February 12, The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

Kristin White

“See,” Moses says, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments I give you, by loving God and walking in his ways and observing his commandments, you shall live, and God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants shall live.”

“Choose. Life.”

Sometimes the law falls heavy on our ears, weighed down with the measure of what it tells us we cannot do.

Love the Lord your God, walk in God’s ways, observe the commandments AND the decrees AND the ordinances, and you shall live. And you shall become numerous. And you will be blessed in the land you’re setting your foot toward.

HOWEVER…

IF your heart turns away, IF you do not hear, IF you bow down to other gods, IF you wind up serving those other gods…you’re not going to make it very long in the land you’re crossing that Jordan River to enter.

Deuteronomy can be translated from the Hebrew as the “second law,” or “the second giving of the law.” And that explains something of the importance of today’s first reading from that book in the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. This is part of one of the three sermons Moses makes to the People Israel as they prepare to enter the land of God’s promise. They’ve spent 40 years wandering through the wilderness. They have walked through the Red Sea on dry land, they have gotten lost and found, they’ve eaten manna and quail that rained down from heaven, they have drunk water from a rock. They have gone from being slaves in Egypt to knowing themselves as God’s own beloved. And as God’s own beloved, they have this new law – this new way of being who they are. They are people of a covenant about to be fulfilled. “Go, to a land that I will show you,” God said so very long ago to Abraham. And now…their feet are about to walk on that land.

So the Law that God gives them is a gift to the People Israel. The law will show them how to give shape and substance to the covenant that God has established. The law helps them live, offers them an identity based not on bondage but on promise. And the People Israel love the law. That’s important. The People Israel, prepared to cross the Jordan, love the law that God has given them.

“Choose life,” Moses tells these people he has helped to free and sought to lead. “Choose life, that you and your descendants shall live.”

It’s clear that the people have a choice. They can choose to walk as closely as they can to the path God has offered, and the promise of the covenant is that they will find in that path God’s abundance. Or…they can choose to fall away, to get lost, to get distracted and fall in love with things that are not worthy, and that abundance will be lost as well. The people have the awesome and devastating choice of life abundant…or death…and God gives them the autonomy to make it.

We’re in the midst of four weeks’ worth of gospel lessons that re-tell Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount. It began two weeks ago with the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you,” Jesus said. And it continued last Sunday with Jesus’ teachings on salt and light. Next Sunday Jesus will tell his followers to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them.

Scholars aren’t sure who exactly Jesus’ audience is with this sermon. We know that he has called his disciples, that he walked around in Galilee teaching and preaching and healing people, we know that as his fame spread, people brought their sick and afflicted family and friends to be healed by him. And they were healed. So his fame grew. The texts tells us that people followed Jesus from Galilee and the Dacopolis region and Jerusalem and Judea and from well past the Jordan. And I’m telling you that that’s a pretty spread out region…so it says something about Jesus, that people came from all over those places to follow him. The text tells us that Jesus sees the crowds just before he begins to preach the Sermon on the Mount. He sees the crowds, and he walks up the mountain, and he sits down, and his disciples come with him. We don’t know about all the others. For all we know, they stay down at the base of the hill. But we know the disciples hear him.

And so begins the “Blessed are you…” and the “You are the light of the world…” and so will continue next Sunday: “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow…”

And (sigh) we have Jesus’ teachings from today: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not murder…’ But I say to you that if you are angry, you will be liable to judgment…’

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart…’

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate…’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife…causes her to commit adultery…’

“Again, you have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all…Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’

Sometimes the law falls heavy on our ears.

Last week Jesus made it clear to those who follow him that the law that God gave to the People Israel is the law that God still gives to the People. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets,” he said. “I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

The two might strike us as different, especially given this morning’s text, but the Book of Deuteronomy and the Sermon on the Mount have something in common. Remember, Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law, the preparation for people walking into the lives that they have hoped for, for generations. And scholars treat the Sermon on the Mount as a parallel fulfilling, a kind of second giving of the Ten Commandments. Jesus is offering it to his disciples up there on the mountain, this distilled and amplified and seemingly impossible way of being, to the people who have dropped their nets to follow him, people who will descend this mountain and continue in seemingly impossible ways with faithful and imperfect lives of ministry.

As hard as it falls on our ears, what if today’s gospel passage from the Sermon on the Mount is every bit as much about choosing life as the reading from Deuteronomy?[1] With those heavy words, what if Jesus is provoking us beyond superficial adherence to the rule of law, to instead find our way inside of that beloved law, to what it means at heart?

Is Jesus saying that life is endangered when anger and insult and judgment prevail?

Is Jesus saying that life is endangered when women are treated as disposable?

Is Jesus saying that life is endangered when we make promises that we have no intent to keep?

It seems to me that we’re living in a distilled and amplified time, one in which multiple times a day we could envision Moses standing before us on the Plains of Moab, saying “See, I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”

How do our thoughts and our words and our actions bring life to this beautiful world? How can we hold this second giving of the law, this fulfillment offered by Jesus, when our fury would cause us to dehumanize another person? When our labels would exclude? When our promises fall flat?

The People Israel wandered through the wilderness for 40 years, proved again and again that it’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to be distracted, to fall in love with bright and shiny objects. It’s easy to forget who we are, especially when the words of law fall so heavy on our ears that we forget to listen.

But the law that the People Israel love, the fulfillment of the law that shapes the disciples’ journey down that mountain and beyond, invites us, as it invited them, to choose life in the abundance of a God who blesses us and calls us beloved.

“See, I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God…so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham and Sarah, to Isaac and Rebecca, and to Jacob and Leah and Rachel.”

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4810

January 29, The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany: Baptism, Welcoming New Members, and Annual Meeting

Kristin White

Micah 6:1-8, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Matthew 5:1-12

“Oh my people,” the prophet Micah says in today’s first reading. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” He’s trying to remind them of who God has been for them throughout the ages, to show them what matters in their own lives and in the life they share.

“Consider your own call,” the apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth, a church that has become consumed with its own internal politics, forgotten who they are and what they are meant to be.

“Blessed are you,” Jesus teaches his disciples. He only just called them after his return from the wilderness, and immediately began teaching and healing and casting out demons and doing miracles, and the crowds have grown grown. Jesus sees them, and he goes up the mountain. His disciples follow behind him. He sits down, begins to teach, offering blessing with the strength of commandment, blessing that confers itself in the speaking of it.

These scripture passages bounce off of one another, weave together, and resonate with each other. Taken together, they offer the church “a call to action, a call to be church.”[1]

“Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus says to his disciples. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake…”

“What does the Lord require of you?” the prophet asks, “But to do justice, and love kindness…”

“We proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul writes. “To those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Taken together, these scriptures offer a frame to see the world without being overcome by it. Taken together, they can show us a way forward with simplicity, and hope, and compassion.[2]

Let yourself experience these passages of scripture simply, without needing to offer expert interpretation. Simply put, what do these passages mean to you? What claim do they make on your life? I’ll show you my pictures and tell you my stories about it later, but how do you imagine Jesus walking up that mountain, away from the crowds that had followed him there? Did the crowds follow, and jostle the disciples, or did they stay at the base of the hill? Did Jesus look across the Sea of Galilee toward the Golan Heights as he taught, or was he looking at a baby, or an elderly man? “Blessed are you….blessed are you…” Where are you in the story, and how does it land on you differently to find your way into it?

Sometimes hope is all upside down and sideways. It doesn’t look like we expect it to. “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” Paul writes to the Corinthians. Sometimes hope is born of defiance, a sheer unwillingness to despair. “Consider your call,” Paul writes. “God chose what is foolish…God chose what is weak…God chose what is low…” What I learned in my bones of my time in Jerusalem is that the place that was Christ’s tomb was also the place of Christ’s resurrection. Defiant hope has always had a home in our faith. And defiant hope, I believe, paves a path to our future.

But the only way we will find our way is to find our way together, and for that we must have compassion. That’s what allows us to see ourselves in one another, to know that we’re made of the same handfuls of dust. “O my people,” the prophet says. We belong to each other. We’re made of the same dust, by a God who uses dust to make beautiful things.[3] And the God who makes beautiful things requires us to “do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly…”

My friend Kate and her church in Western Springs welcomed a refugee family from Syria to their community last summer: two parents and their three children. The Sunday before they arrived from their 20-hour journey, she preached that “one of the reasons we read scripture is to enlarge our imaginations…Not all of us grew up as immigrants or refugees; but we hold sacred stories of the Bible that remind us that once we were no people, but now we belong to God and to each other. It’s not just a story: it’s our story.”[4]

Woven together, these pieces are a fitting call to the church to be church, today, in the life of this church; today, in the life of this world.

Because everything that we do today will come back to the fact that we belong to each other, the fact that, together, we all belong to God.

Today in this church we will baptize a baby whose mother and aunt and uncles were baptized at this same font. Blessed are you, Baby Kayla. We will welcome new members who now join this Body of Christ that is the Church. Blessed are you. We will feast and give thanks and discern and hope for the future of St. Augustine’s. Blessed are you. We will welcome, as our guests here tonight and throughout the week, people who don’t have anyplace else to call home. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you.

And today as we go back out into the world, may we be guided by lessons of simplicity and compassion and hope found in this scriptural call to action. Remember who God has been for you, simply; recall yourself again into our story. Remember that we belong to each other; that we’re made of the same dust. Consider the call we share from the God who created the steadfast hope that burns within us, from the God who uses dust to make beautiful things. Consider your call to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly. O my people…blessed are you.

If this present moment has anything to teach us, I hope it teaches us that all of this matters. God’s calling on your life is not superfluous or haphazard. God’s gifts within you are not accidental. Our lives count. Our gifts matter. Hostility and isolation and cynicism will not prevail against simple compassion and defiant hope…they can’t. But it takes all of us, offering what we have to give with open hands, with open hearts. Remember: the place of Christ’s burial is the place of his resurrection.

So may we hear our call, on this day of baptism and welcoming new members and taking counsel at our annual meeting and hosting guests who stand most in need of our hospitality.

Blessed are you, O my people. Let us gather, now, at the font of our salvation.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4802

[2] Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 1. Charles James Cook “Matthew: Pastoral Perspective.” Knoxville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 312.

[3] http://www.nadiabolzweber.com/uncategorized/some-modern-beatitudes-a-sermon-for-all-saints-sunday.htm

[4] the Rev. Kate Spelman, All Saints Episcopal Church, Western Springs, IL

January 22, The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

The Rev. Dr. Frank Senn

Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23

This is the time of the year when I begin to watch hopefully for signs of more daylight – the sun rising a little earlier in the morning and setting a little later in the evening.  We’re only a month past the winter solstice, but the darkness in our northern world gets old fast.  We yearn for a little more light.

I suppose we could say the same thing about the political situation in our country. We yearn for a little more light. We went through the darkness of a particularly nasty election season and, unfortunately, not much has been done to assuage the fears of many of our fellow citizens regarding the actual policies of new administration. Perhaps what little light has been shed on the situation has come from people comforting one another, like in all the women’s marches yesterday in cities across our country---or one-on-one I did on a street corner yesterday after my men’s yoga class as I listened to a fellow class member vent his heart-felt concerns about the new president for more than an hour.   

We’re also in the time after the Epiphany, which begins with Isaiah’s announcement: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you” (Isaiah 60:1). I expect the light to grow stronger as Christ’s presence in the world expands through the mission of the gospel.

I would note that we are in the week of prayer for Christian Unity. Certainly as Churches find ways to be in full communion with one another and ministers from different Christian traditions can be authorized to preach and preside at the Eucharist as needed in one another’s churches, the light of unity is growing brighter.

Two of the three readings today speak of light in the darkness. The other one speaks of the power of God in the Cross. There’s a clashing here as these readings are juxtaposed with each other that brings even deeper meaning to the "light". I think we need that word about the cross because when we Christians hear the message of the light of God shining in Jesus there is an unconscious expectation and a subtle hope that if we profess our faith in him things will be better and life will be much smoother sailing.  But there is a deeper truth that emerges by holding these passages together.

These three speak of hope and the hope is realized in Jesus when he begins his ministry of preaching, of calling the disciples, of teaching and healing. Matthew carefully places Jesus in the right place at the right time by showing how he was truly the long promised One, the light coming into a dark world. He puts Jesus into the right place geographically by picking up Isaiah's prophecy.

The land of Zebulun and Naphtali at the time of Jesus was Galilee. But back 800 years earlier, when Isaiah wrote, the people from these tribes of Israel were the first to be carted away by the Assyrians. Since then the whole region was considered with contempt and somehow degraded, especially by the Jerusalem Jews. The question of Nathanael when he was introduced to Jesus, "What good thing can come out of Nazareth?" gives you a feel for their contempt. Galilee was now populated with Gentiles as well as Jews, and therefore more cosmopolitan and not as pure as Judea. But the long ago promise was that out of this place of darkness and hopelessness a great light would shine.

And then Matthew paints a picture of Jesus walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee calling his first disciples. He walks between the earth and the sea. Now the ancient Jewish writers saw the sea as evil. It floods and destroys the world. It separated the Israelite people from freedom when they were slaves in Egypt.  It rages uncontrollably in floods that come crashing down the cataracts from Mount Hermon.

In the creation story the earth was formed out of some chaotic watery substance. The sea is chaos and the earth is order. These images and symbols have been given new meaning for us since the great Tsumani of several years ago – the power and chaos of the sea sweeping humanity up and devouring everything in its path. And then came Hurricane Katrina, and recently the floods in Texas and even in Arizona, of all places. Maybe these images help us understand how the Hebrews felt about the sea. Matthew is presenting a picture of Jesus calling order out of this chaos.

The Corinthian reading seems to come from way out in left field. Paul is writing to a small house church which he has planted in the great Greek city of Corinth. When the Corinthian converts first heard about Jesus they trusted in him.  Something connected for them and the light went on.  They were filled with God's Spirit in amazing and wonderful ways.  But in a brief few years they seemed to have completely lost their way. They quickly became divided and proud and self‑seeking. This is a church in darkness, so to speak. And into this darkness Paul drives home the center and focus of their faith – the CROSS of Jesus. He reminds them how he came to proclaim the gospel to them not with fancy words and eloquent wisdom, because the cross speaks for itself. The message of the cross is a powerful message to those who trust in it, but to those who don't it just seems like foolishness and nonsense. It is the CROSS that brings light out of darkness. Martin Franzmann caught that connection in his great hymn, “Thy strong word didst cleave the darkness.” He writes:

From the cross thy wisdom shining

Breaketh forth in conqu’ring might;

From the cross forever beameth

All thy bright redeeming light.

The cross speaks of pain, rejection, abandonment, helplessness and death. Not the sort of things we like to think about and certainly not what we want to experience for ourselves. It doesn't have the same good feeling about it as light shining in darkness does.  It feels more like darkness itself.

So we have today a word about light dawning in a dark world, and a word about the cross. Our lectionary puts them together today. And they raise the question: If Jesus came as the light, why is there so still so much darkness?

If God had revealed himself through an all-powerful Christ who came to conquer the oppressors and liberate his people and bring in a new order of justice and peace, the CROSS wouldn't have been necessary. But he didn't. Instead the Light was extinguished, seemingly snuffed out at the cross. Jesus submitted himself to the evil forces and powers of the time. Even the land was covered in darkness at his death.

Jesus is the icon of God.  He reveals God to us, what God is like. God is not different from Jesus. Does this mean that somehow God is not the all-powerful controlling force that is responsible for every cause and effect in the way we often think of Him? Is there something about the way Jesus suffered and confronted evil that gives us more truth about God? Is this finally what “Immanuel”  – “God with us” – means? Suffering alongside us?

"The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God," wrote Paul. God's power is released in suffering. The light shines because there is darkness. Certainly the resurrection has happened but the full redeeming and reconciling effects of this resurrection haven’t taken place yet. If it had there would be no Tsunamis, no devastating hurricanes, no torrential floods, no wars and bloodshed and refugees.  No, the general resurrection of the dead and the new heavens and the new earth are yet to come, and come they will, just as surely as Jesus came at the right time in the right place on the shores of Sea of Galilee.

This is good news for us. Into the deepest pain and suffering, confusion and disappointments, the sin we can't overcome, the self‑absorption we so easily succumb to – into these dark places the light shines. It shines from the cross. By gazing on the wounded, dying Christ, who reaches out to us with love, seeing us in all our frailty and woundedness, weakness and complete inability to help ourselves, we allow him to enter into these dark places.  He comes with power to turn on the lights and help us see something in a new way. In our weakness, he becomes our courage.  In our fear, he becomes our hope.  In our hurt, he becomes our healing.  In our helplessness, he becomes our confidence.  In our storms, he becomes our shelter. In our darkness, he becomes our light.

When Jesus called the fisherman on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, they immediately left their nets and followed after him. What did they know about him? It couldn't have been much in such a short time. But there was something about him they sensed and trusted. That trust was tested over and over for his disciples, for Mary his mother and the other women and the small company that followed him and learned so much from him. They had been walking in the presence of Love, and when they looked into that face on the cross many of them fled in fear and shame. But some stayed. Later, these same fearful men faced their own violent deaths, but this time strong and sure that the light who had come into their lives was the light of the world.

Light is coming into our dark world. The sun and the earth will keep on doing their thing in their orbits, upheld by God’s grace for our benefit.  But the Light of Christ in our world only grows stronger. As Fransmann wrote in his hymn,

Lo, on those who dwelt in darkness,

Dark as night and deep as death,

Broke the light of thy salvation,

Breathed thine own life-giving breath.  Amen.

– Frank C. Senn, STS, Evanston, IL

January 8, The Baptism of Christ

Kristin White

Matthew 3:13-17

Kevin and his family had come to their church when he was in the fifth grade. They stuck to the edges of things over those next several years – they attended worship once in a while; they didn’t get involved in small groups or ministries; they didn’t really get to know other people very well.

So their pastor, Rodger Nishioka, who tells the story,[1] was happily surprised when Kevin opted to join the other ninth graders as they went through the process of confirmation. Kevin was not yet baptized, so he would prepare for both his baptism and confirmation on Pentecost Sunday the following spring.

Pastor Nishioka held an orientation meeting, and Kevin and his family showed up. At the meeting, he asked the confirmands to sign a covenant that they would participate fully. Kevin signed it. It was clear that he took this process seriously, because he showed up for everything: the two retreats, the mission work, the meetings with his mentor, the weekly classes. Kevin did it all.

At a festive Pentecost celebration, Kevin was baptized, and Kevin and the other young people confirmed the promises of their baptism.

And then he disappeared.

After a time of just not seeing Kevin or his family, on the heels of a year when he and they had become so much a part of the church community, Pastor Nishioka reached out to them.

Kevin’s mother seemed surprised by his call to check in. “Oh,” she said, “I guess I thought he was all done. I mean, he was baptized and confirmed and everything. Doesn’t that mean he’s done?”

 There’s not much about Jesus’ first 30 years of life in the lead-up to today’s gospel passage. The gospel of Matthew begins by telling us the genealogy, that beautifully involved and convoluted and blessed family history that Frank Senn recalled when he preached a few weeks ago.

Then comes Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth: the coming of the magi with their gifts, which marks this season, and their going home by a different way; it remembers Herod’s attack on the innocents.

Next is the description of John the Baptist, with his calling to prepare the way…and, yes, with his calling the Pharisees and the Sadducees a brood of vipers.

And then we land on today’s passage. It’s only chapter 3 in Matthew’s gospel account of Jesus’ life and ministry – there are 25 more chapters to go.

In today’s gospel, Jesus comes from the Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. (And I just have to tell you…next Sunday, my group on pilgrimage will go from the Galilee to the Jordan River to renew the promises of our baptism. I will carry you with me. Thank you for this opportunity.)

So Jesus comes from the Galilee to the Jordan River, to be baptized by John. John can hardly help himself: “No no no – I should be baptized by you,” he protests. But Jesus answers him: “Let it be, for this way it is fitting to fulfill all righteousness.” John consents, the text tells us. And he baptizes Jesus. When he does, the heavens open, and the Spirit of God descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven says: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

In the very next verse, the same Spirit will lead Jesus into the wilderness. There, he will fast for 40 days, and be tempted by the devil. He will return, and call disciples to drop their nets and follow him, and they will. He’ll teach, and preach, and heal, and feed people, and cast out demons, and do miracles. He will upset the powers and principalities. He will set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the cross and the tomb.

Those next 25 chapters of the gospel of Matthew encompass the whole of Jesus’ ministry during his earthly life. And that ministry begins with his baptism – it doesn’t end there. Jesus’ ministry begins with that blessed convergence of recognition at baptism: the heavens open, the Spirit descends, the voice says this is my beloved son. This confirming of Christ’s identity is the ground from which his ministry will grow.

We have spent a good deal of time over this past year discerning the ministries of this parish, asking questions both of ourselves and of leaders outside the church about who and what St. Augustine’s is called to be and to do.

That conversation began with last year’s Annual Meeting, and continued with the vestry retreat and in individual and shared discussions throughout the year.

What became clear through it all is that there are a variety of good gifts and callings among the people of St. Augustine’s Church. What became clear is that people are compelled to share the gifts that have been conferred on us by virtue of our baptism: gifts of hospitality, calling us to shelter and to feed people; gifts of questioning and teaching; gifts of caring for one another; gifts of advocating, of doing substantive work for justice; gifts of praying, for each other and for this beautiful and broken world.

I hear you naming those gifts. And we will have an example of that today, at the end of communion, as we commission Eucharistic visitors who will practice the ministry of their baptism by taking the blessed bread and wine from this table out to people who cannot be here with us for worship.

Helping each other recognize and name and claim the gifts we have been given, and then equipping ourselves to live into God’s calling on our lives, is, I believe, one of the most important callings of this church. And it’s happening. It is beginning to grow.

Kevin and his parents came back to church, not too long after that phone call from their pastor. They came back to the now-confirmed classmates and the mentor and the worshipping assembly that they had become such a part of in those past months; and they were welcomed warmly.

I don’t know what came next for Kevin, because that was just the beginning. But I give thanks for the fact that, whatever his own next steps in the journey, he took them within the context of relationship with a community of faith and love. I give thanks that Kevin’s baptism and confirmation were not the culmination, but just the beginning.

My prayer for St. Augustine’s Church is that this is a place of beginning, again and again. My prayer is that we will discern God’s gifts in our own lives – to name them for each other, to ask questions, to imagine the ways God may be calling us to put those gifts into practice for the good of this world, to equip ourselves for that work, and then having begun, to come back and tell each other about how we have seen God in and through it all.

My prayer for this church is that every time we renew our baptismal promises, as we will very soon, we will have own identity confirmed and reaffirmed. That we will hear again: “this is my beloved child.”

My prayer is that we will all remember our baptism, and we will know it as a calling to begin.

[1] Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 1. Roger Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective.” Knoxville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 302.

December 24, Christmas Eve

Kristin White

The elderly man turns on the light, smiles at his dog, and greets the delivery person who has a package for him.

“English for beginners,” the man reads aloud with a heavy accent – it’s the title of the book that was in the package he just received. The dog watches him, wags its tail.

He makes tea, reads aloud and repeats the phrases he has read. He labels everything around the house with stickie notes, including the dog, who is now no longer wagging its tail, but instead trying to scratch off the stickie note label that reads: DOG.

He repeats again: “I am, you are, he/she/it is, they are…” He says it again.

Children overhear him through the open window. They laugh as he practices.

He names the utensils at the breakfast table, using their English words: fork, knife. He names his toast when it pops up from the toaster.

With his headphones on, he repeats the phrases from his tutorial: “I love you. You are perfect.” Except that he happens to be riding a public bus at the time, which leads to some surprise on the part of the woman sitting two seats ahead of him.

He and his little dog watch English-speaking movies, seemingly of the Godfather variety, which includes some salty language. Someone shoots a gun. The dog barks.

Later, the man repeats some of those salty phrases, to his rubber ducky, in the bathtub. But then he makes it up to the ducky with those well-practiced phrases: “I love you. You are perfect.”

Another package arrives from the delivery service, this time including things with English names he knows, now, and says as he takes them out and then begins to pack:

suitcase…slippers…toothbrush…passport…pajamas…

He delivers his little dog to a friend’s house, turns off his Christmas lights, practices his English phrases on the way to the airport.

And then he’s there. Right there, on the threshold. He hugs his son. And then he walks in and kneels down, and in his now well-practiced English, says to a shy little girl standing to the side in the hallway:

“Hi. I am your grandpa.”

Amy Jacobs shared that story, which, it turns out, is a Christmas advertisement, from Poland. And it’s an advertisement that I have yet to watch without weeping.

Choosing to be beginners isn’t something we do very often, once we become good at something. It’s hard to start again, especially when we’re used to being good at what we do. We like what is familiar, right? I do. We like knowing the things we know, knowing the people we know.

Beginning is hard. Learning something new is a challenge, no matter what. Getting to know different people can be awkward. We make mistakes. And we just might get embarrassed.

And this grandpa, this sweet, elderly, fluent Polish-speaking grandfather, is willing to go through all of that. Because he wants to meet his little granddaughter, yes, but more than that, I think he wants to know her. So he chooses to become a beginner again. He chooses to go through the awkwardness of learning a whole new language and going to a whole new place, so that he can go to her, and kneel down on the floor, and look her in the eye, and get to know her.

I never thought before seeing that advertisement about God becoming a beginner, for us. But he is, in the person of Jesus, on the occasion of the miracle we remember tonight.

Presumably, God the Holy Trinity, Three-in-One-One-in-Three, God who laid the foundations of the earth, God who separated the light from the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it, God who parted the Red Sea and led the People Israel through on dry land…presumably, our God is and always has been…good at what God does. God is, and forever has been, good at knowing what God knows.

So what does it say to us, that God comes to us on this night in the person of Jesus Christ as an infant? God comes to us a beginner at everything.

God comes into our midst, willing to go through the awkwardness of dependence, needing to cry in order to have his needs met. God comes to us and learns to speak and to walk. God learns what all beginners learn: that getting to know things and people can be hard, and painful, and good. In the person of Jesus, God learns what it is to live on this earth, entirely human and entirely divine.

The miracle of this night is our recognition that we’re not doing this all on our own. God comes to be with us – not speaking through a cloud or an angel, though God is really good at that, too – but no. God comes to us as one of us.

In the person of Jesus, God speaks to us with a voice we can understand. In the person of Jesus, God can come right across our threshold, and kneel down to look us in the eye, and say hello.

The miracle of this night is that God gives us God’s own self – a beginner, learning what it is to be with us, so that he can invite us into the miracle of being with him.

Welcome to the miracle, friends. Welcome to the miracle of God with us.

December 18th, Fourth Sunday of Advent -Rev. Dr. Frank Senn

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A of the Lectionary

Matthew 1:18-25

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah*took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ 22All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;* and he named him Jesus.

One week to go until Christmas. One more week of preparations. For many people that means last minute gift-buying. For others it means getting ready to travel. Giving gifts and traveling are ways in which we replicate the Nativity stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew the magi from the East bring gifts to the Christ-child. In Luke, Mary and Joseph have to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a Roman census-taking. Matthew doesn’t say anything about that. You would assume from Matthew’s Gospel that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem and settled in Nazareth later on. The travel story in Matthew’s Gospel is the journey of the wise men following a star, not Mary and Joseph going home for the census. The story of the journey of the magi we hear on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6.

What’s behind all our Christmas traveling? Family. We’re either preparing our home to receive family members who are traveling to us or we’re packing up what we’ll need to visit family members somewhere else. Last year Mary and I decided it would not be much of a holiday for us to be home for Christmas because none of our children were able to come home.  So we went on a Christmas cruise—but on the cruise ship on which Emily worked as an entertainer so that we could be with her. This year Emily visits us.

When I was a youth in the 1950s Christmas Day was all about family. At Christmas dinner we hosted Grandpa and Grandma Lichtenberger and my mother’s in-town brother’s family, which provided me with three cousins.  At night we usually hosted the Senn family reunion with Grandpa Senn. (Grandma Senn died when I was about five.) If all the Senns had gathered there would have been seven other families since my father had three brothers and four sisters, which netted me about 20 cousins.

During Christmas week we visited aunts and uncles and cousins to see their Christmas trees and exchange gifts. So there were more gifts to give and receive over the twelve days of Christmas. My mother’s extended family was a little confusing because Grandpa Lichtenberger was married four times. So my mother had a half-brother from his first wife and a step-brother from his third wife as well as two brothers from his second wife, my material grandmother who died when my mother was five. Great Grandfather Lichtenberger had been married twice. So my mother also had aunts and uncles who were about her age. That was very confusing for a child.

But as my wife Mary’s and my siblings, cousins, and nieces and nephews grew up and went their various ways in life and geography, things got even more complicated. Some married and divorced and remarried and produced children who had different parents or adopted children. Some cohabitated but still produced children. Our two sons married their same-sex spouses and advise us that being foster parents or adopting children is not totally out of the picture in the future.

So as I look over all of our extended families, I see that they have contributed to the statistical changes in marriage and family life over the last fifty years. In the 1970 census, 40% of American households were constituted by married couples with children. By the time of the 2010 census that figure had fallen to less than 20%. Meanwhile, “other” households grew. Among them are many empty-nesters, widows or widowers, as well as single men and women. As for families, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, single parents, and same-sex parents contributed to the cultural revolution that has been dismantling what we took to be the traditional family.

More ominously, marriage seems to be out of reach for many lower income persons, both black and white, along with whatever economic advantages and stability marriage might bring.  Is marriage in our society available only to college-educated middle class or upper class persons? This is a social reality that isn’t receiving a lot of attention, perhaps because government can’t do much about it.

If our present reality seems like a mess in comparison with our images of what family should look like, well…human relationships, marriage, and family has been a mess from the very beginning, according to the Bible. It’s also there in the Christmas story, especially in the way the Gospel of Matthew tells it from Joseph’s point of view rather than Mary’s.  Joseph discovers that the girl he is engaged to is already pregnant and he knows that he is not the father. What is Joseph to think about this situation? What should he do?

As we begin reading through the Gospel of Matthew during this church year, it’s too bad we don’t begin at the very beginning—at the genesis of the gospel with the genealogy of Jesus. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in genealogies, as I’m sure many of you have discovered when you search out your own on ancestry.com. I wonder if Joseph pondered his family history and looked for examples in his ancestry that might help him decide what to do.

Here are some of the ancestors of “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The genealogy in Matthew is very patriarchal, so it leaves out Abraham’s relationship with Hagar and their son Ishmael. In fact, none of the matriarchs are named. So it doesn’t mention Sarah or Rebecca or Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel, who, along with two slave women serving as surrogates, mothered those twelve sons who became the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel. It does, however, include Ruth, the gentle woman who was the mother of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of King David, and therefore the ancestor of Jesus. One wonders if Matthew is making a point by including only the name of a gentile woman in Jesus’s ancestry, since Jewish society is matrilineal. We hear of Solomon, David’s son by “the wife of Uriah.” Not “wife of David?” Solomon was conceived out of wedlock. Bathsheba is not named; nor are David’s other wives. Nor are any of Solomon’s many wives mentioned. But Joseph would have known these stories and all the family irregularities they entailed from the standpoint of monogamous marriage and children within marriage.

Joseph’s situation was certainly irregular from the standpoint of social norms. As a righteous man—one whose adherence to the Law of Moses is tempered with mercy—Joseph wants to do the decent thing. The situation with which he is confronted is a personal humiliation, but he decides not to press charges against Mary or expose her to public disgrace. He will just send her away quietly and let her fend for herself and raise the child she bears. But how might she survive without the support of her family? Set up some little craft shop? Supplement it with begging or prostitution? The latter profession, of course, would be the most lucrative.

Fortunately, Joseph, like his namesake in the patriarchal stories, is a dreamer. So in a dream, an angel of the Lord convinces Joseph to move forward with his plans and take Mary as his wife and presumably adopt her child—a child, he is given to understand, that was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So he did as he was directed. He took Mary as his wife but had no marital relationships with her until the child was born. He dutifully named the boy Jesus—Joshua in Hebrew—, “for he will save his people from their sins.” The evangelist tells us that this was all done to fulfill prophecy. As we read in Isaiah, but from the Greek Septuagint in the New Testament version, “’Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him, Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God with us.’”

If this was to fulfill prophecy, then it was all according to God’s plan. Now think about this situation. The Lord God of all creation could have chosen to be born within the wholesome confines of stable family life. Maybe he could have inserted the Spirit-conceived son into an already functioning family—Jesus in the middle. The Messiah could have entered the world through what would look like the sexual path of the respectable majority.  Yet he assumes human flesh deliberately and scandalously outside of the majority patterns of human sexuality and traditional family.

This is not to say that those traditional norms of sexuality, marriage and family are to be overturned.  But if Jesus’s purpose is to save his people from their sins, he must enter into situations that are outside the boundaries of sexual, marital, and familial norms— precisely in order to save all, in all circumstances, and not just the righteous sinners. As church fathers like Irenaeus and Athanasius said, “what has not been assumed has not been redeemed.” If God’s birth into human life within a human family as Emmanuel—God with us—blesses all human families, then Jesus’s placement into an irregular family situation includes such situations within the divine blessing.

It’s amazing that the implications of the birth of our Savior into an irregular family situation has eluded so many of our Savior’s followers for so long. These situations are not unknown to us. We see these irregular situations in our own immediate and extended families. Are they beyond the scope of grace? Don’t all families need to be saved? I mean, what family isn’t, to some degree, dysfunctional? But family is what we need. As Pope Francis has said, “Without family, without the warmth of home, life grows empty, there is a weakening of the networks which sustain us in adversity, nurture us in daily living and motivate us to build a better future.”

The pope added that despite the “many difficulties that afflict our families, families are not a problem, they are first and foremost an opportunity. An opportunity which we must care for, protect, and support.” This pope struggles to help his Church—and all churches—see the need to care for, protect, and support all families, regular or irregular.  We must “accompany” all families, both regular and irregular, in their unique situations.

If our divine Savior—Emmanuel—comes to dwell with us in a family, and by his presence makes the family holy, then all families with whom the Savior dwells, no matter how irregular their situations, are holy families. Jesus’s presence in the irregular marital relationship of Joseph and Mary made that family holy. We call it “the holy family.” It was a holy irregular family.

Holiness comes from proximity to holiness. If the Savior is God with us, we partake of his holiness not because of what we do or because society decides to make our situation legal, but because of God’s presence with us and among us. Regularly therefore, and not just during Advent, we should pray:  Come, Lord Jesus. Come dwell with us, full of grace and truth. Amen.

Pastor Frank Senn

November 13, The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Isaiah 65:17-25

Kristin White

“For I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth,” the prophet says.

The People Israel are up against it in today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah. They’re divided and cynical. They have been driven into exile, which means they have lost the comfort and familiarity of their lives in the Land of Promise. So there, in captivity in Babylon, they have to find a new way to get along. They have to begin their lives again in a new and foreign place. Everything presents a challenge, everything seems like hardship, every hope seems lost. And the Israelites don’t trust their new neighbors…they resent them. 

In the year 597 BCE, the region of Judah revolted against the emperor Nebuchandezzar. The emperor responded by sacking the city of Jerusalem, burning the Temple, and sending Israel’s leaders into exile in Babylon. They left the land that God had promised them so many generations before, when a stranger took Abram out under a sky full of stars and promised to lead Abraham to a land that God would show him. The People Israel left the magnificent Temple they loved – not just that but they watched it burn – the very place that they believed to be God’s dwelling here on earth. They left their lives and their understanding. They left it all, and they left it for a long time.

Nearly forty years later, when Isaiah proclaims this message of God’s vision, the People Israel are up against it.

“For I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth,” Isaiah says.

“Be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;

I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people;

No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.”

What a passage this is, appointed a long time ago for what would be the Sunday following the most divisive election season of my lifetime, and maybe yours.

And the thing is, nobody’s got the market cornered on chaos and divisiveness and resentment right now. We’re all in it. And we don’t know why, exactly, though lots of people have a great deal to say about their theories on that count. And we don’t know what comes next.

I heard an interview the week before the election about a working-class white man whose life has not gotten better in recent years. He dropped out of high school – which was a source of embarrassment and shame to him – but then he found a training program, and he learned the trade of welding. He found work with a livable salary in that job, and he did it for a number of years. He got married, had a couple of kids, one of whom has a learning disability. And then the crash of 2008 hit, and he lost his job as a welder. So he was out of work for awhile, and then he went through another training program, and found work again, though this time it was hourly instead of full-time, and at a lower wage. His family lost their health insurance with the welding job; then they found a policy through the Affordable Care Act, but then they couldn’t afford it. They lost their home, were in and out of homelessness.

The thing that stopped me short about this whole story was what the reporter said at the end: this man, this former welder, had tried to do everything right. Like I said, he was embarrassed by his lack of education, but he had tried to compensate for it by learning in other ways. And he and his family were really alone – they didn’t belong to a church, the reporter said; they didn’t have anyone to come around them, to champion their cause, to provide ideas and support.

They didn’t belong to a church, the reporter said.

And I thought – oh – have we forgotten that we belong to each other?

I hold that man’s story of exile, together with the palpable and profound fear I see in my own friends right now. A friend from high school now living in California had her Mexican–born adopted daughter come home from school on Wednesday to say that her classmates told her she was going to be deported. A lesbian couple who are very special to me are making legal arrangements to protect their parental status as two mothers of their beautiful infant daughter. Another friend shares stories of trans folks they know who are helping each other get passports right now in case they need to leave the country quickly.

And again, I wonder: have we forgotten that we belong to each other? How did we get so far away?

“I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people

No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,

            or the cry of distress.”

Isaiah shows up in the midst of an exiled and divided and resentful and frightened people, and shares the word of God. The word of God is capable of creating something new out of something that is very old. The world of God has the power to restore order from chaos. The word of God can make beauty where every single thing seems broken.

In the middle of the People Israel, Isaiah returns a word of promise…in concrete and practical fashion:

“God’s people shall build houses and inhabit them;

            they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

They shall not build and another inhabit;

            they shall not plant and another eat;

For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,

            and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their               hands.”

I want that vision. I want that vision of safety and belonging, of a just return for the work of our hands, of a long life, and enough to sustain it. I want that. I want it for my friends who are American Indian and Black and Latino. I want that vision for my friends who are lesbian and gay and trans and queer. I want Isaiah’s vision for that welder who got laid off and who now finds himself really, really alone. I want that vision for your family. I want that vision for my own.

And I don’t know how we get back from the exile of our own fear, but I trust in the power of God’s promise and prophecy. I’m clear that I will struggle together but not fight for vindication. I will speak aloud the truth that I see, but I am finished with vilifying – on all sides. My dear friend Kate says this more eloquently than I can, as she preaches from her own pulpit this morning: “We have elected a president who I would never allow myself or a female friend (or my daughter) to be alone with. But I will be praying for Donald Trump in the weeks and years to come, and I hope you will too.”

When I was in discernment to the priesthood, I found myself praying with an image that would never have been something of my own choosing or creation. I found myself praying like this, with a posture of my own hands outstretched and open. It felt a little vulnerable and strange, and it also made sense. It forced me to imagine God placing things in those open hands of mine…and maybe taking them away, too.

Wednesday morning, I had an email from Meghan Murphy-Gill. She ended it by telling me that she is praying, palms up, looking for the paths.

Me too, Meghan.

So I will pray, and I will listen. And I will seek to live the promises of my baptism, which are the property of no party and which are subject to no election. And I hope you will too.

Because it’s time for us to find the paths, to find our way back to each other. It’s time for us to return from this exile we have created here in this great nation of ours. It’s time for Isaiah’s promise of “a new creation, where the heavens and the earth are no longer alienated.”[1]

Because I want that vision Isaiah speaks into a word of hope, with conviction, for us all:

“The wolf and the lamb shall feed together…

The lion shall eat straw like an ox;”

The vision that

“They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,

            says the LORD.”

[1] Nelson Rivera. Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 4. “Theological Perspective.” Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 290.

November 6, The Feast of All Saints

Luke 6:20-31

Kristin White

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, brand-new bishop-elect of the Diocese of Indianapolis, preached at our friend Amity’s installation as rector of Grace Church, Chicago, last Tuesday. She talked about the walls of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Now, those walls are painted with icons of saint upon saint upon saint – 90 of them – people both new and ancient, whose lives showed forth God’s glory: King David and Teresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi…Margaret Meade and Thurgood Marshall and Desmond Tutu. There are even some who would not claim the Christian faith – Gandhi and Macolm X, Anne Frank and Martha Graham, Abraham Joshua Heschel.

They’re all up there on the walls of St. Gregory’s Church, now; and they’re dancing – one hand on another shoulder, a foot lifted and ready to take the next step, hands clasped to join.

But they weren’t always there. In fact, it took a long time for them to be written into that space the saints now hold. In the time before, for the years and months that led up to their completion in 2009, those saints existed in blank space at St. Gregory’s, and then only as outlines. It took time for them all, the known and the less-well-known, to be written into that dance.

Today is the day, in the life of the church, that we set aside to give thanks for the lives of all the saints – those known and the less-well-known – who are written into the dance of our faith. You can see some of them here, drawn into our memory in glass that is both etched and stained: Augustine and his mother, Monica, who prayed for her son’s conversion a long, long time before it happened. Margaret of Scotland, and Polycarp; Andrew, and Anne.

Our saints will be spoken into our midst today as well, as we receive the bread and wine of communion, we will hear the names of those we love but see no longer, whose lives are imprinted on our own: mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, grandparents…children…friends.

And with the reading of their names, the memory of their lives etches itself in color among us once more.

“Blessed are you,” Jesus says, in the gospel passage appointed for our celebration of all the saints today. “Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you.”

He comes down to the people, scripture tells us in the verses leading up to today’s lesson. This is not the Sermon on the Mount, as Matthew’s gospel tells the story of the beatitudes. Luke tells this story another way. He tells us that Jesus comes down from the mountain, comes down to the people and stands with them on a level place. They’re sick, after all, and hurting, and troubled by unclean spirits. And they try to touch him, because they know that he has the power to heal them. And he does. He heals them all.

Then he looks up.

“Blessed are you,” he says. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, defame you because of the Son of Man. For that is what they did to the prophets.”

And correspondingly, “Woe to you who are rich, and full, and laughing, and well-regarded.”

Finally, this last piece: “But I say to you that listen: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who abuse you. Offer your cheek and your coat and your things.”

Is that what our saints have done?

We all have stories of the ways they are written into our lives – in lightly chalked outline, or etched in color and glass and gold. And on this feast when maybe not so very much would separate us between the living and the dead, we remember their dance in our lives.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you, Augustine, who sought and sought and sought after truth, with your restless heart and your brilliant mind.

Blessed are you, Julian of Norwich, who promises us still that all manner of things shall be well.

Blessed are you, Patrick of Ireland, who bridged ancient mysticism and Christian faith to exalt God in the midst of our natural world.

Blessed are you, Elizabeth the First, who held the people of England together and forged religious peace by way of Common Prayer.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you, Marjorie and Thomas, whose team that saw a dream made manifest after 108 years of waiting, the celebration adorning your resting place outside in our columbarium.

Blessed are you, Kathie, who knew that it was good.

Blessed are you, Pieter, now rejoined to your beloved Miepje.

Blessed are you, beloved Caroline.

Blessed are you, Jim, your name written in chalk on the wall at Wrigley Field.

Blessed are you, Roy, and Georgia, and Fritz, and Brett, and George, and Rodney, and John, and Alfred.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Blessed are you.

Their names are written onto our hearts, and their dance illumines our lives. And by the gift of faith, by the icons of their lives and witness, we are reminded again: Jesus comes to the people. He stands with them on a level place. The people are sick and troubled and hurting. And Jesus comes to be with them.

“But I say to you that listen,” Jesus says to the crowds: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who abuse you. Offer your cheek and your coat and your things.”

We need those saints, all of them. The ancient and the new, the familiar and the less-well-known. We need their chalked outlines, their images etched in color and glass and gold. We need them written into our lives as they are. We need their light – maybe now as much as we ever have. We need their light and their dance.

And so today, let us pray those saints, every one of them, into our midst. Let us clasp hands and remember that we are not alone. And let us be the ones who listen to what Jesus says to the people as he stands with them there, on that level place: “Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you.”