Month: June 2020

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Funeral Homily for Barbara Nelson

6/27/20

            There’s a phrase in the wedding ceremony in which the officiant, speaking to the marrying couple, makes reference to “you, and your new life together.”  I’ve often thought that the burial rite should include something similar: the officiant, speaking to the congregation would refer to “you, and your new life together with the absence of the one who has died.”  We’ll feel it in different degrees; but we’ll all live the rest of our lives with the awareness of that absence.  It will evolve, but it will always be there.

            I think we feel the presence of this absence especially in a case like Barbara’s, because she left us so quickly. 

            (I got to this point in writing this homily and hit “Save”, and had to insert a title, and typed in “barbaranelsofuneralhomily”.  And I thought, Boy, do I hate writing those words.

            When I think about Barbara Nelson, when I think about the unique human being that she was, and the unique gifts God gave her, what comes first to my mind is her gracefulness; that was physical: the gentle, quiet, measured way she moved that slender frame; and spiritual: the always discerning and at the same time always welcoming way she had of being in the world, of dealing with people.

            That combination of discerning and welcoming was apparent in something she said to me once that I thought was extremely incisive and profound, and a compliment that I will always treasure.  Right after the end of a service she came up to me in that slightly shimmering way she had, looked me in the eye, and said, I like your sermons.  They’re not like sermons.

            But in the days immediately after Barbara’s death, as I was thinking about her, the quality that kept resurfacing, that kept pressing to the front of my attention, was her strength.  Barbara was a very strong person.  And it wasn’t the kind of strength that calls attention to itself: that wins athletic contests, or makes noise, or gets its way.  It’s the strength that is exercised by the power of love.  I’m not being sentimental.  It’s just the truth: love is strong.

            It was evident to me from my earliest experience of Barbara, when I came to St. John’s eight years ago.  Whoever is the clergy at St. John’s goes to Candlewood Valley once a month to do a service of Holy Eucharist, and while I was there I would visit any parishioners of St. John’s who happened to be residents at the time, one of whom for the first few years was Rick, Barbara’s husband (Leigh and Scott’s father.)  And the severity of the physical challenges Rick lived with was quite evident; but I never saw that that had any discernible effect on the way Barbara related to him, or me, or the rest of the world.  The Barbara I saw in that room was the same loving person I saw everywhere else.  That’s the power of love.

            I’m going to repeat some of what we just heard from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, because I think it touches on what I’m talking about, and speaks directly to us and what we’re doing here now. Paul writes:

So we do not lose heart.  Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

Barbara lived by the power of love, which cannot be seen but is eternal.  She lived by it, and now she’s living entirely in it.  And I have no doubt she feels right at home.  Thanks be to God for our dear friend Barbara Nelson.

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Sermon Pentecost 4

6/28/20

(Genesis 22:1-14; Ps. 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42)

            Some of you may know of the legendary basketball coach John Wooden.   His teams at UCLA won 10 NCAA championships, including seven consecutively (from 1967 to 1973), a record never even approached before or since.  He had the pick of the best high school players from all over the country, and many of his players went on to star in the NBA.

            Every year, on the first day of practice in the fall, the first thing Wooden did was ask his players to take off their shoes and socks; and then he’d say, Now I’m going to show you how to put them back on.  (It didn’t matter if you were a senior and had already been through this three times; you had to do it.)  He would say, Hold up the sock, and pull it on slowly; work it around the little toe, and the heel area, so that there are no wrinkles.  Then pull it up the ankle firmly and smooth everything out well.  Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on.  And the shoe must be spread fully apart, when you put it on.  And don’t simply pull on the top laces: tighten them from the bottom, snugly, eyelet by eyelet.  Then tie it. Then double tie it.  If you don’t do it this way, he’d say, you’ll get blisters. If you get blisters you can’t play. If you can’t play we can’t win. That’s why this is important.

            So the operative principle was, Start at the foundation (in this case, literally.)  And pay attention to the little things: the big picture starts there.  And make this a habit: do it regularly.

            Of course the same applies to the life of faith. We need regularly to refresh our awareness of the basics; and remember the primary importance of the little things.

            We have been on our present fast from in-person worship in church for 17 weeks now; and we don’t know when we’re going to be able to resume (that’s an open question that your Wardens and Vestry and I are continually revisiting.)  But our present status is also a learning opportunity: as is the disruption of anything we do habitually.  Church on Sunday has been such a given, such a fixture in our lives for so long – even those who come infrequently know we’re here, know we’re going to be here, know it’s available – that its absence is a chance for us to reexamine the question of what it means to be a church.  If we’re not meeting together to worship God, who are we?

By the grace of God, the gospel we heard today bears directly on that issue.  Today’s reading is the conclusion of chapter10 in the gospel of Matthew.  This is the chapter in which Jesus commissions his disciples: tells them what to do, and sends them out to do it.  He co-missions them: in this chapter we hear Jesus enlisting his disciples in his ministry. Matthew 10 is a picture of that ministry, and over the last three weeks we’ve heard that chapter in its entirety.  The story begins with verse 1: “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits,, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness.”  Then Matthew tells us their names: simply recites them, all twelve; and there’s a teaching in that.  We know them as saints ( St. Peter, St. John, St. Andrew), but they weren’t called saints when Matthew was writing this near the end of the first century, and certainly not when Jesus called them to be disciples: they were just people like you and me.  And when Jesus is speaking to them, he is speaking to you and me.

              Jesus sends these twelve disciples out to the people they live among, and in this chapter we hear him tell them what to do: “…proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ “  That is: God’s reign – life the way God intends it to be, is at hand, is possible, is available to us: if we open ourselves to God’s presence in our lives. And God needs us to make it happen. 

And then Jesus goes on to give specific examples of how to make it happen: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”   He’s talking to the people who are to be his church.  He’s talking to us.

            To us, these tasks are from another age, another mindset; and all very well for a miracle worker like Jesus.  But not things we can realistically think about doing, yes?

            Well…let’s think again.  Cure the sick?  None of us is going to cure someone’s cancer; but are there not many kinds of sickness, which we can address, by beng living witnesses of God’s love?  Are there not many kinds of cure?  Little and big?

            None of us is going to bring a dead body back to life.  But are there not many forms of death?  Death through anger?   Death through despair?   The paralysis they create is a kind of death. In Christ we are free from anger, we are free from despair. And Christ calls us to live a different way: to be a living witness to that different way, and so bring hope.

            I doubt whether any of us have ever known someone suffering from leprosy, but we certainly do know people who are shunned, ostracized, treated as less than human, the way lepers were back then. Don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do about that.

            Casting out demons?  We all know people whose lives are dominated to some degree or other by obsessions, addictions, illusions.  We can be part of healing those wounds, by what we say, and much more importantly by what we do; how we live.

            As Jesus commissions his disciples, he commissions – co-missions – us to join in his ministry of healing by being living witnesses of the presence of God’s love among us.  That ministry – the ministry which is described in Matthew chapter 10 – t is happening around us all the time, in little and big ways (and little things can have big reverberations.)  That ministry is who we are, as a church.  One of my fellow clergy, years ago, always said the same words every Sunday at the conclusion of the liturgy: he would say blessing on the congregation, and then dismiss them with these words: “The worship ends.  The service begins.”  Amen.  Thanks be to God. 

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Sermon Pentecost 3

6/21/20

(Genesis 21:8-21; Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39)

            Some of you may recognize the name John Lewis.  He is a congressman from Georgia, African-American, 69 years old, currently serving in his 17thterm in the House of Representatives, he’s been there for 33 years.  Lewis is a Democrat, but because of his 50-year involvement in the fight for civil rights, he is also one of the (unfortunately) very few members of Congress of either party who is revered by people on both sides of the aisle.  

            Lewis has long been in demand as a commencement speaker at colleges around the country, and in those speeches he often talks about what he calls “good trouble”. I’m going to read to you now some things he said about this in a magazine article two years ago:

“When I was growing up as a child in Alabama, I saw signs all around me – I saw crosses that the Klan had put up, an announcement about a Klan meeting. I saw signs that said White, colored, white men, colored men, white women, colored women. There were places where we couldn’t go.  But we brought those signs down. The only place you will see those signs today will be in a book, in a museum or on a video. 

“When I was growing up, the great majority of African Americans could not participate in a democratic process in the South. They could not register to vote. But we changed that. When I first came to Washington to go on the freedom rides in 1961, black people and white people couldn’t be seated together on a Greyhound bus leaving this city. When I was growing up, my mother and father and grandparents would tell me, “Don’t get in trouble. This is the way it is.” 

“But then I heard Dr. King speak when I was 15.  Dr. King and others inspired me to get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.  When you see something that’s not right or fair, you have to do something, you have to speak up, you have to get in the way. And I think we’re going to have generations for years to come that will be prepared to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.  The next generation will help us to make this society less conscious of race.  It’s a struggle that doesn’t last one day, one week, one month, one year. It is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe many lifetimes.”

The demonstrations that have erupted around the country the last few weeks in response to the most recent killings of black people by white people testify to the truth of what John Lewis says: that though those signs that say “White” and “Colored” may be only in museums now, we’re a long way from being done with the problem of racism. And as Christians, we have a special responsibility to be aware of and involved in this struggle.  

We have that responsibility because what John Lewis calls “good trouble” is just the kind of thing Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel reading from Matthew, when he tells his disciples: “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”; and then shows how deeply that sword cuts: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother”, and so on; as John Lewis went against his father and mother and grandparents.

This is one of those passages that falls under the heading, Things We Wish Jesus Had Never Said.  (Which means we need to pay attention all the more closely.)  We don’t want this Jesus.  We want the Jesus of love, and joy: the resurrected Jesus who conquers death; the Jesus who tells us our sins are forgiven; and…he hasn’t come to bring peace? Didn’t we just hear this same Jesus four weeks ago telling us , Peace be with you?   Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you?

Yes, we did.  But that’s the peace of Christ.  What Jesus is talking about today is the peace that the world gives: false peace.  It’s the peace that’s really just the temporary absence of conflict: peace in which the truth, God’s truth, is silenced, or ignored; peace created by the power of this world, to maintain the illusion of its own dominance.   That’s the peace that Jesus has come to put to the sword; which is – in John Lewis’ words – good trouble.

            It is false peace that disguises the racism in American society. And we need to confront that racism: both in the sense of opening our eyes to it, seeing it for what it is; and in the sense of combatting it: speaking up, getting in the way:  making good trouble.

Like anybody else, I am being educated about this, and I’ll share with you an episode in my experience of that ongoing process.   Years ago I served a term on what’s called the Chapter, the governing board of our Episcopal cathedral in Hartford.   About five years ago, during that time, I was on a telephone conference call (we didn’t have Zoom yet) with about half a dozen other Chapter members, mostly clergy, discussing the Cathedral’s response to what was then the most recent killing of an African-American by a white man which was currently occupying the national attention.  (It’s both to my shame, and an indication of the nature and severity of the problem, that I can’t remember who it was.)  The meeting was being led by the Dean of the Cathedral, Miguelina Howell. Lina (as she is know to her friends) is extremely articulate and very practically minded, and one of those rare people who can be, simultaneously, both gentle and forthright.

            One proposal we were discussing was the placing of a banner on the iron railing which borders the cathedral, a banner on which would be repeated, for its entire length, the words “Black Lives Matter”, a phrase which at the time was still  relatively new.  In the discussion, a clergyperson named Michael, who happened to be white, proposed instead the words “All Lives Matter”.  The conversation moved on, and I didn’t participate for about five minutes, because I was thinking about that; and then there was a pause, and somebody said, Jack, are you still there?  And I answered yes, and that I had to say my inclination was to agree with Michael, that “All Lives Matter” would be better.

            And Lina –  gentle and forthright – responded; and mostly what I remember that she said is this: Jack, I am married to an African-American man.  And every day, when he goes off to work, there is an awareness in the back of my mind that he might not come home. 

            And I understood instantly that she was right, that the validity of what she said was undeniable, and I apologized.  Because I saw, in the terms we’re using here today, I was helping to maintain a false peace.  And it’s not that all lives don’t matter; of course they do.  But the plain evidence is that American society tends to treat black lives as though they matter less.   This is starkly clear in the current pandemic, and its disproportionately high rates of infection and death among black and brown people.  The root cause is racism.  And what we need to do is identify it, describe it, and dismantle it. 

            As John Lewis said, this is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe many lifetimes.  But it’s part of our mission as Christians.  Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once wrote, “A proclamation of the gospel that does not call into judgment specific forms of hostility and exclusion is empty.”  Christ is calling us, here: to join in this work; to get in good trouble: first of all, within our own souls.  May we always hear, and answer, that call, and find the true peace of Christ. Thanks be to God.

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Sermon Trinity Sunday

6/7/20

(Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Ps. 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20)

            Since the beginning of the shutdown three months ago, and we all started communicating through the internet (as we are doing now), I’ve been part of a group that has met online at the beginning and end of every day for the Prayer Book services of Morning Prayer and Compline. The group was organized through our Northwest Region of the ECCT, but there are people in it who participate from hundreds of miles away: about fifteen in the core group, though not everyone makes it to every service.  We have taken to referring to ourselves as the Zoomastery, because it’s a like a little monastery and we meet on a Zoom call.

            Those two services each provide time built in for personal prayers, and we also share our responses to the different Bible readings that we hear every day.  So there are opportunities, which we take, to talk with each other how we see the world today: how it’s reflected in Scripture, how the Spirit is moving in us, every day; and where we see God to be active in the world.

            And there’s been plenty to say, because this has certainly been a very trying time, since the beginning of our little Zoomastery: under the lethal threat of the covid pandemic, and the radical changes it’s caused in the way we live, and our constant awareness that we don’t know how long it’s going to take to resolve, or what the new normal is going to look like when it finally does.

            And then on top of all that, in the last two weeks, the murder of George Floyd, following so recently on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery: two African-American men, killed by white men; and the stark witness of those events to the racism embedded in our society, and culture; and the social upheaval we’ve all been watching, and living in the middle of, for the past two weeks.

            So it’s a strenuous time – a chaotic and anxious time – for all of us; but especially, in a particular way, for us Christians: we who strive to see where God is in all this; where Christ is leading us; what we feel the Holy Spirit is moving each of us individually to do about what we see and hear.  Because we try to live faithfully.

            I’m going to get back to these questions: to our present circumstances, to the bewilderment and helplessness that we feel crowding in on us, and to something about all that which came up in the Zoomastery. I’ll get back to all that in a minute. But did you notice I just snuck something in there?  

I just made reference, in a single sentence and one continuous thought, to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.  And I did that because today is Trinity Sunday.  This day – one of the seven principal feasts in our church year – celebrates the foundational belief of the Christian faith: there is one God, who exists in three Persons, but one Substance  (don’t get too hung up on the language for now.)  This understanding took the first three centuries of church history to hammer out.  A lot of smart people spent a lot of time and energy over those years trying to make sense of just what it was that had happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  These people all understood that those events had something essential to do with who God is, and therefore who all of us are, and how we live.  

            So the doctrine of the Trinity came about, not because it sounded nice, and made for pretty pictures: it described their actual experience of who God is, and what God had done, and was doing, in their lives.  From the first days of Christ’s church, Christians have agreed that they experienced God – the one God – in three distinct ways.  I once heard a description of the Trinity that I think puts it well.

               God the Creator is God for us: God who loves us infinitely, God who gave us life, and created the world in which we live and thrive: God the Creator, God for us; God in Christ is God with us, God alongside us, in this life, God who teaches us, God who rejoices and celebrates with us, God who suffers and grieves with us: God in Christ, God with us; and God the Holy Spirit is God in us, working in us as we think and act and feel, as we grow in knowledge and love, as we make choices about our lives, as we try to do God’s will, every day, because we know that’s what best for us, that’s who we really are: God the Holy Spirit, God in us.  We Christians say that God, the one God, is real, and alive, in each of these three persons, these three ways of being: God for us, God with us, God in us.  

            Now: back to the Zoomastery, and this embattled world we’re living in right now.  In Morning Prayer one day this past week we were talking about the feeling of being overwhelmed, unable to get our bearings, as people of  faith, because things seem so out of control, and the stakes are so high.

            And a member of the group, an older woman who has bad asthma and sometimes has to literally gasp for breath but is relentlessly cheerful, said that what she tries to remember at such times is this: concentrate on doing the next right thing.  Whatever it is.  Just: do the next right thing.

            So, what does the Trinity have to do with that?

            Here’s the way I think of it. God the Creator loves me and will not ever stop loving me, even when I foul up.  In fact, when I foul up, I just feel God loving me harder. This is my foundation, my starting point, every day: this is what enables me, no matter what, to get started doing the next right thing: God for me.   

God in Christ teaches me to know how to look for the next right thing.  In this connection I think of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew, on the two great commandments: love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself; and how everything else flows from that, all the Law and the prophets. To love God means to love truth and justice and peace and joy and love itself.  And to love your neighbor as yourself means to love that person as though that person were you; so what’s happening to them, is happening to you; and what are you going to do about that?  That’s the knowledge that guides us to what the next right thing is: God beside me.

And it’s the Holy Spirit in me that actually identifies that next right thing, moves me to it, and gets it done: someone or something that needs help.  A misunderstanding that needs clearing up.  Something I’ve done wrong that I need to fix.  The next right thing is in front of us all the time.  And no matter how tiny it may look to us, nothing is tiny to the Holy Spirit.  And neither is anything is too big, for God in me.

That’s how God, in three Persons, is alive in this world: alive for, with, and in  each one of us.  Let us live joyfully in that knowledge, and joyfully do that next right thing. Thanks be to God.

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Sermon Pentecost

5/31/20

(Acts 2:1-21; Ps. 104:25-35,37; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:37-39)

            The men in the family I grew up in tended to be conflict-avoiders.  I’ve always thought of this as mostly a good thing, because it recognizes some important truths about life: that we’re all different – God made us each uniquely – and what unites us is more important than what divides us.   So the operative principle was, don’t sweat the small stuff; let’s be friends.

            Which is fine as far as it goes.  But, aside from the fact that that attitude tends to sweep things under the rug that need attention, and can turn into worse problems, it also tends to prevent real listening.  Which means that we miss opportunities to learn; to hear truth that we don’t know; to clear up misunderstandings; to recognize new gifts which God is giving us.

            I have one near relative in whom this tendency has created a habit which drives me crazy: in conversation, he’ll finish your sentences for you.  This is to show that he already understands and agrees with what you’re about to say. Except that, usually, what you were actually about to say isn’t exactly what he says you were about to say.  So it’s not really a conversation (even though he thinks everything’s going swimmingly; because he’s not really listening.) Now, in the great scheme of things, this is a tiny complaint.  But it relates to a much larger reality of the Christian life which is one of the things we lift up on this day, the day of Pentecost.

            In the ECCT, for some years now we’ve had a little document going around titled “Rules of Engagement”, which is a guide for honest, meaningful dialogue.  The first two rules are the most important.  Rule One: It’s okay to disagree.  Rule Two: It’s not okay to blame, shame, or disrespect.  (Just think how much our national discourse would be improved if everybody obeyed those rules.) The reality they recognize is that the world is a troubled place: always has been, always will be.  And Christian faith looks that square in the face.  In the Lord’s prayer, we say, Thy kingdom come. This means we acknowledge that God’s kingdom is mostly not here yet.  And God calls us as people of faith to join in bringing it here, making it a reality in this world.   

Christians are not conflict avoiders.  To the contrary: we look for it.  You can’t be part of the healing process if you don’t know what needs to be made whole. It is precisely our mission to look for those places where the world is broken, and to heal, to reconcile.  And we are enabled to do this in, and through, the gift of the peace of Christ; which goes hand in hand with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

 This is concisely reflected in today’s gospel story from the gospel of John, a resurrection story. This encounter between the risen Jesus and the disciples occurs on the day of resurrection, Easter Day.  The disciples, at this point, are paralyzed by fear.  They’ve retreated to the house in Jerusalem in which they’ve been meeting and have locked the doors “for fear of the Jews”: that is, fear of the religious authorities (that’s what the words “the Jews” mean in the gospel of John: that small group of people in power)  These are the ones who had just tried and convicted Jesus for being a blasphemer and handed him over to the Romans for execution. The disciples  – who were of course themselves all Jews, and believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Chosen One of God, which those authorities had pronounced to be blasphemy, and punishable by death –  the disciples are afraid the same thing is going to happen to them.  It’s just two days since Jerusalem was boiling over about all this, and the situation’s still very hot.   That’s why they’ve locked the doors; and why they themselves are locked in fear, and incomprehension.

Now, today is Pentecost, so probably the main thing you heard in this story was Jesus breathing on the disciples and saying, Receive the Holy Spirit.  But the first thing he does when he comes through those locked doors – comes through their fear, their paralysis – the first thing Jesus does is tell them, Peace be with you.  This is not a greeting: it’s a gift of the Spirit, which the resurrected Christ is giving them.  And before he gets around to the Holy Spirit, he repeats it: Peace be with you.  At this point it’s the most important thing he can give them: peace: his own peace.

In the gospel of John Jesus talks about peace only one other time: in chapter 14, in John’s telling of the Last Supper.  He has told his disciples that he’s going to die, and he’s giving them his final teaching.  He tells them, “I will ask the Father and he will send you another Advocate…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.”

But then Jesus gives his own parting gift to them: “Peace I leave with you.  My own peace I leave with you.“  The peace that Jesus gives is not a cease-fire.  It’s not the absence of conflict.  As we heard, Jesus says, “I do not give to you as the world gives.”  The peace of Christ lives in the middle of conflict, goes right there; because it’s the one essential, that heals.  

 Because what we call the peace of Christ is in the knowledge of the resurrection: the knowledge that we are never lost to God; that God reaches right through fear, and ignorance, and death itself: all the different dark powers that threaten us in this life are finally revealed to be powerless, an illusion; it is the knowledge, finally, of what in Christian faith we call our salvation.  There, is the peace of Christ.  The letter of Paul to the Colossians tells us, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”  In our lives as Christians, as apostles sent out in this chaotic world, may that always be true of us.  Thanks be to God.