May 15, Feast of Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21

Kristin White

Please join me in singing a prayer as we begin. I’ll sing one line, then you sing it back, then I’ll sing the second line, and you sing it back. Then let’s sing the whole thing through a couple of times; and whatever harmony you hear, I hope you’ll sing that into our midst as well.

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What we need is here…

What we need is here.[1]

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I’m not sure that was the prayer the disciples would have chosen to sing as they gathered together in that space, whether for safety and protection from whoever might have wanted to do them harm in the days after Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension; or for comfort, for the solace of being together with friends who have gone through the same thing, the kinship found in not having any idea of what comes next.

And what does come immediately next might not inspire those disciples to break out in prayerful song proclaiming that what they need is here. After all what’s here – a rushing wind? Tongues of fire in their midst, landing on them? Didn’t Jesus promise them a comforter? An advocate?

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I wonder how much those followers of Jesus might have instead craved after some assurance, some hope for a measure of safety, even certainty. The disciples have been traveling by foot and by boat for the past three years. They dropped their nets, and have seen things and done things that they must have thought impossible. I wonder if any of them might have wished for the sort of sameness from the first story we heard today about the people of Babel. That kind of stability only seems possible when everyone shares a place and a language, the same peculiar words. I wonder if it might have even felt like a kind of relief for the disciples to think about staying in the same place for long enough that they might find themselves doing the steady and predictable work of making bricks…bricks that could build a city, and not just to build a city but a tower, and not just to build a tower but the highest sort of a tower – one that reaches up all the way to the heavens. I wonder if, after three years of wandering, followed by the devastation they faced into, and then confusion with a measure of hope restored, and then the grief of loss again but this time with a promise…I wonder what those disciples might have been willing to do in order to keep themselves from being scattered any further than they had already been. I wonder if the faintest breath of imagination might have sneaked in to their thoughts, as it did for those builders in Babel: “Let us make a name for ourselves…”

The trouble, of course, with such a wish is that if everyone is doing the same thing in the same place, speaking the same words in the same ways, then there’s no space for harmony. And so, as we see from the time of that story in Genesis, God has been disrupting these thoughts almost from the very beginning.

Instead of giving the disciples what they might have thought they wanted, that great disrupter known as the Holy Spirit rushes and blazes into their midst. The disciples speak languages they do not know, as the Spirit gives them ability. And others who do know these languages both understand and are bewildered, because they have known those languages as their very own, and they know that those who speak them have not.

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And so, in this strange moment, instead of isolation, the disciples find disruption that spills out beyond their walls. Instead of sameness, there is now diversity. And instead of unison, they find harmony.

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Luke Powery, dean of the chapel at Duke University, claims that God is multilingual, multivocal, multicultural, multiethnic. “The gospel is polyphonic,” he says. “We should not erase our own names, our languages, our cultures, our skin colors, our hair texture, the color of our eyes, the shape of our bodies, our identities. We should not obliterate whom and what God has created…God made all of us with our own native tongue, and when we are tempted to erase that which is different, it is an affront to God and to God’s collective Body.”[2]

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So into this polyphonic harmony that is St. Augustine’s Church we welcome Josephine and Florence today. Josie’s parents were married in this church some years ago; her grandparents help with our Family Promise ministry, so that people have a place to stay together as families until they can find a home of their own once again. Flora’s family came to us last June, when her mom Marianna and her big sister Violet arrived at St. Augustine’s for the first time by bicycle. Violet has a special job to do today – she will be pouring the water that we will bless and use to baptize Flora and Josie.

In fact we all have special jobs to do, today and always. If those words of the prayer we sang at the beginning are true on this feast of Pentecost – if what we need is right here, through the Holy Spirit’s great disruptive power of a mighty wind and blazing fire, then it’s our job to be the sacred body that such a spark and such a breath inhabit. It’s the special job of each one of us, and it takes us all – not to march in lock step and use all the same words to say all the same things, not to bake bricks to try and build some kind of fortress with the understandable but mistaken idea that we can secure ourselves to heaven. But instead, to join our voices to the song – whether we’re 2 or 82 or older or younger or someplace in between, it takes everybody, and those others we’ll invite to join the singing; to find those places where our own voices resonate in harmony; and to sing Flora and Josie into our midst.

What we need is here. It’s right here. So let us go, now, to the font of our salvation.

[1] http://www.musicthatmakescommunity.org/what_we_need_is_here

[2] https://www.faithandleadership.com/luke-powery-our-own-native-tongue

April 24, Fifth Sunday of Easter and Welcoming the Rev. Joe Mazza

John 13:31-35

Kristin White

In The Spiral Staircase, the book that tells the story of her life, religious writer and former Roman Catholic nun Karen Armstrong levels the claim that faith is less a matter of understanding than it is a matter of practice. She writes: “Religion is not about having to believe or accept certain difficult propositions; instead, religion is about doing the things that change you.”[1]

Today’s gospel returns us, in the midst of this season of resurrection, to the night when Christ’s passion begins to unfold. Jesus is with his disciples; he has taken off his cloak and washed their feet and dealt with Peter and shared a meal – what will be his last, before his death – together with these friends he has known and trusted. He tells them about God’s glory, he speaks about it as though that glory has already been revealed, and he promises it will continue to be.

And then this: “Little children,” he says…it’s the only time he will address them in this intimate way in the whole of John’s gospel… “Little children, I am only here for a short time. You will look for me and you will not find me. I give you a new commandment: love each other. This is how people will know you, if you love one another.”

In this last conversation with the ones who follow him, Jesus offers no 613 mitzvot, no Ten Best Ways to Live, no two-part summary upon which hangs all the law and the prophets. In Jesus’ final moments with them at table before his passion finds traction and momentum, he gives them just one thing to do: love.

This past Thursday I joined a conversation with our bishop and priests from around the Diocese of Chicago. We began our time together by studying this gospel passage. And the thread that emerged for me in our discussion was the fact that this kind of love was probably never intended as a feeling, an experience, the kind of ephemeral-whatever-it-is that is supposed to emerge from a mysterious place once the stars have aligned and everything is in right order and people are all behaving kindly and you’ve had a nice day off and sufficient sleep and eaten a balanced diet that includes vegetables…the idea that if everything is in right order then the stage is set for a really good feeling to wash over you…that is love.

I’m here to tell you that vegetables and days off and right order and adequate sleep and kindness are all really good things, things we likely could use more of in our lives, but that’s not what’s going on here in this gospel passage. Jesus has just shared what will be his last meal of this life with his friends, and things are very much not in right order right now. “I’m only here for a little bit longer,” he tells them. “So love each other.”

Instead of a feeling, we talked around that table on Thursday about love as a verb. We talked about love as the manifestation of God in our actions, when those actions might in fact be the very last thing we actually feel like doing. The Lutheran preacher Nadia Bolz Weber describes this as agape love, the sort of love that is present with the indwelling of God’s spirit. “Agape one another,” she says that Jesus commands his friends. “Not try and create warm feelings toward the unlikable, the socially awkward, the unlovely. Jesus (knows) better than to imply that if his followers could only muster up enough niceness they (will) be up to the task of following him.”[2] Love as a verb takes this command outside the frame of those fickle qualities we might want to constrain it to. And perhaps doing those things – whatever they might be – that serve for us as manifestations of God’s love, maybe those stand the power to change us. Living love as a verb helps us to know who we are, helps us to be known as God’s own, forever.

We find ourselves at an interesting moment as Church, right now at St. Augustine’s. I’ve described this time as St. A’s season of parties. We began on April 10 with the baptism of Benjamin Klock, and continued last Sunday with Bishop Lee’s pastoral visit to us, together with another baptism and reaffirmations and receptions. This particular season will continue through next Sunday, May 1, as we bless and send our beloved associate rector, Bryan Cones, into the next season of his ministry.

Today we celebrate and welcome the return of the Reverend Joe Mazza, who arrived as rector of St. Augustine’s at just about this time in the spring of 1970. We give thanks for the ministry Joe and his wife Susan and their children – including our own warden, Joy Witt – lived and shared in this place, the friendships begun and continued across generations, to today and beyond. I’m grateful for the ways that Joe called the people of St. A’s to live Jesus’ new commandment to love each other in real and practical ways, in ways that folks maybe didn’t always feel like doing, ways that changed St. Augustine’s to be more fully who we are, and how we are known, and who we are called to become.

Personally, I give thanks for the fact of one of those changes: in 1980, Joe and the leaders of St. Augustine’s called the Reverend Janice Gordon as the first woman priest to serve on a clergy staff in the Diocese of Chicago. I am so grateful for the foundation that he laid, together with so many long-time members of this congregation, some who came before us and have gone on ahead, some who are here among us now, who lived Jesus’ command to love in ways that established St. Augustine’s as a place that welcomes everybody.

Looking at this Church, living as a member of this Body, convinces me that Karen Armstrong has something real to say about faith. Much more than intellectual assent, it’s a matter of practice, one in which we try and fall short and try again. Much more than comprehending ideas that seem incomprehensible, for me faith is about mustering our own willingness to try and try again at practicing those things that stand the power to change us. It’s about living Christ’s commandment as agape, about doing love as a verb, about manifesting God’s promised presence in a way that helps us remember who we are. This is the inheritance of generations at St. Augustine’s, and the promise of the future that unfolds before us.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says. “Love each other.”

[1] Karen Armstrong; The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 270.

[2] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/03/5-years-ago-on-maundy-thursday-i-preached-my-first-sermon-at-hfass-there-were-8-of-us-here-it-is/

May 1, Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22--22:5

Bryan Cones

So how does all this end, in your own imagination? I don’t mean what is death like, or your own “end,” but the whole shebang: How is God going to bring this great drama of creation to a close? What does salvation or resurrection or eternal life or heaven, or whatever it is we are hoping for, look like, or feel like, when it’s finally all said and done?

Maybe we picture a gigantic family reunion around one big table, all the grandmas and aunties, cousins and parents, the friends who are like family, all gathered together. Then there’s the vision of clouds and angels, happily playing harps or leading a big parade through heaven. To tease my partner David just a bit, I wonder if he imagines something like the back country of Glacier National Park, more or less untouched wilderness, with people far enough apart not to get in each other’s way. I don’t know what my own vision is, but I am at least hoping for a big Star Trek-style tour of the universe from beginning to end, and I insist on seeing every dinosaur that ever was. What about you?

The reason I ask is that whoever wrote the book of Revelation—I’m sure that’s everyone’s favorite book—anyway, when that person got done with all the scary stuff, the seven-headed dragon, and the anti-Christ and the Armageddon to end all armageddons, we get this passage today: A vision of how it all ends, or maybe how it begins again. It is a city in a garden, or a city-and-a-garden. That’s odd to me, especially since “city in a garden” is the motto of Chicago, and as much as I love Chicago and the communities that surround it, a vision of the reign of God it ain’t, hardly a picture of the peaceable kingdom, or the justice that assures everyone has what they need, or the charity extended to all, by all, no matter our color or where we come from.

Thing is, today’s great cities are very much like those ancient ones the visionary John knew: earthly cities, brutal and broken. And still John can imagine a city of God’s design: Instead of walls, both seen and unseen, open doors that welcome everyone. Instead of temples separating what is holy from what is not, the whole city is a sanctuary, where God is unconfined, and God’s grace flows freely. Instead of the shadow of narrow alleys or the glare of advertising, God’s glory reveals what is good in both light and darkness. Instead of good food and clean water for some, and lead-laced poison and food deserts for others, one crystal stream quenches every thirst, and the tree of life rises on both its banks, with an abundance of fruit. And from that tree come leaves that heal the nations, and all of those nations are welcome in that city, and all of them bring their glory to God.

Now that’s what I call an eternal city. And it’s a long way from the sad and suffering cities of the earth to that heavenly city-and-a-garden built and planted by God and revealed in Christ. So how do we get there from here?

Well, by following Lydia, of course. Lydia, woman of Thyratira, dealer of purple goods, an unusual woman in her day, perhaps, prosperous apart from any man, a free woman. She was a successful woman of her own earthly city, but when she discovered faith in Christ in the words of Paul, and when she was bathed in the crystal waters of that other city in her baptism, and ate of its fruit, she knew just how to respond: She opened her home and began to practice the hospitality she beheld for a moment in that eternal city, and began to live now as a citizen of that city yet to come.

A few stories back it was Tabitha, who having seen that city in faith, began to make clothes to adorn those in her earthly city who didn’t have anything to wear. And don’t forget Cornelius, whose Gentile faith pushed Peter to reconsider whether those rules about clean and unclean were important enough to deny citizenship in the city to come. They weren’t.

And so the story goes: Christian after Christian who sees the city in faith, is bathed in the water, eats of the feast, then becomes part of God’s restoration crew, sharing freely of the hospitality of God in Christ, living now as citizens of the city-and-a-garden to come, as if it was already here, even though it is obviously not. There’s a list of saints a mile long, most of whose names are long forgotten. Though we all remember some, I’m sure: Miepje and Patsy and Kathie, three men named Bill. We each have our list.

What’s the distance between Chicago’s earthly city in a garden and the city-and-a-garden announced in Revelation? It’s not actually very far at all from here to there. In fact it may be right on top of us now, just waiting for us to start opening the doors. We have our own Lydia to lead us, along with a Barbara, a number of Jameses and Johns, Marthas and Marys, a Jack and an Amy and some Daniels and Claires. And don’t forget Carolyn and Kristin, Tim and Tom—this could go on for a very long time, so I’ll stop, because I wouldn’t be finished until I said all our names, all of us a part of God’s local building restoration and garden crew. And all around us, people lying on mats, waiting to be healed, to be invited into the city that never fades.

And it all starts with us remembering day by day, week by week, that we are always wading in that other city’s crystal waters, always eating of its abundant fruit, sent with leaves for the healing of nations, and that the name of the Holy One is written on our foreheads. At any moment it is within us to reveal the city to which we belong, and invite everybody, everybody, everybody to come along.