True Religion

We had a snafu on Sunday. At the passing of the peace, I noticed that our service, normally livestreamed to Facebook, had not been started for the online community (we do have people show up at 11am on Sunday, or sometimes, later in the week). 

Anyway, I went ahead and recorded my sermon for our YouTube Channel. If you are so moved, dear reader, you can skip the narrative below...and follow THIS LINK to actually see and hear me preach this word.

Or...if you prefer...here it is.

Texts: James 1: 17-27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, Collect for Proper 17 (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, 233). 

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“God of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things; Graft in our hearts the love of your Name, increase in us true religion….”

It’s always about this time every year that we hear the words of this particular collect…and that prayer…asking for God to increase in us “true religion.”

For me…that phrase “true religion” always makes me stop and take a moment to think.

What does it mean to increase in us “true religion”?

Well…let’s start with understanding the words.

The definition of “true”…according to Merriam-Webster…when used as an adjective means “being in accordance with actual state of affairs…the essential reality…properly called…rather than what is assumed or manifest.”

That sounds about right.

The word “Religion” comes from the Latin “religio” which means “obligation, bond or reverence.”

So…putting these two words together…we can think of this “true religion” as “a bond or an obligation that is real.”

Great!

But that still doesn’t get us very far on finding a meaning of “true religion.”

When we look at what the letter writer James is talking about…we get an idea of what we might understand as “true religion.”

James doesn’t talk about “true” religion per se.

Instead… he says that for a religion to be “pure” or “undefiled” it has to show compassion for orphans and widows.

Taking care of those in need is one of the very basic tenets of the Torah in Judaism.

It’s also an oft-repeated message of Jesus to his `followers…both those with him in the First Century…and us today in the 21^st century.

Think about the famous parable of the Good Samaritan.

When we say we “love our neighbor” that means we need to follow up that statement with action…with an actual practice of showing love of neighbor.

The Letter of James is where we get the phrase “faith without works is dead.”

Now…some have thought that meant that we must do a bunch of good deeds in order to earn our way into God’s graces.

But that’s not at all what it means.

What the letter writer of James focuses on is the human heart…the core of our being.

The heart is the place of our motivation and actions.

It’s from our heart that comes the potential to do good or do evil.

And we are all capable of both.

If we live into the path of goodness…which is the path of love…life…and liberty….and do those things to grow that part of our heart muscle…we are capable of extending happiness into the world.

It’s like the story of the Grinch at Christmas…whose heart grows three-sizes when he hears the Who’s of Whoville singing and the joy of the season touches him.

We can also get this from Jesus in our Gospel this morning.

While the Pharisees are complaining that Jesus’ followers have failed to follow the ritual handwashing one does before eating…Jesus is quick to point out that it’s not the things going in the mouth that do harm to the body but what comes out of the mouth that’s the real problem.

Because what comes out of the mouth is a reflection of the truth that’s happening in our hearts.

Think about that for a moment.

The things we say…or in the thinking of James…the acts that we do…speak volumes about who we are…and the faith we hold dear.

They reveal what is in our hearts…and which impulse of the heart is stronger:

A faith that is about love…and compassion…will show loving-kindness to friends and strangers.

A faith that is about fear…looks inward…withdraws from community…and shuts out those who we don’t see as “kin.”

These are some of the important things for us to consider living in our time.

I remember attending a public forum once with my congressman in Florida.

This was back when there was all the debate about whether Congress was going to approve the Affordable Care Act…and Representative Allen Boyd was touring the district to hear from his constituents.

This meeting that I went to was done in Wakulla County…just south of Tallahassee.

It was standing room only.

And boy was he getting an earful at that forum!

At one point…Congressman Boyd put a scenario to the crowd to gauge their reaction.

He talked about a hypothetical situation of a young man…twenty years old…taking a job with an employer who didn’t offer him health insurance.

The young guy didn’t think anything of it.

He was fit and healthy and young.

No need for any special medications or care.

Then one day…he’s on his way to work.

Somebody runs a red light and plows into him.

He’s rushed to the hospital and has broken bones and internal bleeding that requires surgery.

He’s going to be laid up for weeks unable to work.

Congressman Boyd reminded them this young man had no health insurance coverage because he couldn’t afford to buy his own and the employer didn’t have a health insurance plan to offer.

The Congressman looked around the room and asked this crowd, “What should happen to this young man? What should we do?”

A woman…her arms crossed over her chest… sitting very close to where I was standing, grumbled out loud:

“Send him a bill!”

As I left that meeting…I couldn’t help but contemplate the billboard that greets visitors to that part of Florida.

It reads: “Wakulla loves Jesus.”

In such situations…Jesus’s quoting of Isaiah has a very real meaning:

“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are from me.”

People talk about Christianity…but the reality is that many don’t actually live Christianity.

When we think about “true religion” and those things which create “real bonds” ….with God…with the planet…and with each other…I would hope that our goal is to make our words match our actions.

I would love to see those who profess a belief in Christ and his teachings…live more closely to following the seeds of love planted in our hearts as baptized members of the body of Christ.

I would hope that we would understand that this is a love that transcends the small boundaries that we put in place to separate and divide us into camps and tribes.

I would want us to see that “true religion” binds us to a God who empowers and encourages us to work together and love our neighbors…building up people instead of tearing them down.

What a different and joyous world it would be if we did increase true religion in our hearts.

In the name of our one holy and undivided Trinity.

 

 

  

This Teaching is Difficult

 

Welcome back to me! 

I was away for ten wonderful days...driving from Florida to a workshop in Byfield, MA, at Adelynrood. This retreat center is run by the Society of Companions of the Holy Cross, an order if women that has prayer and social justice at its core. 

It was next door to my prep school. That was...how you say...interesting. 

More interesting was the topic of "Into the Blackness of God" with the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, one of the first women who was ordained as an Episcopal priest in Philadelphia in 1974. What a treat it was to be with her and to take up the question of how can I, as a white person, enter into a relationship with God not as the "light" and "bright" and very white depiction of God, but as one who sits at the gate with those who have been--as Howard Thurman describes it--the disinherited. 

Am I able to do it? Not completely. 

Can I make an intention of working into that experience? Yes, absolutely. 

Will that come across in my preaching? 

That, dear reader, is for you to see if you sense any shift in what I am saying, and how I am saying it. 

Text: John 6:56-69

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I saw a meme the other day that made me laugh out loud.

It was one appropriate for this time…when so many are just starting another school year.

A teacher asks a student: what book made you cry?

Now…we can probably think of stories that we read in school that made us cry.

The Diary of Anne Frank. Maybe even Animal Farm by George Orwell.  A well-written novel can really tug on the heart strings…

But in this meme…the answer the student gives is not a title. It’s a meme after all…so instead it’s a picture.

And the book that makes this particular student cry?

An Algebra textbook.

And I thought, “Oh, yes! That one made ME cry. A. Lot!”

To this day…I can feel the pain in my head when I see a formula of One over X.

Maybe this was your experience as well.

Algebra…especially with Trigonometry…this teaching was difficult.

Hard to wrap my mind around it.

We hear that in our Gospel lesson that there were those who were followers of Jesus who also found his teachings about bread “difficult.”

These weren’t the usual critics and naysayers…the ones who felt threatened by this rabble-rousing rabbi of Love.

These were the ones who were ready to follow him…wanted to hear him in the synagogue in Capernaum.

But this talk…this eating his flesh and drinking his blood…talk?

No, no. This sounds like cannibalism.

It’s way too much.

It’s as if the deeper we go into this teaching that takes up chapter six in John’s Gospel…the less and less popular Jesus becomes.

Instead of gaining great crowds…people are shaking their heads and walking away.

The five thousand who ate bread and fish…and thought Jesus was such an awesome miracle worker that they wanted to make him a king….now can’t stomach his message.

We might understand that, right?

It does sound a little creepy to talk about eating flesh and drinking blood.

His Jewish followers did find this too much to take…especially since their rules of kashrut prohibited them from ingesting anything with blood.

But any of the Gentiles in the crowd would have been Greco-Roman…and they would’ve been used to the cult of Dionysus…which included a belief that eating raw meat of bulls  and drinking copious amounts of wine brought one closer to God.

For them…this suggestion of eating flesh and drinking blood would have been more normal devotional practice.

But we also need to remember that Jesus is a master of the metaphor.

The Jesus of John’s Gospel is the one who challenges us to not get so caught up in the literal and the physical and pushes us to see those things as more symbolic of something that is in us and around us and moving with us at all times.

That thing is the Spirit…the Wisdom of God…the Sophia that exists and links us to God and each other.

The flesh and blood of Jesus….the living bread….is the Spirit.

That Spirit which feeds us on a steady diet of compassionate love.

And that compassionate love is that taste of God that we get when we spend time with a friend…a loved one….or even a stranger…and listen to their story.

Find out what experience they’ve had that brings them joy.

Sit with them and be with them in moments when they’re in sorrow and pain.

By interacting and participating in each other’s lives in this way…it helps us to not only be better family members in this body of Christ…it aids in our own growth in Christ.

The more we get to know each other…and appreciate each other… the better equipped we are to hold off those cosmic powers of division we heard described in the Letter to the Ephesians this morning.

For many years…both in Tallahassee and Thomasville…I served as a mentor in the Education for Ministry program.

EfM…as it’s known in the church…is a chance for lay people to dig deeper into the Scriptures as well as learning church history and connecting their faith and the teachings of Christianity to their every day lives. As a mentor…it was my role to walk alongside these learners and provide the space for some theological conversations to happen. It was great fun…and a good lead up for me at least before I went to seminary…particularly as people wrestled with scriptures that they found confusing…or uncomfortable.

But even more than doing the type of reflection work we always did in an EfM session…my absolute favorite time in the course is at the beginning when each person gets about ten to 15 minutes to share their spiritual autobiography.

This is their story that goes beyond the vital statistics of when and where they were born…graduated from whatever school…got married or not. This was a chance for each person to share the times when they either felt God very absent…or extremely present in their lives.

And without fail…this room of six to eight people who might have only known each other’s names…and where they typically sat on Sunday morning in church…now was hearing an echo of something in the other’s story….a phrase…or an event…some experience…that would sound like a piece of their own spiritual autobiography.

It was like watching the assembly of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Slowly…over the course sometimes of two or three weeks…these stories would help forge the bonds of the group as the members moved from being casually acquainted to finding their true relationship as spiritual siblings in Christ.

Now it didn’t mean that everyone in the room necessarily “liked” each other. It did mean that they learned how to love each other enough…and be honest with each other enough…that when we times got tough and feelings got raw…they were able to work through their disagreements and remain one body…in that one Spirit.

Through building relationships…across racial…sexual…language…ethnic…ability…age…any kind of differences really…we build up trust.

We remove fear and anxiety.

And we make a way for each person to enjoy the loving…liberating…and life-affirming gift of what it is to experience the freedom that comes from God.

That’s what Jesus was offering as the flesh and blood that would enliven everyone’s flesh and blood if they accept it.

So many would not or could not.

Then…and even today.

The reality on the ground…both then and now of what it can feel like living under empirical forces…and mean-spirited politics…we might find this teaching of trusting in Love too difficult.

But I am often reminded of the words that get repeated so often in Scripture…both in the Old Testament and the New: do not be afraid.

In the words of the psalmist:

No good thing will the Lord withhold *
from those who walk with integrity.

O Lord of hosts, *
happy are they who put their trust in you!

In the name of our one holy and undivided Trinity.

 

  

 

 

 

 

Taking Scripture Seriously

I wasn't sure where I was going to be headed with this sermon. I was having a tough time figuring out how to start and how to deal with a pericope that sounds just like the Gospel reading from the week before that...and will be remarkably similar to the one for next week. Thankfully, I will be taking a break next Sunday, so I won't be preaching. But still...how to talk about Jesus when he says, "I am the living bread." 

Fortunately, a decision to attend the funeral of a devoted priest...the cleric who started St. Barnabas Episcopal Church...gave me a beginning. And then things flowed from there. 

See what you think. 

Text: John 6: 35, 41-51

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This past Friday…I attended the funeral for the Rev. Canon Bob Carter…whose photo hangs out in the narthex.

As many of you know…he was the first and founding vicar of our beloved St. Barnabas Episcopal Church.

I never knew Rev. Carter…but I learned a lot about him during the funeral service.

As a seminarian…and then as a priest…he was described as a man of “unfailing faith.”

As the Canon to the Ordinary for two bishops…Bishops Shipps and then Louttit…and serving as the examining chaplain in church history for the diocese…he helped shepherd and form many of the new priests…a role that requires a lot of listening and loving.

It also requires a real rootedness in faith…and turning to God for guidance and strength…truly unfailing faithful.

I sensed that the Rev. Carter was one who did feast on the living bread of Jesus…and that his soul was never thirsty.

And I’m not just talking about someone who received Eucharist regularly…which he did.

I’m talking about a man who was a voracious reader.

I heard he had a room in his house that was stacked almost to the ceiling with books.

Father Carter’s quest for knowledge…and devotion to prayer…gave him the type of nourishment that we hear Jesus talking about in the Gospel lesson this morning from John.

A metaphorical type of bread…not a literal one.

I admit…I’m always a little baffled when a person says to me that they take the Bible literally.

Often when a person asks me if I believe that the Bible is the literal word of God…I do what I do when confronted with that sort of question.

I ask another question…. not to be evasive or cagey.

But because behind a question such as that is often a belief…and I want to know what that belief is so I might better understand the real question.

And what I usually find is either a person who has been told by others to believe that the Bible was literally God’s hand put to paper writing down all the words of Scripture….or it’s someone who doesn’t trust clergy people.

Maybe even it’s a little bit of both.

And I’m honest in saying that I don’t take the Bible literally…but I do take Scripture seriously.

I believe our Biblical ancestors of the Old Testament were people touched and moved by the Holy.

These are women and men who could see and sense that Spirit…the Sophia…that moved over the waters of chaos as described in Genesis….and that spirit gave them guidance…and strength and courage to overcome obstacles…see the beauty in creation….and ultimately follow the twisty-topsy-turvy path of faith.

That path would continue and come to a place where Jesus enters the world to announce to all…

”the kingdom of God is right now…put away the distractions and come back to God.” (paraphrase Mark 4)

Be in right relationship with God…which will bring you into right relationship with your neighbors….the ones you like and don’t like…and all of creation.

The Scriptures contain timeless messages for us as we grapple with the things in our day-to-day lives.

That’s what I mean by taking the Bible seriously.

But like those folks who are the biblical literalists of today…we hear that some of those listening to Jesus back then couldn’t wrap their minds around his bread metaphor.

They start to rattle off his lineage…who his daddy is and how they know his mama is Mary.

These complaints are like the ones we heard a few weeks ago…when Jesus was unable to do any healing works in his hometown. The grumblers take his metaphor so literally that they have missed the point of what he’s been saying.

It’s not that he’s “bread” in the same sense as the five barley loaves from the feeding of the five thousand.

But this “bread” is about who he is…the words he speaks…the things he teaches…the way he treats people and heals the sick.

These are the ways to be in right relationship with God.

He’s the type of bread that goes into the head and heart not the stomach.

I was listening to Rose Duncan…the Canon for Worship at Washington National Cathedral…as she meditated on this particular passage.

She noted that Jesus isn’t being critical of the manna in the wilderness that the ancestors ate.

But what he’s doing is inserting himself…his ethic…into a living context...and offering that if the people would listen to him…and lean into this love that he’s promoting…they will have the type of food that will sustain them in a more profound way….

…Especially as trouble arises.

That’s the key here.

We always need to remember that our evangelists…Matthew…Mark…Luke…and John…are writing about and putting Jesus into the context of a time when the believers in Jesus were not in the majority.

They were the outcasts and lived in a system that was set up to favor some and not others.

In other words…the conditions of their time…while not exactly the same as the issues we face in the 21^st century…they have some of the same hallmarks.

Similar stresses.

The kind of hardships that some of us might recognize and resonant with.

And Jesus…then and now…is trying to teach us the basics of how to remain strong…resilient and wise to the attempts of those who want to divide us.

The feeding he did with the loaves and the fishes was an example of how out of something small…big things can happen.

He demonstrated that there is plenty of Love to go around if and when we are willing to share it.

And yet…there are still those who resist this teaching.

That rather than accept this abundance…they want to live in a place of fear and scarcity.

Something else Canon Duncan mentioned was the line about those who are “drawn to the Father” …”drawn to God.”

That verb…when we look at it in the Greek---helkō---is the same verb John uses to talk about the big net of fish that the disciples have to “drag” ashore.

So let’s think about this for a moment.

Instead of hearing in this line…God “drawing” people in like a moth to a flame….what we’re talking about is God “dragging” them to God’s self…as they wiggle and struggle and resist…like fish in a soaking wet net.

That’s a pretty accurate description of what the faith journey can feel like.

No matter how much we hear that we are loved…

no matter how much we sing hymns and songs that speak about the depth of God’s love for us….

…we seem to resist it.

Or we think we must do something to deserve that Love…when the truth is that God loved us first through the life…ministry…death…resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

The good news is that God will never give up on us.

God will keep drawing…dragging…yanking on us…

Chipping away at our hardened exteriors and working to open our hearts to accept this gift of Love so that we pass it on to others.

Sharing love is so necessary for our city…state…and country right now.

In the words of the great theologian Burt Bacharach, “What the world needs now is Love sweet Love.”

We who feed on the words of Jesus…we who come to the table to receive the bread and wine…the body and blood of Jesus…we who believe in the teachings of this rabbi with a radical vision of love…we have it within us to meet the needs of our neighbors. Right now. So let’s go!

In the name of our one holy and undivided Trinity.

 

Prophets and Gifts

The 50th annivesary of the "Irregular Ordinations" in Philadelphia came and went on July 29th. For me, and the many thousand of women clergy in the Episcopal Church, this was a big deal. What those eleven women (and then the Washington Four in 1975) went through was hell. Their bravery challenged the institution of the church. That's no small undertaking. 

And the more I think about what they did, the more I see it as a prophetic act. 

So I give thanks for the Revs. Carter Heyward, Allison Cheek, Merrill Bitner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone-Schiess, Nancy Wittig, Emily Hewitt, and Katrina Swanson for stepping up to be the firsts. 

Text: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a

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Last Sunday… a few of us sat here in the nave and watched the film “The Philadelphia Eleven.”

It’s a documentary that tells the story of the eleven women who were Episcopal deacons that felt called to be priests in the church.

But in 1974…The Episcopal Church hadn’t come to a consensus on allowing women to be priests.

Only four years earlier…the first group of women delegates were seated at the General Convention.

They made the case for women’s ordination and came very close to getting it passed. But when women tried to press the issue again at the 1973 convention…there was tremendous push back.

And so the women deacons met.

They developed a strategy.

They had the support of some male bishops…the vice-president of the Episcopal House of Deputies…and the rector of the historically black Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.

And on July 29^th 19-74…50 years ago…they defied the rules of the Episcopal Church and were ordained as priests.

While not exactly speaking truth to power with words…these women did speak truth to power with action.

It wasn’t easy.

They received death threats…hate mail…and harassment.

In many cases they weren’t allowed to function as priests.

And…even though the church came around in 1976 to approving the ordination of women…the Episcopal Church still allowed bishops to deny women a path to the priesthood…under what was called the “conscience clause.”

As a result…many women would have to relocate to another geographic region just to follow their call and hope to find a bishop who would be favorable to allowing them to be priests.

An almost identical scenario would play out later with the ordination of LGBTQ priests.

We’ve come a long way since 19-74…both as a church and as a society.

But it doesn’t happen without those willing to stand up…speak up…shake things up…and call out the sins of those in authority when necessary.

It takes being willing to be a Nathan approaching a King David.

Nathan didn’t have an easy task.

We need only look at what happened to John the Baptist when he chastised Herod to know that those who enjoy having power over people will not take kindly to those who challenge their actions.

I can only imagine what must have been going on in Nathan’s head.

In the same way that an earthly powerful King David sends people off to war…and command the presence of a woman in his court.

God as a source of power is telling Nathan…”Go tell King David…you ain’t right!’

Now…Nathan has to contrive a way to break this news to David.

And he comes up with a plan… a very pastoral plan.

Nathan tells the wayward king a parable.  

Parables are useful tools.

Jesus spoke in parables to his followers as way of helping them understand the presence of God in ways that they could comprehend…allowing them to think for themselves.

Because each of us has the ability…with our God-given wisdom…to weigh what is right and what is wrong.

What is good versus what is evil.

And this parable of the rich man taking the poor man’s only and most beloved lamb to slaughter worked!

As Walter Brueggemann notes about this situation…David rightly understood the parable.

But he was too blind to understand how it spoke to his own wrongdoing. His guilty conscience betrayed him.

 He so quickly blusters about how this rich man in the story…” deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

“A-ha!” says Nathan! The king is busted!

David will get punished.

Nathan’s mouth opens and he pours out the words of God…laying out for David all that is about to come upon him.

The once favored will lose the child Bathsheba is carrying. His house is going to be divided…and his wives will be given to others.

I can only imagine what that must have been for Nathan to stand there and speak those words to his king.

I imagine it took quite a bit of courage to stand up to one who could easily have ordered him struck down right there on the spot.

But this is the role of a prophet.

They’re the ones who listen deeply to the Spirit…to the Wisdom of God…and even with knees knocking…voices trembling…butterflies beating their wings furiously in their stomachs…they speak the truth to the powerful.

They do so despite the risk to their lives…because the words in their mouths are not theirs but the spirit of God that is upon them.

I find that Episcopalians tend to be shy about thinking that there are still prophets of this kind in our world today.

That whole idea of God speaking through people in the way  our Biblical ancestors understood it may seem just a little too “woo-woo” for our more enlightened minds.

And yet we can still point to people who have spoken truth to power and who do it from a place grounded in the Gospel.

The late South African archbishop Desmond Tutu led the fight against apartheid.

The late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose campaign for Black civil rights in this country was not limited just to black people…but the liberation of working-class whites who struggled against the invisible caste system in our own country that keeps millions living in poverty.

And today…that mantle of speaking up for justice for those who are living paycheck to paycheck can be seen in the efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign led by Bishop William Barber and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. (thee-o-HAHR-ess)

And then there are those eleven women in Philadelphia in 1974…followed by four more women in Washington, D.C. in 1975…and their supporters the Reverends Paul Washington, William Wendt and Peter Beebe who stood with them in the breech to insist that the Episcopal Church do as it has promised to do…to trust in the Holy Spirit to guide it into all truths as Jesus said would happen…if we are humble enough and willing enough to listen and follow.

Not everyone is meant to be a prophet…we get that from our reading from the letter to the Ephesians.

But all of us have gifts…all of us have abilities…and we are all called to bring what we have into practice for the purpose of spreading more love into the world.

A love that sustains people and grows community…not chaos. 

The spirit of the Lord is upon each of us now to do the work we are given to do.

Love God…and love our neighbors as ourselves.

In the name of the one Holy and Undivided Trinity.