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Sermon for 5th Sunday after Pentecost - Pride Sunday

6/24/2018

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Given by The Ven. Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain
Sunday, June 24, 2018
1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49   Psalm 9:9-20   2 Corinthians 6:1-13    Mark 4:35-41

​May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts, and the actions of our lives be acceptable in thy sight, Oh God our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Good morning St. Aidan’s!  It is really good to be here.

And oh my gosh - the story of David and Goliath on Pride Sunday in San Francisco!  Wow.  This is great!
I’ve not preached on this text before, but of course I know it well.  We all do.   My sons loved it when I would read them this story.  Hurrah - they would say – little David the clueless shepherd fells the great big bully named Goliath!  Were my small boys bloodthirsty little things who loved to hear about a good fight, or did they get the point of the story?  I tried to stress what I thought it was all about – light on the violence and heavy on the idea that those who appear to be “strongest” don’t always win.  But I wondered if they got it.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of so many interesting books, wrote one called “David and Goliath:  Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” in 2013.  It’s a book that has been on my list for years, and when I was faced with preaching about this text here at St. Aidan’s, I thought maybe I should finally read it.

And so I did. 

It’s an interesting book.  With lots of good examples and great writing, Gladwell notes several things.  Among them he writes that "The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.”  He also writes “The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn't a miracle, it's just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong.”

When the weak refuse to play by the rules laid down by the strong.

All of this caused me to think about our tiny arguably “under-dog-ish” Episcopal Church – struggling to exist and persist and make a difference in a world full of rules made by the strong.  It seems daunting.

But what if we could close our eyes for a minute and try to see ourselves a little differently?  What if we could imagine an image of ourselves as buoyed up by the love and strength and power of God?  What if we could really live into the words of our reading today from Second Corinthians?  What if we imagined saying and believing what the reading tells us - “We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way….”  It’s clear that the power of God is mighty – our gospel account of the great windstorm and waves and scary sea that Jesus stilled is but one of many examples we hear in scripture about the power of Jesus, and of God.  So, if we have the power behind us, what is holding us back?  What is stopping us from finding what Malcolm Gladwell calls “deeply courageous paths?”

Well, I’m going to go right out on a limb here and posit that I think what stops us is fear.  Fear that we won’t be able to do enough, fear that we’re not good enough, fear that doing something risky will harm us somehow.  And being afraid gets in the way of our faith.  It’s what happened to the disciples in the boat, right?  They were terrified.  Jesus was asleep.  When he awoke, he asked them a simple question, “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?”

There is a chapter in the David and Goliath book centering on the Civil Rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King’s work.  Most of it seems impossible to me – I just can’t imagine how King and his leaders could have been so brave.  I can’t imagine myself feeling anything but terrified in their shoes.  But the book points out that there were some small things they did that didn’t seem quite so scary and that made a big difference.  Things that were strategic and planful and practical.  Things that were starting points.  For instance – when they realized people were afraid to march in their demonstrations and they had very few protesters assembled, they made a small tweak in their plans.  They changed the time of their demonstrations so that they would occur just when people were getting off work.  This meant that there were more people in the streets walking home, more people in cars and busses who would be watching what was going on, just more people.  The end result was that the protesters felt less alone, it looked in the photographs like more people were involved, and the word got out.  It wasn’t a big courageous move, it was more of a small smart tactic.  And those small things added up.

And so, if we’re feeling a little afraid or discouraged – and I confess that I feel both things – I wonder what our starting points might be?  How might we, Episcopal underdogs that we are, make a difference?

As I ponder this question, I remember one of my most moving experiences in this place.  It was the community memorial service for Mikey Lefiti, the UPS driver who was a casuality of senseless gun violence.  Do some of you remember that?  Mikey’s UPS route was around Diamond Heights, and when the neighborhood heard of his death, the idea of a memorial service at St. Aidan’s came up.  His family liked the idea too and so we hosted a service here.  It was an incredible outpouring of pure love.  Person after person talked about how Mikey got to know everyone in the neighborhood, that he introduced people to one another, that he was a symbol of love and caring and humanity.  He was far more than the UPS driver everybody knew and liked, he was an icon of community in the best way that we know it.  Benches were installed and blessed in his honor over by Creighton’s so that people could always remember what his life meant.

And so why do I bring this up as a starting point?  We do services all the time, you might be thinking.  It’s not that big of a deal.  But what struck me that day, and what strikes me often about St. Aidan’s, is that this kind of care for community works only because you, the people of St. Aidan’s, have carefully and patiently and over many years built real relationship with the neighborhood around you.  That’s not easy to do when you’re a small Episcopal church in secular San Francisco.  The service for Mikey that day was symbolic of how people think of St. Aidan’s – as the soul of Diamond Heights.  We didn’t coin that description - our neighbors did.  We weren’t eliminating the Goliath of gun violence that day at our memorial service – although we absolutely need to be brave enough to take that on too – but we were there for our neighbors when we are needed.  Careful shepherds, doing what we could, held by God.  A visible symbol of hope.

Our world is full of much that divides us and so much that we fear.  The New York Times Pride section this morning begins with the headline “Divided Together.”  And it has been ever thus.  Our Corinthians reading mentions afflictions, hardships, calamaties, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.  This reading could have been written today.  There is a lot of work for us to do.  We have national policies that until just this week were separating undocumented children from their parents at our border and elected officials who were using scripture to justify their actions.  We have places in our nation where people are forced to hide who they are and are stopped from using the bathroom of their choice.  We have classrooms and workplaces where racism prevails.  Gun violence is all around us.  I could go on and on but I won’t because what I want to say next is that this very same reading from Corinthians also steers us toward hope.  It talks of purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God.  Our psalm is another place of hope - reminding us that God is our refuge.  God is our refuge.

There’s one last thing from the David and Goliath book that I’d like to leave you with today.  It’s a quotation from a chapter about very much of an underdog community in France called La Chambon that hid Jews from the Nazis during World War II.  Gladwell writes;

“It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France.  It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.  If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.  If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction.  But you create a community of remote misses.  If you take away a mother or father, you cause suffering and despair.  But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.  You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley … and your eye is drawn toward the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor.  But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.”

And so, on this Pride Sunday, as we sit with the story of David and Goliath and as we celebrate and walk with our LGBTQ community and as we send love to the children and families at our border; I pray for us that we believe ourselves to be the fearless shepherds that our world yearns for, carried forth always by the power and love of God.  I have called us underdogs in this sermon, but that’s not really who I think we are.  I think we’re mighty.  And we have work to do.
​
Amen.

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Living Call: a Shared Homily

6/3/2018

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June 3, 2018
Proper 4B

Doug: I‘m Doug Barnett, a longtime member at St Aidan’s. As part of our commitment to year-round stewardship we are continuing to highlight ministries in which we share our time and talents.

Cameron: And I’m Cameron Partridge, your rector. In the relatively short time that I have been at St. Aidan’s thus far—especially in comparison to Doug!-- I have been struck by how many ministries of various kinds this community is a part of. There are varying levels of direct involvement that we have in them. Some we do almost exclusively on the volunteer power of folks who worship here on Sunday mornings. Some ministries we do in a combination of regular worshippers and folks from the wider neighborhood who may or may not worship elsewhere. Some ministries we engage both through our personal engagement and the  support of St. Aidan's Community Ministries Board (“the CMB”), which is the case with the ministry Doug will describe. All of these modes of ministry connect and stretch us in community, giving us opportunities to be agents and participants in the good news of God, to be a people of restoration, reconciliation, and hope in a world that is surely struggling. The  “we” of St. Aidan’s is vital and wide. Its borders are open and flexible. This “we” is on a wondrous journey, growing and changing, met and fed by God all along the way, urged onward into new terrain and new, strengthened relationships.

Doug: My wife Leonor and I have participated in a ministry called the St. Francis Living Room for many years. The mission of the St. Francis Living Room is to provide a clean, safe environment for low income and homeless seniors living in the Tenderloin.  It truly has the feel of a “living room” and most of the clients, living in SROs (Single Room Occupancy housing) or shelters, do not have this luxury. We provide a daily hot breakfast and social and educational activities on a shoestring budget with mostly volunteers.

Cameron: At a time of intense economic disparity in San Francisco, ministries like St. Francis Living Room are so important. I am struck by how it provides not only food but also space, and not just any type of space but “living room” space. Space to relax, to live, to be welcomed, to live and be in community, space to gather and be sustained. The Living Room sounds to me like a sanctuary. A sanctuary is, as we know and have experienced here, both a holy place and a practice, a way of being in community—a way of opening up community to and for others. And as Doug has experienced through his own way of practicing it, sanctuary is a place and community in which to experience God’s call.

Doug: In my life God’s call has been a living thing, both a continuation of my past and an invitation in front of me, beckoning me on. When I showed up for a job interview at the St Francis Living Room 16 years ago, I had no idea that this would be a call for me to live out my Christian life. I know that now. My call and circuitry to God has invited me to extend the call out to others to participate in this special program. I retired eight years ago from the paid position, but I continue to participate as a volunteer. Other volunteers include senior client guests who move from being served to serving others.

Cameron: All of us have a call from God that we live out in various ways—not only through more obvious modes, practices or habits we can perhaps easily label as a “ministry” but also through all of our relationships, through our everyday interactions and practices. But the way Doug speaks of his vocation reminds me that amid all the twists and turns, its various modes, our vocation has an overall shape. All of it works together, moves in a direction into which God constantly invites us. Our call, as Doug puts it, is “a living thing.”

Call can also be surprising. I would wager that the dimensions of vocation that most surprise us may be the most distinctive marks of God’s impress upon it, upon us. God’s call in our lives can be so strange that we may not initially recognize it for what it is. In our first reading the oddity is downright humorous. Poor Samuel thinks he’s hearing his master calling him. And Eli initially can’t figure out why his apprentice keeps waking him up. Finally it begins to become clear. Eli instructs Samuel to say not simply “here I am”, as Isaiah said in our first reading last week. He goes a step further. Samuel is to say, “speak, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam 3:10). Not just hearing, but actively listening. To receive God’s call we need to be prepared to hear things we might not want to hear, things that may make our “ears tingle,” as God goes on to warn Samuel just after our reading concludes (1 Sam 3:11). Our hearing may take us into new places or directions, to make new connections in what Doug wonderfully called a “circuitry to God.” Doug has, as he mentioned, continued to serve as a volunteer at the Living Room after retiring, and in that capacity has invited others into God’s holy circuitry.

Doug: Here are a few brief snapshots of my experiences in this community:

Frannie
Frannie is a woman in her 80s of Portuguese/East Timor heritage who grew up in Shanghai, China during the second world war. She lives close to the Living Room.  I would see Frannie passing by daily while I was working the door and would invite her in for a cup of coffee or tea.  Frannie originally refused saying, “No, that is for poor people.” She didn’t want to take away food from more needy individuals. On the day she finally joined us, she started to make toast for the breakfast program. Well, that was 15 years ago and I’ve since calculated that she has made over 350, 000 slices of toast, earning her the title of “Toast Master General.”  Frannie has become an integral part of the program, and she has found a family among us at the Living Room.

Bob
Bob is a regular client who became a daily volunteer.  He is a Vietnam War Vet and suffers from the effects of Agent Orange. Bob lives on the street and is resistant to attempts to secure him permanent housing. The only real home he has is the Living Room. Bob’s talents are many, including calling Bingo – one of our most popular weekly activities. He is now known as “Bingo Bob.”
​
Alice
Alice is a 90-year woman from China.  She is both gentle and feisty. Since she arrived at the Living Room a few years ago, she has been the unofficial greeter and translator for our Chinese community which has grown. Alice takes new clients under her wing, welcoming them and making them feel comfortable and part the Living Room family.

Cameron: When I hear Doug speak of Frannie, Bob, and Alice, particularly in the context of our readings today, I can’t help but think of our gospel passage and the story of David to which Jesus refers. Jesus and his disciples are walking through a field, hungry. When the disciples take grains of wheat to sustain them and are criticized by the Pharisees, Jesus pushes back. Was not their situation like that of David centuries earlier, he asks (Mark 2:25-26)? In that story from the twenty-first chapter of First Samuel, David is fleeing for his life from King Saul. He had just been warned by his beloved Jonathan, Saul’s son, that his father had indeed turned against him. The bread of the Presence, the only food available to him in that hour, sustained him and those fleeing with him in their vulnerability (1 Sam 21:1-6). As Jesus interpreted it, that sustenance was a sign that the Sabbath was made for human beings, not the other way around (Mark 2:27). To put it in slightly different language, the Sabbath is meant to refresh and sustain us for the ongoing journey, what Doug called the “living thing,” the “circuitry” of God’s call. Rather than refraining from eating toast or keeping it for more exclusive purposes, we are called to eat and share it, like Frannie, 350,000-fold. Rather than holding ourselves and our message back, we are invited to let the light of God shine out of the clay jars of our lives, in the spirit of our second reading (especially 2 Cor 4:6-7), to give God glory in our distinctive voices, like Bingo Bob. Refusing to be bound by the barriers of speech, we are called to translate it, like Alice.

Doug: One charm of the Living Room is that we know the name and special needs of each person that comes in for our services. The need in the Tenderloin has greatly increased: our average count is up from about 25 guests when we began to 75 guests each day. Each client guest is seen as a unique individual. In a city where the elderly are invisible, especially the elderly poor, the Living Room is a place where they are recognized and honored. 

Cameron: May our Living Rooms be opened as sanctuaries of refreshment, and may we continue to grow in love and community, always keeping our ears and hearts open to truly hear and respond to the surprising twists and turns, the circuitry, of God’s living call to us.
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Love, Radically Shared

5/20/2018

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Pentecost, 2018

Yesterday morning my family woke up early— not by alarm, but early enough. We came upstairs, I made coffee and scones, and we sat down to watch the royal wedding, which we had recorded. Admittedly, we are not particularly royal family watchers. We didn't watch William and Kate’s wedding a few years ago. I can remember the childhood summer when Princess Diana and Prince Charles married, but my family didn’t watch. There was no way we were going to miss this one, though, because Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was the preacher. Bishop Curry was elected by the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops at the General Convention three years ago, and I will never forget the ecstatic exuberance with which the House of Deputies voted to affirm this choice. The Presiding Bishop was in our diocese last year, so many of us have been inspired to hear him preach in person. Yesterday he preached with fervent joy and passion about love, how it comes from God and fills us with the power to love one another and in so doing change the world. Love has the power to sustain, inspire, and heal people in the most intractably difficult, oppressive situations, he said. The power of love sustained those who were enslaved in the United States over a century ago, he said, citing the spiritual “Balm in Gilead.” The love of God in and for which we were made, brings people together across all manner of divides, heals us, makes us a new creation and sends us out into the world to manifest God’s love. Not a milquetoast love, not a sentimental love, but a love whose “flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”[1] Together with eighteen million viewers in Britain alone, perhaps including many of you, we went to church yesterday in our living room as surely as we are this morning.[2]
            
Now, that reference to fire in the Presiding Bishop’s sermon was a gift from the Song of Songs (8:6-7), the biblical reading chosen for yesterday’s wedding, but it also perfectly links us to today, the Feast of Pentecost. Today is the day we celebrate the completion of the Easter good news – the fiftieth of the Great Fifty Days we began celebrating on Easter Sunday. It is the day when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples in the form of flaming tongues, filling them with power and launching the movement of Jesus’ followers of which we ourselves are a part. That is the story we heard in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. I will return to it in a moment. But first, our gospel passage can help set the stage for that story. Once again this week we heard from the Gospel of John which has been our companion through much of this season. In earlier weeks we have heard Jesus’ discourses from John’s gospel, explaining how he and the Father are one, and how when we abide or remain with him, we too share in that connection both with God and with one another. In and through that abiding, that seeking and sustaining of divine connection, we will bear much fruit, Jesus has said in passages near ours. Today he explains that this oneness, this connection that we share, continues even after his death, resurrection, and ascension. He remains with us, we hear today, through what he calls the Advocate, the “Spirit of truth.” This “Spirit of truth” is the powerful presence of God who testifies, who shares the truth with us and asks us to share it in the world (Jn 15:26-27). In the timeline of John’s Gospel the discourse we heard is actually prior to Jesus' death—this explains the sorrow filling the hearts of the disciples as they hear him reference “going to the one who sent me” (Jn 16:6). But only by his leaving, only after his dying and rising, could the Spirit of truth come (Jn 16:7). “I still have many things to say to you,” he said, still on our side of grave, “but you cannot bear them now” (Jn 12-13). The Spirit of truth, however, invites us to hear those things. 
            
This is the Spirit whose descent and inspiration we celebrate today. The Acts of the Apostles describes the moment vividly. The disciples are sitting together in a house. Out of nowhere, there comes a sound. They don’t know how to describe it except that it was like a “violent wind” blowing through the house (Acts 2:1-2). I imagine them sitting there, perfectly still, when it began. And then, as the noise continued, we hear that they saw “divided tongues, as of fire” (διαμεριζόμεναι γλῶσσαι ὡσεὶ πυρός) among them, with a single tongue alighting on each of them (Acts 2:3). Suddenly the disciples gain the ability to share about “God’s deeds of power” in languages beyond their own (Acts 2:5). The crowd that gathers around the house, drawn by the strange wind-rushing noise, is astonished to realize this as they listen more closely. Galilean disciples suddenly can be understood by “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene,” by visitors from Rome” by “Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9-12). A mystery takes place this day, a miracle of translation that becomes a bond of union—people are brought together across barriers of language and location. And they are not simply brought together, they are set alight. They are filled with the power of Spirit to go out and spread the good news of Jesus Christ, about the divine power of love to heal all brokenness, to create the world afresh. 
            
As I was sitting with this Acts passage this week, I found myself noticing the description of the tongues. “Divided tongues as of fire,” they are called. The word “divided” reminded me of the state of division so rampant in our world right now and made me curious about its usage, or at least its translation, in our story. The Greek for this word is διαμερίζω. It is related to the noun μέρος which can mean a portion or share, a part as opposed to a whole, or a turn or assigned role.[3]The verb can indeed be translated simply “divide” but it can also mean "distribute" or "share" portions of something larger.[4]The verb shows up in the eleventh chapter of Luke where Jesus speaks about how a kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert.[5]It shows up in all four versions of the passion narrative where the soldiers divide Jesus’ clothing among themselves.[6]It also occurs in Luke’s version of the Last Supper when he takes the cup of wine and tells the disciples, “take this and distribute it among yourselves.”[7]The verb only shows up twice in Acts, once in our passage and again shortly after our reading. In the second instance the disciples, newly inspired by the Spirit, take the radical step of selling their possessions and “distribut[ing] (διαμέριζον) the proceeds to all, as any had need.”[8]With these nuances in mind, the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost takes on a strongly distributive, communal dimension. 

The tongues of the Spirit’s flame not only bridge the divides of language and nation but also inspire a communitarian ethic of sharing. The Spirit is a gift given to all, shared freely with no regard for status or location. The story of Pentecost is one of radical opening and sharing, an ethic that is itself part of the good news we are called to proclaim. It is what Presiding Bishop Curry described yesterday: a “movement grounded in the unconditional love of God for the world… a movement mandating people to live that love,” a movement that can change “not only [our] lives, but the very life of the world itself.”[9]This distributive Spirit is divine love with the power to—as the Presiding Bishop listed— make poverty history, prevent children from going to bed hungry, make us to lay down our swords and shields by the riverside and study war no more, make the earth a sanctuary. This is the power of the Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of love, the Spirit who infuses us with the power to join God in transforming the world. In a week when ten students and teachers have died in yet another school shooting—this time in Santa Fe, Texas[10]—a week when sixty Palestinian protesters were killed at the Gaza border by a disproportionately armed Israeli army,[11]a week when the stability in Korea is vacillating wildly,[12]a week when California’s sanctuary state law and our immigrant communities are under increasingly vitriolic attack from the Trump administration,[13]we need to be reminded of this divine power, this love, this hope.
            
This Spirit descended upon the disciples over two thousand years ago, and it descends as well upon us. We do well to remember that we too are gifted by this Spirit in ways we can identify and in ways we can barely begin to understand. The power of this story is, in part, to remind us of God’s powerful, loving presence with us, urging us on, sending us out to share our gifts, to distribute them radically to help transform our world. There are many ways in which we are doing this and can yet do this, multiple gifts we have been given to share. You will notice in your booklet this morning a little red card labeled with a word. This word is a specific “gift of the Spirit.” There is a tradition, originally from the writings of Paul as Patricia Busk shared with our worship committee recently, of naming particular gifts of the Spirit.[14] I invite you to look at your particular card and consider how this gift may be operating in you. I also invite you call to mind people in the wider St. Aidan’s community, or indeed in other parts of your life, who may embody this gift. On the welcome table you will find a list of other gifts of the Spirit, prepared for us along with the individual cards by Patricia. May we give thanks for all of the Spirit's gifts today. May we share them with one another freely, distributing them broadly in this congregation and way beyond. 

In closing I would like to share a story of a Spirit-infused gift I recently received in the St. Aidan’s community. As you know, I recently experienced a Cursillo weekend with many thanks for all the ways you supported me through it. Last week I visited Harlean Donaldson who had particularly encouraged me to experience Cursillo. In the course of our visit I told her about my weekend before we shared Communion. Before I left, she asked me to wait while she and her health aid went to retrieve something. It was the cross Harlean received at the conclusion of her first Cursillo weekend in 1980. She wanted me to have it. I wear it today with profound gratitude. There are so many ways that we uphold one another here, so many gifts of the Spirit, so much love that we share so freely. Today on this Feast of Pentecost, may we truly take to heart, celebrate, and carry out into the world the Presiding Bishop’s message: “When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are all… children of God.”


[1]The Presiding Bishop’s sermon can be found online in both text and video formats here: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/presiding-bishop-currys-sermon-royal-wedding

[2]The Guardian reported the 18 million figure and guessed that “the global audience, while difficult to estimate, is likely to be in the hundreds of millions.” They also reported, “Social media interest in the event peaked during the passionate sermon delivered by US bishop Michael Curry, at which point people following the ceremony sent 40,000 tweets a minute.” Jim Waterson, Royal wedding confirmed as year’s biggest UK TV event. May 20, 2018:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/20/royal-wedding-confirmed-as-years-biggest-uk-tv-event  

[3]Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford Clarendon, 1889, 1991), 499.

[4]Liddell and Scott, 191.

[5]Lk 11:17 & also 18. A similar usage except with regard to families can be found at Lk 12:52 Entry for διαμερίζω in ed. I Howard Marshall, Moulton and GedenConcordance to the Greek New Testament (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2002), 208. 

[6]Mt 27:35; Mk 15:24; Lk 23:34; Jn 19:24. Moulton and GedenConcordance to the Greek New Testament, 208. 

[7]Lk 22:17. Moulton and GedenConcordance to the Greek New Testament, 208. 

[8]Acts 2:45.

[9]https://www.episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/presiding-bishop-currys-sermon-royal-wedding

[10]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/school-shooting-santa-fe-texas.html

[11]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/world/middleeast/gaza-protests-palestinians-us-embassy.htmland also https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/podcasts/the-daily/israel-gaza-jerusalem-embassy.html

[12]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/north-korea-trump-threats-summit.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=collection

[13]https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Trump-s-dangerous-rants-about-12923644.php

[14]See especially 1 Corinthians 12:4-11, and chapter 12 more broadly; Romans 12:6-8, and chapter 12 more broadly; Ephesians 4:11-12, and chapter 4 more broadly. For more on the Gifts of the Spirit from an Episcopal Church perspective (with further scriptural citations), see https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary/gifts-spirit.
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Touch Me and See

4/15/2018

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By Mia Benjamin, CDSP seminarian

The readings for this sermon were: Acts 3:12-19, 1 John 3:1-7, and Luke 24:36b-48.. 

One of my favorite podcasts, RadioLab, is in the middle of a compelling series on the science and politics behind why the US-Mexico border is the way it is. This week, the show looked into why the numbers of Latin American refugees found dead in the deserts suddenly jumped in the late 1990s--from 5-10 a year to over two hundred. It turns out that right around 1994, 1995, 1996, the US Border Patrol put into effect a major shift in their enforcement strategy. By amassing huge numbers of agents at certain points right along the border, the strategy deliberately channeled migrants away from the safer, traditional border crossings in the cities and into the harshest, cruelest environs along the border.

See, policy-makers believed, and still believe, that the desert—and the inevitable deaths that would result from those perilous crossing attempts—would act as a “natural deterrent” to migration. But nature, the scientists on the podcast reveal, also plays another, even more sinister role. Anthropologist Jason De León and his colleague’s experiments with pigs in the Arizona desert demonstrated for the first time how the desert erases every scrap of a human body is under nine days. Every scrap. Even the bones are broken down and carted away by industrious ants. And since discoveries of human bodies are how the US Border Patrol counts and records the number of deaths in the desert, Jason believes that terrifying statistics is actually far higher. The truth is we will never know how many bodies are disappeared each year. How many human beings are erased.

Easter begins with a missing body. Just that morning, the women disciples discovered that Jesus’s body was gone from the tomb. Later that day, the disciples are huddled together, processing even more shocking news from two other disciples, who claim to have encountered Jesus on the way to Emmaus, recognizing him in the breaking of the bread. Then, all of a sudden, Jesus’s missing body reappears, interrupting the disciples mid-sentence. It’s his body that’s so startling here. It’s his body that is called attention to. It’s his body that has broken all the rules.

Jesus is not a ghost, but a body. And not just a body, a living, breathing, hungry body that needs to eat. That still bears the wounds of the crucifixion. “Touch and see,” says Jesus. Touch and see the fleshy, bony-ness of me.

We live in a world that erases bodies that break the rules. In the light of Easter morning, how are we called to be church in such a world? What does sanctuary and welcome when we stand in the presence of Jesus’s resurrected body?

Bodies in general have a habit of interrupting things. Without warning, our own bodies disrupt carefully laid plans. They betray us, our senses of self. They burp and squeak, stumble and fall ill. Then, out in the world, many of us learn that our bodies are just plain in the way. Have you ever walked into a room and realized, immediately, that you stuck out? That your body didn’t quite belong but there was nothing you could do? Maybe it was the color of your skin or the style of your hair, your wrinkles, your tattoos, your limp. Extra weight or missing limbs. Or maybe it’s because your body parts just don’t quite fit into someone else’s categories. Were you welcomed? Could you receive welcome? And when you were, was it in spite of, or because of, the ways your body broke the rules?

As a teenage girl, I learned that my body, in its developing femaleness, was distracting to my peers. In another country, I learned that my body, in its whiteness and foreignness, did not belong. And every day, as a woman in this culture, I learn and re-learn that my body is supposed to be fixed and plucked and shaped and covered over. Every day, I’m taught to hope that the weirdness of my body can be overlooked.

We live in a world that looks past bodies that get in the way. And yet, Jesus says, touch and see. Jesus’s humanness, his aliveness, is located in his resurrected body. In his wounds, and in his hunger. Jesus’s resurrected body is not something to look past. It demands our gaze.

The bodily resurrection we proclaim in the Easter season dares to announce that we, too, are people and human and alive not in spite of our bodies, we are human because of them. Someone’s body-ness, their blackness or queerness, their disability or their age, they’re not physical accidents to politely disregard at all, they're intrinsic parts of human dignity to be honored and celebrated, touched and seen and loved.

As much as my body is so often a source of frustration and limitation and shame, every scar and every muscle and yes, every stretch-mark, is a map of my story. Because of Jesus, I get to trust that none of this, none of the love and joy and triumph over pain written into my flesh, is erased forever by death.

Easter dares us to dream, like Ezekiel, of dry bones in the desert. Of bone on bone, sinew on sinew, of a great rattling and a new breath of life. Jesus’ bodily resurrection dares us to hope that the bodies in the deserts of human cruelty and neglect, the people disappeared and erased, are not forgotten. Jesus’s resurrection dares us to reach out as if all bodies are human, worthy being touched, and seen, and loved.

What does the Easter interruption mean for bodies that walk into this room? The bodies we encounter throughout our lives? For our own?

At the Eucharist table, here, today, we are invited to encounter Christ’s body. To allow him to interrupt our brokenness. To take him, tangibly, into our bodies with the words “This is the body of Christ.”

May we touch and see and remember.
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Behold the Risen Wounds

4/8/2018

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Second Sunday of Easter
April 8, 2018

A number of years ago I saw the movie The Sixth Sense. It starred Bruce Willis who played a child psychologist and Haley Joel Osment who played a child who, as the famous tagline of the movie put it, saw dead people. And not simply wispy specters but rather terrifyingly substantial ghosts that didn’t know they were dead. The child struggles both with being scared by what he repeatedly sees and by the isolation caused by seeing what no one else could. Throughout the movie the psychologist struggles to assist the child to understand the purpose of his gift, which turns out to be to help the dead actually see themselves. In an iconic example of this realization, a dead character in the movie suddenly realizes what must be true, feels for and finds a gaping wound in his back, and twists around to finally look at it. Until he felt the mark of the wound and twisted around to see it, he was utterly stuck. Unless he did that, he could not believe what the child had quietly come to know.

Now Jesus, as depicted in our passage from the gospel of John this morning, is decidedly not a ghost. Nor is he dead but very much alive. This was just about impossible for his disciples to wrap their heads around, however. Earlier Peter and the person that John refers to as the Beloved Disciple had been at Jesus’ tomb. They had discovered it empty except for the linen that had been wrapped around Jesus’ body. The Beloved Disciple had “seen and believed” (Jn 20:8). It isn’t clear what Peter understood. Then Mary Magdalene had encountered two angels inside the tomb, followed by Jesus himself who stood next to her in the garden and had to speak her name before she realized who it was (Jn 20:16). She had gone on to tell the other disciples “I have seen the Lord” (Jn 20:18), unlike the Beloved Disciple and Peter who had simply returned to their homes (Jn 20:10). Now, at the end of this head-spinning day, the disciples had locked themselves away in the house where they had been meeting, terrified of being betrayed into the hands of Roman imperial authorities like Jesus had, trying to make sense of all that had happened. How could they dare believe what they had not seen? At that moment Jesus came into their midst although the doors were locked (Jn 20:19). The first thing he did was to bid them peace, as if to quell their alarm. The second thing he did was to show them his hands and his side. This move conveys to them, this truly is me. You who saw me die—at however far a remove – I am not an imposter. It is also to say, I am not a ghost. Jesus will say precisely this as he points to his hands and his feet in a passage from the gospel of Luke that we’ll hear next week (Lk 24:36b-48). The resurrected Jesus is flesh and blood. He has not skipped death but is in fact raised from it. And resurrection has not smoothed him over, either. He is marked by all he has passed through. His very body proclaims that resurrection is not an avoidance of death. It is not a prettification of death. It is in fact not possible without death. Resurrection life has taken up death into itself and swallowed it up for ever. Jesus’ body proclaims this to the disciples in a way that his words alone could not. He was showing them something they needed to see.
            
But poor Thomas missed it all and was not amused to learn of this. I tend to read his stubbornness as coming more from a place of disappointment and sadness than of habitual doubt. His declared insistence on not only seeing the mark of the nails in his hands but also on actually putting his finger and his hand into the openings in Jesus’ hands and side – as bitingly sarcastic as these statements sound – speak to me of an underlining longing, loss, and pain. They cry out how could you have left me, Jesus?And how dare you, my friends, open up this my own wound, my own loss? How dare you allow me to open my heart even for a minute to the hope that he lives?When Jesus arrives a week later, when – thank God—Thomas is actually present, Jesus immediately shows Thomas his wounds. And though his actions respond exactly to Thomas’ statement from the week before, I don’t think Jesus is interested in showing him up and making him look bad—even if the passage goes on to declare blessed those who come to believe even though they have not seen (Jn 20:29). This moment underlines that seeing and naming the wounds that led to death is integral to recognizing resurrection. This moment is about inviting Thomas, and through him all who behold this scene, who see this beloved body of Jesus, to take the time to observe the wounds and through seeing not only to believe but to begin to be healed. The resurrected wounds of Jesus which he specifically invites us to see in this scene remind me of the odd declaration Jesus had made earlier in John’s gospel (which we heard on the fourth Sunday of Lent) about the bronze serpent on the pole, lifted up in the wilderness so that all could behold an icon of their shared woundedness and be healed (Jn 3:14-21). 

This moment in the locked room in which Jesus shows himself to Thomas and all, has been depicted many times in art, from icons and paintings to sculptures. As some of you know, I have a particular fondness for these depictions (and for this story in general). The first icon I ever bought for myself was of this scene. Several years ago as I collected various images of it for a project I was working on, I discovered that art historians had come to call Jesus’ characteristic pose in this scene “ostentatio vulnerum,” literally “display of wounds.” To an English speaker the Latin cannot help but add the shade of an ostentatious vulnerability, a stance that defies the expectations of anyone who might assume the risen Christ to convey unblemished triumphalism. This Jesus, ostentatiously vulnerable, conveys visually what the letter to the Hebrews underlines (in a passage the Book of Common Prayer assigns to Good Friday) that Christ is very much able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15). 

As it so happens, the resurrected, side-wounded Christ has become an important icon to theologians whose work connects the gospel message to the liberation of marginalized peoples.[1]One of my favorite examples is in the disability theology of Nancy Eiesland who emphasizes in her book The Disabled God that the body of the risen Christ is not “restored” or “perfected” but very much still who and what it was. Christ’s “transfigured form that yet embodies the reality of impaired hands, feet, and side…” “offers hope that our nonconventional, and sometimes difficult, bodies participate fully in the Imago Dei and that God whose nature is love.”[2] Queer and trans theologians as well increasingly turn to this scene to rejoice that the body of the risen Christ bears the marks of its passage, inviting us not to look away but to see all that has happened, to know that we are joined by God in deep solidarity.[3]We stand before the mystery of resurrection-- something the world tells us we dare not dream of, that makes no sense-- and believe it anyway. This scene was the first biblical story that really spoke to me as a young person. If you had asked me as a teen what story really spoke to me, grieving the breakup of my parents’ marriage and the beginnings of my mom’s long struggle with chronic illness, and alienated at times by peers who didn’t understand my unspoken but visible queerness or my Christianity which was counter cultural in my context, it would be this one. This was the story that laid a claim on me. This risen but wounded Christ could hold the complexities of my life, allow them to be, invite me to turn and look and know that all of this would be, was even then, and is now, redeemed, whole.
 
The risen Christ comes to us as we are locked away in fear. He knows our fears are real. He has felt them himself. It was in fact fear that originally felled him -- fear that suffused and stoked an imperial Roman context that felt it had to extinguish any movement that exposed its brittle power. It was fear that caused it to reinforce the appearance of insurmountable dominance by an execution that served as a public erasure. The risen Christ has walked through all of that. He has lifted up this entire scene even as it became displayed on his very body so that all could see its horrific dynamic. On the other side of this horror, he has been raised, showing us that nothing, not even such horror, can vanquish the power of God, nothing can stop the hope of Christ’s ever-beating heart. We need not lock ourselves away in fear, as treacherous as the world continues to be. We are not powerless, death cannot stop the flow of God’s love and the power of God’s people to be bearer’s of God’s peace and liberation, indeed God’s joy here in this world, even as creation itself groans. This risen Christ stands in our midst and calls us to look, to see the marks of the wounds in his body all around the world. Do not be overcome by fear, he tells us, but see, reach out and touch, do not turn away. Unlock those doors, fling wide the sanctuary, dear friends, nothing can separate us from the love of God and the power of the risen Christ who has vanquished death itself. Turn around and behold your own wounds. See and confront the persistent wounds of gun violence, racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Turn again and behold in sorrow the death of Dr. King fifty years ago this week. Stand with those making their way to countries of safety and shelter from violent contexts of origin. Grieve your losses together, support one another even as I stand with you, but do not lock the doors of your hearts. Peace be with you, Christ breathes to us, sending us out, out to stand with one another in the world, to be bearers in our collective body of his risen glory.

[1]See for example, M. Shawn Copeland in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), especially p. 116. 
[2]Nancy Eiseland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory God of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 107-108. 
[3]See, for example, Rachel Mann, Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God (Wild Goose Publications, 2012), esp pp. 15, 132; Shannon Kearns, Walking Toward Resurrection: a Transgender Passion Narrative, pp. 61-62. I have worked with this image in “Side Wound, Virgin Birth, Transfiguration” in Theology and SexualityVol. 18, no. 2 (2012): 127-132 and in “Holy Week,” in ed. Barb Greve Crossing Paths: Where Transgender and Religion Meet (UUA, 2003), 51-64. Feminist historians of Christianity – e.g. Caroline Walker Bynum, Karma Lochrie, Amy Hollywood—have for some time been unpacking dimensions of gender and sexuality in the mystical interpretations of the side wound in the medieval writings of, for example, Bernard of Clairveaux, Julian of Norwich, or Angela of Foligno. Queer, cisgender theologians have also explored the side wound as a site of eroticism—e.g. Graham Ward, Jay Johnson. Linn Tonstad has recently offered a critical perspective on “the wound-womb” topos in God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude(New York: Routledge, 2017).

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"That's Just What I Wanted!"

4/1/2018

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Easter Day, 2018

Gracious God, stir up in your Church that Spirit of adoption which is given to us in Baptism that we, being renewed both in body and mind, may worship you in sincerity and truth, through Jesus Christ, raised in glory. Amen.

When our youngest son was born, he arrived rather suddenly. We knew that second babies often come early, but still we were shocked when he came a couple weeks ahead of his due date. In the middle of the night Kateri turned to me and said, essentially, “it’s time.” I called our friends Sara and Noah, and Sara came to stay with our older son as we raced off to the hospital. We hurried into the birth center as quickly as we could, and once we were ushered into the birthing room B arrived within minutes. When we texted Sara to let her know, she replied a few hours later that when she woke up G some time later to tell him he had a baby brother, his immediate response was, “that’s just what I wanted!” (Needless to say these guys, like all siblings, don’t always feel that way…) Our whole lives had been stirred up by what the collect called “that spirit of adoption.” We had had several months to prepare, which particularly for families who adopt or are foster parents, may well not be the case. Nonetheless suddenly, abruptly, there we were: a family of four. That’s just what we wanted. And oh my goodness, it was only the beginning of the new life God was stirring us into. Every single day—however our lives of chosen and given family may be configured – God surprises us, interrupts us, calls us to embrace the paschal mystery, newness of life here and now even as well as at the end of all things. 

The resurrection story we just heard from the Gospel of Mark is filled with shock, sudden momentum shift, and invitation to share newness of life. Mark’s version is the earliest of the four gospels and is characteristically pared down, even abrupt. When it comes to Jesus’ resurrection, the tone is jolting, not what you might expect for such a joyous event. In parallel with other resurrection accounts, women play a key role in this pivotal moment. As those whose role it was to anoint the body with spices, they were the first to encounter the shocking good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had lost Jesus, their teacher, the Messiah their community expected to triumph in restoring the kingdom of David, not to be killed at the hands of the Roman empire. In their grief they were focused, as is often helpful in the first days after the death of a loved one, on the practical. How on earth would they be able to move that massive stone? But when they arrived the stone was rolled away and the tomb unnervingly opened. No body was in sight except a young stranger dressed in white, sitting on the tomb’s right side. As Mark tells it, this stranger could perceive the women’s alarm. And if perhaps they wondered whether they’d somehow gone to the wrong tomb, he preemptively says, they are looking for Jesus who was crucified, laid in this tomb right there, yes? “He has been raised. He is not here” (Mk 16:6). The women are understandably confused beyond the telling. The stranger also doesn’t give them any time to process his message. Instead he presses them, “go, tell” the others that Jesus “is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (Mk 16:7). Their grief-stricken momentum has been completely interrupted. They could only flee in terror and amazement without time even to stop and say to one another, “what just happened?” Amazingly, scholars have long agreed, this marks the original ending of Mark’s gospel. In shock, we are sent out with the women, our own spirits stirred by news so unfathomably good that we can barely begin to take it in.

In a sense the Apostle Paul picks up this stirring where Mark leaves off. To be clear, Paul’s letter writing historically precedes Mark’s account (1 Corinthians was written in the 50s C.E. whereas the Gospel of Mark was composed around 70 C.E.). As it so happens, Paul’s account of the resurrection is actually its earliest description in all the New Testament writings.[1]His list of the events we have so carefully contemplated over Holy Week can sound almost sterile: Christ’s death, burial and resurrection followed by his appearance to groups of increasing sizes. To be fair, Paul lists things in this specific way to underline their reality and their importance. But then his own specific relationship to it all emerges. “Last of all, as if to one untimely born” the risen Jesus appeared to him, Paul says, calling himself the least of the apostles (1 Cor 15:8). Untimely born? The least? Now, if you’re at all familiar with Paul you’ll know he is not immune to hyperbole. But Paul had a reason for this self-deprecation. He had never known Jesus prior to his death. And when he learned about Jesus and his followers he didn’t just consider them irrelevant or simply disagree with their proclamation that Jesus was the Messiah. Paul had actively sought to undermine and even persecute the earliest community of Jesus’ followers (1 Cor 15:9). As a result, the early followers were very leery of him. No one was more surprised than Paul when, on his way to Damascus, as is relayed in a passage from the Acts of the Apostles not among our readings today, Paul was suddenly blinded and knocked over by a light from above and confronted by a voice he could not escape. The voice didn’t try to sweet talk him into conversion. It confronted him. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”[2]When Paul asked who was speaking, the voice explained itself as Jesus, “the one you are persecuting.” “But get up,” the voice quickly continued with urgency much like the white robed stranger at the tomb, “and enter the city and you will be told what to do.” So Paul got up, went into the city, was prayerfully healed of his induced blindness by another of Jesus’ followers, and then basically jumped into the fray. Paul went on to become one of, if not the,most influential people to share Jesus’ story and to grow the movement that was then known simply as “the Way.” Jesus’ story was not simply a breathtaking event, but had a profound impact upon his own life. I shouldn’t be the one telling this story, he essentially says, but it reached me, it knocked me over, it confronted me and then picked me up and moved me into new life. “By the grace of God,” he says, “I am what I am” (1 Cor 15:10). Paul’s transformation is deeply connected to the story of Jesus’ resurrection. His life was transformed, his way of seeing the world reshaped. From being one whose actions tore at the fabric of the earliest communities of Jesus’ followers, he became one of the most influential early builders of Christian community.

Truly Paul was stirred up by that spirit of adoption, to use the language of the prayer with which I opened. In fact, Paul is the originator of that phrase. In a passage from his letter to the Romans he speaks of how the “Spirit of the one who raised Christ from the dead” (Romans 8:11a) inspires and infuses us here and now, as well as on the other side of our own mortality. “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,” Paul says, but particularly through the sacrament of baptism “you have received a spirit of adoption.” In baptism we are plunged into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. We become God’s children, adopted into God’s family. When we emerge from the baptismal waters, Paul describes, it is as if we are being born, crying out in disorientation and longing. And in that moment, Paul says, the Holy Spirit joins our cries, “bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,” that we belong, that Christ’s resurrection opens the way of our own newness of life, our own transformation (Romans 8:15-16). At baptism, in response to God’s planting of the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection into our very hearts, we pledge to practice lives marked by Christ’s life and ministry, his death and resurrection. This is why at several points during the Church year we renew our baptismal covenant, particularly at Easter. We promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers; to persevere in resisting evil; to proclaim the Good News in word and example; to seek and serve Christ in all persons; to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.[3]These promises requires us to be stirred not just once but again and again, to awaken afresh to the interruptions of the resurrected Christ, to be turned in new directions, to embrace our adoption as an ever-expansive family of God in all that we do.

The assurance of resurrection life is a bedrock of our faith that can sustain us in the worst of times. And in the midst of so much pain and fear in the world, so much up-building of walls and undermining of human dignity, we need to be grounded in this mystery of resurrection life more than ever. We need to open ourselves again and again to the imprint of resurrection patterning and shaping our lives, to look for the interruptions of God here and now, stirring up our lives, prompting us into deeper fellowship and communion far beyond the familiar lanes of our everyday lives. The mystery of resurrection makes us new, reshapes us as community, splices us into new forms of family through the spirit of adoption. Sometimes that newness of life will shock us into speechlessness. Sometimes we might instinctively run in the opposite direction. And sometimes in response we are able to declare in its full-throated embrace, “that’s just what I wanted.” May the unbounded love of God, Creator and Parent, the bond-bursting power of the risen Christ, and communion of the Holy Spirit be with us, sustain us, and stir us this Easter morning and ever more.
 
[1]The HarperCollins Bible Commentary (HarperCollins, 2000), Mark.
[2]Acts 9:4+, also referenced in Galatians 1:13-17.
[3]Book of Common Prayer, 304-5
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This Is the Night

3/31/2018

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Easter Vigil, 2018
 
This week, dear friends, we entered upon the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby God has given us life and immortality through Jesus Christ.
 
We have observed the entry into Jerusalem waving palms and singing. We have witnessed Jesus’ betrayal, trial and mocking, the momentum that led to his execution. We observed him being laid in the tomb, and this morning we sat in here in observance of his death.
 
But now the tide has turned. “On this most holy night…” we prayed together outside. And then again, This is the night, we sang together in the Exsultet. “This is the night,” dear friends, “when Christ passed over from death into resurrection life.” At the Easter Vigil, the apex of the Christian year, the layers of story align like a syzygy in our telling, opening the mystery of the good news that in Jesus Christ the domain of sin and death, brokenness and mortality, have been overcome. No longer do they hold dominion. Death’s chain has been broken. The life of resurrection, the forgiveness of God, and the redemption of our souls and bodies have been unleashed, graciously bestowed in a manner far beyond our logic or even our imagination. 
 
This is the font. The sign, or perhaps for some of us (if we were baptized here) the literal location of our baptism. In it, says Paul in his letter to the Romans, “we are baptized into Christ’s death… buried with [him] so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by God’s glory, we too might walk in newness of life.” This is the outward and visible sign of our inward engrafting into this wild mystery.
 
Take, eat: This is my body. Drink this, all of you: this is my blood, Jesus said to his disciples and to us each time we celebrate communion at his table. This bread and this wine are his body and blood, they are holy food for a holy people, a people who come to the table again and again to be nurtured to grow, to walk with one another and with Christ.
 
This is the tomb.That’s what the women expected to say when they came upon it, grief-stricken and overwhelmed. As they approached prepared to fulfill the practice of anointing the body of their beloved Jesus, they expected to come face to face with an unmovable stone. Only when they arrived, their worldview was turned on its head once more. It was opened, not sealed; empty, not filled. “He is not here but has been raised,” a stranger in white proclaimed to them. The object of their affection and the focus of their grief had been transformed. They had been shocked into a life beyond their imagining, blindingly good news that opened a way forward that was in that moment far more terrifying and overwhelming than consoling.
 
Twenty years ago after I graduated from seminary, and when I was early in the ordination process, I began working on a mobile homeless outreach team at an agency called Tri-CAP. Much to my amazement and utter inadequacy, I was the “housing specialist” on the team, working with unhoused individuals, and sometimes couples—but not folks with children – to find housing. Because in greater Boston, housing prices were usually far beyond their means, I helped those who didn’t have Section Eight vouchers apply for them, or to apply for “elderly/disabled” housing, since most of them qualified for it whether by age or ability. But actually getting them into housing felt totally overwhelming and practically impossible. Whenever we had a victory—and particularly whenever one of them got housed – it felt especially important to celebrate. We celebrated in triumph, but we did so with a sense that the journey continued. We did so in a spirit of what I came to think of as an expression of “aliveness to God,” to use one of Paul’s phrase, of bearing forward and embodying in community the wild, surprising excess of resurrection life. The sign I chose for that celebration was a bell. It was a bell that came from my grandfather’s basement, brought to California from farm life on the Midwest, a bell I had played with as a child. I had eagerly brought it in when my high school chorus director had let us know that a piece we were singing called for cowbell. You should have seen her face—it clearly had hung around the neck of an actual cow at some point.
 
This is the bell. We rang it every time we had a victory at Tri-CAP, and we laughed every time. Everyone on our hall heard it and they would laugh too, reminded that we were all on our way together. In the years since I have always hung it in my office, mindful of the tradition of ringing bells to signal our joyous participation in the victory of Christ over death. 
 
This is the night. This is the font. This is Christ’s body and blood. This is the tomb. This is the bell. These are our stories. Christ is raised. Alleluia!
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Beloved, Behold Your Family

3/30/2018

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Good Friday, 2018
Liturgy of the Seven Last Words

1) Father forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34)
2) Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43)
3) Woman, behold your son: behold your mother (John 19:26-27)
4) My God, My God, why have you forsaken me, (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34)
5) I thirst (John 19:28)
6) It is finished (John 19:30)
7) Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46)

“Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.”
 
In her powerful book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Episcopal theologian Kelly Brown Douglas writes of Jesus as someone who throughout his life identified and stood with those on the margins. Because Jesus was always identified with what she calls the “crucified class” of people, his death on the cross was an extension of his—of God’s— commitment of solidarity. In conversation with theologian James Cone, whose book The Cross and the Lynching Tree we read here last spring, Douglas says, “the crucified class in the first-century Roman world was the same as the lynched class today. It consisted of those who were castigated and demonized as well as those who defied the status quo. Crucifixion was a stand-your-ground type of punishment for the treasonous offense of violating the rule of Roman ‘law and order.’” (174) Douglas writes passionately and devastatingly about the deaths of four young people in 2012 and 2013 - Renisha McBride, Jonathan Ferrell, Jordan Davis, and Trayvon Martin – who were gunned down amid this country’s ongoing, racist “stand your ground” culture war. A mother herself, Douglas pays particular attention to the impact of these deaths on the young people’s parents. They “were the pride of their mothers,” she says. “They were all children of God. They had lives that were not defined by the stand-your-ground realities that killed them. Their lives were defined by who they were as children of God. Because of Jesus’ resurrection the crucifying realities of their deaths will not have the last word over their lives.” (203) 
 
My oldest son G and I picked up this poster last weekend at the San Francisco March for Our Lives in recognition that fight against gun violence connects across communities and histories. Today may we remember Stephon Clark in Sacramento and Jesus Adolpho Delgado in the Mission, both recently lost to gun violence, in their case at the hands of the police. May we pray for all families and particularly all parents impacted by gun violence. And may we open ourselves anew to the gift of relationship, of an expanded sense of family, as Jesus gifted to his mother and beloved disciple: “woman, behold your son; beloved, behold your mother.”
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Maundy Thursday

3/29/2018

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By Mia Benjamin, CDSP Seminarian

The texts for this sermon were: 
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35, and Psalm 116:1, 10-17

When I was trained as a Godly Play teacher a few years ago, I learned that an essential part the Montessori-inspired children’s curriculum is what’s called “work time.” After the teacher physically acts out a Bible story with small figurines, the children are invited to play with the props themselves. After sitting impatiently through the story, they’re finally invited to wiggle their fingers in the sand of the Exile story, smell the chrism scent of the Baptism oil, and spill water all over the floor. 

Contained in this teaching method is an understanding that the act of retelling a story ourselves, with our bodies and voices, is a key part of learning. As a Christian educator, I also used other Sunday school curricula that suggested silly activities like jumping around a room, dividing up marbles, and holding hands to metaphorically reinforce lessons from the Bible and Christian tradition. They were fun, and they ate up time, but they also helped the kids remember.

It took going to seminary to plant to idea in my head that “work time”--playing through the lessons--is exactly what worship is for adults—for everyone, really. It’s rehearsal for our lives. It’s a chance to act of the “what if” of the kingdom of God, and to intentionally move and sing and speak as if all this is true and worth learning to do well. And it’s a time to know it in our bodies. We taste the sweet wine on our tongues, we touch the soft sweater of the friend we are praying for, we let our feet move to the rhythm of ancient songs. 

In this specific context and culture—in this well-educated, 2018 Californian city—intellectual, rational knowing is most often privileged above all other ways of knowing. In fact, there are very few spaces in our culture left for embodied knowing at all. Mainly we just leave it to experts or watch others play out the drama. I fear we’ve forgotten what it means to let ourselves learn with our bodies, through play, through throwing our whole selves in.

That’s part of what makes this place, this parish, so special, isn’t it? Over the course of this year, I keep learning what many of you already know. Silliness and humor, acting and drama, are a striking part of St. Aidan’s gifts. And I, the way-too-serious kid who gave up acting as soon as she had to do comedic musicals, have a lot to learn from you still. Play--letting loose, letting go, diving in--hasn’t always been so easy for me, especially with other adults. It can feel so...foolish sometimes. My brain gets in the way. I’m afraid it will be awkward or unhygienic or unsafe, that’ll break the rules...See, but then Jesus comes along and reminds me that the rules that keep us from one another, that bar us from following the truest, greatest commandment of love, deserve to be broken. This is the first gift Jesus gives to me this night this year. He comes along this night and shocks Peter, and me, into love that breaks through my sense of self.

So much of Holy Week is about allowing ourselves to be shocked, after all. No matter how many Holy Weeks we’ve experienced, we are invited to get carried away in the drama, throw ourselves in, and feel it all anew. To be shocked at the horror of the cross, the hollow emptiness of the closed tomb, and the joyous fullness of the open one. Yet here, at the beginning, on Maundy Thursday, the mighty act of God is a humble one. What’s so shocking is how tiny and simple it really is. A small ritual that speaks beyond words. 

Tonight, we celebrate a second beautiful gift Jesus gives us, one that’s meant to be opened again and again. This is the night when Jesus knelt down to wash his students’ feet and asked them, asked us, to do the same. This is the night when he sat with his disciples and took, blessed, and broke the bread and the wine and asked us to keep doing this. To keep remembering symbolically together, to keep knowing in our bodies what his words really mean. So this is also the night we take those bodies and we act out what service looks and feels like—taking each other’s feet into our hands and gently washing them, feeding each other from a shared glass of wine. As if all of it is true and worth practicing and doing well.

Yes, God asks more of us than the symbolic actions contained within worship. Hospitality is more than the gathering around a Eucharist table and serving each other is more than washing feet. And no, Holy Week is not just contained within the next three days. The cross and resurrection don’t just happen once a year--or even once a week. But it is in worship, it is in these three days, that we collectively reorient ourselves to those values and deep truths. It is in worship where we define ourselves and our faith as the way of life signified in simple movements. 

I've had the pleasure of speaking with several of you these past few weeks in recorded interviews. You've let me ask you about what faith and church and all this means to you. And I hope more of you continue to let me! I've been struck, in this interviews and the one-to-one meetings in the fall, by a point that seems to crop up in just about every meeting. There's this moment when it all becomes just a bit beyond what either of us can express. When you've told me that the feeling, the knowing you can't explain--well, how real it is anyway. And I hope you've noticed me nodding. Because I've known, too. Just as there is love too deep for words, and cliches, there is, too, a faith too mysterious, too shocking, too irreducible to squeeze into human language. And it's what draws you back. And it's what I suspect many of us know in our bodies--that which our hands and feet and hearts remember from the simple act of practicing, over and over, as if all this is true and worth doing well.

So this Holy Week, this is our chance to wiggle our toes in the water, breathe in the scent of lilies, and dribble beeswax all over our clothing. Now maybe washing feet feels silly to you, or too shocking. Or maybe it breaks too many rules. And that’s okay. Noticing those feelings, and that resistance, that's actually part of the point. And there are so many more moments in our Christian life to try on, play around, and practice together. But above all this Tridium, I do invite you to allow yourself to be shocked, all over again. To let go and dive in, regardless. To step into the drama that is at once both theatrical and so profoundly true. To play.
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Entering Upon the Contemplation - Palm Sunday

3/25/2018

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“…that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality…” Palm Sunday Liturgy, Book of Common Prayer, 270
 
“…he emptied (ἐκένωσεν) himself… Therefore God also highly exalted him (ὑπερύψωσεν)…” Philippians 2:9
 
“And I, when I am lifted up (ὑψωθῶ) from the earth will draw all things to myself.” John 12:32

This morning we stand in a gateway—a hinge, if you will – of Holy Week. We have been walking together these last five weeks to arrive at this moment, “the entry into Jerusalem.” As the collect we prayed earlier outside beautifully put it (and as I commented upon in my Flame piece last week), today we “enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts” whereby God has “given us life and immortality.”[1] That is, today we step together into a space of contemplation, a prayerful and reflective practice of telling and hearing the story of the events leading up to and including Jesus’ death and – as we will celebrate one week from today – his resurrection. In the prayer’s odd phrasing, we “enter upon” this contemplation as if entering a room where multitudes long before us have been contemplating this mystery and where others will continue long after us. Having walked through today’s gateway, this week we will contemplate this story at much greater detail, worshipping here each evening at 7pm, beginning tomorrow night. At the start of this week-long contemplation, the question that swirls in my heart is what this story, this sequence of stories, reveals to us about God. Who is the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ who -- after walking with us, healing injuries, proclaiming good news to the poor and release to the captives, casting his lot among outcasts-- died in a horrific execution at the hands of the Roman Empire? More pointedly, what does our collect mean when it describes the turns of this week’s story sequence as “mighty acts,” and what do those acts reveal about the God who carried them out?

First there is the mystery of the word “mighty.” This descriptor sounds impressive, kingly, perhaps even imperial, an evocation of a conquering God who overthrows evil foes. The Gospel of Mark’s version of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, the first chunk of the gospel that we read outside, also carries some of this tone when it, alone of the canonical gospels, includes the phrase “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” (Mk 11:10) There was an expectation in Jesus’ first century Jewish context that when the Messiah came he would indeed re-establish the kingdom of David. He would be righteous and mighty. The Messiah would carry power in an easily recognizable, triumphal manner. The anointed one would be exalted. And I think it important to point out here that this idea of kingly exaltation carried deeply gendered dimensions. Particularly in a context of imperial oppression, where power was so often wielded as “power-over,” as a form of what contemporary theorists of gender in general and masculinity in particular might call “hegemonic masculinity,” one who would re-establish a kingdom was expected to carry power as a form of being in-charge, as calling the shots, as invulnerability.

The “mighty acts” of God in Jesus Christ, however, the workings of divine power in his life and ministry, in his death and even in his resurrection, do not come across as invulnerable. They are not invulnerable, in fact. They express the very height of vulnerability. These “mighty acts” look the opposite of strong. In fact, they look weak, so much so that they inspired mockery not only from the soldiers who took him to his death (Mk 15:16-20), not only from passersby who saw him hanging on the cross (Mk 15:29), and not only from religious authorities who expected a Messiah to look and act entirely differently (Mk 15:31-32a), but even from people being crucified alongside him (Mk 15:32b). If they looked like nothing else, all of these people supposed, God’s mighty acts in Jesus should at the very least entail coming down from the cross, not succumbing to it.

The Apostle Paul gives us an overview of this paradox of divine power in the hymn that he quotes in the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians. Though Christ was in “the form of God” (a mysterious idea in and of itself), “he did not consider equality with God as [something] to be held onto” (οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ) but rather “emptied himself” (Philippians 2: 6-7). Instead of an exalted, hegemonic form of power that is easily recognizable as power-over, Christ “emptied himself” and took on a form of service. Paul puts it yet more provocatively by calling it, “the form of a δοῦλος,” which can be translated servant or slave. Paradoxically, in the wake of this emptying came exaltation. The base verb for this exalting – υψόω — is the same as the one we have heard for two weeks running now. As you may recall, at the conclusion of last week’s passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke of being “lifted up from the earth” (Jn 12:32). And the week before that, also in John’s gospel, Jesus spoke of being “lifted up” just like the bronze serpent on the pole (Jn 3:14). These passages used this idea of being lifted up as a sign of healing, a sign of new growth and life from out of hurt, out of pain, out of death itself. So too, Paul’s hymn speaks of God lifting up the one who poured himself out and adds the prefix “hyper” (ὑπερυψόω) — super-exalted, if you will. As with John’s gospel, being lifted up is intentionally paradoxical, purposefully subverting expectations of what we think divine power should look like. The mighty acts whose contemplation we enter upon this Holy Week reveal a God who poured Godself out in the life, ministry and death of Jesus Christ, a God who can be neither named nor contained by the standards of human power-over. In Jesus Christ, this God joins us in mourning and anguish, heals and consoles, stands in the margins refusing injustice, is willing to die unjustly that injustice itself might be overturned. This God does not model a form of power that walls itself off from others but, rather, one made manifest in the opening of hearts to presence and connection, a power that invites us to bear witness with one another to our unique humanity, to walk with one another just as Christ has promised always to walk with us.

Recently we have seen this kind of power, this outpouring, enacted communally in rallies and uprisings across our country in response to gun violence. Young people in particular have been coming together to claim and affirm their agency, to call for accountability and gun control legislation in the wake of the violence that has been claiming their lives in neighborhoods and in schools across this country. This week in Sacramento people shut down highways in protest against the killing of Stephon Clark, a twenty-two year old African American man, dad of a one-year-old and a three-year-old. Suspected of breaking car windows in the neighborhood, he was shot in his grandmother’s back yard by police who fired twenty times, thinking he had a gun. He only had a cell phone.[2] Two weeks ago in the Mission the community rose up in protest against the killing of nineteen-year-old Jesus Adolfo Delgado.[3] An undocumented immigrant who had come to this country as a child, he was suspected of armed robbery and died amid a volley of 99 rounds fired by police as he hid in the trunk of a car, terrified of deportation.[4] And of course, yesterday streets from Washington D.C. to Oakland and San Francisco were filled particularly with youth and young adults who have been activated anew in the wake of the school shooting that took place in Parkland, Florida on Ash Wednesday. As several of us from St. Aidan’s walked down Market Street, swept along by a band and drums, one of our children carried a sign we made when Ana Hernandez led us in a sign making and chant composition event in October. At the end of the day I watched speeches from Washington D.C.’s rally. The one that really got me was by Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland shooting. She and her classmates are very clear that although this movement has recently risen into unprecedented prominence, their privilege has contributed to that rise and the scourge of gun violence has been afoot for decades.[5] In her speech Gonzalez named all of her classmates who died, adding brief tidbits about their personalities. Then suddenly she went silent and stared out into the crowd. The silence went on and on as tears ran down her face. Several times the crowd cheered her and then went silent again. What was she up to? And then suddenly a timer went off. It had been six minutes and twenty seconds since she had begun speaking, she declared, the amount of time it took the gunman to kill all seventeen people and then blend in with the crowd as they ran to escape the building.[6] By her practice and explanation of this silence, Gonzalez had in a powerfully way brought all of her listeners into the unspeakable horror of that day. She had allowed us – as our collect put it – to enter upon the contemplation of a sequence of events, a profound experience of terror, pain, death, and loss that has forever changed her and her classmates. By allowing a wide swath of people to become present to the sequence of events, all of us were brought into its immediacy. All of us were invited to see, experience, and be changed.

This week as we enter into the contemplation of that sequence that we dwell upon each year during Holy Week, we are reminded that this practice reflects and responds to the God who in Jesus Christ came to dwell with us. Sometimes our contemplation will take the forms of singing, and of praying aloud. Sometimes it will take the form of silence. As we make this journey, may we know that the God for whom we sing, the God to whom we pray in word and in silence, this God consoles us, stands in radical solidarity with us, and takes up into God’s own heart the violence and death that erupts in our world. Amid the violence of our world, God invites us to know every human being, including ourselves, to be profoundly seen, known, and beloved. The mighty acts of this God whose “contemplation we enter upon” this week do not take up what we might think of as hegemonic forms of power. These acts do not wall God off, set up bulwarks, exude invulnerability. Quite the opposite. In Jesus Christ God is poured out into the fear, the pain and brokenness of our world. In Jesus Christ, God has joined our world, has taken it up and into God’s own open heart in order to transform it, to raise it into a new creation of beauty, of love, of peace that surpasses all understanding. This is the God of hope with whom we walk—who walks with us. This is the God who through the mystery of this outpouring has given, has lifted up the gift of resurrection life.


[1] Book of Common Prayer, 270

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/us/video-sacramento-police-shooting.html

[3] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/13/mission-district-fatal-ois-jesus-adolfo-delgado-duarte-town-hall-meeting/

[4] https://missionlocal.org/2018/03/19-year-old-police-shooting-victim-came-to-the-u-s-as-a-child-and-grew-up-and-worked-in-sfs-mission/

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/24/politics/march-for-our-lives-students-checking-privilege-trnd/index.html

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/03/24/us/ap-us-student-gun-protests-six-minutes.html


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