RCL Year A, Palm Sunday

It’s a confusing day. I wonder how you would explain what we’re doing today to someone who’d never been to church, who didn’t know the story we’ve just told. What is it we’re doing here? Why did we start outside? Why were we handed palm branches trimmed only yesterday off our palm tree during the work day, and told to wave them around? Why did we act like it was a festival, only to come inside and hear a really long dramatic reading of the terrifically sad story of the Passion? Why are we all over the place in terms of the emotions we’re arousing – glad, sad, most of all maybe a kind of awkwardness and embarrassment, if you were really going to be truthful? And why is this such a small group of people going through this today anyway? Does anyone else in the world know what we’re doing, and if they did, would they at all understand?

It’s a long tradition, the Palm Sunday procession. Some churches go all around their church building on the inside. Some go all around outside. Some go out into the neighborhood and walk all around. Talk about confusing the neighbors. It’s a parade – with no music except for that one song, not even sung very well. It’s a parade, but the only people dressed up are those 3-4 people in robes. It’s a party, but there’s no food. What is this? Who is this? what are they doing?

That’s the reaction Jesus and his followers got too, if it’s any consolation. There were people that were all excited at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, people who threw their cloaks and tree branches on the road and shouted Hosanna! as he came in on the donkey. A very large crowd of people, says Matthew. But then there were a lot of other people, probably more people, people in the city standing there watching this with confusion on their faces. Who is this? they wanted to know. What the heck is going on?

Well, as one commentator noted, that’s the question of the day. Who is this? is this the future king of Israel, coming in to kick out the Romans? Is this someone of great power and might? It doesn’t seem like it, once the story continues further on. Is this a random itinerant preacher from the country with a Messiah complex? Maybe, but maybe not. The only thing that’s clear is that this is someone who, when they go to put him on trial and wait for him to tell them who he is, refuses to speak, refuses to clear up all their questions. Pilate can’t figure him out, and neither, really, can anyone else. His best friends deny they know him. His people clamor for his blood. Even the others being crucified with him use their last dying breaths to make fun of him.

There are a few answers given. The adoring crowds tell the confused city people, this is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. The soldiers and the High Priest call him the Messiah, but they don’t mean it in a good way. Pilate thinks he’s trying to be king of the Jews. The Pharisees say he’s an imposter. And the centurion and a few others watching him die say he’s God’s Son. Jesus’ answer to most of these is, You have said so. But he doesn’t offer any other answer himself.

So the question just hangs out there, waiting to be answered. Who is this? What answer do you live with? My personal friend and companion. The judge who watches everything I do. My model and guide for how to live. An enigma, a mystery I can’t connect with. A stumbling block. An all-powerful savior when I can’t save myself.

You may or may not be used to asking yourself who Jesus is. You might have words ready to say who you experience Jesus to be, and you might never have thought about it consciously. But that’s the question, today. That’s the question for this week, as we go through the whole story piece by piece, and wind up with something incredible on Easter Day. This week, today, I invite you to consider it. Who is this? what are we doing here? And now what do we do?

RCL Year A, 5 Lent

Reading that story aloud gives me chills. It’s one of the gospels I almost hate to preach on, because I just don’t want to say anything after those last words. ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

This is the sign beyond all other signs in John’s gospel. This is the fullest revelation of who Jesus is. In encounter after encounter, people have been realizing just who he is – in Nicodemus’ nighttime conversation with Jesus, in the Samaritan woman’s time with him at the well, in the blind man’s healing and all the uproar that follows. And now, lest we still be wondering and in the dark about Jesus, John makes it perfectly clear with this story. Jesus is life and resurrection. Jesus is the fullness of God, right here in the midst of mortality and pain. It is such a flagrant display of his power that from this point on, the Jewish authorities will plot to kill him. And Lazarus too, for good measure.

But to get to that point, we have to spend a long time in the story dealing with death. Lazarus is only raised in the last few verses of this long passage – all the way up unto that point we are reminded in every way possible that he is dead. First the news comes that Lazarus is ill, but Jesus waits around somewhere else until he dies. Then Jesus tells his confused disciples: ‘Lazarus is dead. Let us go to him.’ The disciples panic, because returning to Judea sounds like walking into their own deaths – but Thomas bravely says, let us go and die with him. They arrive, and first Martha and then Mary run out to meet Jesus, saying, if you had been here, he would not have died. Jesus weeps with them, real grief at Lazarus’ real death. And finally, to make the point very, very clear, everyone complains about the smell. Lazarus is dead, really dead.

Our Bishop Mary told about time she spent studying at Hebrew Union in New York last year, doing theology and studying scripture with Jewish students and theologians. She said it was a revelation to her how quickly her Christian faith leads her to jump to the happy ending. In our narrative, suffering leads to healing. Death leads to resurrection. Good Friday leads to Easter. Sometimes we make that jump so quickly that we can forget that the suffering and death really exist. And there are problems with that, Bishop Mary realized. Sometimes it makes us the worst kind of companion to people who are suffering or grieving, however good our intentions – we can’t just be with them in their pain without trying to cheer them up. Sometimes jumping ahead to the happy ending makes it difficult for us to stay faithful when we encounter suffering and pain in life – we can’t believe God is there even when things are rough. And sometimes avoiding the hard part of suffering prevents us from really grasping the enormity of the good news. We have to know death to know resurrection.

Suffering is real. We all of us face into our own death, especially as we get older, or as we get new diagnoses of illness that we must struggle to comprehend. We live with the deaths of others: of people we love, our children, our parents, our spouses; and of people we do not know, killed in terrible tragedies halfway around the world. The stink of death and suffering is real – the smell of bodies succumbing to illness and decay; the stink of painful memories of things we have done or that have been done to us. We wish that we could find a way to explain why all of this happens to us and to people we love, and we can’t. It can be very, very hard to find hope – all that we seem to find is heartbreak and loss.

Jim shared with me a story he’d worked on for Guideposts, about a woman with schizophrenia. Her name is Rebecca, and she was a churchgoing, faithful person, with a good stable family, but things had started to fall apart for her in college. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on medication, but still couldn’t find her way. She stopped taking her meds and became convinced that people were out to get her. She th[...]

RCL Year A, 4 Lent

Now, if you were paying attention during the reading of the gospel, you might have noticed that the story the kids just acted out is a different one. They gave us a story found in Luke’s gospel of a man who is blind and who is healed by Jesus – a whole different kind of story than the one we heard in our reading from John’s gospel. What we heard first is a long story of how a healing caused upset and upheaval; while the skit was about a healing that caused rejoicing and celebration. One thing you can say about these two stories – and the other stories we’ve been hearing in the last few weeks – is that you never know which way it’s going to go when Jesus is on the scene. People might get what he’s talking about, and they might not. They might be joyful at what he does, and they might not like it one bit.

You could say what we heard today is a story of how the world is; what we saw is a story of how the world should be. A man is blind. He desperately wants healing. He makes his way to the one who can save him and he is healed, able to see. And in the skit, he is thrilled, his whole life made new, and all who see him are thrilled along with him. Healing and sight, new life and hope – something everyone can rejoice in! That’s the way it should be.

But the first story is different. A man is blind, born blind – he has never known what sight is. Jesus heals him. He can see, something completely new for him. And nobody is happy about it. Not the neighbors, not his parents, not the religious leaders. They throw him out. Get out! We don’t want the new you. We all liked the old you better. All too often, that’s how the world is.

Because the man’s healing isn’t just something that happens to him. His healing throws the whole system around him out of whack. He was a beggar, dependent on other people to care for him – all of a sudden he can make his own way, he is well, he doesn’t need their help anymore. He used to need them and they could look down on him for it. Now it’s all different. No one adjusts to that kind of change easily.

And the man was healed on the Sabbath, when no work is supposed to be done – therefore, the Pharisees argue, the one who healed him must be a bad man. But the man is healed, he can see! How can that be bad? The rules of behavior, the way people are supposed to worship God, have been broken. These are rules that matter, because they help define who God’s people are. But Jesus has just tossed them out the window. No one responds well to people who kill sacred cows – who throw out things that other people think are important and holy.

And furthermore, the man was born blind, and that means he is full of sin, according to the theology of the Pharisees. But after he’s healed he’s proclaiming and witnessing to who Jesus is, saying that Jesus is from God. No one wants to be preached to by someone they don’t approve of.

So it is easier for all of them if they just toss him out. But can you imagine? Your own child, your neighbor, a member of your community, and you’re so upset about the change in them that you just want them gone?

But that’s how we can get when sudden and total transformation happens. It seems like in the story the kids shared with us, it was easier on everyone. The blind man’s healing didn’t rock any boats. Maybe he was just a stranger to all those crowds who rejoiced when he was healed. His family wasn’t around, his neighbors weren’t there to see. It’s the people who know and love us who have a hard time when we change – anyone in recovery can tell you that. It’s the things that are most dear to us that we want to stay the same – the house we grew up in, or our church, or the town we’ve known for so long. We shake our heads and complain that nothing stays the same.

But the weird thing, the thing that must make God just shake her head sometimes, is that even good change drives us bananas. Change is hard, it takes work on our part to adjust to it, and we don’t like that. We’re na[...]

RCL Year A, 3 Lent

This is not actually an attendance question, but how many of you were here last week? Do you remember Nicodemus in last week’s gospel? The powerful man of authority, sneaking in to Jesus under cover of night to find out if his suspicions can be proven, if Jesus really is the Messiah? Jesus doesn’t give him an easy time of it, rebuking him for his unbelief and confusing his literal mind with metaphor and symbol. Whether Nicodemus saw and understood at the end of that exchange, we don’t know – but he does show up at the end of the gospel, still a little furtive, but bringing rich spices and ointments to bury Jesus’ body. Somewhere along the way he seemed to get it, even if only quietly and a little late.

This week’s story at the well is almost an exact opposite of that one. It is not nighttime; it is high noon, the heat of the day. The person Jesus engages is not a religious man of authority; it is a woman, a Samaritan outsider, whose name we never hear. She too has a hard time seeing Jesus for who he is. But when she gets it, she really gets it – and runs off to become the first apostle to the Samaritans.

This is just about the most extended encounter Jesus has with a woman in all of scripture. Really it’s one of the most extended encounters he has with anyone. Maybe that’s why the story is so powerful – we get such a sense of who she is. She’s there at the well in the heat of the day; something has caused her to be excluded from her community, to want to avoid the other women who go to the well in the morning and evening when it is cool. She has had numerous marriages and relationships – perhaps ending in divorce and disgrace, perhaps ending in grief and widowhood, we don’t know. But whatever protection marriage should afford her in that culture has failed her, one way or another. Her life has been hard, tragic, and painful. And you can hear it in her tone as she addresses Jesus. Oh yeah, living water, huh? Sure, guy, give me some of that. Then I won’t have to keep coming here to draw water. Then I’ll finally be free of this drudgery, this endless hopelessness. This woman, it seems, has seen too much of life. She is bitter and jaded, and nothing good is going to come her way again.

Except it does. There sits Jesus, talking with her. Looking right at her and into her and knowing her. I am he – the one who is talking to you is the one you have been waiting for. And the second she sees that, everything changes for her. Off she runs, forgetting her chore and her water jug and the drink Jesus had asked for. She’s bubbling over with the good news, completely breathless and full of joy, running to all the people in her town she used to avoid to tell them about Jesus. Everything that up to this point has blinded her to God’s action in her life falls away, and she sees – and she can’t wait to bring that news to others. And she really does bring that news, because they all come running themselves to meet Jesus – they don’t stop to question her, because they can see how everything in her has changed. It’s an incredible story of hope and new life where before there was none.

So what’s the difference between this woman and Nicodemus? Why does she get it so quickly and readily and rush to share it with others, while he keeps doggedly asking his questions and trying to pin Jesus down? We aren’t quite given enough of their stories to know. Maybe it’s because the woman has been beaten down so far in life that she’s ready to embrace the change – whereas Nicodemus still has so much to lose if he takes the risk of following Jesus. Maybe by nature she’s readier to hope – all those marriages show some belief in the possibility of new beginnings, after all. For one reason or another, she knows her thirst. She knows what she lacks and what she needs, and she knows that she hasn’t found it anywhere else. She is ready to drop that water jar and really drink from the water Jesus is offering to her.

She’s an example of why the Bea[...]

RCL Year A, 2 Lent

I’ll begin with a story I told the Lenten class on Wednesday night:

‘Help us to find God,’ the disciples asked the elder.

‘No one can help you do that,’ the elder said.

‘Why not?’ the disciples asked, amazed.

‘For the same reason that no one can help fish to find the ocean.’

Hold onto that for a moment. First, I want to look at that all-too-short first reading we heard from Genesis. Therein is the beginning of a whole new relationship between God and people. God calls Abram, picks him out of all the people in the world, and asks him to go, to leave everything he knows and all those who have known him, and to move to a whole new land. To move to a whole new land not so that life would be better for him and his family, necessarily – but to move so that he and his descendants could become a blessing for the whole world. And Abram and his wife Sarai go, without a word.

But a few verses further on we get a little more sense of their feelings about this upheaval in their lives. They travel on to Canaan, and God appears to them again to say, this is the land I will give to you. So they build an altar there. Then they travel further on to Bethel and stay there a bit. And they build an altar there. And then they keep going, traveling on to Egypt and beyond in search of a place to stay. Building altars all the way.

Those altars, you see, are a kind of lifeline for Abram and Sarai. God has turned up and talked to them and given them a mission, and now they’re off in the wilderness, away from everything and everybody they knew. And they wonder: Is the god who spoke to us back home still with us? Let’s build an altar to him and make sure he is. And then they travel further on. Is he still here? Let’s build another altar and make sure. Every altar is a way of tying their god to themselves, like building a space station before voyaging further out – making sure that local god of home is still there, that they can still count on him. Only gradually do they begin to realize, after several more encounters with God inviting them to look at the enormity of the land before them, the vast number of the stars above them, that God is everywhere. Not local to a particular place or set of people, but greater than everything and everywhere. The Spirit blows where it will, beyond anything they can tie down and understand.

But the instinct to pin things down is strong in humans. Thousands of years later, there is Nicodemus, stealthy and hiding and visiting Jesus under cover of darkness. Hey, psst, Jesus, you there! I know – we know – that you’re from God, because we’ve seen the evidence. We’ve seen you do these signs, proof to us that you’re something real. I’m not entirely sure, but I’m pretty sure, that you’re it – and if you prove it just a little further, do a sure sign or two, we’ll anoint you Messiah, build you an altar, and publicize to everyone who you are.

But Jesus doesn’t applaud Nicodemus for his faith – you saw the signs and deduced the truth, good for you. Instead he offers a kind of rebuke: you can’t see all there is to see, the kingdom of God, until you’re born of the Spirit. You need to move away from what you can prove and understand and hold onto. That is what faith really is. The Spirit blows where it will, through you and around you. Until you allow that unknown to happen, you will never see. Stop trying to build altars, Nicodemus, and let go.

Nicodemus is mystified. And no wonder. He is only doing what Abram did, what anyone does in trying to comprehend the vastness of God and the world. He’s starting with what he can observe and verify, setting up a marker in a journey that can feel a lot like just wandering around. He wants a touchstone, a cairn that will stand and show the way. I may not know where I am going, but I at least know where I am right now – and I’ve built a pile of rocks to show it.

If you’ve ever tried to follow a trail in the wilderness, you know the value of those piles of rocks. In the East [...]

This is a sermon given by guest preacher, Kimberly Axtell on February 23, 2014.

Jesus said, You have heard that is was said.

Well the season is almost over. No, not Epiphany, I’m talking about the Olympic season. I believe that the closing ceremonies are tonight, right? So in the spirit of the season, I am going to briefly mention a post I read about having a different kind of Olympics: Liturgical Olympics. So for all the church-y people who are feeling left out the past 2 weeks, the Rev. Bosco Peters in New Zealand has the following suggestions:

Speed mass – where the celebrants have to complete the Eucharistic prayer and distribute the elements in record time. Extra difficulty points will be awarded to those who select Rite 1 and don’t trip over the older language.

Other suggestions included Acolyte Choreography, Altar Guild prep, changing the worship space and my personal favorite: Endurance preaching – how long can you preach without preparation on a surprise text without putting anyone to sleep. This sounds a bit like one of those cooking shows like Iron Chef, with surprise ingredients;   but I don’t think we’ll be participating in that one today.

On a slightly more serious note, another Olympic story caught my eye about the women’s figure skater, Gracie Gold. The story briefly told how Gracie wanted to skate at the Olympics and was yet afraid of failing. So her new coach “convinced her that her perfectionism was getting in the way.” That “it’s not the perfect skater that wins, it’s the best skater.” And by allowing herself to be comfortable with the prospect of failure, Gracie got a spot on the American team and skated her way to 4th place. This is actually an important point and I will come back to this a little later. So keep this brief snippet of a story close at hand.

And if it seems that the Olympics have been too short, it has been a long Epiphany season – yes we are still in the season of Epiphany – the season of the wise men, and the baptism of Jesus. Christmas seems so long ago. This is a flexible season whose length changes from year to year and it has as a central theme the proclamation of God revealed in this world. The star sends out a beacon light to gentiles near and far. The beginning of Jesus’ ministry is celebrated in his baptism. And for the last couple of weeks we have been hearing different takes on the Torah, or Hebrew teaching. This week, that emphasis is brought into sharp focus.

You have heard it said…

I had occasion this week to sit and talk with a Rabbi friend of mine, Rabbi Ari who leads a synagogue close to our work. And he had some interesting observations about the passage that we just heard from Leviticus. Unfortunately today, we did not hear the whole passage. Some verses were cut for the sake of editing, I guess. But he named this chapter in Leviticus the heart of the Torah. The arrangement of the verses, their number and their structure, has an overarching meaning of life – life in this world and the next. And in contrast to our translation of word Torah as Law – something that is legalistic, so very cut and dried, it is actually the keeping of Torah that is life now, and in the life to come. And the emphasis is on the word keeping, not perfecting. Remember the story about Gracie Gold.

If you look closely, you will notice that the commands that God gives to Moses begin with the concept, “you shall be holy.” This concept is then laid out in the next 32 couplets as an example of how to be holy – separate, set aside as priests to the world. Rabbi Ari pointed out that it is in the doing of good works (keeping the Torah), that the Hebrews are sanctified. Not that they are perfect in doing the law, but that they keep the law. It is an important distinction. Nowhere does God say that we are to be perfect at all times in our thoughts or our behavior. (We’ll be getting to the Matthew reading here soon).

And another observation quickly surfaces, that all of the words that w[...]

RCL Year A, Last Epiphany

We’ve been trying out an experiment in our worship space this season of Epiphany, and now that season is drawing to a close. Some of you have had a chance to share your thoughts about removing the altar rails; we’ll continue to take feedback today if you’ve not yet done so. It’s been interesting reading your responses, which have ranged all over the map. And as I’d suspected, they’ve been pretty evenly balanced between those who welcomed the change and those who did not. Some of you wrote simply that you want your kneelers back and you want them now! Some of you are ecstatic that they’re gone and what the church looks like without them. Some of you are fine either way, or maybe concerned about other people who miss the kneelers even though you yourself don’t care; others of you have enjoyed the opportunity to try it differently, and would like to see the experiment continue. And many of you have spent some time really thinking about what it means to you to take communion and be together as the Body of Christ – which is the best feedback of all, in my opinion. Knowing why we do what we do in worship is so important – particularly when the answer isn’t simply, because we’ve always done it this way. There should be more to what we do and why we do it.

The early church, as I mentioned when we began this in January, did not kneel for communion. Instead, from what we can tell anyway, they stood together around the table, arms upheld throughout the Eucharistic prayer, and then received together there. Or maybe they sat and shared the bread and wine in the midst of a meal. The Eastern Orthodox churches never kneeled, and still don’t – and rarely sit during the service either. The Catholic Church in the West began kneeling and receiving the host directly on the tongue once the doctrine of transubstantiation became the norm – but around the time of Vatican II, most Catholic churches took out their altar rails and began standing for communion, receiving the bread in the hand as we do. Pope Benedict began bringing back the rails and the kneeling and receiving on the tongue, and now there’s general confusion in the Catholic Church about which way is right. So you see that the question of posture is not one unique to us alone – there’s a range of beliefs and feelings out there. Is standing to receive communion a cattle call, or is it a dance? Is kneeling to receive reverent and pious, or is it an unwelcome insistence on our unworthiness? To use words I read in your feedback, is standing for communion just like being in a bread line for the homeless, bedraggled and shameful? Or, is standing for communion like being in a bread line for the homeless, together in our need and hungry for what alone can feed us? One thing that is clear is that receiving communion is both a communal act and a private one – it’s something we do together with the community around us, and it is a moment of intimacy for each of us with God. And there will always be a tension between those two poles of the experience. Just as, as our little congregation shows, there will always be a tension between the way I prefer to receive and the way another person prefers it.

It is my sense that there are times when one or the other posture is more appropriate. There are times when what we need to remember is our worthiness before God, and our unity together as a community – standing helps us do that. And there are other times when a greater emphasis on our own need for forgiveness and grace is important – kneeling can help us remember that. We are blessed to have the option here in our space, with the moveable kneelers. So in Lent we will continue the experiment, using the kneelers again while still trying to keep the space more open. (And remember, you are always welcome to kneel in the prayers, during the Eucharistic prayer, after communion, and so on if you find that meaningful for your piety. No one is attempting to prohibit you from kneeling if[...]

Feast of the Presentation

Today, you might have realized, is a big day, an important day on the calendar, a long-awaited day of much preparation and moment. That’s right – it’s a feast day of the church. For all of you church calendar junkies out there, this feast day is one of only three feast days in the year that take precedence of the usual Sunday observance – meaning that because the date February 2 falls on a Sunday, we celebrate this feast rather than 4 Epiphany as we would otherwise have done. So you know it’s important! It’s a feast with several names: Candlemas, the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, the Meeting of the Lord, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And it’s Groundhog Day. And – ‘something else’ Sunday too, but I can’t recall what.

Here’s all the things this feast day encompasses: the blessing of candles in church, the churching of women, the gospel story we just heard of Simeon and Anna. Finding out the weather forecast for the next several weeks: ‘If Candlemas Day be fair and bright, Winter will have another flight. If Candlemas Day be shower and rain, Winter is gone and will not come again.’ A rhyme which predates Punxsutawney Phil by centuries, but the same idea. On the pagan calendar, this day was a ‘cross-quarter’ day in the cycle of the year, the day exactly halfway between the Winter Solstice and the spring Equinox. It’s Imbolc, the Feast of St Brigid in the Celtic tradition. It is a day for purification, the day to take out and burn the Yuletide greens (so if you haven’t done anything with your Christmas tree yet, today’s the day); the day to carry torches in procession around the city to purify the air, as in old Rome; the day to carry torches around the fields to purify and invigorate them for the coming growing season in Ireland; and, the day to start plowing, literally purifying and preparing the earth. And so America is honoring this day with a football game to celebrate all this – its own sort of ritual of purification and hope, I suppose. I’m supposed to be non-partisan, but I did grow up in Seattle, you know. (Go Hawks.)

It’s not hard to see how the several threads of tradition intertwine today. Purification even feels right for this time of year – it’s beginning to feel like spring even without much rain, and it makes you want to open the windows, let the fresh air in, do some spring cleaning to clear away winter’s grime. Purification, preparation for what is to come, light and darkness – and all of this is mixed in the story of Jesus, his parents, and two old people in the temple.

Two separate events of Jesus’ early life are brought together in this story: the purification of the mother and the presentation of the child, both required by the Law. The firstborn son was presented in the Temple with a ‘redemption price’ according to Hebrew law. Also according to the Law, a woman had to be purified after childbirth in order to offer worship in the Temple and return to society again. A woman was considered unclean for a certain number of days after childbirth – forty days after a boy child, sixty days after a girl child – until she performed the required ritual sacrifice and was made ‘clean’ or ‘purified’ – all of this part of a system of purity that classed women as often unclean for various reasons, along with other categories of people. There is, of course, a power analysis to be made about all that.

But despite the problems with it, the religious foundation of the purity code around women has powerful symbolism attached to it – a woman was called unclean after childbirth because she had lost blood, and her blood meant her vitality or life force. The Hebrews believed that all life comes from God – in the first creation story in Genesis, God breathes into the newly created human body, and it lives. So to lose one’s blood or life force was to be separated from God, the source of life. A new mother, or anybody unclean through loss of blood, had to go through a [...]

RCL Year A, 3 Epiphany

When I was a kid, our family owned a 23-foot powerboat that we would take out for trips around the San Juan and Gulf Islands. Every now and then, we would pack along fishing rods and reels and fish off the back of the boat. I always did this with some trepidation. Because as great as it was to sit in the warm sun, dangling my feet in the water, as fun as it was to feel that tug on the line, I knew what it would result in for me: three dogfish. Every time I fished, I landed three dogfish. Even the time I tried reeling in to give up after the second dogfish, the third dogfish grabbed hold of the hook just as it was about to break the surface of the water. Dogfish are ugly, dogfish are inedible, and dogfish get you no points in the family fishing tournament – excitement was reserved only for real fish like salmon. But somehow, dogfish, three of them, were all I could ever catch.

Some of you, I think, are fisherfolk, or have done some fishing in the past – right? I imagine I’m not the only one to learn that when you fish, you don’t always catch what you’re hoping to catch. Sometimes, of course, you don’t catch anything at all. But despite that, there’s something appealing about it. For a certain kind of fishing at least, you do it not because you’ll probably catch something, but because you get a chance to be quiet in a beautiful place without really doing much of anything at all. Having a rod and reel gives you an excuse to sit still and be quiet. In other words, fishing is something done for the experience of fishing – not for the outcome it will lead to.

Fishing, of course, is central to the Christian life. The gospel today tells us of Jesus’ call to the disciples: Follow me and I’ll make you fish for people. It’s similar to the charge Jesus gives them at the very end of the gospel, to go out and make disciples. Go reel them in, in other words. You could read these commands as jobs with measurable outcomes: to be followers of Jesus means we have work to do, a certain number of people to bring into the fold, adding to the growth of the church in tangible and quantifiable ways. But you could also see this as a description of what it is like to follow Jesus: when we follow Jesus, we bring others along. When we follow Jesus, what we do is care for others around us. And when we do this, God uses us to care for them too. The net is spread through the relationships we have, the love we share.

Over the last year we have been exploring relationships in a number of ways. We began pursuing community organizing in the beginning of the year, first imagining this as a way of connecting in relationship to people outside of our church. Then we realized that to do that, first we needed to build the relationships within our church. So we set up a series of house meetings to bring people together, to talk and listen to one another about things that mattered. It was a chance for conversation on a different level. Some of you who’ve known each other for years learned new things about one another, heard things you’d never heard each other say. Although it was aimed at the ideas of outreach, it deepened our relationships a little bit in the process.

We deepened relationships between us by sharing our own needs, too. We saw members go through health crises and life changes this year and reach out to others here for help. A little bit more chipping away at the self-reliance that so many of you pride yourself on. And of course help was readily at hand when it was asked for.

We began relationships with new people too, as new members joined our congregation and others came to programs like VBS and the Christmas pageant party and shared in our common life. And we began relationships with members of our community in our Lenten series, ‘Who Is My Neighbor?’, learning about cultures in our area and hearing some about what others around us need as well. A reminder that as a church we do more than just care for one another’s needs – [...]

RCL Year C, Proper 29

 

Welcome to the Feast of Christ the King. It’s a relatively recent feast on the church calendar – it was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925, and moved to its current date, the last Sunday of the church year, in 1969. Pope Pius created the feast day as a response to the growing secularism and nationalism of his age, a day to remind the world that it is God who is really in charge, and that we are citizens first of God’s kingdom, not our earthly nations. And so we keep the feast.

But technically, we don’t actually keep the feast, because we’re not Roman Catholic. Our Episcopal church calendar does not include this feast, even though it’s there in everything but name – you might have noticed that the readings for today all are on the theme of the righteous king, Jesus the king of the Jews, God’s reign on earth. And even though many materials from our national church say this Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, our democratic General Convention has never voted that name onto the calendar. So confusion abounds.

Well, there’s some church trivia for you. But who cares? Shouldn’t this day really be about Thanksgiving? Or better yet, Black Thursday?

But whether it is really a feast or not, there’s something important for us to hear today. The readings all make the point that yes, Jesus is king – but he’s king in a completely different way than we understand. He is not a new Caesar. He is not about earthly conquest and control. He is not absolute power wielded absolutely. Over and over again in the gospels Jesus turns our ideas of power upside down, and rebukes those who try to hold on to that kind of power – through riches, or status, or exploiting or lording it over others. When Pilate asks Jesus if he is indeed King of the Jews, Jesus’ answer is that he is one who bears witness to the truth – if he is king, then this is what his kingship is about, and his followers, his ‘subjects’, are those who hear the truth of God’s love and respond to it.

In the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote the Spiritual Exercises, a series of meditations for his monks. He includes one meditation called the Two Standards. The meditation offers two images of kings and their strategies: one the false king, Lucifer, who uses the desire for riches, honor, and pride as his strategy to enslave and destroy his followers, and one the true king, Christ, whose strategy is poverty, powerlessness, and humility. In the meditation, we are invited to decide whom we will follow – and therefore to begin changing our life to reflect those values. Of course the right answer is to follow Jesus. The paradox is that in self-emptying and humility, we possess everything:  Christ himself. Rather than being enslaved to the false king and the destructiveness of his path, we are brought into the truth: freedom from what has bound us, and the knowledge that our whole reality and value is grounded in being created and redeemed in Christ.

Here’s the thing, though: we find it very, very hard to live this out, because it requires living with a trust and a vulnerability that we rarely attain. It requires loving others more and worrying about ourselves less. That’s something that’s hard to do. It’s hard to do in our families – many of us will be trying it out over the holidays beginning this week. It’s hard to do everywhere. But here in this congregation, right now, we have an opportunity to try to do it better.

This last week we began our house meetings, the small group conversations we are having at ECA about why we are here and what we are feeling called to do together. We are including everyone in this process, every single one of you who come to this church. That means every one of you here – not just your spouse, not just the younger people, not just the grownups. Everyone is invited, because without knowing and understanding what everyone really cares about and has energy for, we can’t go anywhere togeth[...]