Archives: Ordinary Time

Listen Hard in the Dark

In today’s scriptures we have a tragic story, an absolutely key synthesis of our entire faith, and some very hard sayings.

We begin with the story of Hagar being cast out into the wilderness, driven out by Sarah’s jealousy and Abraham’s cowardice, left to die with her son in the desert.

Then we have Paul in Romans giving the most succinct summation of death and resurrection as embodied by baptism in the entirety of the New Testament.

And finally, we have Jesus telling us he might potentially deny us before the Father in the heaven, that he came not to bring peace but a sword, and that family conflict is 100% a part of following him.

How are we going to put all that together?

We must begin where we always begin—by putting ourselves into the story.

We can start by identifying where we want to turn away with disgust from what’s happening, and that’s with Sarah and Abraham.

It’s a godawful mess.

Sarah could not bear a child, so she told Abraham to “go in” to Hagar, which is Bible-speak for having sex, and Hagar got pregnant.

Hagar had no choice in this scenario, she was exploited twice over, first by being used as a sexual object by her master, and then as a brood mare to produce an heir.

Sarah quickly regretted her decision, but not out of human decency. She was jealous and bitter both of Abraham having sex with Hagar, and also of Hagar’s ability to conceive.

Sarah took it out on Hagar multiple times, until now she goes to the extreme and essentially condemns Hagar and baby Ishmael to death.

She tells Abraham to send them out into the desert, and to his eternal shame, he does.

It’s an ugly, ugly situation, and incidentally, that is one of the remarkable aspects of the Hebrew scriptures. The writers in no way shy away from telling the truth about what happened, no matter how repulsive it is.

These ancient writers are not afraid to attribute reprehensible moral conduct to the ultimate patriarch and matriarch of the nation, Abraham and Sarah.

This reflects a tradition that is able to be self-critical, that is able to see God at work even in human weakness and sin. That is one of the great gifts of Judaism to us, one of their daughter faiths, and to human religion at large.

A great clue as to what lies unredeemed in our own hearts is what causes a strong negative emotional reaction in us.

If you want to see where you’re in denial and where you need spiritual growth, simply pay attention to where you get defensive.

It’s a surefire way to see your shadow.

I think most of us would react against Sarah and Abraham’s actions in this story, and justly so.

But as soon as we say, “I would never do that!” we have to think again. Continue reading

Election: I Will Not Be Moving On, and Here’s Why

I was listening to a book by Jim Finley, the great Roman Catholic contemplative teacher, and he said something extraordinary.

He said, and I paraphrase here, “Great pain is always pointing to great unacknowledged truth.”

I can’t think of a more apt description of how our nation has been feeling this week.

This is not a pulpit sermon. I will not be preaching this to my congregation during Sunday morning worship.

It is instead a very personal reflection on what I have been experiencing in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump as our president, and how I see the scriptures relating to that.

Jesus is right with us in the beginning of our gospel lesson today.

“When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’”

This week many things were thrown down in our lives, first and foremost our image of what we thought America was, how far we thought America had come.

I think many of us really believed that with our first black president and the advent of marriage equality, our nation had really turned a corner.

We were living in a fool’s paradise. Continue reading

The Best Part of Being a Height-Challenged Sinner

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he!” If you didn’t get to sing that in Sunday school as a kid, you were missing out.

Luke goes to great pains to point out to us that Zacchaeus was short in stature, but he means it in terms of more than just his physical height (or lack thereof).

Zacchaeus doesn’t have much moral stature either. He’s not just a tax collector, but a chief tax collector.

Luke says that he’s rich, and we can read into that “filthy rich with ill-gotten gains.”

This is not an admirable man. In fact his moral stature is so low that he can’t even see Jesus.

But one of Zacchaeus’ greatest characteristics is his lack of self-consciousness.

He is curious about Jesus, and he is determined to see Jesus.

So Zacchaeus, a rich and well-known figure in the community, climbs a tree to see Jesus, no matter how ridiculous it may look.

It is not a dignified posture, and immediately draws attention to Zacchaeus’ physical shortness, that he has to take this step to see over the crowd.

Could we infer that he also boldly reveals his lack of moral stature as he climbs this tree in the imaginative universe of this story?

If he is not afraid to be seen to be too physically short to see Jesus, is he equally courageous in admitting his lack of ethical worthiness?

How could we do the same?

How could we approach Jesus with an utter lack of self-consciousness, exactly as we are? Continue reading

Enlightenment: Alone and An Idiot On the Far Shore

Are you serious about your spiritual journey?

Do you really want to have a meaningful life?

What are you willing to go through in order to really be transformed? To learn to love?

“Who doesn’t want a meaningful life?” we might ask.

But even Jesus cautions us to think twice.

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?,” Jesus asks in the Gospel of Luke. “Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’”

Honestly, I think it’s probably better that we don’t really know how demanding and challenging the spiritual life is when we first start out, or else we might really think twice about pursuing it!

Do you remember the first time you started to think seriously about deeper things?

If you were raised in a faith tradition, it might have been in adolescence when you first started to say, “Wait a minute: how can Moses have written the first five books of the Bible if they tell how he dies?”

Or, “How could they have gotten two of literally every kind of creature on the ark? Did they get two gnats? Two mosquitos? Two flesh-eating bacteria? And what about the fish? The flood wouldn’t have bothered them at all, so are there a bunch of descendants of sinful, unredeemed fish and clams and stuff from Noah’s time who didn’t perish in the flood?”

These were the surface questions that started to trigger more meaningful ones, like “Who are these people we’re supposed to be emulating? What am I supposed to do with my life? And will the faith I’ve been taught really help me find out?”

If you were not raised in a faith tradition, it was probably one of two things that triggered your first existential crisis: a bad break-up or your first philosophy class in college. (The two have more in common than you’d think.)

You were either badly jilted and mourned your suddenly meaningless existence, or started reading Kant and Hegel in class and thought for a heady half-hour at a coffee shop with your friends that you were the first person to seriously consider moral relativism.

And then enjoyed looking down your nose at your poor, deluded, stodgy parents who just believed a bunch of out-of-date boring stuff. (Insert nostalgic sigh here.)

What I’m getting at is that a meaningful life requires some engagement of your spiritual self, and any spiritual path you take, if pursued with integrity and energy, will eventually take you some really tough places. Continue reading

I Have Something to Say. About Evangelism.

Today I am going to get up on my soapbox, so just brace yourselves.

This is a ranty, possibly self-righteous screed with many iterations of phrases like, “And another thing!”

So strap in, and hold on.

Rant commences here: let me tell you something. I am sick and tired of Episcopalians acting like they’re too cool for evangelism.

We are grown men and women, and what’s more, we are grown men and women who have been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And we have an affirmative moral obligation to make the grace and mercy and peace we have been so richly anointed with available to people who have not encountered it.

I see three common attitudes with regard to evangelism in the Episcopal Church. Continue reading

Dishonest Manager Job Application

“You’re fired.”

One of our presidential candidates used to like to say that on TV, and that’s what the man in our gospel story today is about to hear from his employer.

This story in the Gospel of Luke is known as the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, and it’s honestly a little tricky for us to get our heads around at first.

When I found out this was the text I had drawn for my first sermon at St. Francis, I was afraid “you’re fired” was exactly what I was going to hear as soon as I got out of the pulpit!

But I have faith that we can figure this out.

Let’s review the facts as we know them. We start with two characters: the rich man and his manager.

Word on the street is that the manager has been embezzling funds and taking kickback, and the rich man summons him to his office for a pre-firing dressing down.

In serious hot water, the manager realizes he’s not trained for any other type of job and he’d better lay some groundwork for his future.

So going to his master’s clients, he reduces their bills, thereby earning himself their gratitude and restoring his master’s reputation from someone who employs corrupt officials to someone who is generous with his clients.

We can follow up to this point. The manager is trying to make the best of a bad situation, and since he’s already defrauded his boss, he might as well go whole hog and make himself look good by unethically reducing the amount of money the clients owe.

You would think that when the rich man found out that his manager had again cheated him out of money, he would call for the tar and feathers.

But no. Jesus said that the “master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”

What? Continue reading

Goodbye to St. Thomas and St. Luke’s

It’s hard to believe that this is the last time I’ll be standing in this pulpit as your parish priest.

We have been on such a journey together over these last three years, full of blessing and challenge, and I am so grateful for every moment.

There’s no way I can articulate everything our time together has meant to me, so I hope our hearts will speak to each other, as they ever have, and God will place us in communion together on this, our last Sunday morning together.

As ever, our scriptures come to our aid with guidance, truth, and the path for our future.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” Paul tells us in our lesson from Hebrews.

Three years ago, we had many things we were hoping for. Continue reading

Transition: What to Do and How to Do It

The Holy Spirit works in mysterious and very helpful ways, for I could not have found two better scriptures for our transition reflection today than our epistle and gospel. They are perfect for where we are and what we need to talk about today.

The gospel tells us what to do, and the epistle tells us how to do it.

A priest who supervised me when I first got ordained told me that families are more who they are than ever at weddings and funerals.

What he meant was that in moments of life and death, all of their best qualities are exaggerated, but so too are all of their worst.

In times of transition, old fights and grudges reemerge, but so too do forgotten depths of courage and insight and grace.

I have found that this dynamic is true for church families as well.

So don’t be surprised if in the next few weeks and months, the fight about taking down the old stained glass window above the altar at St. Luke’s comes back, or the question of who exactly had the idea of taking down the altar rail at St. Thomas and moving the font up to the front.

As anxiety levels rise in transition, we start to get territorial.

This is my ministry, my area, my pet project, my meeting, my idea about how our church should go forward.

We start to take ownership, false ownership, over things and ideas and people.

It may help to damp down our anxiety, but it will not help our church at all, in the short term or in the long run.

A man in the gospel falls right into this trap. Continue reading

How and Why to Pray

Today we’re going to keep talking about what we need to prioritize in our transition time, and the number one thing we can do for ourselves and our church is pray.

Our gospel story today is from Luke, and we see Jesus praying, talking about prayer, and using prayer in his ministry in the Gospel of Luke more than any other gospel.

Luke tells us that Jesus “often withdrew to a lonely place and prayed,” (5:16), that he prayed on the mountainside and stayed there praying all night (6:12), that he prayed alone (9:18), that he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and thanked God publicly (10:21-22), and of course we know his prayers in Gethsemane and from the Cross.

Here in chapter 11 of Luke, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to do what they see him do so frequently: pray.

We in the Episcopal Church are great at liturgical prayer. We have profoundly beautiful words handed down to us in the Book of Common Prayer that stir our hearts and bring us into the living presence of God.

We can find the sweeping majesty of God and the intimate comfort of God all brought to life between the pages of our little prayerbook.

We also use spontaneous public prayer, often at the beginning or end of meals and meetings, and it can be a great way to unify the hearts of a group in a shared experience, bringing that experience before God.

But we don’t talk enough about private prayer, and it is such a rich field of spirituality.

In fact, it is the lifeblood of our Christian walk. It is the way we communicate with God.

The apostle Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians to pray without ceasing.

Sometimes trying to maintain an active prayer life can seem like a chore, but there’s a quick cure for that. Continue reading

The Gifts of Martha and Mary

Today we’re embarking on a unique phase of our worship life together. Today we begin our transition work in earnest.

I have four Sundays left in this pulpit, and my preaching task is as follows: to say goodbye, to tell you how much I love you and thank you for our time together, and to equip you for your transition time in any way I can.

We’re going to tackle those in reverse order over the next few weeks, using our lectionary scriptures to guide us in those tasks.

So let’s talk about Mary and Martha and what we can learn from them, not just for our everyday lives, but specifically for this unique season of transition St. Thomas and St. Luke’s are entering right now.

To do that, let’s start by talking about what clergy transition is like for a parish.

Transition is all kinds of things.

It’s exciting as the priest and parish look forward to the novelty of change.

It’s anxiety-producing as we face an unknown future and wonder how to tackle life without each other’s steady presence and familiar patterns.

It’s awkward as we try to decide what to say to each other—how much truth-telling is helpful and how much is just self-indulgent and divisive?

It’s full of grief as we say goodbye.

It’s simply full of emotion as we rehearse old grievances and old joys.

We give thanks for everything we’ve accomplished together and the ways in which we were so well-matched, and we mourn the goals we didn’t achieve and the ways we couldn’t fulfill each other.

It’s a holy mess, to my way of thinking, a sacred disaster, an exhausting miracle and a blessed train wreck.

It can bring out the worst in us if we’re not careful, but it will bring out the best in us if we allow it. Continue reading