Month: December 2019

12/24, 25/19

            Right after I got out of college in the mid-1970’s I moved to New York City, to study acting at a place called the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre.   The main acting teacher there, and really the guiding genius of the whole place, was a man named Sanford Meisner.  Mr. Meisner was a legendary figure in American theatre and had been since the 1940’s, one of the greatest acting teachers of the 20^thcentury in this country, with many famous actors among his former students, and there are countless teachers now who use his technique and the exercises he developed.  

            So he was a genius.  He was also a crabby, vain, sometimes detestable old man – old by the time I got to him: I’m sure he’d been a crabby, vain, sometimes detestable young man as well; but if you wanted to learn from him – and there was a lot to learn from him – you just had to put up with who he was.

            Near the end of his career, around the time I was at the school, one of his graduates came back for a visit, bringing with him his first child, a six-month-old boy.  He came to Mr. Meisner’s office to pay his respects, they talked for a while; then the young man said he wanted to poke his head into the school’s theatre for a minute and just look around.  And Meisner told him, You can leave your son with me if you want, I’ll look after him.  So he did, and when he returned a few minutes later, he found his son sitting placidly on Meisner’s lap, looking up at him; and Meisner was looking back at the boy, and quietly weeping.

            I heard this story from another graduate of the school, and that’s where the story ended; because anyone who knew Meisner wouldn’t really need an explanation of why he was weeping.  It was because the sudden and unexpected appearance of this baby had shoved in front of him what he knew was missing in his own life: that is, the sense of any very young child that the world is a good place, hospitable place, that’s going to be joyful to live in, and explore; the sense of any very young child that the love we naturally give, all the time, others will just as naturally return; the sense of anticipation, and hopefulness, that, as young children, we go to sleep with on Christmas Eve, and wake up with on Christmas morning.  This state of mind, which is Square One for a child, was what Meisner knew in his heart is the truth, but which life in this world had always seemed to be snatching away from him, knocking out of his grasp; as, for any and all of us, life in this world sometimes so abruptly and inexplicably does. 

            Well, tomorrow/today is Christmas Day, the day when we get a gift: the gift of God which addresses just this problem, which we all have.

            This gift that we get, as we bring alive, in our celebration of Christmas, the birth of this one child, two thousand years ago, this gift is really twofold.  First, the gift is a promise: God’s promise: that it’s all going to be all right; that when life suddenly snatches peace away from us, when we feel overwhelmed by fear, or anxiety, or despair, or anger, or hopelessness, God’s promise is that none of that is the last word: that God’s love for all of us, the current of God’s love that runs through life, that fuels our life, that we are living here now – that love is infinite, and eternal, and will finally make all things well.

            So first, this gift is a promise.  Second – it’s the flip side of the same coin – this gift is an invitation: God’s invitation.  God offers the power of God’s love to each of us: a power which, working through us, makes joy; heals; brings light into darkness.  All of which is to say that, with this gift, God invites us to join in the creation of the kingdom of God, here where we are now; which creation God is engaged in, all the time, all around us.

            This twofold gift – the promise, and the invitation – is the one that all the gifts we exchange on Christmas morning represent. Those gifts are all little tokens of that love.  It’s what they all come from; one way or another, it’s where they originate.  And the better we understand that, the more strongly we make that connection, the closer we draw to the true holiness, and the true joy, of Christmastide.  And I love to use that old English term “Christmastide”, because it brings to mind the unfathomable power, and the constancy, of God’s love.

             A few years ago a parishioner here introduced me to a Christmas prayer he’d discovered that was written by Robert Louis Stevenson (appropriately enough, a writer whose works have always spoken most powerfully to young people.).  I think it exemplifies all this that I’m talking about, and I’m going to close with it.  

            Let us pray.

Loving God, Help us remember the birth of Jesus,

that we may share in the song of the angels,

the gladness of the shepherds,

and the worship of the wise men.

Close the door of hate

and open the door of love all over the world.

Let kindness come with every good gift, and good desires with every greeting.

Deliver us from evil by the blessing which Christ brings,

and teach us to be merry with clear hearts.

May the Christmas morning make us happy to be thy children,

and Christmas evening bring us to our beds with grateful thoughts

forgiving and forgiven, for Jesus’ sake.  Amen. 

Advent IV, December 22, 2019                                                                          St. John’s Episcopal Church, New Milford, CT Matthew 1: 18-25                                                                                                                                         Robert W. Woodroofe

What about Joseph?

I have a joke that at least at its beginning seems to fit the darkness of this – the shortest daylight day of the year in the northern hemisphere.  An extended family has gathered in the ICU visitors’ room when the doctor emerges looking somber.  “I’m sorry,” he says.  “There just doesn’t seem to be anything we can do unless you were to agree to a brain transplant, but it’s highly experimental, risky and costly.”  In the stunned silence that follows, a person asks, “How much would a new brain cost?”  “Well,” he says, “for a female brain it would run somewhere around $20,000.  For a male brain, it would come in at the neighborhood of $50,000.”  A child asks, “How come they’re priced differently?”  To which the doctor replies, “Well, it’s a standard pricing procedure.  The males’ brains are generally factory fresh, but we mark the female brains down because they’re used.” 

I’m not one hundred percent in agreement with the worldview reflected in that joke, but I did find it funny.  It pokes fun at this male dominated, patriarchal world we live in. I thought of the joke because today, perhaps more than any other day in the Christian calendar just prior to Christmas, Advent IV generally brings to the forefront an extremely important woman, Mary, the mother of our Lord, as saint and a hero well deserving of our praise and gratitude.  

The theme of the gospel on this final Sunday of Advent, after all, is generally dominated the Virgin Mary and her delivery of Immanuel, God with us.  Orthodox Christians have given Mary the nickname of “Theotokos – the God bearer.” Such is Mary’s courage, her willingness to obey the Holy Spirit and her trust in God’s goodness that she submits her body and her very being to the purposes of God in a way that has moved and witnessed to Christians ever since.  If anyone can qualify for owning a well-usedbrain and heart in Christian lore, that would be Mary.  

Nevertheless, in the Gospel of Matthew, the account we follow this year, and every third year, the disclosure of the coming birth of Jesus is made not to Mary but rather to Joseph, her intended husband.  It happens in a dream.  And the result delivers a different tone to this day.  

You will recall that Mary, upon hearing from the Angel Gabriel of her unique calling and task, replies, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  In St. Matthew’s Gospel account, rather than hearing of heroic witness and submission, we encounter the story of Joseph’s confused and troubled conscience, his lonely test of faithful trust, and an angel’s call to action so as to further God’s purposes.  All of this is prompted by a dream experienced by Joseph; it’s a message which Dr. Freud might be convinced came from Joseph’s own unconscious self, but which he, Joseph, takes straight-forwardly to be an angel’s urgent message to him from God.  

Joseph was promised to Mary in marriage, yet they had not had occasion to physically live together as a fully married couple.  Here was Mary already expecting a child.  Who might the father be?  Joseph draws some understandable conclusions that it is not he. There’s no indication that he and Mary sat down and discussed together what was going on.  Yet, he is well aware of the laws governing pre-marital sexual engagement in Judaism.  Here is a relevant passage from Deuteronomy: “If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife.”  Mary in her unexplained pregnancy is apparently guilty of fornication.  A capital crime may be lurking here.  Joseph, perhaps in not a little fear with a higher loyalty to the Law, initially figures that by acting quietly and discretely to withdraw from their engagement he at least might be spared.

Instead, Joseph is urged by the angel to take action. He is to stick with this mysteriously pregnant young woman.  The angel explains that God’s Spirit is the source of Mary’s expected child, and that he’s to be named Jesus, a name describing One who will save the people from their sins, their wanderings far from their Creator God.  This is only the first of three dreams for Joseph in which he is guided by a messenger of God to take action in behalf of the divine will.

In my experience, Joseph remains an otherwise fairly shadowy figure.  By the time Jesus reaches maturity and begins his ministry in Galilee, we hear no more of him.  That’s probably why Joseph is so often pictured as so much older-looking than his wife.  During Jesus’ public ministry, only Mary remains along with Jesus’s younger brothers and sisters.  

Our tradition hasseen fit to honor the Holy Family, the trio of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, and on March 19 every year we remember Joseph among the calendar of saints.  The collect for that day nicely catches the essence of Joseph gleaned from today’s gospel account when it says, “O God, who from the family of your servant David raised up Joseph to be the guardian of your incarnate Son and the spouse of his virgin mother; give us grace to imitate his uprightness of life and his obedience to your commands…”

So the prayer stresses and imagines Joseph as a nurturing and protective father to Jesus even as he remains a faithful and loyal husband to Mary: this is a tall order in any age, and a laudable image for any man to which to aspire who is called to a life of marriage and parenting. Still, there are other qualities in him of a more general nature: qualities that can be worn comfortably and faithfully by married and unmarried, by women as well as men.  These are qualities that Jesus himself would uniquely stress and teach through his own ministry.  They are teachings and of Jesus through which he uniquely brought out and further developed the Jewish-grounded laws already revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Here they are in a nutshell: first, by not allowing himself to leap to conclusions, Joseph avoided the mistake of passing judgment on others, especially Mary.  “Judge not …” Second, in spite of this unexplained pregnancy placing him in dangerous bind, he receives her in a forgiving mode.  Whether or not there’s really anything to be forgiven, there’s the appearance of it that can so easily damage human relationships.  God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of one another is surely central to the Christian life.  A third characteristic of Joseph is his gentle steering clear of violence, something Jesus would repeatedly warn us to avoid.  And finally there’s a cloak of humility that surrounds Joseph and his actions.  He does not take the path of protective dominance supplied by his own peoples’ patriarchy, but rather quietly and supportively picks up his cross and gets himself into the line.  By accepting the pregnant Mary, the threat to them both really never goes away. Humility takes that sort of courage. So, non-judgmental, ready with forgiveness, non-violent in action and humble to the core: those are Christ-like virtues which Joseph embodies to which we all can aspire.

Thinking back to those less-expensive, used women from my initial story, I note that the term “used” as in “used car” has been superseded by the term “pre-owned.”  Now that’s a description that can fit men and women, married or single, parent or child: pre-owned.  Our previous owner, our Creator God, has brought us into being, set us free to find our way, and now promises the succor of forgiving grace along the way – guided by these Christ-taught virtues that Joseph so faithfully modeled.  May we all find in St. Joseph a person of rectitude and inspiration for us to practice non-judging forgiveness, gentleness and humility. Amen

12/15/19

            In the season of Advent we talk in church about the coming of Christ; and there are three principal ways in which we understand what that means.  One is the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, that we look forward to celebrating at Christmas; another is the Second Coming of Christ, at the end of the age, the final establishment of God’s kingdom; and the third – the one which is most immediately important for us – is the coming of Christ into our own lives.  Some evangelicals talk about that as a single, overwhelming and life-changing event.  That can certainly happen, but it’s  rare, and to limit our understanding of the coming of Christ into our own lives in such a way is a big mistake: it’s usually a gradual process: Christ much more often soaks his way into our lives.

            Of course, when Jesus was alive and walking the earth, it was much less gradual, much more immediate: we see this all through the gospels.  But there’s an aspect to today’s gospel story that may be useful to us as we think about that soaking process in our own lives.  I want to talk a little about that, and then give a contemporary example.

            Last week we heard John the Baptist’s proclamation of the one who would come after him, whose sandals he wasn’t worthy to carry: the Messiah: a figure who had been the hope of the people of Israel for over 500 years.  They looked for a human being, chosen by God, to come among them and establish God’s kingdom on earth.  Most people expected some kind of political/military figure.  John has a different idea: as we heard last week, the Coming One that he sees “will baptize…with the Holy Spirit and fire.” That’s a Messiah who’s going to change people, not just the political structure.  By the time of this week’s story, John has landed in prison, but he’s heard about what Jesus has been doing, and from jail he sends his disciples to ask Jesus directly: Are you this one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

            Now: the way Jesus responds to that question is important in several ways.  In the first place, he directly involves John’s disciples in his ministry: he says, Go and tell John what you see and hear.  So they’re not just messengers.  Jesus invites the disciples to confront for themselves the meaning of what they’re seeing and hearing right in front of them.  And it’s not simply the miracles of healing: Jesus ends with, And the poor have good news preached to them: the good news of the kingdom of God: that’s what changes people’s lives.

            And Jesus finishes all this with these words: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  This sounds curious, given the way we normally understand what it means to take offense at something.  Why would we “take offense” at Jesus?  What could he be talking about?  

            As it happens, it’s not a small thing: it has to do with understanding just who Jesus is: with preparing for Christ to come into our lives.  The Greek word here translated “take offense at” is skandalizo, which means literally to put an impediment in someone’s way, something they could possibly trip over.   Sometimes that’s the way it’s translated: in a famous verse in First Corinthians, Paul writes, “But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”  That’s to say, it’s a stumbling block for some in the kingdom of Israel to believe other people when they say that this guy, whose life ended in brutal execution, in a manner reserved for the lowest, most contemptible kind of criminal, this man is the one we’ve been waiting for all these centuries, the one who’s going to make everything right; the Chosen One of God.  

            It’s an important idea, and one that comes up many times in the gospels.  There’s another in which Jesus goes back to his home town to teach in the synagogue, and the people there say, Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power?  This is someone we knew as a boy, we knew his father, we know his mother and brothers, his sisters are right here with us; where then did this man get all this? And the gospel tells us, “And they took offense at him….And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.”  Their familiarity with Jesus was the stumbling block; they couldn’t believe that God could be present in someone who was so much a part of their lives.

            The basic idea that governs all of this is that we insist on defining the ways that God is active in our lives; that God has to be at work in certain specific ways, certain times and places; and cannot possibly be present in others.  Getting rid of this idea is part of the work that we do here.

            Now, for the contemporary example.  You’ve probably heard the phrase, “the power of one”; which refers to the truth that individual people, beginning alone and on a very small scale, can start great movements, that affect many people.  And the phrase, the power of one, is an encouragement not to be deterred, not to be daunted, by the fact that it happens to be just you alone that feels a particular, little, spark; that sees something worth doing that hasn’t occurred to anyone else, or that no one else thinks has a chance of success.

            In the mid-1970’s I became part of a theatre group in New York that had a loosely organized membership of actors, directors, playwrights, and designers, and had a small performing space and a couple of dingy offices in a mostly abandoned warehouse way over on West 52^ndSt., in the district known (for good reason) as Hell’s Kitchen.  One of the actors in the theatre was a kid in his mid-twenties named Willie Reale (picture Harpo Marx as short, Italian, and talking: that’s Willie.)  Willie hung around the theatre, because there was a lot of good stuff going on there, and lived in an apartment not too far away; so he spent a lot of time in that part of town.

             In 1981, Willie decided to do something to improve the quality of life for the kids he saw hanging around the neighborhood, with nothing to do.  So he started a program in which he put an individual kid together with a professional playwright and director, and under their guidance each kid wrote a five-minute play; they then rehearsed the play with professional actors, at the theatre and the Police Athletic League across the street (Willie called it the 52^ndSt. Project, to acknowledge them both.)    And the plays were performed in front of an audience of family and friends and whoever else was interested.  And these were people who lived in the neighborhood, so it was the underclass: poor, Latino, African-American, a lot of broken homes, a lot of single-parent families.  And all of a sudden, these people were involved in theatre: and there was a dimension of life now open to them, that hadn’t been there before.

            There was no formal structure to any of this at the beginning; it was just done by whoever happened to be around, and available for Willie to tap; and you made it up as you went along. Well, in four years the program had grown to the point that there was an organization; it became necessary to move the performances to a bigger theatre on 42^ndSt.; several years after that their big annual performance was at Lincoln Center; and the 52^ndSt. Project today creates over 80 new plays, and serves hundreds of kids from all over the city, every year, with half a dozen different theatre and education programs; and is currently being replicated in 14 different cities around the country and around the world.

            On the Project website, their mission statement includes this sentence: “The Project is about giving a kid an opportunity to prove that he or she has something of value to offer, something that he or she alone possesses, something that cannot be taken away.” And Willie himself writes, “There’s no way to fast forward and know how the kids will look back on this but I have seen the joy in their eyes and have heard it in their voices, and I have watched them take a bow and come up taller.”

            Folks, this is the power of Christ coming into people’s lives.  That was the power of Christ that came into Willie’s life: it may not have had that label on it, but blessed are those for whom that’s not a stumbling block, because that’s what it was: opening a little door, and saying, there’s something that needs to happen here: there’s a wound that needs healing: there’s life that wants to grow, and needs room.    And it can happen this way because the truth is that what we call the power of one is really the power of God, working in us: and that’s Christ coming into our lives.  Let us never take offense at that.  Let us not stumble over it.  Let us Christians look for it, name it for what it is, welcome it, and as it works in us, do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  Thanks be to God.

11/24/19

(Jeremiah 23:1-6; Canticle 16; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43)

            The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is a magnificent chronicler of American history and culture, and has given us works on a wide variety of subjects: the Civil War, baseball, Prohibition, World War II, among others.  His latest effort, which first aired a couple of months ago, is called “Country Music”, and describes the origins, and growth, of all the varieties of what we in America lump together under the single term “country music”.   Like most of his work, it’s a series of films, and it’s absolutely wonderful.  There are eight episodes, with titles like “Hard Times” (about country music in the Depression) and “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” (about the era of Hank Williams).  But the title of the last one in the series, which covers the period from 1984 to 1996, is “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’ “.

            When I saw that title on the screen I was kind of nonplussed: what do raisins have to do with country music?  Is a “raisin” a euphemism, or a symbol of something? But very soon someone in the film used the phrase and I saw that I had misunderstood, because I hadn’t seen there was an apostrophe after the “n” in “raisin”.  So it was a countrified way of saying “raising”.  So the statement “Don’t get above your raisin’” meant, Don’t forget your roots: don’t forget how you were brought up: remember what your parents, your family, your community taught you about how life is to be lived.

            In the documentary, Burns applied this principle to musicians of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s like Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, and the Judds, people who were taking the musical heritage they had received from the great stars of the past, which had inspired them to become musicians in the first place, and making it their own, refreshing and renewing it for the world they lived in.  

And of course the principle “Don’t get above your raisin’” applies in the same way to the life of faith as well.  And it’s important because it’s about how we live our lives, every day.  We live in the Christian tradition.  The Latin root of our English word “tradition” is a verb that means “to hand on”; and that’s certainly one of the things we do here in church: we hand on the truth of Jesus Christ.  But it’s not just about teaching our kids.  Wedon’t get above ourraisin’: we remind ourselves of the truth, we grow into the truth of Jesus Christ: we refresh and renew that truth in our lives, every day, our whole lives long.

            I’m lifting all this up especially today, the last Sunday of the season of Pentecost, the final Sunday of church year, which we celebrate as the feast of Christ the King.  This feast is a relatively recent addition to our church calendar: it was created in 1925 by the Roman Catholic Church in response to the rise of fascism in Europe and to the secularism which was mushrooming throughout society after the horror of World War I, a war which seemed, to many, proof that God had disappeared: God was a myth, and humanity was on its own.  

            Secularism is a tendency of spirit which leaves God out of our thinking, and our living: it organizes life as if God did not exist; or as if God were a being like any other being, an optional concern, and belonging to a church was like being a member of the Bicycle Club in high school, it’s a pastime, at best, and you can take it or leave it.  The Feast of Christ the King was created to work against that way of thinking by focusing our attention in a particular direction: that when we call Christ our King, we are saying that God – the Creator of the universe, is alive and at work on this earth; and that if we want to live truthful lives, in the real world, it is God in Christ to whom we turn; and do so with joy, and thankfulness: because it is there that we are most fully ourselves, that we are who God created us to be.

But of course there are problems today with the language of kingship.  In the first place, we hear the word “king” and we think, history, museum piece, not part of our world.  So when we talk about Christ the King, we seem to announce ourselves as stuck in the past, heads in the sand.

            In the second place, in the words “Christ the King”, there are unfortunate overtones of the kind of imperialism and triumphalism that, over the centuries, have deservedly given our church a bad name. “Christ the King” represents an attitude that, for many centuries, has announced, We’re Christians, and we’re better than anybody else, and God wants everybody to be like us, inside of every heathen is a Christian trying to get out, so therefore we’re going to go forth and make disciples of all nations (which means get people to behave in church the same way we do), just like Jesus told us to do, whether they like the idea or not.

            This, of course, has nothing to do with the church of Christ..  It has nothing to do with the kingdom of God Jesus talked about.    

             So what does it mean today, to proclaim Christ as King?  Why do we maintain this tradition?  Why is it part of our raisin’?  

 We first have to ask: what’s a king?  What do we mean by that word?  What was a king, back when kings were kings? 

             A true king was not merely someone who had power, who could compel you to do his will. A true king was the representative of what his people considered to be best in life: the best kind of order, justice, virtue; who exercised the benevolence that he understood came with power: a king in whose kingdom his subjects lived in peace, and harmony with each other.  And because of all that the king was someone who inspired not only loyalty, but reverence: the king was someone whom people followed, because they knew that where that king led, they would find their truest good, their highest destiny, the fulfillment of who they really were as human beings: each of them individually, and together as a people.

            And that is why we proclaim Christ as our King. Because that is what Christ does. And does it in a way that utterly transcends the power of any other king.  That’s the message of today’s gospel story.  It’s why we read this story on this day: a day on which, in any other tradition, we would hide such a story: throw it out, delete the file.  The one we proclaim as our king in this story is dying – naked, bleeding, beaten literally to within an inch of his life – and dying on the cross: the means of execution reserved for the lowest, most contemptible criminals.  And most of the people in this story who are witnessing this scene are raucous in their mockery, of this man whom others have proclaimed to be the Messiah, God’s Chosen One, the King of the Jews.   This, sisters and brothers, is secularism, distilled to its bitterest essence: You say that God comes among us?   And saves us?  And this man is the proof?  I…don’t think so.

            But in this story, in the little exchange between Jesus and the two thieves, we see our King, the one true King, whose reign is universal.  The first thief jeers at Jesus along with the others, but the second stops him, saying, Do you not fear God?  God whom you’re just about to stand in front of?  And that thief acknowledges the truth of who Christ is: he turns to Jesus and says, Remember me when you come into your kingdom.  And with the last ounce of strength he possesses – he dies right after this – Jesus lifts his head, looks at this man, and tells him, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.   Those are the words of eternal life.  That’s the love of God in Christ, in the face of which all earthly power is powerless.

            This is God in Christ, in whose love we are made whole: Christ who comes to us in the darkest depths of our suffering, and despair, and hopelessness, and tells us, I am with you, and I will never abandon you.  That’s our raisin’.  This is Christ our King.  We live out of that knowledge.  By the grace of God, may we never get above our raisin’.  Thanks be to God.