Sermon--Blue Christmas 2020

 For the congregation of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Thomasville, GA. The scripture text I was working with is Psalm 23 in the King James Version. 

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^{If there ever was a year when this Blue Christmas service is needed, 2020 definitely would be it!}

^{This has been the year of the mask, the Purell, the hand soap, and toilet paper shortages. Too many people have been sick and far too many have died from COVID…from friends, church members, uncles, aunts, cousins, people’s moms and dads. COVID has wreaked havoc on our lives…changed the way we shop, go to school, do our jobs, even go to church. And in an almost too cruel twist of fate, this viral pandemic has collided with the ongoing struggles in the nation over race and racism. As our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry describes it, these times are our midnight hour, which is the darkest hour of the night.}

^{These are the times for Psalm 23.}

^{This one is probably the most well-known of the psalms. And this version…the King James Version…is the classic form of the psalm. In fact, my practical theology professor…the Rev. Dr. Altagracia Perez-Bullard…told us to memorize this rendering of the psalm. She told us it will be important because in any ministry we might have, we might find ourselves in a hospital room with grieving Christians from another denomination and this is the version of Psalm 23 they will want to hear. It is words of comfort.}

^{It is a song of reassurance.}

^{It is the one that tells us the eternal truth: God is with us at those moments when we feel adrift in a sea of grief and can only sing the blues.}

^{“The Lord is my shepherd…” The psalmist uses the imagery of the shepherd leading and encouraging the flock along still waters. I’ve seen shepherds at work when I was on a trip to France with my spouse. It was a small village, and the shepherd was moving the sheep along a street heading toward the pasture on a mountain. The sheep were pretty content to follow him…except when they would stop to snack on the flower beds of some of the houses. Then the shepherd would drop back, encourage these hungry sheep to keep moving along, not with a beating but with a guiding nudge of his staff. Eventually, the flock arrived at a fountain in the middle of the town square, and he let them take a drink before they continued their journey toward the green pasture of the mountain side.}

^{Shepherd, for the psalmist, has additional meaning beyond the shepherd of sheep. Many a biblical scholar notes that the kings of the ancient world were called shepherds of their people. It was thought that the job of the worldly leader was to guide and direct the populace with the same skill as a shepherd. So, to say that the Lord is my shepherd once again places God as the true guide and authority to lead one along and  restore the life force—the soul-- to a place of resting and feasting.}

^{Before we get to the banquet table in the psalm, we pass through the valley of the shadow of death. The Hebrew for this description is “deep darkness,” a sense of danger and death. This is the midnight hour of the psalm. This type of darkness is one that can leave us frightened for the lack of being able to see our way out of our troubles. And yet…the psalmist tells us “I will fear no evil” because God is there and remains present even when we haven’t asked.} 

^{God keeps gently guiding us through this dark spot.}

^{God is there with the food bank worker distributing bags and cans to families in need because COVID forced parents out of their jobs.}

^{God is there with that nurse checking on patients in the intensive care and emergency room and being one of the only people able to hold the hand of a person struggling to breathe.}

^{God is with the scientists and medical researchers who have put their skills to work to get us a vaccine.}

^{God is with us to keep us moving toward the psalmist’s vision of the banquet table, where we will be beyond the things that trouble us, where we will lay down those things that keep us divided and bring us to the other side of pandemics. Because even when it is midnight, stars of bright light poke through the gloom to remind us that God is nearby.}

^{To keep Christmas in this Coronatide it’s important to not only keep looking for those lights, those signs of God’s presence in the acts of kindness of others, but to remember that we can be those lights to one another.  “The Lord is my shepherd.” The Lord will lead us through our valleys to a day when we will again feast together.}

"Famished": A Sermon for 1 Lent Year A

Sermon for 1 Lent

St. Monica and St. James

March 1, 2020

Matthew 4:1-11



“…and afterward he was famished.” It’s when we are at our lowest, weakest, most vulnerable moments that our faith in God helps us to overcome the forces that would destroy us. We can know this through the Scriptures.



Prayer: 8am simple doxology.

11am: Let us pray: All the faithful make their prayers to you, O God, in times of trouble. May your calming presence be felt in our hearts and your Word spoken in truth and love from my lips. Let this be an acceptable offering in your Holy Name. Amen.

I don’t think it’s an accident that our Gospel today is focused on temptation.

Lent has started and presumably we have all made some sort of commitment to either give up a habit, take on a new life-affirming one, or otherwise make an effort to walk more humbly with our God. We hear that Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness…so even Jesus is in a Lenten period.

Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation paints a vivid picture of the struggle with his accuser (fun fact: Satan is the Hebrew for accuser or adversary). If we enter deeply into this Gospel narrative…we might find ourselves being able to see the stones and feel that ache in the stomach that says, “if only these rocks could become bread.” 

Perhaps we can imagine being at the highest point of the temple with the wind whipping around us. We might be filled with a daredevil impulse beckoning us to let ourselves go without worrying if we’d crash land. Remember: angels will catch us! 

Or possibly we can visualize being on top of that mountain surveying all the land and wealth in the valleys below. What would it be like to not just be the one-percent…but even richer than a Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined?

I imagine that if Jesus was facing off with the accuser in the wilderness on his best day, when he was feeling fit and healthy, he probably would have run logic circles around Satan and twisted him up into a pretzel with a parable of some kind.

But Matthew doesn’t present us a Jesus on his most robust day. Hear the words again: “He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished.”

Famished. Not simply hungry or-as the Brits might say—peckish.

Famished is more than that. Jesus is weak, dizzy, parched throat, low blood sugar, starving. 

He is completely vulnerable, and he is alone. What a perfect entry point for the tempter to come in and whisper: “you’re the Son of God…go ahead: turn those stones into bread so you can eat.”

And yet…even in this diminished state, Jesus goes back to the Hebrew Scriptures…noting that “one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Not only has he said, “Not today, Satan!”; he returns to the God known through the Scriptures to summon the strength to resist temptation. And as this scene progresses…and the pull toward a narcissistic self-obsession…”All these I will give you if you fall down and worship me!”…the greater the enticements to turn away God, the more this weakened Jesus was turning back to the One who knew him best…relying on the word from Scripture to feed him.

I think that’s the real message for us. During those times when we are feeling tried and tested, and at our greatest moments of insecurity that’s when the ego will tempt us to believe that we are invincible, that we don’t need any help, that we have everything under control.

Think about the destructive and bad theology behind the message: “God helps those who help themselves”

Really? I don’t think that is what Jesus was saying in this dialogue with the devil.

 “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”

No, sometimes the things before us…whether a personal crisis or ones of a more global nature…are truly more than we can handle. Certainly, there is a lot in our world that is more than we can individually handle! Our egos are too frail to sustain us.

What I believe Jesus is showing us about God is that it’s not our selves and centering on our self that feeds us, keep us safe in times of trouble, and makes us rich. It is our realization that our strength, our life, our breath is dependent upon God.  And it is God who is love and loves us dearly in those times when we are at our weakest, most vulnerable and completely famished.

How can we know this is true? Well, for me…at the moments when I have been the most challenged and even in times when I am feeling that spring of joy in my step…I have turned to the words of the psalmist, who seems to be the best Biblical poet and captures the ups and downs of what it is to be human.

Whether it is phrases such as

“Restore us, O God of Hosts, show us the light of your countenance and we shall be saved” (Ps.80) or

“Taste and see that the Lord is good,”(Ps.34) 

Reading and sitting with those words have been the necessary touchstones and the gentle reminders that I am not alone and that God is with me and isn’t absent from our world.

As we journey through this season of Lent, we will no doubt face temptation and our egos will prick at us and persuade us to forget about God and become so self-absorbed as to believe that we don’t need anybody else. I don’t know what Lenten discipline you’ve adopted…or if you’ve even thought about adopting one. But I would encourage us to consider finding a phrase or a line of Scripture that speaks to our soul and feed on that for these forty days. Keep it somewhere where you can read it and meditate on it daily. In these troubled times of pandemics and politics…see how feasting on the Word might give you the strength to carry on.