Tears Will Keep Us Together

Some of you may remember the 1970s Captain and Tennille hit, "Love Will Keep Us Together." 

I'm calling this entry "Tears Will Keep Us Together" because I think we are all overdue for a collective cry in the face of the madness that is swirling around us. 

And I think it is through our crying that we can arrive at the realization that for those who are wondering, "Where is our God?"...the answer is "in community." 

COVID forced us apart. Now is the time to pull together because we are going to need to lean on each other and work together if we want to maintain the ideals of this country: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

With God's help, we can get there.

Text: primarily Psalm 51

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Normally…when I preach a sermon…I like to focus on the readings we’ve just heard.

I like to expand upon them…maybe fill in some gaps here and there…offer a slightly different take on familiar passages.

And the longer I sat with all the readings from this service for Ash Wednesday…I found myself drawn to a part of our opening collect…and how it confirms the words at the end of Psalm 51.

Specifically…I want us to remember these two ideas…and keep them close…and let them sink in:

“Almighty and everlasting God…you hate nothing you have made…”

And from Psalm 51…which we will be reading later…

“The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

God hates nothing God has made. That means God does not hate you, or me, or anyone. 

God’s only requirement is for us to bring our broken and remorseful hearts to God’s altar.

These are the words that felt the most important for a time such as this.

We’re living in a moment in this country where so many are feeling that up is down and down is up.

The very core teachings of our faith…things such as having empathy for other people…seeking to build a more just society for all…following the Biblical mandate to welcome the stranger…simply showing loving-kindness to one another…these are getting ridiculed…tossed aside as weak…labeled unpatriotic.

Even…by some…these ideas have been called “demonic.”

I mean…Bishop Mariann Budde…who is definitely not one of those in the ranks of the purple shirts looking to be the center of attention…came in for harsh criticism for asking the President to be merciful toward minority groups feeling afraid.

Five Georgia Congressional representatives signed onto a House Resolution to censure her.

Such legislative attacks are performative and silly.

The Episcopal Church is religious denomination and not a branch of government.

And yet they are heartbreaking.

Our basic values…the core of our faith…and the ability for us to live as E Pluribus Unum in this country…is under daily assault.

I admit…it has left me at times…shedding some tears.

Perhaps…some of you have cried, too.

But…despite what might pass for conventional wisdom in the world…I will tell you that tears are good.

They’re normal.

They’re not signs of weakness.

On the contrary…they are signs of strength because we care.

About ourselves.

About other people.

About the beautiful creation that surrounds us.

And about goodness…fairness…and justice.

My wife shared with me a blog written by a Roman Catholic priest in Wisconsin named Father Derek Sakowski.

Father Derek describes tears as “a precious gift from God.”

Rather than be fearful or ashamed of our tears…we should see them as God’s way of helping us to let go and acknowledge that we really aren’t super humans.

We have countless examples in the Scriptures that confirm the importance and rightness of our tears:

Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.

Mary Magdalene wept at the tomb of Jesus before she saw his resurrected self standing in the garden.

Peter…who was so wanting to be heroic and stand by Jesus in Jerusalem…wept when he heard the cock crow a third time and realized he had let his friend and teacher down…just as Jesus had predicted.

We heard this recently…Joseph and his brothers wept when they discovered that this youngest son of Jacob who the brothers had abused and sold into slavery…was alive and was in a position to save them from famine and death.

And of course…Psalm 51 is King David’s lament over his failures…both as a leader and as a man.

By bringing our tears…our broken and contrite hearts before God…it’s a way for us to say…without words…”I need help.”

And we do need help.  

Think about our responses to those five pledges we make in the Baptismal Covenant.

We cannot accomplish the tasks of staying with God in prayer, resisting evil, proclaiming God’s Good News in word and example, seeing Christ in all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being as we strive for justice and peace….we cannot accomplish any of those laudable goals without God’s help.

And that means…we can’t do the work of Love without each other.

Lent is often seen as a time…and was once upon a time…a period in which the faithful and sin sick people of God separated themselves from community.

I would offer that we do not do that now.

Now…perhaps more than at any other time…is a time for us not to go our separate ways and “give up” on each other.

Rather we need to find ways to come together…in mindfulness and loving kindness…and drop this idea that our rugged individualism makes us strong.

This is the false self…the front we put up for others…in our effort to project some idea of what it means to be “tough.”

Perhaps the thing we “give up” this Lent is our pulling away from each other…our diehard self-reliance… and recognize that we need community.

Because it is in community where we find the Spirit of God….and that sense that we belong to something greater than ourselves.

Maybe our tears are a way of clearing our eyes…and giving us a chance to see each other as siblings in Christ…with our quirks and particular gifts…as we keep on the journey with Jesus…to the cross…through his death…and into a resurrected life.

It could be that this is the Lent where our tears…having watered the garden of our hurt and anger and frustration at things happening in the world…will grow the garden of that tiny mustard seed planted in us at our Baptism: that seed of a faith in a Love that will never be defeated.

Because Love is the best antidote to a culture of self-centeredness and death.

For this Lent…may we rediscover our connections and our interdependence on God and each other…and this be the beginning of building the bonds that will sustain us in times of sorrow and remind us of the joy of friendship.

In the name of our One Holy and Undivided Trinity.

 

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

 

A lot has been happening in my world which I will post about at a later time. For now, let's just stick to the transition into the Season of Lent. Too often, I have found that people (especially clergy) make this a season that is just dismal. After taking some time to read through Matthew's perennial Gospel lesson again, I think I figured out why everyone dreads this season so much.

It's not all the busyness that comes with it. Or that Holy Week and Easter put all those in the church, especially clergy, to the test of their physical limits. 

It's the change.

Text: Matthew 6: 1-616-21

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As we’ve been approaching this Ash Wednesday… and the start of the Holy Season of Lent… I’ve been pondering about this time… this season of “penitence and fasting.”

“Penitence and fasting” doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.

It’s almost like the Debbie Downer of our Liturgical Calendar.

Our joyful proclamations of the “A” word disappear from the worship service.

The bright shiny silver paten and the chalices are replaced by wooden ones.

And the sweet oil of the baptismal chrism becomes the burnt palms of ash on our foreheads.

It’s as if the church really wants this day and this season to be one lengthy time of depression, drudgery, and dreariness.

But that’s not what Lent is about.

In fact… if we pay close attention to our Gospel lesson from Matthew… Jesus seems to be ribbing the dour and serious religiosity of the self-proclaimed penitent fasters from fun.

Believe it or not… our beloved one is a funny guy.

Our Gospel reading from Matthew comes from a portion of the Sermon on the Mount.

Yes…even in a sermon… humor is OK.

It’s especially OK here… because he’s just finished telling his disciples…and us… that we are to love our enemies…and refrain from resentment and anger.

This instruction is tough for most people to hear… especially a people under the thumb of bullies and tyrants.

Jesus’ counter-cultural logic is not easy to absorb… even if it is ultimately the path to right relationship with God.

So… perhaps to lift some of that heavy load… Jesus pokes fun at those who take their practices of religion too seriously.

To rephrase his language a little bit… he’s saying to his ragamuffin followers…

“You see those guys giving lots of money to this cause and that charity and wanting a plaque with their name on it to show how much they’ve given? Yeahhh….they got their reward!”

“Oh, and this group over here with their bullhorns screaming at everyone to Repent or Die as if they’re the holier than thou?

Uh-huh, they’ve got their reward!”

“And doncha see how that person is fasting?

I mean look at how they’ve got such a dismal face and they’re telling you how they haven’t eaten all day!

I mean, they’re so pathetic… even than the way your cat looks at you from their food bowl.

Good for them! They’ve got they’re reward!”

The reward all of them have earned is attention… and the spotlight on them.

They’re getting noticed! Whoo-hoo! Good for them!

But what happens when the bulb in the spotlight burns out?

Suddenly that reward starts to crumble and fall apart… because it was tied to something fleeting… a show of piety that no longer gains the applause.

They haven’t really changed. At all.

And that’s what Lent is about: it’s about a period of change.

The word itself means “Spring” as in the season of blooming flowers and trees. We know it here as the “Yellow Season” when everything is coated in pollen!

Seeds that had been underground and, in the dark, begin to come out of the ground and into the light.

The days start to get progressively longer.

We can put away our jackets and pull out our sandals.  

Spring means change is in the air.

And perhaps that’s why Lent can feel like such a daunting season.

Change means things won’t always be the way they were before.

Change means we can’t predict what’s going to happen next.

Change means we can’t be comfortable doing things in our lives like we’ve always done them.

Change means we become different than we were before.

The late science fiction writer Octavia Butler called change “the ongoing reality of the universe, an inescapable truth and the basic clay of our lives.” She says that “in order to live constructive lives, we must learn to shape change when we can, and yield to it when we must.”

We can’t stop change from happening.

But we can let it form us… and grow us… and teach us.

Lent can serve as a time…where we push aside the barriers we’ve placed between us and God…and allow the Holy One to come closer to us and walk with us through this time of change.

God is already present.

God is just waiting for us to step through the door to begin the changes we need to make during this season.

This is the start of putting aside those behaviors… and thought-patterns and habits that keep us trapped in our old selves.

Our old… smaller… ego-centric selves… which find ways to sabotage our relationship to God… and keep us from seeing the Christ in ourselves as well as other people.

Tonight is the time to do that spring clean-up and to change.

If change makes us anxious… sit with that anxiety… breathe into it and know that in every breath… God is there.

Inhale the love… exhale the anxiety.

If change makes us afraid… sit with the fear. Even Jesus was anxious in the Garden of Gethsemane knowing that there were authorities of Rome out searching for him and to do him harm.

Again…

Inhale the love… exhale the anxiety.

Change is an inescapable truth…and it can lead us to greater growth… more empowerment… and a chance to live more fully into tomorrow.

We need change.

Just one night of watching the evening news can show us that there is a lot in this world that needs to change.

And it has to start with us.

The greater the change in us… the more we might change this world into God’s dream rather than God’s perpetual nightmare.

May God lead us through these next forty days and grant us our reward of a deeper…and truer relationship with God.

In the name of God… F/S/HS.

Getting Right in the Heart: A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

 

There are some sermons that flow out of my brain and into my fingers on the computer keyboard pretty easily. This was not one of them. Between mourning the deaths of my godmother and a good friend from the Mickee Faust Club, a war raging in Europe because of a tinpot dictator such as Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing efforts to marginalize people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community in this country...I was having a hard time getting 'excited' to write a sermon for a day that is all about our mortality. As my spouse noted, I had a little bit of the late Fr. Lee Graham sitting on my shoulder exclaiming loudly, "I ain't dust!!" 

I understand his point, and I don't fully agree. I am dust. We all are dust. But we aren't dust yet, and we have work to do while we're still here in these bodies on this planet. And, in the end, it begins with getting right in our hearts. 

Texts: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21; Joel 2:12; Ps.51:18

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As I stand here tonight…I am aware that so many people have been experiencing loss because of death. We have been burying family, friends, parishioners, colleagues and neighbors. Beloved celebrities have passed away and with each of those deaths goes a little piece of ourselves…a remembrance of our childhood or some other part of our past that we thought we’d have forever.

And so at this service, where we remember our mortality, with those words that “we are dust and to dust we shall return,” there’s a part of me that is reminded of the old song refrain: How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away? How much more “reminding” do we really need that our time on earth is limited and fragile?

Then…on a night when our baptismal cross is re-traced on our forehead in black ash… we have the reading from Matthew’s Gospel, which seems to counter Jesus’ instructions to not make much ado about our piety and our prayers.  I don’t think you can get more obvious that you are a follower of Jesus than to walk around with a black cross smudged in the middle of your head.

But these ashes aren’t about showing off our piety and our Christianity, at least I hope that isn’t the motivation.

The Matthew passage highlights three practices that Jesus’ Jewish audience would have known…and we get the sense people are praying, fasting, and doing acts of charity and social justice. And since we’re here, I would be willing to guess we probably do some if not all those same things in our own lives.

But the actions themselves isn’t what is at the center of this Gospel. It’s about the intentions of the acts rather than the attention the acts receive.

The more I looked at it, the more I wrestled with this, I realized that a key line in the text comes at the end of the passage:  “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The heart is a powerful and vital organ. It works to take in deoxygenated blood and pumps back out blood filled with oxygen into the body. This anatomical lesson became a point of mystical meditation for me some years ago when I was walking the labyrinth at my massage school. As I moved slowly through the cut grass, I had a vision of God as Love. And Love being represented by the heart symbol. I thought about how the heart and the lung work together in this kind of cleaning up and sending out blood into the body. And I thought about how the heart has four chambers…in the same way we hear that God’s house has many rooms. I remember that feeling I had that if God is Love, and Love is a heart, then what an amazing thing this is that Love takes in all the imperfection, cleans it up, and gives it new life to be sent out?  

Our biblical ancestors saw the heart as the center of thought, intention, and moral disposition. What happens in the heart becomes the way in which a person lives and moves and has their being in the world. If we think about the acts we do…such as if we make a charitable contribution…it can have the affect of helping another person or entity. It might also make us feel good or useful to have helped another. It can also be a means to draw attention to ourselves. That’s more of an ego trip and isn’t so much about relieving another person from suffering as it is about us feeling good for having performed goodness. It can also keep us separated from the other rather than entering their experience in a true sense of solidarity. We continue that siloed existence of “us” and “them” instead of seeing that we…every one of us…are in this life together…and have a responsibility to each other.

What Jesus is calling us to do in this excerpt from Matthew is to do an examination of ourselves, our motives, and be less about the performance of doing what is right, and actually fixing our hearts on God so that we live in right relationship with others. Jesus wants more than status updates on social media or checks in the mail.  We are called to have our hearts broken by being in relationship with the person who is hurting. As Mother Teresa was quoted as saying “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

That crazy, counter-cultural Jesus who wants us to break our hearts!

But he’s no crazier than the prophet Joel. The prophet calls upon people to “return” to God… with all our heart…rending our hearts and not our clothing.

God doesn’t need us to rip up our outerwear; God is looking for us to do a self-check and pull apart our hearts…figuratively speaking… and examine our thoughts, our intentions and how we go about living in the world.

Soon…we will hear the psalmist remind us that God doesn’t despise the broken and contrite heart. In fact, that’s exactly what God is looking for so God can get to work on us…just like the heart and lungs work to clean up the blood.

When we acknowledge our imperfections and mistakes, our anger and frustration at loss of control over events in our lives or the world around us, and even acknowledging the weight of our grief, that’s the moment when God comes to meet us. So if you have come here tonight with troubles…or a sense that things aren’t quite right in your world…this is your night…your season…to give space…and allow your heart to crack open. Begin the practice of fasting on the fears of falling short and feasting on the faith that we are loved by God as the Holy One’s human creatures.

May the cross of ashes on our foreheads serve as a visible reminder of that.

 

 

 

Ash Wednesday: Mortality Too Close to the Surface

I was going to write a post yesterday noting that Ash Wednesday this year landed on Valentine's Day and my 50th Birthday. Fifty--the Jubilee Year--a year to celebrate freedom and returning to one's roots.

But I made the mistake of looking at Facebook. And there was the live stream from one of the south Florida TV stations doing coverage of the 18th shooting at a school in the United States, this time in Broward County at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. 

Two dead. Then seven. Finally, the number climbed to seventeen. The shooter, a 19 year-old former student, was captured after initially eluding police. The details about his life and what was known, and not known, about him are coming to light and will continue to surface over the next several days.

And then, the story will fade from the headlines. People won't be talking about it. News crews will leave Parkland, Florida. Nothing will change.

One of the most striking images I saw from Parkland was that of a parent holding her teenager, arm around her, rushing her away from the scene with the unmistakable black ash of a cross on the mom's forehead. 

Wow. That's right: it was Ash Wednesday. "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." But do we really believe that a child at 14, 15, 16 years old or even an otherwise healthy thirty-something year old adult are going to return to the dust? Does a parent really think that kissing their child good-bye and sending them off to school is akin to sending them to a war zone? 

This sobering thought was on my mind for the rest of the day and into my own trip to an Ash Wednesday service. I couldn't stop thinking about the image of that mom, the terror that must have filled the hearts of both the kids and the adults. Tears came to my eyes as I watched a family go forward for the imposition of ashes. As the rector traced the sign of the cross on the forehead of the toddler, it felt like a punch to my gut. I looked at that and thought, "Newtown." 

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of a 40-day journey into self-examination and reflection. And while I can't do the spiritual work of anyone other than myself, it seems we are dying--literally--to examine our political leaders inability to do anything to address the wide-spread availability of semi-automatic weapons and reflect on whether we want something different. 

The Broward County Sheriff, the Governor, and several politicians described Wednesday's massacre as "evil." I agree. And a mentally-disturbed person armed with a semi-automatic weapon is more dangerous than a mentally-disturbed person who is unarmed. Refusing to acknowledge and address the issue of guns is like Peter in the courtyard pretending he doesn't know Jesus in those hours before his execution. The good news about Peter's betrayal is that he felt remorse and he had the opportunity to undo his denial by affirming his love for the risen Jesus. Perhaps this could be something for our political leaders to contemplate while they are down on their knees praying for the victims of gun violence. Maybe if they listen closely they'll hear a call to stand for something other than the money they receive from the NRA.

Lent would be as good a time as any for lawmakers to change their ways and take this issue seriously.

"I Ain't Dust!"

On Ash Wednesday, many Christians will be entering churches and emerging with the sign of the cross, made with the ashes of burnt palms, on their foreheads.  They will have heard those heavy words:

"You are dust and to dust you shall return."

Ash Wednesday is a tough love day in the calendar.  Words of the penitential Psalm 51 reverberate off the walls to remind us that today, we are low and lowly before God.  Coming on the heels of Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday where we've partied hearty and lived life up to its fullest, we are brought back down to earth, to the dust. Because we are dust and to dust we shall return.

But one of my favorite people in the community of St. John's Episcopal Church has steadfastly said, "No!" to Ash Wednesday and its guilt-tripping practice of the imposition of ashes.

"I ain't dust!  I am a child of God!"  says Rev. Lee Graham, the rector emeritus and one of the wisest men I've met in Tallahassee.

I was interviewing him as part of a church project, gathering some of the more recent history of St. John's and its topsy-turvy travels down that bumpy path of schism and rebuilding in the last decade.  As a priest, Fr. Lee has stood on the battlefield of segregationist Alabama in the 1960s, dealt with the hue-and-cry over women and prayer books in the 1970s, and is one of the few Episcopal priests in Tallahassee who openly preached on the need to include the LGBT community in the church and to recognize the LGBT struggle for equality as the next civil rights struggle.  He used to preside at the noon day Eucharist on Fridays where it was my pleasure to serve along side him as a Eucharist Minister.  At 91, he has finally fully retired in large part because his eyesight has been failing.  But bad eyes have done nothing to dull his mind.

"I think we ought to have a demonstration on Ash Wednesday. People ought to have placards that say, 'We Ain't Dust!' "   I didn't interrupt him as he went on, fingers drumming on the table top.

"Dust is the most useless thing in creation." he said.  "Even dirt will raise a crop, not dust.  The church says to me, 'You are dust,' I ain't dust: I'm a human being. That's not dust.  I'm a baptized Christian.  I'm a child of God.  For the church to say to me, 'You are dust.  You ain't nuthin'.  You're like a hound dog!' is not only degrading to me, but to the Church.  I think the Church should be embarrassed.  And to add, 'and to dust you shall return.'  The second of the last two lines of the creed are we are going to eternal life.  This (dust) is just patently false.  It's crap!"

It is particularly crap to a man who has been ministering to his friends and neighbors in his retirement community.

"When I was having service out here, I refused to do it.  I got some oil, chrism.  That's what we got at baptism.  And so that's what I would do for these people here that are clinging on to life.  And I'd tell them, 'You are a child of God.'"

Then he looked at me.  "What do you think?  Do you think you're dust."

"You know, I hadn't thought about it."

"You're just gullible.  You need to think about your faith."

We laughed at the exchange, but he'd made a good point.  I had become complacent instead of questioning.

Our conversation did leave me thinking about this practice that happens every year as the set up for a penitential time.  The history of Ash Wednesday traces back to practices of the early church where the 'notorious sinners' were set apart and had the sack cloth and ashes treatment until they publicly repented of their sins, whatever they were, and then could be integrated back into the community.   Today, the Episcopal Church doesn't make such a demand of those who have sinned.  If it did, the buildings would likely stand pretty empty for the period of Lent.  But it has incorporated the practice of doing the imposition of ashes on the forehead.  And, depending on who is doing it, you either get this indiscernible smudge or this massive cross.

As a child and teenager, I didn't like the imposition of ashes because it usually was something we'd do in the middle of the day, and then I'd have to go back to school and deal with the other kids wondering why I had dirt on my face.  I would try to pull strands of my hair down so as to cover the thing.  I didn't like the attention.  It was not a "teaching moment"; it was something that separated me from my peers which I was already experiencing estrangement as a tall athletic girl.

As an adult, I have been able to handle the weird looks I get after Ash Wednesday service.  But I also would find a bathroom and wash the black cross off my forehead.  It has nothing to do with being ashamed of being a Christian.  But it has everything to do with my belief in how I show that I am Christian.   Ashes on my forehead?  Or paying attention to the people around and standing right in front of me, and engaging them in eye contact to confirm, "I see you, child of God, and fellow traveler on the planet"?

It's interesting to note that although everyone expects to be marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday, the 1979  Book of Common Prayer makes that part of the Ash Wednesday service optional.   If a church should so choose, they could forgo the imposition of ashes, and stay strictly with having everyone kneel and recite Psalm  51 and the Litany of Penitence.   Plenty of time to reflect on where each of us are at this time of the church year.

And what might we reflect on?  As Fr. Lee says, you might think about what it means to be a child of God.

"If that's so, I better be thinking about me for this Lent.  Am I living like a child of God?  Am I getting ready for heaven?"

Those words, and the challenge they pose, are more weighty than telling us that we're dust and to dust we shall return.