January 25, Epiphany III

Kristin White

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany and Annual Meeting – January 25, 2015

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

Life is short. And we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind.[1]

—

If there’s a watchword for the Gospel of Mark, it’s “immediately.”

By Mark’s telling, Jesus’ story begins with John baptizing him in the Jordan River. As Jesus comes up out of the waters, immediately the heavens are torn open and the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. Immediately after that, the Spirit takes Jesus out into the wilderness, where he stays for 40 days and is tempted by the devil. When Jesus returns from that trial, he calls two sets of brothers: Andrew and Simon, James and John, all of them fishermen on the shore. “Follow me,” Jesus says. And, you guessed it, immediately they drop their nets and follow him.

They go to Capernaum, where Jesus teaches in the synagogue, and immediately he is confronted with an unclean spirit that needs some rebuking. Immediately after that, Jesus leaves the synagogue with his new disciples, enters the new disciples’ home to find their mother ill, and immediately he heals her.

You get the idea. And I promise I’m not exaggerating. All those “immediately” quotes are really actually there. And we haven’t even made it to the second chapter yet.

Mark’s gospel is the earliest of the four evangelists’ telling about the life and ministry of Jesus, written most closely to the time when he lived. It’s also the shortest, and the most urgent. You can read Mark’s whole gospel account aloud, start to finish, in about an hour and a half. It might leave you breathless, with all that “immediately” business, but it is possible. Everything feels like it’s right here in front of your face – like there are no extra words and there is no extra time that might provide cover or insulation from what’s going on in the story.

—

If “immediately” is the essential word for Mark’s gospel, then Mark is the essential gospel account for the season of Epiphany. Because that’s kind of how and what Epiphany is: right here, without extra words or extra time that might provide insulation from what’s going on. There isn’t much chance to think, before immediately something happens and we need to respond. A baby is born. The heavens are torn open. We find ourselves in the wilderness. Someone we love becomes very sick, very fast.

I think this parish has experienced the yearlong extended version of the season of Epiphany over this past year. It has felt like Epiphany as told by Mark the Evangelist: immediately and immediately and immediately. As a parish, we have received profound blessings and sustained devastating losses, all at about the same pace as that gospel, all about right here, in rapid succession, without the luxury of extra time or extra words that might provide insulation or protection from all that is taking place.

Karoline Lewis is a preaching professor who says this about Epiphany: “Maybe a life of faith can only happen in immediately, in the surprising, sudden, profound epiphany of God at work, God revealed in our lives. Because if we think that we can prepare for God’s epiphanies, that we can be fully ready for what we will see, well, then, God might be less than epiphanous.”[2]

The texts in today’s liturgy support this immediately mindset that marks both this season and this gospel passage. God calls Jonah, tells him to get up and go to Nineveh and share a message of repentance. Jonah has learned that God will not be easily avoided (read: big storm, belly of a fish), so he goes to that city expecting that the people will continue on their path of destruction. But they don’t. The people believe him (and it doesn’t say immediately, but it might as well). No delay, no extra words, no extra time in this moment. They declare a fast. Everybody puts on the clothes of mourning. And (again, maybe immediately?) God changes the divine mind. God does not destroy the city, as Jonah anticipates. (And if you continue reading past today’s lesson, you’ll see that immediately Jonah is annoyed with God to the point of disgust…but that’s another story, a different sermon.)

Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth shares this level of urgency. He opens by saying “the appointed time has grown short.” (An echo of our blessing from the first?) So, he says, this is how you’re supposed to live. The world is changing. What you have known is passing away. And so put all your energy, all your focus, on how God is calling you to live right now. The peculiar details of Paul’s direction about those who are married and those who are mourning and those who are rejoicing and those who are buying bears its own conversation, and probably some disagreement. What I take from this lesson, though, is Paul saying that what we do right now, how we live right now, in these immediate moments, matters.

And again, we return to Mark’s gospel, his text of immediacy. “This is the fullness of time,” Jesus says. “The kingdom of God has come near.”

—

We’ve learned over and over again throughout this year of Epiphany at St. Augustine’s, that life is short, that we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. Like Mark’s gospel, so much has happened immediately.

And as Dr. Lewis says about God’s epiphanies, we have been changed. Without benefit of the extra words or extra time for preparation or self-protection, we have been called into those moments of life and death, of joy and grief. And in those painful and profound moments, as we have faced into them together, I believe that God has revealed God’s own self to us. In the warmth of a welcome. In the grief of a goodbye, and another, and still another. In the discovery and claiming of the stories we tell ourselves. In the comfort of a prayer shawl. In the celebration of a new priest among us. In the feast, together with everybody.

The fullness of time is a weighty thing. The kingdom of God come near will change us. And it does. And it has. And it will. And you, the people of St. Augustine’s Church, have borne this season of Epiphany with grace and steadfast love. And with a strong sadness, at moments. And in joy for the great gifts God has given us.

—

It will not always be Epiphany. We will not always tell time in Mark’s terms, immediately and immediately. Because, thank God, there are other seasons, too. Lent offers space to turn around, time for contemplation. Easter gives us resurrection and rejoicing. And the others…imagine the respite of marking our days in Ordinary Time.

There will be other seasons for us at St. Augustine’s. But what a gift; what a heavy and rich and full gift, to live this truth among all of you, that life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So thank you, for being swift to love. Thank you, for making haste to be kind.

May God’s blessing be with you all, right now; immediately, and always.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Amiel

[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3500

January 18, Epiphany II

Kristin White

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany – January 18, 2015

Beloved, you are created by God:

“Lord, you have searched me out and known me,” says Psalm 139. “You yourself created my inmost parts. You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

You are created by God, and that is not all. You are also inhabited by God. For all else that Paul says in his letter to the church at Corinth, to a people who have become forgetful, to a people who have lost their way, who have come to believe that they can separate their lives of faith from their lives of action…for all else that is there, Paul also asks this question: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” he asks.

You are created by God, you are inhabited by God, and that is not all. Because you are also called by God. It has been a long time, in the reading from the first book of Samuel. It has been a long time since the people anticipated, since they expected God’s action in the world. It has been a long time since that burning bush, since that pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. The text says that the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were not widespread. God’s word was so rare, in fact, that God called, but it took Eli (a priest of the temple) three times before he figured out how to help his young protégé, Samuel. “Say this,” he tells Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Thankfully, God is faithful, and persistent. God calls again, and Samuel responds.

And it may seem these days that the word of the Lord is rare. It may seem that visions are not widespread. And I say to you, listen. I say to you that you are called by God.

Beloved, you are created by God and inhabited by God and called by God, and that is not all…because you are also invited as a participant together with God and with those others who will follow. “We have found him,” Philip tells his friend Nathanael in today’s gospel passage. “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, the one the prophets foretold. We found him.” And when Nathanael protests (“Is there anything good that can come from Nazareth?”) Philip responds, “Come and see.” No defensiveness, no umbrage, no grand argument, no theological justification of right and wrong, no formulaic proof…instead of all that, an invitation. A widening of the circle. “Come with me. Be part of this, with me. See who this is, and join us.”

And that, Beloved, is all…or at least it is the beginning of all. Because you are created by God, inhabited by God, called by God, invited to participate together with God and to find and invite others…to widen the circle of those who seek the kingdom…and in so seeking, to join God as co-creators of that kingdom, helping with our created and inhabited hands and hearts and voices to bring it into being.

Tomorrow we celebrate the feast of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yesterday, I saw (from the second row, because I was late getting there and the theater was full) I watched the movie Selma. And as I saw the explosion in a church that would end the lives of little girls who were talking about their baptism, I heard the words of today’s psalm: “Lord, you have searched me out and known me…you yourself created my inmost parts, you knit me together inside my mother’s womb.”

As I watched sheriffs’ deputies wrap baseball bats in barbed wire in order to inflict the greatest possible harm on the bodies they would attack, I heard Paul’s words to that forgetful church in Corinth: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Do you not know that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit as well?

As I watched Dr. King kneel at the bridge in Selma, with a legion of state troopers and sheriffs’ deputies and Klansmen before him and thousands of people behind him, as I watched him kneel to pray and then rise and turn back with all those people to return the way that they had come, I heard Samuel respond at a time when the word of the Lord was rare, with the words that Eli had given him: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

And at last, at last, as I watched footage of the actual march, the march joined by clergy from this diocese whom I have had the privilege to meet, together with people of every background from all over this country, the march that finally culminated on the steps of the capitol building in Alabama in spite of everything that the sheriff and his deputies and their governor and so many others had done to stop it, as Dr. King ended his speech to those thousands of followers who had risked all they had to join him, saying “Mine eyes have seen the glory,” I heard Philip, again, to Nathanael: “Come and see.” Come and see the glory of the Lord.

Like you, Dr. King was created by God an inhabited by God and called by God and invited by God as a participant in the Kingdom. And, like Philip to Nathanael, he beckons us with his witness to “come and see.” So come and see, beloved of God. Come and see the kingdom that God invites us to help prepare, with our hands and our hearts and our voices. Come and see, and widen the circle by inviting others who would join us.

Come and see justice roll down like water. Come and see people judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Come and see little black boys and black girls join hands with little white boys and white girls. Come and see every valley exalted and every hill and mountain made low. Come and see light drive out darkness, and love drive out hatred. Come and see that dream made manifest.

Beloved of God, together with Dr. King, together with Philip and Nathanael and all those who would serve as witness, you are divinely created and inhabited and called and invited to participate as co-creators of the Kingdom of God. So come and see. And invite the others who would widen this circle.

Come and see the glory of the Lord, revealed.

January 11, 2015, Baptism of the Lord

Mark 1:4-11
Bryan Cones

Imagine for a moment being Jesus on his way to the Jordan. Imagine him for a moment really as a human being, with every human limitation and concern, joining so many others on his way out to the desert prophet, seeking also a “baptism of repentance.” Why was he going there? What was he looking for?

Did he feel like a failure, that he wasn’t a good Jew. Maybe he didn’t think he had been a good son to his mother, or a good provider for her. Maybe he had failed to create a family to bear his father’s name. Maybe he wasn’t very good at carpentry or building or whatever trade he had inherited from his father. Maybe he feared his life had lost direction, that he was unworthy.

Now step into the water with Jesus, and imagine seeing that mystical vision and hearing that heavenly voice: You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well-pleased. And imagine for a moment the feeling of being freed from all your doubts, all your fear of failure, and discovering yourself entirely loved by God, without ever having done anything, accomplished anything, to “deserve” it.

Now step back again, on the way to John at the Jordan, except this time go as yourself: Imagine all your own self-doubts, your own fears: Am I a good parent? A productive person? Am I success?

Imagine all those other voices, all those other standards, the world proposes that we measure ourselves by: whether we are too fat or too thin, too old or too young, whether we have enough money, or if our job is important enough or prestigious enough, whether our marriage is good or happy, or our family fits the model, whichever model currently proposed.

And don’t forget those gnawing, terrible questions lying beneath all those measures: Am I good? Am I worthy? Am I loveable? Am I “normal”?

And now step into the water with Jesus and hear the good news, God’s loving judgment on all that fear and self-doubt: You are my child, my own, Beloved. With you I am well-pleased.

What is it like to have all that doubt, all that fear, washed away by Jordan waters, to feel ourselves beloved, not despite our differences or limitations, as the world judges them, but beloved by God in them and through them.

Beloved in our bodies, in their many shapes and sizes, in their many gifts and abilities and limitations, beloved in our ages, beloved through the spectrum of how our brains process the world around us, beloved through our moods, in our depression, in our joyfulness, beloved when we can pay attention and when we can’t, beloved in our families exactly as they are, beloved in every moment of our human stories, through both the highs and the lows.

Now let us feel ourselves together as the beloved community, that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King imagined, born of Jordan waters: beloved together in our all our blessed differences, all of them created by God, and blessed and redeemed in the waters of the baptism.

That is not to say, of course, that being beloved is without difficulty, or that every blessed difference is easy to hold in this or any beloved community, especially for the person whose difference is hard to bear.

I have been thinking this week of the death last month of a transgender teenager in Ohio named Leelah Alcorn, who could not find a community to see her difference, her change from being Joshua to Leelah, as something they could hold and bless as Beloved. And even for Leelah that difference became too much for her to bear alone, and she decided she could no longer go on living.

As I thought of Leelah, I longed to be part of a beloved community that could bless and affirm her difference as beloved of God, even if it’s a difference I don’t fully understand. And I wondered how this church might cultivate such a vision of all that is beloved of God, so that no matter who comes among us, we recognize God’s beloved child walking through the door, so that no one has to bear their difference alone.

I would like to think that this gathering is one place we do that, that here, Sunday by Sunday we notice with care, and never overlook or dismiss, all the beloved and blessed difference that gathers here.

Here, Sunday by Sunday, we remember in word and sacrament, as we will when we renew our baptismal covenant in a few minutes, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited into the healing waters of the same font, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited to a place at this table, and that everybody, everybody, everybody, is held in life beyond death in all our blessed difference by the loving gaze of the One who has created and restored us.

That is the vocation of being Beloved of God, to practice here the vision God has for creation, to gather as God’s outpost of belovedness in a world in desperate need of it, and to be sent to share this good news of God’s loving judgment on all the unkindness of the world: You, all of you, are my children, beloved. In you, all of you, I am well-pleased.

Second Sunday after Christmas, January 4, 2015

A sermon written and preached by Debbie Buesing

Luke 2:41-52

And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:47)

In the long, 30-year gap between Jesus lying in the manger and Jesus stepping into the Jordan to be baptized, the gospels provide us only this view of a pre-adolescent Messiah. So it is natural for us to wonder – if you’ll pardon the old cliché – what did Jesus know, and when did he know it?

In one of my favorite modern or maybe post-modern takes on this question, in the novel Lamb, subtitled The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal*, the 12-year-old Jesus leaves this scene in the Temple still wrestling with his identity. His mother Mary reminds him, “When you were born, these three men showed up who seemed to understand something about you. Maybe they can help.” Jesus then spends the next 18 years traveling to Afghanistan, India, and China, in search of the Magi, who, one by one, ultimately come up short; and a resigned, grownup Jesus returns home to finish working out why he is here.

At the other end of the artistic and perhaps theological spectrum, I have a photograph of a stained-glass window in the 17th-century church of Saint-Eustache in Paris, showing a young Jesus sitting in the Temple on a cathedral-style throne that’s too big for him, looking every bit the medieval prince with his blonde hair in a bob, wearing a gold crown and brilliant brocade robe. At his feet, a tonsure-headed monk holds an open book, leaning in towards the boy and hanging on his every word.

There are scholars who posit that this strange little story arose in a very early Christian community that did not have access to the other narratives of Christ’s birth. So in the absence of heavenly angels and wild stars, they told of a Jesus born with innate knowledge, including his own status as Son of God. I don’t know what the real origin of the story is, but what I do know is that it contains some valuable wisdom about teenagers, parents, and the Church.

A few weeks ago I spent some time kicking this passage around with our high school youth and asked them how they pictured the whole scenario unfolding. Before we got into it, there were some things to clarify. It was incomprehensible to them, in this over-protective and over-scheduled age, that Mary and Joseph would not know where their son was. For those of us who are used to single-family road trips, it helps to know that entire villages walked together to Jerusalem. While the men walked apart from the women and children, a 12-year old boy, on the cusp of Jewish manhood, could easily float between groups, particularly a boy as bold and sociable as I imagine Jesus was.

When we tell this story to very small children, we typically frame it as “Jesus being lost but then found,” because when you are four or five years old, it is terrifying to think of being separated like that. But as our young people pointed out, it is not Jesus who was lost. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

With that established, then, how did they picture the scene in the Temple unfolding? Our high school group pictured a lively dialog, lots of give-and-take. (The text, in fact, refers to Jesus both asking and answering questions.) As one of our young people put it, “Here were men who had spent their whole lives thinking about God, studying about God. They probably had very strong opinions about God. But maybe, just maybe – Jesus offered them an insight that caused them to stop and reconsider what it was that they thought they knew.”

In other words – in the words of Luke’s Gospel – they were amazed. This is a word that goes beyond astonishment. It is that breathtaking moment of recognition that one is in the presence of something truly extraordinary, even holy. It is the way the Gospels describe frightened disciples on the Sea of Galilee, who exclaim, “Who is this, that the winds and seas obey him?” It is the word used to describe the crowds who witness Jesus’ acts of healing and his teaching with authority. It is a word that calls us to pay attention.

I asked our young people who it is that makes them feel that they are amazing. Not surprisingly they mentioned coaches and directors and a few teachers in their particular areas of interest. The mentors who help them discover their gifts and vocations, in the places they are drawn to, much like the 12-year-old messiah who was drawn to the Temple because that was where he knew he needed to be.

And HOW do these adults make you feel that you are amazing, I asked. The answer surprised me: “These are the ones who don’t flatter us. They tell us when we are not doing well and how to do it better.” It seems to me that there is a meeting at the intersection of honesty, respect, and kindness, and perhaps that is what the young Jesus found in that Temple as well.

And where are you in this story? Where are we, as church? For many years I included reflections on this passage whenever I did youth ministry training at churches in our diocese. For the most part, adults see themselves as Mary or Joseph, many of them remembering that same, heart-stopping moment when you realize that your child is missing. (My moment was at Disney World, probably as bad as Jerusalem at Passover.) Typically, just a few will see themselves in Jesus. These are the ones who haven’t forgotten being a curious and adventuresome and even headstrong teenager. But no one ever seems to remember those other characters in the story – the ones in the Temple. And so this is what I remind them (and myself):

As Church, it is our job to be the ones who are amazed. To listen when our young people are ready to give us their truth, and to have the grace to let everything we thought we knew about God be shaped by their wisdom. To be patient, because as one of our youth told me, “Sometimes we don’t answer your questions right away because we are still figuring it out,” and so we wait with them in that holy silence, because in all honesty, we are still figuring it out, too. To listen, to be present with, to be amazed, is not just the province of a few volunteers or youth ministers. The most significant factor in a young person’s choice to continue in a faith community is having had a positive relationship with one other adult in their congregation.

And what of their parents? Mary and Joseph searched, the story says, for three days before they got to the Temple. Perhaps they were too overwhelmed with anxiety to think through the implications of this messiah business. Or maybe with anger. (As our Deacon Bryan’s reading suggested, The Blessed Mother was in possession of the “Mom Voice,” and not afraid to use it.) But there are other echoes in this story. Those three days just might be a foreshadowing of another three days: surely Jesus’ parents’ despair at his disappearance hint at the disciples’ grief and terror after his death. His retort to his mother – that he needed to be here, not with them – is not so different from his admonition to Mary Magdalene in the garden: “do not hold onto me.” These are painful words to hear – and so as Church, we embrace the parents too, and reassure them that their sons and daughters are amazing, in those times when they are too close to the action to perceive it.

If I have a prayer for Saint Augustine’s, it is that this may always be a place where our young people can come,

And question,

And answer,

And know that they are amazing.

*Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Christopher Moore, 2002.