Bryan Cones Sermon - Epiphany VI

(We transferred to a new website earlier this year, and sermons dated before that transfer did not get moved. This sermon of Bryan's was requested by so many people that I needed to bring it over to the new site! Please find it below, out of order by date but entirely in order in all other respects. KW+)

Bryan Cones

Epiphany 6A

Matthew 5:21-37

So how is everyone feeling about following Jesus right now?

Is anyone remembering a particular moment

of anger this week?

Or maybe a stray lustful thought

that might be paving your way to Gehenna?

Is anyone thinking about which hand or eye

is going to have to go

            so that you can get our ticket to heaven punched?

Jesus is particularly stark today,

            hard-edged, almost unreasonable:

No anger? No lust? None at all?

As the vestry reflected on this uncompromising passage,

            one of the evening’s inspired theologians, Carolyn Eby,

pointed out that we really mean it

when we say Jesus was fully human,

                        clearly subject to bad moods and bad days.

            with this passage being a case in point.

As a pastor,

I worry about how passages like this one

are heard by the people

whose experience they directly address:

I wonder, for example,

how those of us who have experienced a divorce

            or the difficult end of an important relationship

feel as we hear Jesus condemn “divorce” in such stark terms.

Even if we delve into the differences

between divorce then and now,

            or explore what Jesus might have meant,

            or even the impact divorce had on women in particular

                        in that male-centered culture,

this teaching has caused many people a great deal of pain.

Then there’s the teaching about “cutting off”

some part of yourself to enter the reign of God.

As a gay person,

the idea that I should exclude some unacceptable part of myself

            from my religious life has been unhelpful to say the least.

I wonder if many of us have struggled somehow

with the idea that something unacceptable about us

must be “excluded” or “cut off”

            if we are to be “real” disciples of Jesus.

I know that one of the reasons I am an Episcopalian

is our church’s willingness to sit

with the gray areas of life.

This either-or, black-and-white, uncompromising Jesus

frankly doesn’t seem very Episcopalian,

and no matter how I dig into this passage,

I find myself struggling to make use of it.

So instead of digging deeper, of seeking its riches,

I decided to watch the Olympics instead.

I’ve been struck by how finely tuned,

            how single-minded and focused,

these athletes are about their disciplines,

how their bodies have been shaped

by their devotion to their sport.

The long track skaters seem to be all legs:

The Dutch have these strikingly enormous thighs,

            the product of their thousands of meters on the track.

Then there are the cross-country skiers of the “skiathalon,”

            an event that looks to me like a carefully designed form

            of winter alpine torture,

30 kilometers of running with skis on.

The skiers are like machines built only for this,

            just muscle and bone pushed to their absolute limits.

Then there was the Swiss downhill skier,

            a woman who finally won her gold medal

after nine knee surgeries.

Or the Japanese ice skater

who every day spends two hours

            practicing his school figures

—the most basic shapes of skating—

and that’s before he starts on the astonishing jumps and spins

that he manages to land on the knife edge

attached to his foot.

And then there are my favorites:

The slope-stylers, half-pipers, and mogul riders,

            the surfers of the Olympic Games,

            who manage to answer most of Bob Costas’ questions

            with variations on the word “awesome.”

And they are, all of them, awesome.

I wonder how these Olympians

might hear Jesus’ words in today’s gospel.

I have a feeling that the either-ors and black-and-whites

            probably make a lot of sense to them.

I don’t think it’s possible to do a YOLO 1060

on an ice-covered 22-foot halfpipe

            by saying, “Well, maybe I’ll make it.”

It’s “yes, yes” or “no, no”—there’s no waffling.

No skater ever manages a quadruple lutz

followed by a triple toe loop

            to land one-footed on a knife blade

by switching coaches or changing choreography

            or wondering if she’d rather play golf instead.

It does not seem an exaggeration to say you have to be

            faithfully, unbreakably married to the rink.

I didn’t notice enormous biceps on those Dutch skaters;

clearly some parts of their bodies,

while not exactly amputated,

            don’t get the same kind of attention

as the legs that win gold.

When I think that way about this gospel and those athletes,

            I realize that I’ve been thinking only negatively

            about Jesus’ teaching today.

I don’t think these athletes see their hours of practice,

            their unbending dedication,

their discipline of their bodies,

            as some kind of chore,

as if they are giving up some important part of themselves.

In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite:

It is by their discipline, their dedication,

            that they are becoming more and more themselves,

ever more a skater, a jumper, a half piper, a hockey player,

ever more Shaun White or Shani Davis or Gracie Gold—

ever more the selves they are created to be.

I wonder what it would be like if we could see this passage,

this uncompromising teaching of Jesus,

as an encouragement to say “yes, yes”

to who and what God has created us to be,

as an invitation to practice our particular “disciplines” of life

            in ways that continually expand

the gifts God has given each of us,

to stretch our hearts and our spirits to Olympic size.

What would it be like to wed ourselves

so completely to God’s call in us,

that to do otherwise would be adultery against ourselves,

            a denial of who we are?

Perhaps Jesus is not asking us

to cut off some “unacceptable” part of ourselves,

            but simply to let go of whatever is preventing us

            from becoming the images of God that only we can be.

In our creation and in our baptism,

we have all been set on the path to “gold,”

            and even better,

we each have unique place prepared for us on the podium,

a place only we can take.

And Jesus is inviting us to lean in ever more strongly,

            ever more faithfully, ever more boldly,

into who we really are

as the friends and partners of God.

Imagine the possibilities when we accept that invitation.

As the half-pipers might say it:

Dude, that would be awesome.

Kristin White Sermon - Patsy Pemble Funeral

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Burial of Patricia Roberts Pemble – June 21, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

In the not-quite two years since I arrived as rector of St. Augustine’s, many people have asked me what this church is like. 

“Down to earth,” I said, after an usher and long-time member pulled my husband aside on our first Sunday here to tell him, “Don’t feel like you have to wear a suit to church.”

“Faithful,” I said, after one Friday morning Eucharist followed by a rich discussion over coffee.

“Good humored,” I added, after laughing out loud in the sacristy with a gathering of Altar Guild members.

“Deeply caring,” I told someone, after learning that the Good Samaritans had set up a rotation for meals and visits and lawn care, following a parishioner’s serious bicycle accident last summer.

“Committed,” I said, after the members of this parish managed to put on a self-catered meal of delicious food…for the whole parish and our bishop…at last fall’s Stewardship Dinner.

Down-to-earth.  Faithful. Good-humored. Deeply caring. Committed. Those are all words I would use to describe our dear Patsy Pemble, as well.

On May 20th, I was in Royal Oak, Michigan, for a friend’s Celebration of New Ministry as Rector…the same day Patsy was admitted to Glenbrook Hospital for what would be the last time. I left the information about where I was on my outgoing phone message, so when Patsy called to tell me where she was, she found out about my trip. I went to visit her in the Intensive Care Unit as soon as I got home. In her characteristic manner, as I walked in the doorway of her room, she looked up and said, “So. You go to see a friend installed as rector, and come home to find me here. How’s that for a welcome home?!”

I could tell you about her wit, which you just heard about, and already likely know of…I could tell you about how she and Betty Jenkins started telling stories to Mary Jacobson and me about the real history of the women’s guild at St. Augustine’s. We laughed so hard and so loudly that I am still a little bit amazed that we didn’t get kicked out of Panera that day.

I could tell you about her committed and unsentimental generosity… about her donation to the church of the beautiful covering on our altar, lovingly vested at the beginning of this liturgy by her beloved friends and fellow members of the Altar Guild…

I could tell you about her faithfulness.  Just a couple of days before Easter, after deciding we would begin our Easter Vigil service by lighting the Paschal Fire outside in the columbarium, I shared with a few people that we would start 15 minutes beforehand, by chanting the names of all who were buried there. Patsy was having trouble with her breathing then, as she had so often over the past months. She needed to lean against the lower wall as she waited, but she was there. And when we came to The Venerable Richard Pemble, she stood up. And she sang his name: “Blessed Dick,” she sang; “Pray with us,” we responded.

---

In his Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Patsy didn’t mince words. She struggled with a number of serious health problems in these past years, dealt with hospitals and tests and surgeries and recoveries in her practical and honest manner. Through it all, she showed herself to be tenacious in her faith. She believed fiercely that the suffering she encountered was not the whole of it. She had a sense of, and a trust in, God’s glory still to be revealed.

What I will tell you is this: she shared ways that she had seen pieces of that revelation. She shared stories of those moments with her children and her grandchildren, with her friends, and here at the church she loved so deeply. She shared her faith and hope, with members of her Saturday morning Bible study, and by joining the conversation at our small group gatherings in Lent. She shared in service, helping to cook and serve meals when we hosted people who are homeless here at St. A’s. She shared in ministries of care, organizing our Good Samaritans to provide meals, or rides to the doctor, or other ways of supporting each other during times of need. She shared her trust in God’s glory by witnessing to it in practical and substantive and everyday ways.

That first day I saw her after coming back from Michigan and finding her in ICU, I left church in such a hurry that I wasn’t well-prepared for the visit. Toward the end of our time, I asked what else I could do for her. Even in the midst of her pain and trouble breathing, Patsy turned to me with a twinkle in her eye, and said, “Well, communion would be nice.” I brought it to her when I visited early the next day.

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul asks in his letter. Patsy’s condition deteriorated quickly in the days that followed, to the point that Hank and Sara asked me to come pray Last Rites with her by that next Sunday. She mostly slept, while her daughter, Sara, and her granddaughter, Nicole, and I sang “Seek ye first,” to her…as Dick had sung the same hymn to her in another hospital room many years before. Her eyes stayed closed as we prayed the prayers of that Last Rite. But when it was time for Communion, I broke off the tiniest piece of a wafer, dipped it into the wine. She opened her eyes, received it, smiled…and closed her eyes again.

“Who will separate us?”

I am convinced, as I believe Patsy was when she chose these words to be shared with you all here today: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And so I give thanks. I give thanks for the life and witness of such a down-to-earth, faithful, good-humored, deeply caring, committed soul to help illustrate, help reflect back to us who we are, who we are called to be.

Godspeed, dear one.

We will chant you and Dick into our midst once more, together again at the Feast of the Resurrection.

Kristin White Sermon - Trinity Sunday

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

Trinity Sunday – June 15, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

Hear again the words of Psalm 8:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars you have set in their courses,

Who are we, that you should be mindful of us?

Who are we, that you should seek us out?

You have made us just a little lower than the angels

You adorn us with glory and honor;

You give us mastery over the works of your hands,

You put all things under our feet.

Dr. David Lose says this about Trinity Sunday: “Trying to explain the Trinity in a sermon is a really bad idea.[1]”  I have to agree with the professor.

If I were to make such an attempt, I could toss around some $5 vocabulary words, like homo ousia (which is Greek for God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being three distinct persons of the same substance), or perichoresis (also Greek, describing the perpetual relationship between the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit).  If I really wanted to get flashy I could try to impress you by sharing the fact that the word circumincession means the same thing as the word perichoresis.

We could explore the history of the early church, wandering through stories of bishops duking it out at the Council of Nicea in the year 325 over the heretic priest Arius’ claim that “there was a time when (Christ) was not,” or the subsequent council at Constantinople in the year 381 with its confirmation of the Nicene Creed.  Or later, the addition of the Filioque Clause, that place in the traditional interpretation of the Creed, when we say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son…those 6 words are one of the few things separating us from full communion with Eastern Orthodox traditions.

So I could talk about all that for the next 7-10 minutes, make a defensible claim that sums it all up for you…and you could do your best not to fidget in your pews and discover how very much more interesting are the announcements at the back of today’s bulletin, as your patience ebbs…as boredom sets in…

My friend Elizabeth Molitors says, “not everything that might be explained should be explained.[2]”  There is a time for highly technical vocabulary and elaborate recitations of early church history.  And, dear ones, there is a time for wonder, and awe.  Hear the words of the psalmist:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars you have set in their courses…

Trinity Sunday is a big deal in the life of the Episcopal Church, the one Sunday of the year that celebrates doctrine.  The one Sunday of the year that celebrates…doctrine? 

Other celebrations in the church year give us something to attach ourselves to.  Christmas gives us God, right here with us, in the person of a baby to be held and loved.  Easter gives us a tomb that is empty of everything but the shroud and a promise, fulfilled.  Pentecost offers wind and fire and words and understanding…and Church.  And now?  This day?

Who are we, that you should be mindful of us? The psalmist asks.

Who are we, that you should seek us out?

This day gives us a moment to pause, and celebrate awe, defined as “an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear…produced by that which is grand, sublime, or extremely powerful.[3]”

During seminary I was assigned as part of a team that included two other classmates to argue the heretical side of a debate, called a disputatio, about the persons of the Trinity.  We wore our black cassocks, we trotted out words like homo ousia and perichoresis and circumincession.  We named the major players at the councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381), we argued for and against use of the Filioque Clause.  As I look back on that very valid classroom exercise (valid except for the fact that my team of heretics lost…I’m doing my best to live with that disappointment)…when I look back on it, I hear the Bishop, saying: “If you can explain it, it’s not God.”  When I consider how God could be three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and still one Person at the same time, distinct members of the same substance, perpetually connected, I hear my friend wonder if, by “practicing awe, we can come closer to appreciating – if not entirely understanding – the timelessness, vastness, and complexity (of God).[4]”

Who are we, that you should be mindful of us?

Who are we, that you should seek us out?

So what is it for you that offers such an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration…even fear?  Can you name those moments in your life when they have happened, when your breath caught, at the magnitude and majesty?

Have you stood on a mountain, seen the range of mountains disappearing into the horizon, above and below the clouds? Have you looked up at night in the wilderness, far away from any city lights, into a sky filled with more stars than your imagination could count?

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars you have set in their courses;

Who are we that you should be mindful of us?

Who are we that you should seek us out?

Have you been blessed by the weight of either of those extraordinary twin privileges, to sit with someone who is growing very near to death, or to sit with someone who will very soon give birth?

You have made us just a little lower than the angels;

You adorn us with glory and honor

In the face of all that, what I know of homo ousia and perichoresis and circumincession and councils and disputatios…all of that suddenly falls short.  And what I know of awe comes closer.  Because sometimes, the best witness we can offer is to stand in the midst of those overwhelming moments…and be overwhelmed…be overwhelmed by reverence and admiration, even fear. Sometimes, the best we can do is restrain ourselves from suggesting explanations with highly technical vocabulary and appropriate historical reference. 

Sometimes, instead, the best we can do is to stand still, to allow our breath to catch in our throats, and to give thanks for the God who created us, for the God who came to be right here among us, for the God who sustains us.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars you have set in their courses,

Who are we that you should be mindful of us?

Who are we that you should seek us out?

You have made us just a little lower than the angels

You adorn us with glory and honor;

You give us mastery over the works of your hands,

You put all things under our feet.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&cat_id=36

[2] Rev. Elizabeth Molitors, Trinity Sunday sermon 2014.

[3] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/awe?s=t

[4] Molitors

Bryan Cones Sermon - Easter VII

Bryan Cones

Easter 7A

Acts 1:6-14

I have been imagining this week being one of the Eleven

in today’s first reading,

            standing there watching Jesus ride away on a cloud,

and then “suddenly” to have “two men in white robes” appear

and ask an incredibly stupid question:

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

I think I would want to say something like:

“Duh, my rabbi, who was crucified just a few weeks ago,

            then came back to life

and has been appearing to us,

            just floated away on a cloud.

Where else would I be looking?”

Standing and staring is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

The story reminded me of a similar one in the gospel of Luke,

written we think by the same author.

It’s Easter morning

and the women have come to anoint Jesus’ body,

            most likely weeping and miserable.

And again, “suddenly” the passage says, two men,

            this time in “dazzling” clothes,

            ask an equally stupid question,

one that might even seem cruel to a grieving person:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Two questions, both rhetorical,

            and both kind of harsh,

            as if the women and the Eleven are being dull,

even though what they are doing is totally reasonable.

It is also curious to me that these two questions frame

            this Easter season we have been celebrating.

The first is asked at the empty tomb on Easter morning,

            when Jesus’ body had seemingly vanished.

The second one comes at the time of the Ascension,

            when Jesus’ body vanishes for good,

or at least until some unknown time in the future

when he will suddenly come back riding on his cloud.

What are we to make of these questions,

asked at such a crucial time in the history of the church,

asked now at the end of this Easter season?

What message was the evangelist trying to convey?

As I have been sitting with these questions,

they have begun to sound like warnings to me.

The first one comes at an empty hole in the ground:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

You won’t find life in a graveyard.

Emperors and presidents may build monuments,

            but Jesus’ witnesses can’t live in the past,

            whether reliving former glory or nursing old injuries.

There is no life among the tombs.

The second question comes as the disciples

are worried about their future

and the ancient church is looking skyward,

wondering when, or if, Jesus is coming back:

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

There’s nothing but clouds up there.

Don’t waste your time looking up,

            wondering when all this will be over with,

            as if Christian life is just putting in time

until we are fully vested in the eternal retirement plan.

It’s as if the gospel writer had a crystal ball

and knew well the kinds of temptations

his community might fall into.

Or perhaps he was just well-acquainted with human nature.

On the one hand,

there is the danger of too much focus on the past:

            the way things used to be in the good old days,

            the “we’ve always done it this ways,”

            the inflexibility and unwillingness to change

that has indeed made some churches literal “empty tombs.”

On the other hand,

there’s the danger of too much focus on the future,

            either because we become so paralyzed by fear

that we can’t take a risk,

            or because we think so much about the hereafter,

            that we forget that the resurrection is not something

                        that happens to us after we die,

            but the pattern for how we are to live now.

And so the gospel writer gives us our two men

with their dazzling clothes and their uncomfortable questions,

blocking the way to nostalgia on the one hand,

            and escapism on the other.

And between them, there is an open space, and an invitation:

“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,

in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Perhaps instead of looking down

into the past of the empty tomb,

or looking up toward some imagined future,

Jesus instead is inviting us to look out at the waiting world

            so in need of the good news we have to offer,

            so in need of the life we have to share.

Kristin White Sermon - Easter VI

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Sixth Sunday of Easter – May 25, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois     

Clinical Pastoral Education is a 10-week course of supervised chaplain service that just about everybody who hopes to become a priest has to fulfill.  I served my Clinical Pastoral Education also known as CPE, at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge the summer after my first year of seminary.

I look back on that time with a certain amount of wonder at how we survived it.  Our family did not have much money.  We lived in a small cinderblock apartment on campus.  John and I shared one car.  He worked a 50-hour/week schedule that was opposite my 50-hour/week schedule so that we could both be with Grace as much as possible…and also avoid paying for child care.  But the timing of it all meant that John had to get into our one car and drive to work in Glenview at the same time that I boarded a bus in Park Ridge for a 45-minute trip home.  And for that window of time, our 9-year-old daughter was home alone in our apartment.  Yes, it was on the seminary campus, which meant that, yes, if she had an emergency there were others to help.  But still.  It was not the way I hoped to be a parent, not the way I had hoped that things would unfold.

I’m startled sometimes as I look back on that time.  Because after the initial flinch at remembering my cell phone anxiously clutched to my ear as soon as I handed off my pager at the end of the day, I have a second recollection.  It’s a passage from scripture, actually found in today’s second reading: “Always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in you.”  It surprises me, because I don’t remember that summer as being especially rich with hope.  I remember general frustration and sometimes a little fear, and loneliness, even though I was surrounded by people most of the time.  All of that was wrapped up in my desire and responsibility to care for the people entrusted to me at Lutheran General, to care for my family.

One of the marks of CPE is that you have regular group conversations.  Actually, you get to have lots of group conversations.  During one of those, one of the supervisors shared this passage from the First Letter of Peter as something he walked with in his life and ministry.  I didn’t know him very well – he wasn’t my own supervisor…but I watched him over the course of that summer, watched his intuitive, confident, caring manner with people…and I grew to trust him.  I grew to find myself walking with that passage in my own life as well.

--

Too often, I think, hope gets reduced to something it is not.  Christian hope is not vapid optimism, to borrow a term from another preacher.  It is not greeting card sentimentality.  It is not about pretending, with an a clenched jaw and highly enunciated words, that everything is just fine, thank you very much…when it’s clear that much is really, really not. 

Christian hope, I believe, is something more substantive than all that.  It has muscle and grit.  Christian hope is robust and honest and sometimes defiant.  It recognizes the truth – that the world as it is, is not the world as it should be.  Pain is real, and we can’t be perfect (parents, spouses, friends, whatever…insert role here), we can’t be the fulfillment of all we had imagined, and people we love will sometimes be lost to us, and our hearts will unfailingly break.

And the strength within that hope is that will not be all there is.  Because there is more.  Because love wins. 

And that is the hope – in the midst of experiencing derision from a colleague, and seeing a 13-year-old flown in by helicopter, and visiting a woman whose bones throughout her body were broken in a motorcycle accident, and clutching my cell phone to my ear and waiting for Grace to answer each day at 5pm – that is the accounting of the hope that I hoped to be prepared to give.

That’s the same hope I see Jesus trying to instill in his disciples in today’s gospel passage.  This reading from John’s account takes place at the Last Supper.  By John’s telling, the Last Supper is also the Passover Meal.  The disciples, faithful Jews that they are, have spent this meal remembering who they are as a people: they have remembered God leading Abram out under a sky full of stars, and on to a land that God would show him.  They have remembered the People Israel following Moses with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm as they walked to their deliverance on dry land.  They have remembered who they are. 

And Jesus, knowing and loving them as they are, also knows his time with them is coming to an end.  He knows that Judas will betray him.  He knows Peter will deny him.  And he wants to call these disciples of his into who they will become. He sets aside his robe to do the (for them) embarrassing work of a servant, kneeling to wash their feet.  And then he does the (for them) scandalous thing of telling them they have to do the same.  He tells them to love each other.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus says to them.  Not: “I will not leave you.” Because he will, he has to.  But this: “I will not leave you orphaned.”  I will not leave you without someone who names and claims you, whose role it is to be with and for you, yourself, in this world.

(Can you hear it?  He’s offering them hope.  Be prepared.  Be prepared, disciples, to give an account of the hope that is in you.)

Jesus has reminded his friends of who they are.  He has told them that the thing they most dread will be the thing that happens.  He calls them to love.  And he offers them hope.

This is where the disciples’ hope needs to find stamina and strength, where vapid optimism and greeting card sentimentality will not be sufficient. Because the worst thing they can imagine will be the thing that happens.  And the light will go out of the sky, and the curtain of the temple will tear in two, and they will pierce his side, and the Centurion will cry out, too late, “Surely this was the Son of God.”  And those three days will be an eternity of grief.

And I worked with people exhausted and hardened by too much work for too many hours in too much pain.  And I prayed for a 13-year-old boy flown in by helicopter, in convulsions, after falling farther than doctors thought he could survive.  And I visited a woman whose bones were shattered after a motorcycle crash when her boyfriend was drinking.  And every day for 45 minutes I held my breath just a little bit until I got home again to my daughter.

And that is not all.  There is more.  Love wins.  Because on the third day, the stone is rolled away from the tomb.  And it will be empty of everything but the shroud.

Always.  Always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in you. Always.

Bryan Cones Sermon - Easter IV

Bryan Cones

May 11, 2014

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A

There is a woman I have been visiting in the hospital

where I work as a chaplain;

she is expecting her first child.

There are some complications with her pregnancy

and so for several weeks now I have been checking in with her

            to see how she is doing.

Our conversations are full of the dreams she has

for herself and her child, a boy,

and together we have been praying and hoping

that those dreams will come true.

I think it is because of her and her dreams

            that I have been reading today’s scriptures

            as the dreams of mothers for their families.

The passage from Acts is indeed a mother’s dream

—it is certainly my mother’s dream, anyway—

of a family happily sharing their possessions

            and “eating their food with glad and generous hearts.”

It’s a dream that neither my brothers and I,

nor the church then or now, always fulfills.

Still, I imagine a “mother of the church”

writing this passage of Acts

            as a love letter to her young family,

hopeful that they would keep the work of Jesus

alive in her household,

though with the full knowledge that they and even she

would not always be able to live up to their high calling.

In First Peter

I hear a different mother speaking to a different child,

an older one, perhaps, who is discovering the unfairness of life.

Maybe her teenager is learning the hard lesson

that doing what is right

            is sometimes, many times, the hardest thing to do.

“If you endure when you do right and suffer for it,

you have God's approval,”

writes this mother of the church,

“because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example,

so that you should follow in his steps.”

For her child she dreams of courage to stay the course,

            no matter what the cost,

though she stands ready to welcome

the return of any sheep that wanders off.

The gospel brings a mother in a different mood,

            one who warns, as mothers often do,

of “thieves and bandits,”

the “wrong crowd” who might lead her sheep astray.

She admonishes the bullies

who would separate the weaker sheep

from the protection of the flock,

or who would take from them what is rightfully theirs.

“I am the Gate,” says Jesus, the true son of God our Mother,

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

We hear those mothering voices still speaking, of course:

I heard it here not two weeks ago,

            when Mary Jacobson,

speaking with the voice of a mother of the church,

indeed speaking in the voice of God our Mother,

invited this family to prepare to welcome and shelter

the mothers and children of Family Promise,

            our ministry with families experiencing homelessness

as they struggle to find housing and work and security,

a ministry we share with other churches in this community.

In Mary’s voice I heard her dream for her church,

that we would be the Gate for Christ’s sheep,

that we would share what God has given to this household

            “with glad and generous hearts.”

Perhaps in another mood, she might also encourage us to ask

            why the gate to abundant life remains shut

            to families such as these,

or to consider what changes we must make within ourselves

and within our common household of Wilmette,

or Chicagoland, or Illinois, or the United States,

to ensure that all Christ’s sheep

have a just share of the pasture.

That is after all the dream of God our Mother

for all her people.

It is a dream that as a son of this church I am eager to share,

            especially as I continue to visit that expectant mother,

            who has herself been experiencing homelessness,

and who at this moment still has no home to go to

after her son is born.

Her dreams for her family,

            dreams I am certain God shares with her,

are so precarious, always in danger of slipping away.

What other dreams does God our Mother have

            for her family here at St. Augustine?

What dreams does God our Mother have for her world?

Who will share those dreams with this family?

Perhaps for the sake of all God’s families,

            we might ask for the courage to dream big,

and the good sense

to listen to our mothers.

Kristin White Sermon - Easter III

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Third Sunday of Easter – May 4, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

The church I served before coming to St. Augustine’s had a tradition of sharing what people called “God Sightings.”  It began with their young people on the annual youth group work trip.  They gathered each night, sharing ways that people had seen examples of God in their midst during the day, as they repaired fences, built wheelchair ramps, painted homes.

We continued that practice during the time I led the confirmation program at that parish.  Each Sunday, three or four middle school students would stand up in front of their peers and share the ways they had seen God at work in the world that week.  Sometimes it was as simple as a teammate helping one of our kids up on the field.  Other times, it was profound – as it was when one confirmand named Peter (who was actually baptized at that font) talked about he light he saw in our columbarium. It was shining on his grandfather’s name as Peter went in that morning to pray before he was confirmed. 

--

I would venture a guess that the disciples are not anticipating God Sightings of their own on the road to Emmaus.  We don’t know why they’re headed that way.  Are they trying to escape the same fate Jesus suffered?  Are they trying to escape their own disappointment, their own grief, their own brokenheartedness?  They meet a stranger on the way, seemingly the only person in all Jerusalem who doesn’t know about all that has unfolded in these last days.  So they tell him about Jesus’ life, about his ministry and then his death. And then they say perhaps the three saddest words in all of scripture: “We had hoped.”

“We had hoped he would redeem us.”

“We had hoped…”

They go on, those disciples with broken hearts, walking with a stranger who is no stranger at all.  But they don’t know that until he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it…and then in the blush of a moment, they have their own God Sighting, before he’s gone.  Their hearts, first broken, now burn with recognition of the One – the One in whom they had hoped.

--

The first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles actually takes place after today’s Gospel.  In the time between the two, Jesus has ascended into Heaven.  The disciples have cast lots to choose a twelfth disciple to take Judas’ place.  And that crazy moment of Pentecost behind that closed and locked door, when all the twelve talk in different languages, and all the twelve understand each other.  All of that has just happened. 

So the people, flummoxed, say to Peter and the disciples – “What should we do?”

“Repent and be baptized,” Peter says.

I have to pause here to say that at first flinch, Peter’s answer feels less like a God Sighting to me, and more like a street corner preacher with a placard and a bullhorn.

But wait.  Because repentance is really about orientation.  It’s about deciding how we are going to focus, about who we are going to be.  “Repent,” Peter says.  “Turn away from those things that will not give you life.  And turn toward the One who will.”

“And be baptized.  Choose your identity, as one who is sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own, forever.”

So this is the God Sighting that Peter promises: you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  You will receive that gift, and also your children, and people who are far away, and everyone whom God calls.

Just as diverse as the many languages spoken by the disciples in that upper room and yet understood by all of them, so is this promise of the Holy Spirit to the same.  It’s a God Sighting, to all who would turn toward it, who would seek that gift.

Today we welcome Brady Robert Curchin to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit as he is baptized.  We will gather around that font and remember the promise of our own baptism, as we help him to prepare for his.  We will bless the water and remember God’s deliverance, how the people walked through the sea with a wall of water on their left and a wall of water on their right, and they walked through on dry land.  We will remind Brady that he is sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own.  Forever.  We will receive him into the household of God, inviting him to confess the faith, to proclaim Christ’s resurrection, to share in his eternal priesthood.

And even as these next moments of Brady’s baptism may well serve as God Sightings for us, I hope we will recall those disciples on the road to Emmaus.  Being faithful can also mean being disappointed, or grief-stricken.  Being faithful can also mean being broken-hearted.  Because grief is real, broken-heartedness is real.  And in the end, even though hope prevails, love wins, there is still the path to follow on our way. We can teach Brady that, as he grows in his life of faith. 

We can remember that Christ comes among us on the way – in moments of joy and moments of pain.  I pray that we will look together for the promise for Brady, for our children, and for those who are far away, and for everyone whom God calls.  I pray that we will look together, with Brady, for God Sightings in our midst.

Vicki Garvey Sermon - Easter II

Vicki Garvey

2 Easter A

Acts 2.14a, 22-32; Ps 16; 1 Peter 3.1-9; John 20.19-31

St Augustine, Wilmette

17 April 2014

I don’t see any Easter bonnets out there or bunnies or baskets or eggs or even a solitary -- if dried up – Peep.  What’s the matter with you people?  Don’t you know we’re only in Day 8 of the Great Fifty Days of Easter?   I’m glad to see in the bulletin that we’ll be saying and singing some Halleluyahs.  At least we’ve got that.  And when we get to them, I want us to raise the roof.  Because Easter’s not over.  Easter’s really just begun.

I get it though.  For many of us, the rigors and the hoopla of Holy Week, Triduum and Easter Day were a bit over the top, so it might seem meet and right and all that to get on with life.  Makes me want to put on a fake British accent and Say, “Alright then.  Get a grip; it’s all over.  Back to the humdrum.  Pip-pip.”

Which leads me to the gospel of the day of course.  Because we have within that story both Easter Day itself and the 8th day of Easter.  The disciples have already cleared out their bonnets and baskets and bunnies less than 24 hours into the day itself.  “When it was evening of that first day,” our gospel this morning begins.  What day?  Easter Day.  The Great Getting Up in the Morning Day.  And according to this gospel, some rather momentous things have already happened:

·      Mary of Magdala has been to the tomb and back twice.  Her first time out she was so disturbed by what she didn’t  see – not only no body, but also no mysterious figure/s dressed in white to tell her he’s risen as in the other gospel accounts – that she raced back to spread the alarm

·      prompting two of the other disciples the unnamed one whom Jesus loved and Peter to do their own footrace back and forth to the tomb where they also discover no body home leading one of them for some mysterious reason to, as the gospel puts it, believe, but believe what?  There are several places in this story where the author turns quiet on us.  Leads us on tantalizingly and then leaves us hanging.  How is it that the empty tomb causes belief and what’s the content of that belief?  We don’t know since they simply go, as the gospel tells it, back home and do nothing about whatever it is they have come to believe.

·      Which apparently doesn’t sit well with Mary Mag who returns to the garden tomb to investigate some more at which point she finally meets her version of angels dressed in white who question her motives but give her no news. 

·      Then finally there’s the famous encounter with the very missing body himself, whom she mistakes for the gardener – they are after all in a garden that happens to contain a tomb – and she only recognizes her beloved Jesus when he calls her by name. 

·      After which she makes a second dash back to the others to proclaim with what I have to believe great excitement and joy and ebullience the Easter news:  “I have seen the Lord,” she tells them along with everything else from her encounter with him.

In our bibles, were you to look this up, you’d see only a double space between those stories and the one Kristin just proclaimed. Another of those places where the author seems deliberately to leave us out of things.   A double space, which is to say, a blank space.  What happened in that white space between their hearing the great good news and confining themselves to a locked room?  Really?  He’s been raised, conquered death, sent the news ahead, and their response is to huddle behind locked doors and windows. And it’s the same day; it’s the first Easter Day.  Makes our lack of Peeps and dyed eggs this morning look rather pedestrian.

And after that blank space following her news, our gospel of the day begins.  This Sunday is traditionally called by some regular churchy folks “Doubting Thomas Sunday” because of 2 things: the last several verses of the story are about Thomas, and no matter which liturgical year we celebrate, this is the story we proclaim every year on 2nd Easter.  So every year on the 8th day of Easter we hear about the only disciple who gets the pejorative nickname “Doubter” attached to him as if doubt were some sort of religious dirty word.  But hold the phone!  First, there’s yet another curious gap in the story. We don’t know what Tom’s been doing that keeps him away; all we know is that on Easter Day he’s not huddled up like the rest shaking in his sandals.  We don’t know that he’s out there goofing off or hanging at the mall.  Perhaps Tom is doing precisely the kind of thing that Jesus instructed all the others to do the night before he died:  Serve those who need serving, spread the gospel, feed the hungry, love people as Jesus had loved them.  We don’t know for sure what he was doing, but we do know about the others. 

There they are, all locked up.  What happened to that whiff of belief?  And notice this:  Jesus comes among them having busted mysteriously through all the locks.  Ta-da!  The gospel records no response from them.  He speaks to them and he doesn’t say what we might expect:  “Where were you guys the other day when I needed a little support?”  No, he says to them, “Shalom”.  Which means “peace” and so much more.  It means, “We’re okay, you and I.  All is forgiven.  I still love you.”  Their response?  Nothing.  Not a peep, not the faintest whisper of a halleluyah; nothing.  It is not until he shows them the scars of his passion that they get it, not until they see proof that they recognize him and finally begin doing the appropriate rejoicing.

After a brief conversation with them and fresh round of commissioning, we are treated to another small blank space in the text.  Jesus has apparently gone off again who knows where, but Thomas returns and is told the glad tidings by the others.  And it is here that his nickname is born.  “We have seen the Lord” they say, echoing the words of the Mary they apparently didn’t take seriously when they first heard her news.  Thomas doesn’t believe them.  But listen again to what he says: “Unless I see…” he says, “I won’t believe.”  Let’s see [pun intended]:  Mary didn’t get it until she’d seen and heard Jesus for herself; the others didn’t get it until they’d seen him and heard him.  Thomas’ response is right in line with the others.  He asks for nothing more than the others have already received. He wants to see Jesus. Thomas won’t settle for second-hand faith.  And more.  Seeing is not just believing; seeing and hearing is about relationship and it’s only in relationship that faith finds true home. Sometimes the demand to see is not doubt.  Sometimes it’s love.  Thomas is the realist here and the only one with the grit and the courage to enunciate his question right out loud and give voice to what he needs.

I like that about him.  He functions here as a placeholder for people like me and perhaps like some of you. I don’t have now nor can I remember a time ever in my life when I had what some would call a blind faith.  Sometimes I need to see to believe too.  Some of you know that I was for several years a woman religious, what some would call a nun.  Early on in my religious formation, I had a period of intense doubt.  We were at war and boys I had known in high school were dying, a cousin of mine was in danger and the country had turned ugly with some insisting that the litmus test for good citizenship was being pro-war and others denouncing the war as unworthy of us as a so-called Christian nation.  Meanwhile people here and in countries far, far away were suffering unspeakable horrors. 

And there I sat in my safe religious haven having real difficulty believing in a loving God who cared a fig for us.  To make matters much worse, I was wandering around in a habit, proclaiming one thing externally, raging against that very thing internally.  The stress was awful and I had to leave the community – and for a couple of years, the life of faith.  I won’t bore you with the whole story, but after struggling with God and notions of God for a protracted period, I was alone one night – actually in a locked motel room on a business trip – when I had an experience for which I still do not have adequate words.  I did not have a vision.  I didn’t see Jesus nor did I examine any wounds. I didn’t even hear a voice.   But I did have an overwhelming experience of the presence of a God who loved me beyond imagining and who loved and suffered with our sorry world. And that changed everything for me.

Everybody talks about Tom’s doubting but nobody talks about his faithfulness, about his hanging in with a program that was curiously no longer his in a way.  Did you notice?  A week passes, another of those strange blank hiatuses in this story, and apparently in that week, Thomas who had missed the initial excitement stays with the rest of them open to what may come.  As I once was, our Tom is rightfully agnostic [from the Greek root which means ‘I do not know’].  “His faithfulness is found in his ability to participate in the resurrection community despite his having missed that community’s mystical encounter with the risen Christ.  Surely he felt left out, but he didn’t sacrifice his questioning mind for the sake of getting along with the others.”[1]  And Jesus, when he returns on the 8th day, doesn’t really chide Tom for his questioning, but responds to his needs and then uses Tom as an exemplar, first for the early Christian community who also never had the opportunity to see and hear the living Jesus of the 1st third of the first century and then for all of us who would overhear this story through the millennia even to our day.

Tom, of course, got it.  Did he ever get it.  He’s the one person in all the gospels who makes such a stunning confession.  Not only “my Lord,” a title others have used for Jesus often in this and other gospels.  That exclamation tells us that Tom recognizes the Jesus whom he’d followed and that Jesus is indeed alive.  But “my God” a title no human in any gospel has ever attached to Jesus. Do you see it? Tom’s our guy.  Who among us wouldn’t want to see Jesus as he did?  Who among us doesn’t have questions about this faith of ours which is gift, of course, but also conundrum on occasion? Who among us doesn’t want to name and claim Jesus?  

It’s the 8th day of Easter.  And on this 2nd Sunday of the Great Fifty, the Church offers us as icon not Doubting Thomas the lacking-faith-and-should-have-known-better-disciple, but Tom our brother who teaches us that doubt is not antithetical to faith but indeed necessary to a robust faith.  From that day on, so far as we know and legend tells us, our Tom lived his life in Easter mode.  Minus the bonnets and bunnies and baskets, so might we at our best.

[1] Bruce Epperly in the weekly blog “Process Faith” for 2 Easter A, 2014.