God, Jesus invites.
May they be one, as we are one, Jesus prays for the disciples
and prays for us.

In this prayer, Jesus does not speak of discernment
But of the closeness with which he experienced God
whom he called Father.
As close as two that in reality are only one.
May they be one as we are one.
As close as Jesus is to God
As close as the tree is to the stream of water which gives it life
In the Psalm we sang this morning
As close as we are called to be to in Christ with God.
In Christ’s incarnation,
God showed God’s own closeness, and oneness
With the suffering of our sin and fallen state
And in inviting the disciples into that very closeness in turn
Christ establishes a second Incarnation just as reckless
as the first:
An incarnation of God’s word and work among the world
At the hands of normal human beings
Infused with the Spirit of God incarnate
Left to discern where that closeness might lead
For better, and as we have seen all to well at times, for worse.

How do we discern the will of God?
I would suggest that we do not discern the will of God
Any better than the tree discerns that its life is in the river it is
planted by.
This tree that we hear of in Psalm One
This tree that we are invited to BE
By planting our own lives close to the streaming wisdom
Of the Torah of God, of the Psalms of God, of the Word of God.
The tree does not discern what quality of water it is
Saturating the ground beneath its roots
The tree does not even choose for itself
What method might be best to bring that water to the world.
The tree is simply fed by the water which sustains it
And GROWS
As it is MADE to do.
Take, eat.
This is what God wants.
To be our food
To be our sustentation.
To be as close to us as water in a tree
Pressing out against our fruit in its due season.
Pressing out in the fullness of our being
In the fullness of Christ’s joy made complete.

Perhaps in the chance encounters we stumble through
In the greatest glory and the darkest pain
In all our strained attempts to hear what God is calling for
As often as our hasty leaps of faith
Perhaps even in lots cast by the disciples in the first days of their mission
We can work to see a radical faith
That not only because, but also in spite of our greatest efforts
God will continue to be revealed.

So here we are: casting lots and calling committees,
busying ourselves with the business of determining
how much of God’s will we are willing to work with

And here too is the Grace of God-
pulsing through our lives, through our words, through our touch
in spite of ourselves,
weaving inbetween our good and bad decisions,
striking out for the new kingdom of God’s redeeming love
all the while.

Year B, Epiphany 4: The God of Human Moments

Year B, Epiphany 4
I Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
I Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
Greensboro, NC

Note: If you've never participated in Episcopal worship you have to know that there is a prayer commonly said at the beginning of each celebration of the Eucharist called the Collect for Purity. The prayer goes like this: "Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord, AMEN."


“Lord you have searched me out and known me
You know my sitting down and rising up.”

IN THE NAME OF GOD WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE.

Nathaniel scoffs at the thought of a Nazarene Messiah
The Corinthians are scolded for their
apparently amoral gallivanting
The priest Eli coaches the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
and we. gather for one more week
in the midst of war and burden
to ask that God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit
that we may perfectly love him
and worthily magnify his Holy name
through Christ.

Anyone who spent pubescent
years in an Episcopal Church
can surely recall the acute sense of horror
that accompanies this weekly recitation
of the Collect for Purity.
“Oh God,”
we’ve heard each Sunday,
“to whom all hearts are open, all desires known
and from whom no secrets are hid,”
And typically at this point
if there are any thirteen-year-olds in the room
their eyes hit the floor,
heavy with the thought of a God
who knows exactly what happened last night,
not to mention what we thought of on our beds
the night before.
Some of us,
confronted with the strains of such divine surveillance
opted out of church life altogether
in exchange for a happily unexamined private one instead,
one complete with guilt-free binge-drinking, swearing, cigarettes
and, in grand Corinthian fashion, other pleasures of the flesh
that we deemed had no business to do with God at all.
Ironically,
when some of us made it back to Church after all that
it usually had something to do
with being so completely known by God
that we couldn’t find any good reason to stay away.
And it is somewhere
in this range of experience
That Psalm 139 comes singing to us.

Our psalmist, this morning,
has reconciled herself
To being completely known by God.
This psalm is one of the biggies,
One of the biblical corner stones
in attributing omniscience
and omnipresence to God
and then wrestling through the implications.

The words we sang this morning have empowered many.
Generations have resisted
literal readings of the Bible meant to diminish them
By finding strength in this particular image of God:
The God who watched in silence as our DNA
clicked like clockwork somewhere in our mother’s womb
somewhere with the stardust and the stones
that we came from.

We have been reassured by these words
That the presence we are so aware of
pressing in. on. us. at all sides
like a well sewn seam pulled tight
IS, in fact,
the God our predators have tried to warn us of.
And we have slept at night because of this understanding.

But there is more to this psalm than what we sang.
There are verses of this psalm
That- for the sake of brevity- our lectionary leaves
on the cutting room floor;
And something of this psalms heart is there with them.

Verses 7 through 12, which we do not read in Church
are more than just a variation
On the theme of an omniscient God,
They are a development into inescapability.
Where can I escape your Spirit? she asks
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb to heaven you are there
If I make my bed in the grave, you are there
If I take the wings of morning
and settle at the furthest limit of the sea, you are there
Even there your hand guides me
Your right had holds me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness conceals me
The day around me like the night
Even darkness is not dark to you, O Lord,
and the night is as bright as any day.

Some psalms wonder at the lack of God’s company.
Psalm 139 marvels that she cannot get away.
There is a strong chorus running through the psalms
That demands to know where God is,
that pleads for God’s presence.
Psalm 10 asks why God stands so far off
to hide in a time of trouble
13 joins in with 83 to ask how long it will last:
Will you hide your face from me forever?
_Why have you forsaken me, inquires 22
from amidst a clutch of dogs teeth.
And 88 goes so far as to plead for salvation, if only
because there will be one less voice to praise God's holy name
Should that voice be lost to death.
“Is your steadfast love declared in the grave”, that psalm asks
“or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?”
Psalm 139 looks up from the other corner of that grave
and simply answers: Yes.

Yes, God is here, she seems to tell us.
This, too, is a Godly moment:
the chill you felt when God's face was hidden
As much as the thrill of victory.
God was here when our legs became like wind
And carried us to victory
just as God was here when we celebrated too much for it
And crushed our front teeth on the pavement.
God witnessed the breathless pause you took
with the ruddy sunrise this morning
Yet not the pause only
But also the red face you got
when you wrestled with the tangled power strip on Tuesday
and finally pulled it out of the wall.
God sat next to you in the car
While you cut through three lanes of traffic,
and when you yelled at your kids
and when you sat on the couch not really watching any program
but just letting your eyes glaze for a bit.
God stood by as you made breakfast
hung the laundry
and fell asleep before remembering
to say goodnight to your spouse.

We can go far with this idea of God’s
inescapable omnipresence,
and in most modern readings of this psalm we do.
And the danger here is how perfectly
we can make this psalm fit
with our creeping Western suspicion of always being watched.
Of being the star of our own personal reality show
That everyone is tuned in to.
Of being the author of books and blogs and sermons
Whose readership and audience is infinitely extended.
Of being guilty, mostly, of personal sins
Such as sex outside of marriage
Or having too strong a fondness
for chocolate cake.

But that would simply be a performance.
Perhaps one elaborately staged
To avoid the more awkward truth
That there is something much more profane,
and frustrating, and inadequate, and vulnerable
In other words,
Something much more whole emerging
In the eyes of our Great Beholder:
Less a life of Godly moments
and more a God of infinitely human ones.

Reconciling ourselves
To being known by this God
Who knows the world so fully
May be disconcerting.
We who have grown accustomed
To keeping dark things hidden in the dark-
the poor silent in their ghettos
and our own skeletons wrapped neatly in our closets-
may be reluctant to show ourselves
In a light so indiscriminately embracing.
We may have to contend with the fact
That this constant companion of ours
Is more deeply world-weary
Than what we might care to invite
into the privacy of our homes.
The longer we let ourselves sit
With the steady, loving, gaze of our Redeemer
The more frequently we may find
That we share the same place there
As the Haitian mother trying to decide which of her children
will eat tonight.
The more frequently we may find
That our fascinating table conversation
Is more or less as valued
as dangerous children's play by cook fires in Guatemala.
The more frequently we may find ourselves
in the company of Palestinians as they retrograde
with each explosion past the meager vestiges of progress
They had managed to claim thus far.
We might even begin to ask
How much we really value God’s presence after all
At least Over things like comfort, safety, health, food
or even spiritual well-being for that matter.
We may find ourselves as frustrated
With the seeming lack of God’s action
In the world
As those psalmists who have wondered at the lack
Of God’s presence altogether.

Near the end of 139- a section also left from our lectionary-
the psalmist rises up with the heart of the matter
& cries:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with a perfect hatred;
I count them as my enemies.

By the end of it, 139 is not much different from the other psalms.
Whether aware of God’s pervasive presence or not
The psalmist is still faced with a world
that seems to be at the mercy of the godless
Waiting for God’s intervention.
A waiting made all the more plaintive
Because the psalmist has known
That God is here, witnessing with God’s own self
the devastation we have wrought.
That God must know the pains of this life of flesh
even as we wait,
wading in the thick of it.

Search me, O God, and know my heart
test me and know my thoughts, the Psalm ends
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, O God,
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, we join.

By the end of it, the psalmist
opens herself to what is truly liberating about
an omnipresent God-
the possibility of being known by an Other
more deeply than she knows her self-
and in that possibility
being open to the unknown direction that might take.
The possibility that the wickedness
she deplores in the world
may be held within her
as much as she is held within
the world her God is watching.
Perhaps it is the best concession one can make
upon discovering ones own belonging
to a world so wholly caught up
In God’s redeeming work.

Eli, after all
cannot train the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
Without risking a message from him
that tells of his own demise.

Nathaniel cannot judge the unlikely origins of the Messiah
Who will save him
Without surrendering that judgment just as quickly
When confronted by a teacher so clearly possessed
with a prevenient understanding of his life.

Paul cannot introduce a liberating theology of God’s grace
To the Corinthians
without the risk of them extending the applications of that Grace
in directions he never dreamed of and could not condone.

And we cannot pray to a God
To Whom All Hearts Are Open
Without the danger of opening Ourselves to All Hearts
An endeavor that pinned our own Christ to the cross;
An impossible task that may very well crush us too.

But that is the Good News of our faith:
That in the crushing there is cleansing
That night is as bright as any day
That in crucifixion the Spirit Thrives.
That the steadfast love of God is declared in the grave
As often as in our victory over it
That wonders will be known in the darkness after all.
May we all love God more perfectly because of it
And worthily magnify her holy Name
through Christ our Lord, Amen.

Year B, Advent 4: A House for God

Year B, Advent 4
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

Preaching with St. Francis Episcopal Church


David wants to build a house for God.
It seems like the least one could do, right?
God, has, after all,
handpicked David from the midst of a muddy field
Where he was busy tending sheep
And placed him as King over all Israel
so that he might shepherd God’s people instead.
God has delivered David
from the peril of his enemies
God has given David strength,
abundance, and security.
And what kind of gift does one give for all that?
What do you get for the God who has everything?
A house, David thinks, would be appropriate.
David wants to build a house for God.

The story that we read from second Samuel this morning
Comes just after David has been anointed as King over Israel.
Jerusalem has been made the capital
of the newly United Kingdom
And the Philistines have been defeated in their last move
of resistance.
In a wave of riotous celebration
David takes a company of thirty thousand
And marches into the new capital
With the ark of the Lord in procession.
David dances wildly, half-naked, before the Ark
Passing out parcels of meat and figs and bread to his new subjects along the way
and at the end of his parade,
settles into his new cedar-panneled home,
where we find him in the beginning of this mornings lection.

When I read this passage from Samuel,
I imagine that it is night,
and that is is raining.
I imagine David, wild-eyed, and out of breath
worn out from celebration
wet with rain
Storming into his new palace, still singing songs of victory.
But something troubles him.
While he dries by the fire
In the comfort of this grand home
He can see the Ark of the Lord
the very seat of God’s divine presence
outside; protected by little more than a tent,
virtually exposed to the elements.
“See now, I am living in a house of cedar,
but the ark of the Lord stays in a tent.”
He says to the court prophet, Nathan.
Nathan understands his meaning,
what better way to show that God is with this people
Than to display the magnificence of God
in the earthly glories of a beautiful house.

Now, the “house” we are talking about here,
Will eventually be the Temple built by
David’s son, Solomon.
This structure will be the key location
In what we refer to as Temple Judaism,
a biblical Jewish movement in which worship of God
is focused toward the singular location
of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
A truly magnificent architectural achievement
An earthly realization of sacred space.
This is the Temple that was destroyed during the
Babylonian captivity and exile of the Jewish people
Only to be rebuilt and destroyed again by the Romans.
The Temple Jesus caused such a stir in after his triumphal
Entry into Jerusalem
The Temple whose only remaining fragment
Of its Western Wall is still venerated today-
the place where Michael took all of our written prayers
On his trip to Israel.
A house, King David imagines, that will be worthy
Of all the great works God has done for him.

We know a thing or two about building God houses ourselves.
From the time Christians first got the official Roman
seal of approval
We have been offering up elaborate architecture
to the greater glory of God
The Haiga Sophia in present-day Istanbul, for instance
Has a dome perforated by windows -all the way around
And when the sunlight comes pouring through them
It looks as if the dome is floating in heaven itself.
even while grounded here on Earth in its foundations [LOOK!]
or take St. Peter’s in Rome:
a 448 foot high man made cavern whose ceilings
are tiled with such fabulous mosaics
that you cannot help but crane your neck
to look outward and beyond yourself.
We delight in capturing something of divine transcendence
In an actual physical space we can enter.
Colonnades arc up and over
Making stone look as if it could plant roots
And grow toward the sky.
Glass of every color transforms light into a holy dance
Glazing trails across the marbled floors.
Stepping into a well-built church
Can take your breath away
It can hold you in its sacred hush-
Because the best architecture manages to capture
something of the INFINITE
in a finite space.
Even an old country church can have this effect:
Wooden pews creak beneath the weight
Of generations
Steeped in prayers of promise and hymns of praise.
Even the storefront ministry
With its fluorescent lights and folding chairs
Speaks to the urgency of its mission.
And Even if you find greater peace
in a starbucks or a shopping mall
The modern mega-church manages to convey
All this and more as an appropriate dwelling place for the Lord.

WE, are a God-house building people

And David, just as well as us, in our loftiest aspirations
wants to build a house for God.
A mighty, grand, beautiful house,
Maybe even with David’s name emblazoned right across the front of it
In Memoriam
House.
And the only problem
Is that God doesn’t want one.
Or, perhaps, more accurately,
the house God wants, is David himself. [Big Pause]

Before even a single night passes from David’s plan
The word of the Lord comes to Nathan
and is swiftly delivered to his servant David’s door:

“Will you be the one to build me a house?”
God asks.
“Will you be the one to build me a house to live in?
All this time I have traveled up from Egypt
Among my people Israel in a tent and a tabernacle
And have I ever once asked for a House to live in?
No!
What is more, I will make a House of YOU
It is MY saving work that will contain YOU”
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

And in an instant,
as David receives this word of God
for the gift that it is
a new relationship,
A new covenant is born.
A covenant in which God’s people are taken in promise
Not in the same old patterns where
Disobedience is punished with abandonment
And forgetfulness is corrected with wrath
But in a new promise of steadfast, everlasting love
even in the face of the great human failures to come.
In David, God will bear anew
Generations will come
And come, and come
and even in ONE bewildered carpenter
STAND for us
to greet our own Christ-child in his meek estate.
David will give his life to be this Household of God.
David will become many, yoked to God by chords of love.
And even in their exile,
Even in the ruin of the very temple David dreams of,
They will remember this covenant
and fight to know themselves
Not as a people punished
But as keepers of God’s steadfast love.
This Household, not of stone
But of souls will be the one
To bear God’s holy name.

But what of us?
Will we be the ones to build God a house to live in?
This time of year
Reveals our frustrations at such attempts
More than any other.
We are, all of us, in the midst of great efforts
That might have at some point
been well intended for the greater glory of God.
We all take jobs or start projects
We all make big plans
To create some outward show of our love to one another
To our neighbors, to our families, and to God.
We have all, at some point,
Run into the house as wide-eyed and alive as King David
With a great new idea for what we’re sure God wants of us.
And we all know what it is like to have those efforts buried
In the mundane details that life requires
Shot down by the armies of To-Do Lists, cutbacks
Bureaucratic Requirements and Comities
that seem bent on killing dreams.
I intend my own work to be a kind of house for God
Teaching kids from low-income families
Because it seems like what I’m called by God to do
But if you had seen me last week
You would have seen a very disgruntled young man
Trying to cajole a crowd of sneezing, jittery four-year olds
Into a jumbled mess of carols
That looked like a far cry
from the Holiday cheer it was meant to inspire.
Where does it all far apart?
When do our calendars get too full
When do our resources get spread too thin
At what point do the households we intend to build up for God
Start creaking beneath the weight of their own
Hasty assembly?
Somewhere, I think
between the trips to Friendly Center
and the rehearsals and the practices
Somewhere in the diners and the parties
and the correspondence we haven’t tended to
Somewhere in the faculty cutbacks we had to weigh
Somewhere in the pile of papers
that threatens to outgrow the angel ivy on our desks
SOMEWHERE in the places
Where all this becomes so automatic
that we forget what we were building for
It all falls apart.
And then, and only then [Slow down, end]
When we get so tired of it all
maybe then we will be ready
To hear God say “no”
To All the big plans we’ve made-
As he welcomes us instead
into the House he has prepared for us.
And maybe, when we can hear that welcome
It will sound something like the song
Of an unsuspecting virgin mother
Praising the God she has found magnified in her soul.

If we have ears to listen then
We might hear of a new house
Where the proud are scattered in their conceits
And the lowly lifted up-
We might hear of a new house
Where the full are sent away
And the hungry filled with good things
We might hear of a new house
Where our room is right next to Edward’s
who is recovering from a drug-related prison term
and its accompanied repatriation
And also happens to share a place setting with us
At the welcome table down the hall.

If we have ears to listen then
We might hear news that tells us in the midst of a recession even
In the midst of an economic downturn
That threatens to unsettle the lives we’ve made
Good news even here that as long as we have flesh and bones
And a spirit of life within us
We have all the building blocks we need
To be built into mighty towers of dwelling for our God.

We might hear the Good News
That whether we are on the way down
Or already at the bottom waiting for our help to come
We are somewhere in God’s new world.
That even in the midst of our gradual exile
From all the affluence
and security we
thought we had stored up for ourselves-
Even as we watch the temples of our best ambitions
Get disassembled stone by stone
We have a covenant to remember
And bodies and souls to give
To the construction of something new.

David wants to build a house for God,
and so he gives his life.
Mary wants to build a house for God,
and so she gives her soul- in song, and in birth.
And we, eyes drawn toward the Giver of All Gifts
Hearts Full of Thanksgiving
Gather here
In this community
To be a House where God will dwell.

So as we end this Season of Preparation
And await the dawning of our Lord Among Us
Let us open all the shudders
All the windows
All the doors
That the light may come pouring in
And lift us all high beyond
where our necks can crane to see
as if we were floating in Heaven itself
built up and grounded from the Earth.

Year A, Proper 22

Proper 22, Year A
Patronal Feast/Stewardship Kickoff

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Phillipians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Preaching with St. Francis Episcopal Church


You spend enough time somewhere and you begin to feel like you OWN the place.
Enough time in a favorite cafe or restaurant
leaves us with an expectation
that there will always be a seat for us at OUR table
Or,
maybe its a surge of traffic
that leaves us wondering aloud what so many bad drivers are DOING
on OUR section of bryan boulevard

Enough time, enough familiarity,
and a sense of ownership gradually settles in.
We might not even notice it there at first;
at least
not until its pulled out from under us.
Someone takes our favorite seat at the restaurant
The short cut around Bryan that we always treasured
suddenly becomes common knowledge

Something happens
that sends our sense of ownership crashing to the ground.
One might call this a "reality check"
Kind of like the one the wicked tenants of the vineyard
Are about to get in this mornings parable.

I experienced this kind of reality-check myself recently
When I became the last of my friends to finish my undergraduate degree
And the time finally came
For my two best friends and I
To move out of the house
We had rented together for the past four years
of college.

I call this: The Parable of the Wicked Tenants
of the Bachelor Pad.
The landlord in my story didn’t expect us to produce any crops
Or even come to collect what was due to him
At the end of our term
But I think its fair to say that he expected us
To take care of what belonged to him
While we were tenants there.
Now, like I said,
You spend enough time somewhere
and you begin to feel like you own the place.
You could say that the three of us
Did a lot of living while we leased that house
And we DID care for it
if only in the special way
That only a trio of early twenty something undergrads could.
(Our current Sunday morning audience
prevents me from sharing some of the more colorful details.)
Suffice to say, that OUR reckoning occurred
At the end of our lease
When the time came for our landlord
To show the place to prospective new tenants.
It became VERY apparent VERY quickly
That OUR idea of a happy home
Did not quite match up to the image
That our landlord expected to see upon his return.
We had to make a FEW minor changes
To spruce the place up.
Among many things,
This included ditching the movie theater seats
We had found on the side of the road
That were serving as a lovely perch on our front porch.
But perhaps the thing we were sorriest to see go
Was the giant plywood spray painted bulls eye
That we kept out back.
You see, we had this friend
Who would visit us and crash on our couch all the time
And he just LOVED throwing knives
So we kept this giant, plywood, spray painted bulls eye out back
For him to practice on each time he came to visit.
Our landlord was not amused.
[When he finally sent his only daughter
To review the place before showing
Possibly the only thing we could hold to our credit
Was the fact that we DIDN’T throw her out of the house
In a last ditch attempt to claim heir to something
That never belonged to us in the first place.]
By the time we were finished DIVESTING the house
Of everything that we identified with
It became painfully apparent
That we never really owned the home
We had taken the liberty of so much ownership with.
We were promptly shooed away from the environ
Of so many treasured memories,
And some very nice young women
Were ushered in to take our place.
I am sure that house
SMELLS much nicer these days.

Now, there are some SLIGHT differences between MY story
And the story from this mornings Gospel
(And I’m not just talking about the fact that there WERE NO
1st century Galilean bachelor pads in the parables of Jesus)
The BIGGEST difference, rather, is that
The tenants of this mornings parable weren’t wicked
Because they trashed something that didn’t belong to them
They weren’t wicked
Because didn’t care for the vineyard enough
They were wicked because they cared for it too much.
The tenants of the vineyard
Were GIVEN land to lease
And then their leassor left.
The tenants of the vineyard
Put a season’s worth of hard labor into that land
They spent the first hours of the morning
Checking the temperature of the soil
And the last hours of the day
Fretting over whether the frost would be enough
To kill the crop completely.
The tenants of the vineyard
Spent more than enough time in that place
They spent ALL their time there
And they loved it as their own.
They took ownership of it.
They came to HOLD IT
As their POSSESSION.
So what do we EXPECT them to do
When the servants of their landlord come knocking?

THIS
is not a pretty picture to paint
of the Kingdom of God.
If the Kingdom of God
Is anything like the vineyard in this parable
Then God looks like an absentee landlord
And the Kingdom looks like a place
That EVERYBODY
-servants and tenants alike-
Keeps getting kicked out of.
Its a picture that should set us ill at ease
But it is PRECISELY the image
that Jesus is trying to convey
To the scribes and the chief elders of the Temple.
The scribes and chief elders of the Temple
Who just moments before have asked him:
“By what authority are you doing these things?
Who gave it to you?”
This parable
Is part of an answer to that question
And because it is a question
That we still find ourselves faced with
Two thousand years later
We also ask:
Which part of us, here, now
Is Jesus speaking to in his answer?
Where do WE fit in to this story?

If we were 1st century Christians
Among the original audience for Matthew’s Gospel
We would probably find ourselves identifying most strongly
With those lucky souls about to inherit
The vineyard snatched away from the wicked tenants.
For the early Church
This parable was an allegory
Depicting the failure of the religious leaders of the time
A failure to recognize the word of God
in those prophets sent to instruct them.
In this sense, the tenants of the vineyard
Are the elders, priests, and scribes
While the servants of the landlord are the succession of God’s prophets
And the Son of the landlord is Christ himself
Handed over to others to be killed.
The first Christians heard this story
And the wickedness of the tenants
Was absolutely palpable
And there was a new church that just couldn’t WAIT
for God to kick out the bad guys
So they could get to work and do a much better job.
Now, if this kind of mentality sounds familiar
It might be because we’re in the middle of an election year,
And this is exactly the kind of attitude that most of us adopt
As we’re advocating for our choice of new leaders.
The people in charge have messed it up
They need to be on their way out
And OUR people are the ones who are going to set it right.
This mentality also happens to be very easy
For people my age to adopt.
It seems to US at times
That we have INHERITED a world
That has been duly messed up
By those who came before us:
That we INHERITED a fragile ecology
Ravaged by industrialization
That we INHERITED a failed economy
That rewards greed even as it
Renders assistance to the least among us
All but impossible.
The idealistic YOUNG
Have always identified with the new wave;
Those about to INHERIT a kingdom
That the pervious tenants failed to recognize
As precious to God.
The earliest Christians were ready,
THEY were going to get it right this time.
THEY were the stone the builders rejected
And they were ready to squash the builders
As the brand new cornerstone.

But is this really who WE identify with
In this parable?
If we are honest with ourselves
We may begin to admit that we
Are much more like the first tenants
Than we might care to imagine.
After all, our Church is not one century old
But twenty
And we have had plenty of time to live into our role
As tenants of this Kingdom.
From this end of the story,
We might begin to wonder
About Who
WE’VE thrown out of the vineyard.
We might begin to wonder
Who WE failed to recognize
As a prophet and servant of God.
Was it the woman protesting the war
On the street corner
That we drove past, rolling our eyes?
Was she a prophet?
Was it the man begging for change
That we shrugged off
Before he could get a word in otherwise?
Was it the television pundit
Spewing vitriol about our politics of choice
Before we changed the channel?
Was he a servant of God?
Or what about the men holding hands in the park
That we looked the other way to avoid seeing?
WHO has come knocking at our door
For a piece
Of what we’ve spent our whole lives protecting?
We may wonder WHO has been trying
To force their way into our lives
With a word from God.
We MAY EVEN BEGIN to argue to ourselves
That there’s a REASON
Why prophets get KICKED OUT of the vineyard
In the first place.
They make us uncomfortable,
And their demands are unreasonable,
And they are often extremist to the point of being obnoxious.
“Sure, sure”
We might say to the prophet
“War is wrong,
But how else are we going to pull out of this mess”
Or maybe:
“Yes, yes, I know,
There are people starving-
But what am I supposed to do about it?
What good will changing my own ways do
When no one else will follow suit?”

Prophets make unreasonable demands
They ask for too much
But that is precisely because
The God they serve
Is asking for EVERYTHING.
Everything that we’ve labored so long for
Everything that we’ve conjured by the work of our hands
Even our very selves,
And THAT is simply TOO MUCH
For us to bear.

So one by one
We show them the door.
We kick them out of the vineyard
Lest they ask for more than we are ready to give.

I ask you again:
Who ARE WE in this story?
Are we waiting to inherit a kingdom
Done wrong by those who came before us?
[Pause]
Or have we already locked the door shut
To ensure that NO ONE will take hold
Of what we’ve made?

I tell you:
We, in this place,
here, today
are not called to be EITHER.

We, the members of this Church
are not named
after a TENANT of the vineyard
We are not even named after future TENANTS
About to inherit the Kingdom of God
WE
Are named after one of the very SERVANTS
Who came to knock on the vineyard walls
Demanding what is God’s
For God’s own self:
Francis.
St. Francis who shunned his family’s wealth
To their embarrassment
For his naked stroll through city streets.
Francis whose community of simplicity
Stood in direct contrast to the indulgent wealth
Of the Church in his day.
Francis who spoke the word of God so fervently
That he preached to BIRDS
When the world grew tired of hearing him.
WE bear HIS name.
We bear the name of Francis, God’s servant
And messenger to the harvest time/
We BEAR the name Christian
The name of God’s own Beloved Child sent to claim
God’s Own World
for God’s Own Self.
We have been charged with this difficult work
Of asking for too much
Of answering to a God
Whose love for us is so complete
And is such a foundation for everything that we have made
That it possesses everything we have
And everything that we are
[That it demands everything we have
Everything we are]
More than we can even imagine possessing for ourselves.

When you spend enough time somewhere
You begin to feel like you own the place
And whether we trash it while we’re here
Or become so possessive of it
That we cannot imagine giving it up
To the community God is establishing with us
Doesn’t matter:
What matters is that we are called as servants
Charged with a message
To bring
to the laborers of this Kingdom
to the stewards of this world /
A message we are charged to bring
To our families
To our coworkers
To our politicians
To our institutions
And not least of all
To ourselves.:
That THIS belongs to God.

So the next time you find yourself in the midst of life’s abundance,
The next time you find yourself in the middle of
Life’s Great Harvest
I challenge you to take a chance
and be a prophet;
be a servant for God
With Francis
And with Christ:
find someone nearby, tap them on the shoulder
and remind them that these fruits belong to God/
that God is giving them to us to share together.
Just wait and see how many vineyards
you can get yourself thrown out of
Talking like that.

And when you do finally go
You might as well just leave that giant
plywood, spray painted bulls eye in the back yard

You never know:
The next tenants
Might enjoy
throwing knives
As much
as the old ones did.

Year A, Trinity Sunday: In the Beginning

Trinity Sunday, Year A
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
Greensboro, NC

In the beginning
There was a pit
Deep inside each one of their stomachs
Where all the deep darkness
They thought they had lost somewhere on the trail
Had simply gathered
Into a canker of a stone;
Where the stone then turned
As it does upon visiting a new doctor
Or perhaps more accurately
As it does on a first date.
Dread, anticipation, hope
Grand nebulous images of tomorrow
With sure points readied for deflation:

The disciples
in THIS story
had an appointment to keep.

The disciples in this story were not afforded
the luxury of shock
At a half-risen Jesus appearing through walls
In the midst of their supper
Neither did they perceive their beloved companion
As a phantom on the shore
Nor were they brought along into slow recognition
While he kept their company on some long road
To a not-so-important destination.
THESE were disciples whom Jesus had told:
When I rise, you’ll have to come find me again
in Galilee.
THESE were disciples to whom the Mary’s came
With the message of the angel:

The risen Lord will see you now.
He’ll be the one on the Mountain at 3, dressed in white.

Can you hear the collective gulp?

In the beginning
There was terror,
Wild guilt,
Misdirected leaps of faith from entropy
And the spring-loaded cringe of a child ready
for inevitable discipline.

The unique flavor of this Resurrection
Is in the disciples shared journey to see Christ resurrected.
In other stories after Easter Jesus often appears suddenly,
Sometimes to upbraid the disciples for their lack of faith.
Or, Jesus might appear to a few disciples at a time
Leaving them to weave a common portrait gradually
Nodding their heads as they halfway listen to each other;
Making silent corrections in their own minds
For what their friends must be leaving out.
No where else in the Gospels
Is the presence of the disciples so requested by God after Easter
As it is here in Matthew.
The presence
Of disciples who have not been seen in the narrative
Since each of them had abandoned Jesus at the cross.
The imagination can wander on from here
But we will stop at the suggestion
That the road
From Jerusalem to Galilee
Must have been a far different road
From the one to Emmaus.

It is the end of THIS journey
That brings the disciples into worship
And- for some, we are told- into doubt.

I am, of course,
projecting
Some of my own feelings onto the encounter of the disciples.
Namely the feelings that I have
About coming to Church
And listening to the first chapter of Genesis
After two weeks of natural disaster
Months of rampant political violence
And the willful starvation of our world’s poor
By the world’s better off.

In the beginning
when God created the Heavens and the Earth
The Earth was a formless void
And darkness covered the face of the deep
While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

God said, “Let there be light” and there was light
And God saw that the light was good.

When I hear the words of Genesis, I melt.
My heart opens into a myriad of images:
The buds of trees unfurling a miraculous display of veins
That were somehow bound up in dead wood all along;
Seas teeming with intricately limbed creatures that stunt
my own limited imagination
Babies born and crying
Cells dividing
Stars falling into themselves before their own
annihilating expansion.
Something, appearing out of nothing.
When I hear Genesis,
my heart cannot help but worship
my knees cannot help but bend
And in my worship
There is
deep, deep doubt.

Good for whom? we may rightly ask at this juncture
And what, precisely, do we mean by good anyway.

Last weekend,
as a little more than two hundred of my many-aged peers and I
celebrated the commencement of lives newly informed
by undergraduate careers at Greensboro College,
One of the things that we heard reiterated
by the bevy of speakers prepared for us
was the goodness of this life:
An appeal to remember
to stop and reflect often
on the fact that life is good.

Newly graduated,
Mortarboard still fastened tightly to my head
Speeding down High Point Road
While shouting out the lyrics to the latest Madonna song
With my best friend, Devon, right beside me
I was probably the last person in the world
Who needed to be reminded
Of the goodness of my life
In that moment.

Goodness, as I understood it in these speeches
Is the innate God-given quality of life
That we are to remember in times
When other worldly aims threaten
To deter our perception of it.
Goodness, in this sense, is the FOUNDATION
We may return to at all times
When all else fails.

Surely it must have been what I returned to that day:
Coming home to a table full
of good food and good company:
Three loving and true friends
Two parents in good health and spirits
And one man that I fall more deeply in love with every day
I sat down to ALL THAT
And I SAW that it was good.
And we celebrated its goodness and gave thanks

But the foundation we celebrated on
Seemed much further off than any innate blessing guaranteed
by God.
The foundation seemed to lie in a much more
Hard to reach place than that.
Part of it rested on the shoulders of the Haitian woman
I had heard lamenting on the radio
That her days wages were barely enough
To buy a tin of rice
And that all the rice did anyway
Was scrub out her children’s stomachs like bleach.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Kenyan student
Who found herself homeless when the tides turned this year
Against her and her own
And could not protect herself against rape
By those in power.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Sichuan woman
Who railed in wild grief against a province
Secure enough to make the shoes on my feet
But not to build hospitals out of anything more
Than cheap steel and concrete that powdered at the touch
All of which crumbled on the sick and young
While the factories stood strong.

The steady numbing global expose of the information age
Does not offer a way around our responsibility
In this shared creation of ours
And Genesis does not offer a way
To know ourselves as originally good
Without first moving over the chaos we are raised from;
It is not history without also
Being the destination.
And the original blessing communicated by Our Creator
Is not a SENTIMENT meant to keep us comfortable
In an entitled happiness
But a rallying cry
And reminder
That this world is being MADE
TO MANIFEST THE CREATIVE PRESENCE OF GOD
and WILL NOT be itself until it does.


What were we supposed to do?
The disciples mumble, shifting their feet,
Resentment building at the assumed responsibility
Of their own failure.
Uproot our lives and move to Myanmar
Only to get shot down by the border?
Set up shop in Zimbabwe and be dead within a matter of days?
Starve ourselves and ship the food to Haiti
While the real problem bloats beyond control
and consumes us too?
Weren’t our prayers enough?
Wasn’t our moment of reverence appropriate?
Didn’t our donations contribute in their own small way?
The cross was bloody and unnecessary
Our lives were at stake
And we did everything but get up there on it ourselves!

The road from Jerusalem to Galilee
The road back to the home where we were first called
From the scene of our own crime and complicity
Is a road traveled with thoughts such as these.

In the beginning
They were the best we could come up with
To keep from falling apart all together
So sure we had been of our own goodness
And then
So suddenly aware
Of the deep darkness
We belonged to.

And then came the Wind
And then came the Light
And we fell to our knees in a mess
Of worship and doubt.

And Christ, Risen from the Grave, for his part
Spoke to neither of these things.

In the new creation rising from this void
Christ speaks instead to authority on earth and in heaven.
And the logic we have hidden behind for so long
The safe rationales that belong to the economies
Of the Earth that we fancy ourselves at having mastered
Wither beneath the compassion and the camaraderie
That we are being remade within.
Christ speaks instead of discipleship to all nations
Discipleship to all peoples
Discipleship in the fashion that he has reared us in
Incarnate and fully present to the ones we are to serve
Sitting the trouble of our world
Down at our own table to break bread.

In the beginning
We were unraveled and exposed
To the wholeness of this end:

As a flawed and willing people
Held within our Maker
Waiting for the making to begin.

Year A, 2nd Easter: The Liturgy of Risen Wounds

Year A, Easter 2
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center


he said to them, "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."


IN THE NAME OF GOD, WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE. AMEN.


I have some bad news for you.
On the last day, in the General Resurrection,
that glorious becoming
in which we, in all our earthly endeavors
will finally find completion
in the drowning fullness of God:
you might not recognize me at all.

Which is to say,
After the Lamb of God
comes to take away the sins of the world
I'm still confused
as to how much of me
will actually be left over.

I am the hypothetical fool that Paul rebukes
in this week's daily office readings, who asks:
"How are the dead raised?
With what kind of body do they come?"

I might, after all, be so completely full of God
as to be more completely myself
than I never had been before:
my SIN having at long last
withered entirely away,
to reveal the real me.

If, in this glorious becoming,
there were to be any ROOM for disappointment,
I dare say, you might be.
You might be disappointed
that I'm not quite as funny as I used to be.
My small stabs at humor are, after all,
mostly a product of my sin,
of my insistent separateness from God
and the resulting insecurity that at times
procures, albeit, rarely, a small offering
of dry wit.
I'm sure, however, that in our newly exalted state
we won't miss the old, bad jokes so much.

You might, however, be disappointed
that I've stopped baking entirely.
Yes, I'm sad to tell you after all this time
that my chocolate caramel tarts, my pear Roquefort,
and even my lemon curd icing are all products of sin.
All gluttonous misuses of the wealth of creation
while my brothers and sisters starve.
No more baking in the Kingdom,
we won't have to bake.
Everyone will already be provided for
and the price of dessert,
typically meted out with fasts and dire longing
will simply be paid until the endless end of time.
You'll get over it, trust me.

But then, you might be disappointed
that we don't preach and pray together anymore.
You might actually MISS that lingering suspicion
we came to dwell within so often
of whether or not we were ever really ON
to anything about God at all.
Once we are rooted firmly in our places
of the Great Welcome Table
we might not have to talk our way through any of this
any more,
We will simply know
and be glad in the full presence of God.
The consistent, startling inquiry
we have learned in the life of flesh
will die with sin once, and forever.
No more questions asked
All answers found.
You might
if there were any ROOM for disappointment, then,
be disappointed.
A glimmer of melancholy at how life used to be
Before flushing away
to a more satisfying spiritual greatness.

You might, in other words,
not recognize me at all,
or yourself for that matter.

Unless, of course,
today's Gospel has anything to say about it.

This is the day, after all,
when Christ appears to his disciples
bearing the marks of sin
on his risen body.
This is the day, when in John,
alone among the Evangelists
it takes the specific wounds of crucifixion
to signify himself as risen in the flesh
to disciples who exclaim
at this most gruesome display:
"My Lord! and my God!"
This is the day when we are invited
by the love of Christ to wonder:
What does the risen life of flesh look like
When all we have known of how to live in flesh
has been learned here on the ground? [pause]
What does it mean to see, and touch, and know
the wounds we have inflicted on the body of our God
and have our fear of death from wounds subside? [pause]
Can we really hold fast to the conviction of the psalmist
that the God of our faith will not abandon us to the Pit
in an age as grim as our present one? [pause]
And how do we approach these questions in Christian community?
Do we stand around with our arms crossed and wait
for Jesus to come and prove us right to Thomas?
Or will we bear the wounds of our own risen body
instead?

Here, at St. Mary's House, in Episcopal worship,
one way we approach these questions
offered by the mystery of the Gospel
is through our liturgy.
Our liturgy is, in part, what helps us INHABIT the tough
or unbelievable stories
which are so integral to our community of faith,
and on this, the second Sunday after Easter
we are just coming off something like
a liturgical binge session.
Its no wonder most of us stay home on this day.
We're worn out!
We've had a liturgy of Palms to inhabit the triumphal
entry of Jesus into Jerusalem,
a liturgy of foot-washing to re-enact the last supper
and the installation of the Eucharist
(which, in itself, is a liturgy for God's great gift to us),
We've had a liturgy of the cross to recreate the Passion narrative
and the liturgy of the Easter Vigil to symbolize
the resurrection of God's Light
among the darkness of sure death.
To return now to the bread and butter liturgy of Communion
is like having a breakfast of Melba toast
After a week of great feasting.
It is probably best for our digestion,
and yet, the part of me still lurching forward must wonder:

Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

We are, after all, more than happy
to pile the World's problems onto the story of the Passion.
It seems natural that we should talk of the
death penalty, and gay bashing,
and the pain of a Mother's loss
on Good Friday
but where are all those stories now?
There are wounds on both sides of Easter:
is it easier to see ourselves in the wounds of the cross
rather than the wounds that have passed through walls
and graves?

Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

To find out,
I would like for you to take a moment and imagine
The body of our Church
coming at long last
into the arms of our Beloved Jesus.
This is what we have been waiting for all this time.
The Body of our Church in our collective longing
has been rising through the Centuries
To touch
The Object of our One and Singular Desire:
the Body of our Christ
which has itself
been rising through the Centuries
among us
in the tired hands and faces
which have labored for the Kingdom
on this impossible Earth.
I want you to IMAGINE
for just a moment,
that this is the day when we are reunited.
It is, in fact, not day at all,
but night, for the world itself is at rest.
It is difficult at first to recognize Jesus
in the starlight.

"Is that you?" we ask.
He nods.
"Did all this really happen?" we ask.
He nods.
And still we are not so sure.
We can feel the love between us
and we know it is eternal
But we are unsure if this is the same love
that saved us
through all those years
we thought for sure
we were alone.

Jesus, knowing our hesitation,
takes our hand,
and brings it to his eyes.
We can feel the bags of worry
that have gathered there
from all the nights that we spent sleepless
waiting for our children to come home.
There are tiny canyons in his face
Carved from the river of tears we shed
When our brother died.
There are the ears
we stared at for hours in the bathroom mirror
sure that they protruded too far from our hair
to be beautiful to anyone.
Then he brings our hand to his side,
and there is the sickly familiar shape
of the first legion we found
before the letters H, I and V even had a meaning.
It is right next to the shrapnel
that dug the end of our life
right out from underneath our fifth year
of childhood games in the field.
The ulcer is there
that appeared when our parents decided
that the final weeks of our dissertation
was the best time to tell us how disappointed they were
that we hadn't gotten married yet.
There also is the crick
that ticked through our calf
on the nights we spent 10 hours or more
standing behind the cash register.
The dirt beneath the finger nails,
the cancers that refused to recess
the feet that buckled long before
we ever reached the finish line
even the vanity we feigned each time
a handsome man passed us on the sidewalk
and FROM AMONG this clean cut ruin
in the heartiest of tones
he bids us Peace,
"Peace be with you!"

"My Lord,"
we whisper, in response
"and My God"
And we finally BELIEVE
that all the wounds we retained [SLOWLY!]
in the life of our own flesh
never once held the THREAT
of keeping us from this love.

We spend the whole first night like this
two lovers who, for the last time,
have escaped the bullies of the yard:
together, side by side beneath the stars
Examining each other's wounds,
as they rise and disappear again
like blemishing trout
beneath the clearer stream
of our Resurrected Union.

Where, I ask, is the liturgy for this embrace?
Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

Can you imagine how uncomfortable it would make us feel?
Can you imagine how messy it would be?
Can you imagine the squirming
As each intimate detail of our own injury
rose in the unguarded voices of our neighbors?
With what would we symbolize such an encounter?
At whom would we gawk?
Would stories of mere survival alone suffice
Or would those wounds be too healed
to sufficiently represent the ever-open sores
of our dear Savior?
Could we really look on any injured mortal flesh or object
without the fear of DEATH that always LOOMS
when someone mentions their foreclosure
when someone mentions their ill Mother
when someone mentions their disbelief
at being able to face another day?
Or would we shy away
completely
and simply wish
they would get their act together.
Where is the part of our worship
That abolishes this fear of death?
Where is the part of our worship
That gazes upon the marks of horror
this world has made
and returns from such gazing
with a strength of faith
that proclaims:
this too is in the body of our Christ,
risen from the grave!
even here, we were not given up
to Sheol,
we did not, even here,
see the Pit alone!
Where is the part of our worship
Where our applauding God commands:
"MORE LIFE! MORE LIFE! MORE LIFE!"
Even as we, weeping,
look up from our bloodied brierey hands?
Where our laughing God proclaims
"MORE LIFE!"
Even as we, trembling
lock our doors to our own kind?

Where, then, is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

I tell you,
it is here,
in this place,
every week:
in the prayers that we share
and in the peace that we exchange
and in the bodies that we bring
into communion.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we pray together
and we can hear the sins and calamities of our life on Earth
confessed, cataloged and retained
in the memory of our own complicity and helplessness:
Ceaseless War, Environmental Destruction, Reckless Poverty
All a mark and pox upon us
Even as we rise
to be collected
by our God.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we bear
the names of the sick, injured, troubled and dying among us
Even as we greet one another
in the name of our Lord's peace.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we confess ourselves unfinished;
still a mess of flesh
not quite resurrected
not quite knit together with our God
and yet still FROM AMONG such ruin
persisting
in the heartiest of tones
of resistance and resilience
to bid each other
as Christ bids us:
"PEACE!
Peace be with you!"

IT __ IS __ HERE
in this communion
where the recognition comes:
a people risen with our wounds
murmuring in the shock of such belief,
"My Lord,
and my God."