St. Paul's Holyoke - Celebration of New Ministry

This afternoon, it was my privilege to preach the sermon at a Celebration of New Ministry for the Rev. Joel Martinez, who is the new rector at St. Paul's in Holyoke. He is such an amazingly talented priest. I admit I was a bit nervous about this sermon and didn't want to be the skunk at the picnic - everyone is so energized and excited, including me. But I followed the text for the day - and my experience. 

Today was a great day. But there will surely also be challenging days. If Joel and St. Paul's can "lean in" on the hard days and not resort to denial or passive aggressive behaviors, then today is truly the beginning of a beautiful relationship that will thrive over time. May it be so...

Good afternoon, Bishop Fisher, Joel and Francesca, St. Paul’s and others gathered here to celebrate this new beginning. It is a great joy to be with you today. This past spring, as details of this call were being sorted out, I was with Joel and others from across our diocese in the Holy Land. (Some of those folks are here today!) I got to see him let down his hair there and take in that pilgrimage with all of his heart. You have chosen well – on all sides and you are off to a very exciting start together. Things are happening and will continue to happen as the Jesus Movement rolls on. Thanks be to God.

I don’t want to bring things down. But I do want to follow the lead of these readings for the Feast of St. James of Jerusalem, so I ask that you bear with me for a bit.  I want to talk about conflict with you today because that is what is happening in that reading from the Acts of the Apostles: a case study almost.

We don’t usually do conflict very well in the church. We ignore it and it festers, or we get passive-aggressive. Those are, sadly, our two “normal” strategies in church life. But the Way of Jesus insists that we see conflict as an opportunity for spiritual growth and as an invitation toward deeper and more authentic community that frees us to focus on purpose. Just as in a marriage or deep friendship, there can be no intimacy without conflict. In figuring out where each person begins and ends we find our way to respect the dignity of everyone and that opens the door to actually do the work God has given us to do.

Acts 15 is a turning point, not just in the unfolding drama of Acts itself, but in the unfolding of the Jesus Movement that began on Pentecost in Jerusalem. For me to tell that story, I need to back up to the first eleven verses of that fifteenth chapter.

Certain individuals came down from Judea, and they were teaching that in order to be saved, you must be circumcised. That’s shorthand for saying, in order to become a Christian you first need to become a Jew. And then these words, perhaps the greatest understatement in all of the Bible: Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them. In other words, all hell broke loose at that next vestry meeting.

For Paul, this is more than a friendly theological disagreement. Either Christ has broken down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile or has not. Either Christ has broken down the dividing wall between male and female, slave and free – or not. For Paul, it can’t then also be true that you need to get circumcised for your Baptism to mean what it means. Either we are all one and in Christ there is no east or west – or we are just many with our own agendas and stories.

But as that wise Irish theologian has noted, we are One, but we are not the same. We are one, but we’re not the same. And we get to carry each other.

No small dissension and debate ensued. In other words, they forgot that they were One – they were dividing into factions and conversations had moved to the parking lot. In whispered tones people were talking about each other and not to each other.

The question is this: what do you do next? Find a new parish or denomination? We heard what that early Christian community in Jerusalem dared to do:

·       they kept silence;

·       they listened;

·       James spoke out of his experience;

·       they reached a compromise – a consensus – discernment about a way forward.

It’s simple really. And so very difficult. It’s easier to revert to old patterns. It’s hard to lean in. But it’s what we are called to. I wonder what might happen if vestries across our diocese chose to “dwell on this word” for a year or so as we find our way into new ways of being church after the collective international trauma we’ve been through? To keep silent, and listen, before speaking our truths from our own experience – in order to discern together where God is at work.

Paul and Barnabas needed to be heard or we wouldn’t be here today. For the Jesus’ Movement to move forward, they needed to listen to each other and hear the experience of those who had been working first-hand with the Gentiles. It’s so simple and so difficult, every single time the Church comes up against something new: ordaining women, fully including LGBTQI folks, confronting racism in this country, and classism. Spanish and English language differences is the easy part: you can improve on language skills. Harder than that is sharing one another’s stories, food, and culture. That requires taking a breath, being silent, listening to each other, and then a commitment to share our experiences.

It has never been easy to be the Church. In recent history St. Paul’s has faced some challenges even before the pandemic. And the whole Church, across denominational lines, has been shaking at the foundations. But the question that lies before us all today is this: what comes next? Not what used to be in the glory days, not what could have been done differently during the pandemic – but simply, clearly, where is God leading next? To answer that question requires some silence, and listening, and reflecting on experience, and discernment. You are all in my prayers as that unfolds.

Moving forward, guided by the Holy Spirit, will mean changing and change always brings some amount of conflict. There is no avoiding that. Conflict itself is not bad; it’s what we do when it arises that allows us to continue to move forward with a new sense of resolve and courage and purpose and hope. So fight fair when you need to fight. Be still and know God is God. Listen to one another. Share your stories with “I statements.” Pray together without ceasing. Call me if you need to phone a friend.

In my nearly thirty years as an Episcopal priest and in the past decade serving on Bishop Fisher’s staff, I’ve realized with a heavy heart how often the important work we are called to share in the name of Christ gets derailed by conflicts that are not addressed. The trick is not to avoid it or hide from it or get passive- aggressive. The trick is to see it as an invitation and work through it, with God’s help, to a place of more authentic community.

You are off to a great start. The next six months to a year are critical as you get to know and trust each other. Joel is clearly such a gifted priest but he also comes here as a brand new rector. He will make some rookie mistakes. And St. Paul’s, you are an historic parish in a changing city; you will make some mistakes, too, if you are serious about doing the work that God has given you. The goal isn’t to be perfect or to grade each other. The goal is to love one another and work together.

When things get difficult, be patient and kind and gentle with each other. Focus on what you are learning together, by God’s grace, not whose fault it was. Love is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. A parish that takes it’s name from the guy who wrote those words surely knows this. Be prepared to also play the role of St. James when that opportunity comes your way: to speak the truth in love, out of your own experience, in a way that finds a path forward rather than pouring salt on the wounds.

Toward this end, I want to close by sharing with you a prayer from John O’Donahue, for leaders, with this reminder: Joel is not the only leader here. He shares this work with wardens and vestry – with committee chairs and heads of ministry. So this prayer is for all of you, in the work that lies ahead:

May you have the grace and wisdom
To act kindly, learning
To distinguish between what is
Personal and what is not.
May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things.
May you act not from arrogance but out of service.
May you work on yourself,
Building up and refining the ways of your mind.
May those who work for you know
You see and respect them.
May you learn to cultivate the art of presence
In order to engage with those who meet you.
When someone fails or disappoints you,
May the graciousness with which you engage
Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.
May you treasure the gifts of the mind
Through reading and creative thinking
So that you continue as a servant of the frontier
Where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,
And may you never become a functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening,
The healing of wholesome words,
The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,
The decorum of held dignity,
The springtime edge of the bleak question.
May you have a mind that loves frontiers
So that you can evoke the bright fields
That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.
May you have good friends
To mirror your blind spots.
May leadership be for you
A true adventure of growth.

May this next chapter in the life you will share together be, indeed, a true adventure of growth. United in Christ, may you find new and exciting ways to do the work that God has given you to do – in this time, and from this place.

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I've gotten out of the habit of posting my sermons this fall, but today I am with the people of St. Michael's on the Heights Church in Worcester and thought it might be a good time to return to this practice. The readings for this day can be found here.

Over the course of the past five months, Luke has been slowly and methodically inviting us to follow along with Jesus and the disciples as they make that 120 mile-long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. Over these past few weeks, their conversation has turned to prayer.

Last week we heard about the healing of ten lepers in the region between Samaria and Galilee. As you may recall, only one of those ten returned to say, “thank you.” (And he was a Samaritan!) This encounter reminds us that gratitude goes to the very heart of what Christian prayer is all about. Someone I know posted these words as their Facebook status: “Envy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings.” We might turn that around and remember that gratitude is the art of counting our own blessings.

Today, Jesus teaches persistence in prayer. He sets before us a parable of a persistent widow who wears out a corrupt judge in her pursuit of justice. I suspect that most of us, when we hear about widows, tend to think of savvy, wise, determined old ladies. Fair enough; I have known my fair share of them. But I wonder if it helps us to hear that parable in new ways to picture “the widow” as someone more like, say, Julia Roberts playing Erin Brockovich and taking on a corrupt legal system because she is out of options. Or perhaps Sally Field in Places of the Heart, a young widow trying to save her farm and get the crop in against all odds.

It seems to me that much of what passes for prayer in the church is just plain anemic. Sometimes we pray as functional atheists: we pray because we know that is what Christians are supposed to do. But deep down we aren’t really sure we expect much to happen, either in the heart of God or in our own hearts. But Jesus invites us to take note of that persistent widow and to take note of her determination and courage and ultimately her faith. And then Jesus says: try to pray more like that.

That doesn’t mean we will always get exactly what we asked for. I sometimes joke when I am asked to pray for good weather or a Patriots victory that I’m in sales, not management. But underneath the joke lies a much more serious point. We are all in sales; not management. Ultimately God gets to be God.

So, Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

The Hebrew and Greek words for “heart” are used 814 times in the Bible to refer to the human heart and 26 times to refer to the heart of God. In Greek it’s cardio, a root familiar to anybody who has ever had an EKG or been in a Cardiac Care facility or gotten your heart rate up on purpose by doing cardio exercises at the gym.

In the world of the Bible, the heart was seen as more than a pump. It was the center of emotions and feelings, of moods and passions. The metaphor is the same as when we celebrate Valentine’s Day.

The heart is capable of both joy and grief. In Acts 2:26 we read: “therefore my heart was glad.” In Psalm 13 the poet asks “must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?”

The heart can be a source of courage as in II Samuel 17: “the heart of a valiant man that is like the heart of a lion.” It can also become a source of fear, as when Joseph’s brothers discover their brother is still alive “and their hearts failed them and they turned trembling to one another…” (Genesis 42:28)

But in the Bible the heart is seen as even more than all of this. We tend to think of matters of the “head” and of the “heart” as separate realities with a clear division of labor: the head as the place for matters of intellect and the heart as more emotional. But for ancient peoples the heart was also seen as the center for decision-making, and as the place of devotion and obedience to God. It was the place where discernment happened.

So Jesus says, across the centuries: pray always, and do not lose heart.

I like this reminder, from Pope Francis: “you pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works.” There is, in that same vein, a petition that comes to us from the Iona Community in Scotland. It goes like this:
 

Lord, hear our prayers, and if today we might be the means by which you answer the prayers of others, then may you find us neither deaf nor defiant, but keen to fulfill your purpose, for Jesus’ sake. 

Jesus tells the story of the persistent widow. Basically, she nags the judge until the judge gives in. It’s about persistence. The parable is not saying God is like an unjust judge. Let that go. Jesus tells stories to uncover theological truths but the parables are not usually allegorical, which is to say that there does not need to be a correlation with God to make it real.

The Living God knows our hearts already. The Living God’s heart is full with compassion and steadfastness for each of us and for this world, and for all the little children of this world, and for the earth itself. God is love.

We pray not to convince God to hear us, precisely because God is NOT like an unjust judge. But we persist in prayer to open our own hearts and to soften up our hard hearts. We pray so that we can hear God, so that when we might be the means to answer the prayers of others we might be neither deaf nor defiant but ready to act with courage and hope.

You all know this, of course. If our neighbors are in need of diapers for their babies, we pray for them – of course. But no one expects God to rain down diapers on those who need them. You all, aware of a need, provide the diapers. It’s how prayer works. The parable is not an allegory for God; it’s a story of persistence and of not losing heart.

I wonder what that might have to say to a congregation at the front end of a clergy renewal leave? I had an opportunity to walk with Fr. Dave in between the time when I was away for some rest and his began. Among other things we talked about how St. Michael’s has changed and been changed by the pandemic. We talked hopefully about the future. We also spoke (as I have with so many of our clergy over the past few years) about how tiring it has been.

This is not limited to clergy, of course. Lots of people are exhausted and have carried a heavy load throughout the pandemic. Teachers, health care workers, people who work in the service industry to name a few. There is something called emotional labor that folks in these roles take on – it’s not just the work, it’s not punching a clock – it’s adapting and holding a lot of emotional stuff. So I’m glad for Dave and not too long ago for myself, and for others who have a chance to step back and recharge the batteries.

But I also hope that this time can be the same here at St. Michael’s: a season of reflecting and recharging and getting ready for the new thing God is up to in our world and in the church.

It’s easy to lose heart these days. But part of letting our light shine in the world is about the practice of persistent prayer, so that we do not lose heart. I invite you, during this season, to pray like that widow for wisdom, courage, discernment; for faith, hope, and love. For an awareness of God’s abiding presence, not as unjust judge, but as loving friend.

More on prayer next Sunday; in the meantime: pray always and do not lose heart.

Presence

Just over a decade ago, I was serving as the rector of St. Francis Church in Holden. Our youngest was about to head off for college. I was asked by the Standing Committee of our Diocese if I'd be willing to chair the Profile and Search portion of a process that would ultimately lead to the election of a new bishop. I was glad to say yes, and the vestry at St. Francis was supportive of me taking on this volunteer role on behalf of our diocese.  

There were two main parts to that work. First, was to listen across the diocese to lay and ordained leaders toward the goal of putting together a "profile" that would tell potential candidates who we were, and where we believed we were headed as a diocese, and what help we needed from a bishop to follow God's lead in that direction. And second, to come up with a "slate" of candidates who had responded to that profile by applying to serve. We did the initial screening work; once the slate became public we turned the process over to a second committee, called the Transition Committee, who managed the rest. Previously, I had been involved at the diocesan level as a parish priest primarily in two ways. I had served on Diocesan Council and I had chaired the Commission on Ministry, responsible for discerning calls to holy orders. But this was a leap for me, one I was happy to take on. 

There was lots to tell in that Profile, but one portion was to let candidates know that we have a lot of college campuses across our diocese. We wanted some images to show that, so I scrambled into my car and headed six miles down the road from Holden to the campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute to snap a photo. 

Fast forward: we elected a new bishop at a special electing Convention in June 2012, and  then that new bishop asked me to serve on his staff as Canon to the Ordinary, ordinary being a fancy Latin-derived word for bishop. I left parochial ministry after twenty years for diocesan work.

My family and I had lived in parish-owned housing to that point, but now we would need to enter the housing market and buy our first home at the age of fifty. We found one in the city of Worcester, near WPI. As mentioned above it was just a little more than six miles from where we had raised our sons in Holden. Out for my morning walk yesterday, and walking past that sign almost at the end of a three-month renewal leave (sabbatical) I had one of those almost mystical experiences. I felt fully present and the past nine years rushed over me. I felt like I was, and am, where I need to be. I paused to take that picture again, this time on my "smart phone." I reflected on the interior journey I've been on for almost a quarter of a century now in central Massachusetts, remembering that line from T. S. Eliot: "we shall not cease from exploration / And the end of our exploring / Will be arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." ("Little Gidding") 

Continuing my journey toward Elm Park, I felt that same overwhelming sense of purpose - of being where I need to be. Not just on that walk. And not just in my work, but in my life itself. I'll turn sixty on my next birthday. With a father who died at 37, it's an occasion I truly never thought I'd reach and, since we only get life one-day-at-a-time I'm not counting on that until it happens. But it's now within sight...

There is a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor, in An Altar in the World, that I really love. It goes like this: 

No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are. 

The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are. When we do consent, when we are fully present, when we know where we are, it can be a mystical kind of experience. It's not so much "out of body" as fully in body. A kind of awakening to purpose, and meaning, and joy. 

Sipping my morning coffee on this hot summer day and getting ready to go out for this day's walk, I find myself reflecting on what has happened during this time set apart, this time of renewal. I am fully aware that the world is spinning out of control, that the pandemic is not over, that our institutions are a mess.

...and also that life is still good. And that God is still present in the midst of our days. We don't have to go far to see that. We just need eyes that see and ears that hear. 

Cuttyhunk Church, July 10, 2022

This past Sunday night I was the preacher at the Cuttyhunk Church. What a beautiful place and congregation. Below is my sermon manuscript, on the text from Jeremiah 32

It is a great joy to be with you all again this summer, my third time to this beautiful island to be with this faith community. 

I recently read an article that perhaps some of you saw in The Boston Globe that talked about the joys and challenges of life on this island and it's future. Someone (I think an islander) said that this was kind of "an island of misfit toys." I think it was meant with great affection as a term of endearment; at least I took it that way. Besides, in the world we are living in, I’m so glad to be in such a place, a little out of step in all the right ways, all of the ways that perhaps make it easier for us to listen for the voice of God and return to our own true selves. For Hathy and me, this night is the culmination of a lovely week among you and we will be heading back to Worcester tomorrow. I know I speak for both of us in thanking you, again, for your generous hospitality and for welcoming us to this holy ground.

I have chosen a difficult and very strange reading from Jeremiah on purpose tonight. I hope it left you scratching your heads and wondering if this guy should ever be invited back again after tonight. Please bear with me…

I have never before preached a sermon on this text and my guess is that you have never before heard a sermon preached on it. I went back and forth between peaching on the story of the Good Samaritan (which came up today for those denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary) but in the end it was this text that called to my heart, and it’s a rare treat for an Episcopalian to get to choose our own readings outside of the lectionary. It's good to go rogue every now and again!

I also do believe that there is a word of the Lord here for us, a word we very much need this summer and beyond. But it will require a little patience and some digging. So I want to do three things tonight. First, I want to remind you about what Jeremiah’s ministry was all about. And then, I’ll get to this text and try to say why this real estate deal at Anathoth that we just heard about was so important. And then, lastly, I want to reflect a bit on where we are as a nation and a planet and why I think there really is a word of hope here for us as well as a challenge.  

First, Jeremiah was a prophet who lived roughly six centuries before the birth of Jesus. There are basically two prophetic tasks that in a sense are two sides to one coin. Sometimes the prophets comfort the afflicted. And sometimes they afflict the comfortable. Prophets are not fortune-tellers looking into a crystal ball to predict the future. Rather, they are close cousins to social critics: they see the present through God’s eyes and know where that is heading if things don’t change. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that the prophets take us by the hand and lead us to the other side of the tracks, asking us to see what we’d rather not see. The prophets are not fooled by spin.

In particular, Jeremiah had a very difficult task of trying to wake comfortable people up. He was more in that “afflict the comfortable” camp. He knew that if God’s people didn’t get their act together there would be serious trouble ahead; it ended up coming in the form of the Babylonian exile. So when God calls Jeremiah, God says, “I formed you in the womb – even before then I knew you and I have called you” - Jeremiah is scared and intuitive. I’m just a boy, he says. Might you be able to find someone else?

And God says, “oh, stop saying you are just a boy already!” I’ll be with you.

Pay attention to the verbs in the Bible; if there is one hint I can give you in interpretation and personal devotion it is that one. Where is the action? In the case of Jeremiah his work can be summed up by six verbs which are a kind of mission statement for the work God gives him to do. His job will be to pluck up and pull down and to destroy and overthrow – all verbs of deconstruction that need to happen before the last two can happen: to build and to plant.

Oh, and God adds this: no one is going to listen to you. You’ll talk about all that plucking up and pulling down and destroying and overthrowing but no one will want to hear it because they’d rather skip to the building and planting without doing that first part and that’s not how it works.

In a nutshell that is Jeremiah’s long ministry. His work was to afflict comfortable people with warnings that the world was coming unglued. But denial is not just a river in Egypt. When it finally did come apart and only then did Jeremiah say, “all will be well but it’s going to be a very long time from now…”

We all have been though some tough times ourselves in the past few years – and you don’t need the preacher to tell you that you can lose hope when it begins to sink in. You lose hope that the sun will come out tomorrow, to quote Annie. Jeremiah is speaking initially to people in denial: so there is a lot of plucking up, pulling down, destroying, and overthrowing. But because he has a long ministry, after the exile happens, the work shifts toward building and planting.

And that brings us to this strange real estate deal. It’s a risky move. The temple has been destroyed and the leaders have laid up their harps on the willows of Babylon. They don’t know what to sing anymore, other than the blues. Their hope is gone. It’s dried up. This little real estate deal is contemporaneous with that more famous prophet vision of Ezekiel, of the dry bones. Can all these bones live? Do we have a future?

If this is the end of God’s people and they will never come home again, then this real estate deal isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. What Jeremiah is therefore doing is choosing not to give up hope. The future is unclear and distant but it’s an act of defiance and trust in the living God. And that my dear friends is why I wanted to put it before you tonight.

So let’s move from a little history lesson in a little closer to see if we can hear a word of good news addressed to us tonight…

Let me first tell you a personal story. Hathy and I did not become homeowners until the ripe old age of fifty. In my work as a priest and in all of our married life up to that point, we lived in parish-owned housing. We call them rectories in the Episcopal Church, but parsonage works fine too. It was nice in so many ways. When the roof was leaking, we just called the property chair. The vestry paid the bills.

When I was asked to join the Bishop’s staff in 2013, however, we bought our first home. The home we found was ready to move into, which was good since neither of us are handy and we needed to move in quickly. But things come up as I’m sure most of you can appreciate. Roots had grown into a sewer pipe and the roof needed to be replaced and there was some moisture in the attic and basement that needed to be addressed. Over the past nine years we’ve been on a steep learning curve on how to be homeowners. All of you who have done this before and perhaps with multiple places know that it’s expensive and never-ending. Some of the work is exciting and you get to enjoy it but other stuff is just maintenance.

A couple of years ago we had to remove two big old dead oak trees. It’s important but after the tree guys leave you get a rather large bill and it seems like that’s a lot of money to pluck up and tear down. We decided to plant one new tree and did a lot of research and settled on a tri-colored beech. I love that little tree, but it’s still little. In fact I’ve realized that I’ll never see it fully grown. We are investing in that tree, not ultimately for us – but for whoever owns the home after us.

We had to take down trees that were both much older than we, planted by someone else who has long since returned to the dust. And now we are getting a new tree started that someone else will enjoy, and eventually will have to remove. We are stewards and someday someone will have to cut that tree down and pay good money to do that. But I trust that is a long ways off. Are you with me?  I think that tree is a little bit like the real estate deal we read about tonight. We are called, I think, to take the long view.

Since preaching isn’t about learning history but proclaiming good news, I’ll just say this: it’s been a very challenging season in the life of our country. Whatever your own politics may be it’s been exhausting and scary for all of us, I think. We are divided and hurting, and you don’t need me to recite the litany of all that has been happening in our nation and in our world. A lot of tearing down and plucking up and destruction. I, for one, am ready for some building and planting. Our institutions – including even the church that we thought we could count on – are changing so rapidly as to be unrecognizable.  

All of this can make us passive and isolated and maybe even depressed. It can also make us angry and I can tell you that when I drive on the Mass Pike I see some of the rage coming out every day. We feel powerless and that is discouraging, in the literal meaning of that word: dis-courage. Remember that the word “courage” comes from the old French word: corage. We still have the word “coer” in modern French. It’s about heart.

So here’s my question and let me admit I can only point in a direction tonight, as I have no easy formula to offer. What might unleash courage in us, so that we do not lose heart just from reading the morning newspaper? How do we en-courage one another in the name of the living God?

I take great comfort these days in poetry and I have a couple of go-tos that include Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. It was one of Berry’s poems that I selected as our second reading tonight.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.  

That little poem makes me feel a little less crazy, and gives me hope and courage to live life one day at a time. There is another one of his we didn’t read but some of you may know:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Well, that is what I have for you tonight, my friends. Do not lose heart. Trust God. Find ways to plant seeds of reconciliation, healing, and hope and then find ways to water those and nurture those. We won’t get there fast, but we need to find ways to do what we can – and trust God with the rest. We need to be the Church, here on this island of misfit toys and in those places where you worship when you aren’t here. God is not done with us yet.

So yes, there are signs of endings all around us. But together and with God’s help we will find the courage – the heart – to buy some real estate and plant some trees and invest in a future that we won’t fully realize. We can refuse to let fear dictate our actions and dare to see in signs of endings the possibility of new beginnings: those seeds of new resurrected life.

I leave you with a question we will sing momentarily, as a response to this sermon. Questions are good. (Do you know that Jesus asked way more questions than he answered in the Bible? And he often answered questions with questions. They leave us space to work on the hard stuff that doesn’t have easy answers.)

So here is the question:

Can it be that from our endings
new beginnings You create?
Life from death, and from our rendings
realms of wholeness generate?

It's an Advent Hymn and I admit that feels out of time. But right now everything is a little mixed up. So we’ll sing it anyway, as an act of affirmation and as a song of hope: can it be? Can it be that from our endings, God is already creating new beginnings? Life from death?

Yes. I don’t know when, or how, but yes, because God is trustworthy. So let’s sing it like we believe it because the one who sings, prays twice. (A link to the hymn can be found here.)

Let us pray it as a response to this sermon, as a defiant act of hope. 

Take our fears, then, Lord, and turn them
Into hopes for life anew
Fading light and dying season
Sing their Glorias to You. 

Make America again!

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)   
                                 - Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

If you do not already know the full poem quoted above, then I commend it to you in it's entirety. It can be found here. Spending some time with it will be way more fruitful than this post could ever hope to be.

Hughes' poem has become important to me over the years, and right now more than ever. This is how it concludes, and where the title of this post comes from (please note that not having the word "great" in there is very much on purpose):

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

At the end of my freshman year at Wallenpaupack Area High School, I won the Wayne County Loyalty Day Essay Contest sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, on the theme "What Loyalty to the United States Means to Me." I was a straight white boy growing up in small-town America. Although I referenced "problems like inflation, unemployment, and energy" in my essay, I boldly concluded (as only a fifteen-year old can) that they were "minor when compared to the problems other countries face." I went on to talk about our freedoms: freedom to run our government, to work in a career of our choice, to succeed, to follow the religion of our choice... America was America to me, a middle-class white kid who bought it all. God bless America! 

By the way, the reason I know what I wrote is not because I have a photographic memory; it's because my mother clipped that article (and I think every other one I was named in during high school) and then put them all in a scrapbook that she passed along many years later. This particular article appeared on May 20, 1978 in The Wayne Independent. In addition to sharing kind words about me they also included the essay in it's entirety. 

I find myself wondering: if Langston Hughes had been in my grade and submitted his poem then on this topic, who would have won that contest sponsored by the VFW in Wayne County, Pennsylvania? I'm guessing it would have been me, sadly. 

My mind has changed, in part from listening to voices like Hughes and others over the past four plus decades for whom America was never America either. There have been places along the way too many to mention when I've been discouraged. But the election of Donald Trump and those four years culminating in the events of January 6 and now the recent decisions of what is clearly the Trump Court (and not the Roberts Court) have been more than discouraging. I feel heart-broken this Fourth of July 2022, and fear for my nation. 

I consider myself a pragmatic optimist. One of my former parishioners used to joke that in every sermon I would talk about hope. And I still do, but it's become far more challenging and nuanced of late. I'm glad not to be preaching this weekend. To paraphrase Hughes, America is no longer America to me, and I could not win a Loyalty Day Essay Contest anymore. Most days my emotions run from rage to shame about what my country has become.

And yet...

I ask myself every day: what can I do? Since I'm a priest, I usually ask, "how can I help shape the Church I am a part of to be salt and light and yeast in this time and place?" I am not interested in theocracy for both political and theological reasons, although it seems that is on the table right now as the wall of separation between church and state is being eroded. Lord, have mercy. 

After 9/11, a well-intentioned member of the altar guild in the parish I was serving suggested we move the American flag to the front and center of the church. I said no. I said we needed to be focused on Font and Table on that Sunday more than ever. She meant no harm, but her question is one with which most clergy are familiar and the pull toward civil religion is greatest on weekends like the one upon us. Pity the pastor who decides to skip the patriotic hymns! 

My favorite prayer in The Book of Common Prayer for national days including Independence Day is a "Thanksgiving for National Life" that is found on page 838. It is really as much a confession as it is thanksgiving, and it is the prayer I need right now, and perhaps others do also. It goes like this: 

Almighty God, giver of all good things: 

We thank you for the natural majesty and beauty of this land.
They restore us, though we often destroy them. 
Heal us. 

We thank you for the great resources of this nation. They 
make us rich, though we often exploit them.
Forgive us. 

We thank you for the men and women who have made this

country strong. They are models for us, though we often fall
short of them.
Inspire us.

We thank you for the torch of liberty which has been lit in 
this land. It has drawn people from every nation, though we
have often hidden from its light. 
Enlighten us.

We thank you for the faith we have inherited in all its rich
variety. It sustains our life, though we have been faithless
again and again. 
Renew us. 

Help us, O Lord, to finish the good work here begun. 
Strengthen our efforts to blot out ignorance and prejudice, 
and to abolish poverty and crime. And hasten the day when 
all our people, with many voices in one united chorus, will
glorify your holy Name. Amen. 

Please consider joining me in this prayer in the days ahead, and if that's too many words maybe we can all just pray: Heal us. Forgive us. Inspire us. Enlighten us. Renew us. Help us.

In so praying, perhaps (with God's help) we can make America again. 

Pilgrimage #6

In March 1984, I traveled for my very first time to the Holy Land, with my college friend, Rich. We had no guides and very little money, but our time there left a mark on me. 

This blog started a dozen years ago, in January 2010, when I went back again. On this second pilgrimage my companions were my stepfather, Marty Cox, and another college friend, Chris Owen, both pastors. We attended a course called "The Palestine of Jesus" at St. George's College. It changed my life in so many ways and I was so blessed to share that time with Marty and Chris. (And so many of you, who followed along on this blog.)

I had an opportunity to return in April 2016, this time with members of the Fellowship of St. John the Evangelist, including some good clergy friends from my diocese and some friends I came to know and keep from that shared time.  We stayed on the same "campus" as St. George's College but this time in the cathedral guesthouse, and then with the Sisters of Nazareth when we journeyed north. Our leader was Iyad Qumri, a Palestinian Christian. The photo shown to the right was taken when I was asked by Brother Curtis to celebrate our early morning Eucharist in the desert. At the time I posted these words from Curtis' reflection for the day - the original post can be found here: 

 ...Jesus was tempted in areas where he already had strength, and also for us. We are most vulnerable to temptation where we are strong. If you've been given the gift of love, you also have the power to seduce. If you are articulate, you can use language powerfully, for better or worse. If you've been given the gift of decisiveness, you have the real power to judge and condemn. If you are compassionate, you can get overwhelmed by the suffering that surrounds you. If you are young, you can be tempted with the delusion of immortality. If you are beautiful, you can be as luring as the ancient Sirens, and also as lost. If you are old, you can be tempted with resentment or despair in a world slipping through your fingers. If you are well, you can be tempted to take it all for granted: your mind, your body, your work. If you are good, you can be tempted to believe that you are never good enough We are most susceptible to be tempted in areas where we have some strength. C. S. Lewis said, "It's not our weaknesses that will keep us out of heaven." 

In 2018 I went for the fourth time, this time on a Worcester Interfaith Pilgrimage with my friend, Rabbi Aviva Fellman and a group of Christians and Jews including some clergy friends. I already knew that the Holy Land is "complicated" but I remain grateful for this time because I saw places that are not on the usual "Jesus footsteps" pilgrimages. Our conversations were rich and we shared a kind of "holy envy" for each other's traditions.

At the time I thought that might be it, and it would have been enough: dayenu. But an opportunity presented itself not very long after that to travel there once more, this time on a diocesan pilgrimage that included my bishop, Doug Fisher, and the retired dean of our cathedral, Jim Munroe. We had a wonderful group led again by Iyad Qumri, just about exactly three years ago. This time though, Jim and I began plotting a return visit as soon as possible as Doug planned an interfaith journey. Neither happened as planned. But now Jim and I are off with a group of pilgrims that will include my spouse, Hathy, and our youngest son, James. And again, our guide will be the very gifted Iyad Qumri. 

Other than vacations to the Cape or Outer Banks, this sixth pilgrimage represents a place I've been to more than anyplace other than the places where I've lived. It's both the same and different each time. It really is a pilgrimage and those who travel together are changed for good. I ask for your prayers this time around, especially for the first-timers. 

Although I have blogged diligently in the past, I expect to have far fewer posts this time around. But I will, I'm sure, have some thoughts to share...

What Comes Next? Song-Infused Days!

Today I was a guest of the Diocese of Massachusetts - the "other" Diocese in the Commonwealth, at their Spring Clergy Conference. Here is what I shared.

I would like to begin our time together with a prayer written by Walter Brueggemann, from his collection, Prayers for a Privileged People.

Let us pray:

Here we are, practitioners of memos:
      We send e-mail and we receive it,
      We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it.
      We write to move the data, and
                organize the program,
                and keep people informed –
      and know how to control and manage.

We write and receive one-dimensional memos,
               that are, at best, clear and unambiguous.
      And then – in breathtaking ways – you summon us to song.
      You, by your very presence, call us to lyrical voice;
      You, by your book, give us cadences of praise
               that we sing and say, "allelu, allelu."
      You, by your hymnal, give us many voices
               toward thanks and gratitude and amazement.
      You, by your betraying absence,
               call us to lament and protest and complaint.
      All our songs are toward you
               in praise, in thanks and in need.

We sing figure and image and parallel and metaphor.
We sing thickness according to our coded community.
We sing and draw close to each other, and to you.
We sing.  Things become fresh. But then the moment breaks
      and we sink back into memos:        "How many pages?"
                                                               "When it is due?"
                                                               "Do you need footnotes?"
      We are hopelessly memo kinds of people.
      So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
               give us some song-infused days,
               deliver us from memo-dominated nights.

Give us a different rhythm,
                    of dismay and promise,
               of candor and hope,
               of trusting and obeying.

Give us courage to withstand the world of memo
      and to draw near to your craft of life
                     given in the wind.
      We pray back to you the Word made flesh;
      We pray, "Come soon."
      We say, "Amen."

I.                  Introduction: Roots and Wings

For the past nine years I have served on Bishop Doug Fisher’s staff in the diocese just to your west. Although our diocesan offices are in Springfield, I live in Worcester. So I’ve traveled just about thirty miles to get here.

If an expert is someone who comes from at least fifty miles away, I want to be very clear: I’m not here as an expert. I am a friend and colleague in ministry, a part of the Jesus-movement in this Commonwealth. I’m here as a fellow traveler who is honored to have been invited to be with you today, just three days before I take a three-month sabbatical.  

I am blessed to know some of you very well and over many years. But since I am not known to most of you, I want to begin with a few words about me. My intent is not to inflict my psychobiography on you. Rather, it is that you know a bit more about where I am coming from which I think in the practice of pastoral ministry is always a good thing, but also because I think that all theological reflection is (for better and for worse) autobiographical. Frederick Beuchner put it this way in The Sacred Journey:

My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all. For the reader, I suppose, it is like looking through someone else's photograph album. What holds you, if nothing else, is the possibility that somewhere among all those shots of people you never knew and places you never saw, you may come across something or someone you recognize.

I have one of those little framed prints in my office in Springfield that was given to me back in the early 1990s by the director of the Christ and Holy Trinity Pre-School in Westport, CT where my oldest son, Graham, was a student at the time and where I was the Associate Rector. Today it would be a meme and perhaps is. It simply says this: “There are two things you can give your children: roots and wings.”

So, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was a child, given both roots and wings. My roots are in Hawley, Pennsylvania. I’m the oldest of four and grew up in a small town of about 1800 with one blinking traffic light, northeast of Scranton, just a few miles from Lake Wallenpaupack. I grew up with both sets of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents within walking distance from my home. I was baptized at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church but raised up and confirmed at the Hawley United Methodist Church. The pastor for all my growing up years was the Rev. Gail Wintermute and my Sunday School teacher for many of those same years was Mrs. Katharine Bates. To use language borrowed from Donald Winnicot, it was a “good enough” congregation and they were both “good enough” guides to the Christian faith. I learned to love God and my neighbor there.

As for wings, I began trying them out at Georgetown University in Washington, DC in the Fall 1981. I am the first in my family to go to college. My closest friends at Georgetown were almost all New York City Jesuit high school guys who spoke the insider language of Fordham Prep and Regis that I didn’t know at all. They had studied Latin in high school! They helped me to navigate my way at Georgetown. Even though as New Yorkers they quickly labelled Washington as a AAA city, it sure felt big enough to me. And not for nothing, Patrick Ewing arrived on campus that same fall, so we had some pretty exciting basketball and a lot of March Madness ahead of us over the course of the next four years.

My father died, suddenly and unprepared, on April 30, 1982; it will be forty years ago on Saturday. It happened just a week or so before the end of my freshman year and I was in a course required by the Jesuits at the time called “Problem of God.” No kidding.

Yet the crisis of faith that followed and led me to ask big existential questions also bore the fruit of a more mature faith on the other side of it – if I’m even yet on the other side of it. And vocationally, it led almost directly to a decision to rethink law school as my life work and apply to seminaries right after graduation. I’ll spare you the details today, except to say that I am one of those people who went to seminary more clear that that was my next step than that I’d be ordained at the end of three years.

I told the United Methodist Board of Ministry that I felt called to be “a Protestant Jesuit.” That language made sense to me and enough sense to them to let me slip through.

At first, that took me to an ecumenical campus ministry in New Britain, Connecticut. One way of living into a call to be a “Protestant Jesuit” is to serve God on a college campus. I think our first ordained jobs mark us, for both good and ill, and mine certainly did. The ministry was funded by six Protestant judicatories. I also developed close working relationships with the Newman House Catholic priest (his name was Father Lord) and a reconstructionist rabbi. I assumed all ministry was ecumenical and interfaith and that we needed partners to do the work. I still do.

Five years after being ordained, however, I found myself coming to a different understanding of “Protestant Jesuit.” I’d been flirting with the Episcopal Church even as an undergrad at Georgetown. In my third year of seminary I worked for the new rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, Bob Ihloff. Two of my most influential professors (Nelson Thayer and Charles Rice) were already serving there as priest associates. And after my first year of seminary, I had married a “cradle” Episcopalian, who by the way grew up at St. Anne’s-in- the-Fields in Lincoln, where we also were married. All of that “centrifugal force” converged in June 1993 when I was re-ordained to the diaconate at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford and then to the priesthood at Christ and Holy Trinity, Westport in February 1994.

I’m going to hit pause here. If we are going to talk and think about vocation today it can    be helpful to return to where it all began, to the times and places where we began to notice the calling of voices in our lives. I hope in hearing a little of my story it’s made some connections to yours and maybe primed the pump. I now want to invite you to find a friendly face and just turn to them for some conversation – 2-3 minutes each. Roots and Wings. Share something that may not be known by the person you are speaking with about what you were in touch with at the beginning of awakening to your call, even if it took years to act on it. Give each other the gift of listening in.

II.               Early priestly formation

My MDiv had been earned at Drew Theological School, a United Methodist seminary. Immediately after Drew, I did a ThM at Princeton Seminary in Church History. I focused on the Reformation and wrote my thesis on the first Prayerbook. Bishop Arthur Walmlsey did not require me to go back to seminary for an Anglican year, but instead assigned me to a mentor to teach me some Anglican polity. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t need to leave the Wesley brothers behind to become an Episcopalian. I still feel that way and remember them both every March 3 with deep appreciation.

When it all finally happened and I was in fact ordained in the Episcopal Church, I still felt called to campus ministry. St. Mark’s in Storrs, literally on the UConn campus, was open at the time. But I ended up as the runner-up to a guy named Rob Hirshfeld. For those who don’t know, Rob served there until he was called to Grace, Amherst when I was still rector at St. Francis, Holden. So we’ve been colleagues for many years. It was from Grace that Rob was elected Bishop of New Hampshire. Next week he will be the speaker at our WMA Clergy Conference at the Barbara C. Harris Center. (But of course I’ll miss that; did I mention that I’ll be on sabbatical?)

After the bitter disappointment of not being called to serve at St. Mark’s, I landed at Christ and Holy Trinity Church in Westport as their Associate Rector. I’m grateful that I did and in hindsight I realize that this was the Lord’s provision, my own ram in the thicket. It was better for me in both the short-run and in the long-run than being on my own in Storrs as a newby in a new denomination. No associate position is perfect. But my four and a half years in that parish did way more for me than any Anglican year at any Episcopal seminary could have. I also learned a bit about leading from the second chair over my time there, which has served me well in these past nine. But mostly I was loved into the Episcopal Church in Westport, and to this day I remain grateful to them for it.

I realize in looking back that I came into the Episcopal Church at the end of an era, and you could feel it in several ways even at the time. I did multiple courses at the College of Preachers at National Cathedral which ultimately ran out of money. It was there I got to spend time with people like Barbara Brown Taylor and Phyllis Trible. Walter Brueggeman once told me that Phyllis Trible was James Muilenburg’s best student and that she was the well-deserved heir of being called his best rhetorical scholar. They were both students of Muilenburg, so that was high praise.

But Phyllis Trible didn’t draw a crowd. She did Texts of Terror with us which may also have scared some people. So there were like ten of us just sitting around the table with her for a whole glorious week at the College of Preachers. I sat next to Verna Dozier, who was there as a fellow student and fan of Trible. I will never forget that week!

When I offered up what I thought was my best sermon ever, that I’d preached at a commissioning of lay ministers service, Ms. Dozier politely wondered with me what it would be like to commission lay people for their work in the world and not just as “daddy’s helpers” in church. She was right, of course and I never forgot it. That seed ended up becoming a big part of my DMin work, which I will tell you about soon.  

I also got to go through the Clergy Leadership Project and work with Hugh O’Dougherty from the Kennedy School. Hugh is a colleague of Ron Heifitz so I learned about leadership without easy answers second-hand, although that is probably not fair to Hugh. Both the COP and CLP left a mark. But I also felt like I was doing these things at the end, after all the “cool” older boomers had done them already. (Is “cool older boomers” an oxymoron?)

The issue of adaptive versus technical work (with a lot of Rabbi Ed Friedman thrown in there) is what energizes me in both parish and diocesan work. When it came time for me to do a DMin I settled on Columbia Theological Seminary, where I got to study “missional church” before it was considered cool in a program called “Gospel and Culture.” There I got to sit at the feet of Walter Brueggemann, Barbara Brown Taylor, and the somewhat lesser known (but also very talented) Anna Carter Florence. All three of them left their marks on me.

I need also to mention the Fellowship of St. John the Evangelist which unlike those other two seems to be going stronger than ever and is so important to my journey. When I was in Connecticut, I would take retreats at Holy Cross Monastery. But starting in 1998, when I was called to St. Francis, Holden, I discovered the monastery in Cambridge and Emery House. For the past twenty-five years, as part of the Fellowship, that’s been one of the key constants in my formation and I honestly don’t think I’d have made it without those brothers, for whom I pray every day.

So again, there is no test at the end on my story. What I hope is that perhaps you’ve overheard some of your own story, whether you have been ordained longer than I have or for a minute and a half. What I want to do again is take a few moments to ask you to think about how you have learned to be a priest or deacon after the formal education part. Take a few moments first in silence and then share a bit with each other: how have you been formed in this work by the places you have served and by mentors? Who are the saints in your own “cloud of witnesses” who have formed you beyond ordination? 

III.           What Comes Next? Song-Infused Days

So I jumped right into this talk, but I want to back up a little now that I’ve introduced myself. I want to say that I am very grateful for the invitation to be here with you today to begin this conversation. Thanks to the planning committee and especially to Christen for inviting me and helping me think through this time with you. Did I mention that I’m going on sabbatical in three days? So my initial inclination was to say “thanks, but no thanks.” The run-up to sabbatical is always a little crazy. But I’m glad I said yes. Whatever you make of this time for yourself today, it has actually been really helpful to me to sit and think a bit about it as I do indeed prepare to step away for a season.

Thank you to Bishop Alan and Bishop Gayle and my brother from another mother, your Canon to the Ordinary, Bill. And to those I’ve shared transition work with over these past nine years in particular: Bishop Carol and Martha and Kelly and before them, the one and only Jean-Baptiste. All are treasured colleagues. Last year I got to know Julie Carson and Pam Wentz in the work we did on common ministry between our two dioceses. Along with the two lay women and Bill, they represented you all very well and there was a lot of “holy envy” going on over the 495 Border. I also am grateful to see Martha Gardner, who amazes me and whom I think is perhaps our very own "Verna Dozier" here in the Commonwealth. 

I also need to give a shout out to Phil Labelle, who was on my staff as youth minister at St. Francis, Holden when I arrived in February 1998 and who we ended up sponsoring for ordination. Proudly. As some of you know, Phil now serves in the only DioMass parish in Worcester County. I was the preacher at Phil’s ordination to the priesthood. Like mine it took place in Fairfield County, CT. On that snowy day, Phil and Melissa also had decided that this would be the day that their eldest, Noah, would be baptized. I told Phil and Melissa and those in the assembly that day that I thought this was an outward and visible sign we must not miss: that as great as this day was for Phil, to be clear this was a bigger day for Noah. And that Phil’s own baptism (and mine, and yours) were more important than our ordinations. And that his calling as dad was more important than his vocation as a priest.

Verna Dozier had gotten to me. And I still think she (of blessed memory) has written perhaps the most important book for us in these days that lie ahead. Whatever a post-pandemic church is going to look like: it’s about The Dream of God and God’s dream is about the ministry of all the baptized. If you have never read The Dream of God: A Call to Return, I encourage you to do so soon and if you have read it, pull it off your bookshelf and read it again, in this new time and place. It’s still so important to the work God has given us to do.

The theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer gets it just right, I think. The catechism asks: who are the ministers of the Church? And the correct answer is that the ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons. But we are a very long way from living into that dream. We profess it with our lips, but in so many ways we remain a long distance from living it in our lives. In most places we still mostly just commission lay ministers to be on vestry or altar guild or teach Sunday School, rather than to go out to do the work God has given them to do in the world. In fact if they get too busy in their work and say they don’t have time for vestry we can get a little annoyed with them.

When I did my DMin, I needed to do a project and the seed that Verna Dozier had planted those years before did grow and did bear fruit. I developed curriculum for four groups of professionals in my congregation to think about their faith in the workplace and to ask the very simple but important question: how was what we were doing on Sunday morning empowering them to do what they were sent out to do on Monday? I had a bunch of lawyers and educators and health-care workers and businesspeople at St. Francis, so those were my four small groups, with 5-6 persons in each group. The six weeks that we did that work were not at church. We met in their workplaces and we focused on what it was like for them to live as followers of Jesus in the office, in the classroom, in the hospital and in the courts.

I will say that it was pretty cool and I like to think they got something out of it. But to tell the truth it changed me way more than I think it changed them. It changed how I thought about my own ministry. It changed my preaching. It changed how I thought about their lives and the challenges they faced. It changed how I prayed for them.

I was in Washington DC visiting my oldest son, Graham, and his wife Cara, when Christen asked me for a title for this talk. The first part of it was a tip of the hat to Hamilton for those who missed it: what comes next? You all got that?

I struggled for what might come after the first part of that clever title, though. We aren’t post-pandemic yet. We are still learning and I’m not yet sure we’ve learned. We are still waiting. I settled on “Mission and Ministry Going Forward,” which is still what I want to talk with you about, but I didn’t really like that second part of the title very much.

 

I therefore want to revise that in a way that would not have made any sense before I prayed today’s opening prayer, which I’d not yet thought of using when I came up with that title. This is the pertinent part:

 

We are hopelessly memo kinds of people.
           So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
               give us some song-infused days,
               deliver us from memo-dominated nights.

What comes next? Song-Infused Days. That’s my working answer to the question: what comes next? We need to get clear on our mission and ministry for sure. But I think that the way we will do that is to learn to sing again, not by issuing memos. That will include songs of thanks, gratitude, amazement for sure. But also songs of lament, protest, complaint. All the songs we sing toward the living God in praise, and thanks, and need.

My COVID experience has been relatively privileged, like much of my life. My wife, Hathy, works for the New England Regional AIDS Education and Training Center and she has worked from home since UMass Medical School told them to go home over two years ago. While we don’t live in a giant house, it’s big enough that we have carved out work space and personal space for the two of us as empty-nesters. Our adult children, Graham and James, and their partners have been similarly fortunate in Washington, DC and Hoboken, NJ.

I discovered a while ago that doing diocesan work is very different than parochial work. Honestly, the first few years I was doing this work I grieved the loss of parish ministry which as I said, I never thought I’d even be doing when I went off to seminary. But I also must add that I don’t envy you who have been doing it for the past two years. The truth is that while my work involves a lot of people, it’s often meeting with search committees or vestries. It’s no longer about holding a child in my arms and marking them as Christ’s own forever, or anointing the dying, or even breaking the bread. It turns out you can meet with a vestry in Stockbridge from Worcester on Zoom at 6 pm and pour a glass of wine and start dinner at 7:15 if you keep them moving and that’s actually nicer than driving back on the Mass Pike in the dark.

I’m not saying there wasn’t loss during the worst days of the pandemic; that would gloss over the truth. What I am saying is that much of my own job was more easily adaptable to the new realities we faced than the work of parish clergy or even the work of bishops who also use their hands to ordain and consecrate and bless and confirm. Early on I realized that without a daily commute I was free to begin each day by walking; in 2021 I averaged over six miles a day.

Some months into the pandemic, I began to wonder as I wandered: what if all that Once and Future Church stuff about the end of Christendom that Loren Mead and Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon had been talking about throughout my whole ordained life was really, finally, happening and the Church was actually being deconstructed before our very eyes? What if the pandemic didn’t do something new but just accelerated what was already unfolding?

And most importantly, what if amid all the temptations toward memos, we were now being called up on to learn to sing the Lord’s song again in a strange land? What might song-infused days look like?

Poetry in general and the psalms in particular got me through the worst days of the pandemic. At our Winter Clergy Day I worked with my friend and colleague, Canon Vicki Ix, and we presented the Psalms as the content part of our time together. I naturally went to Walter Bruggemann’s Message of the Psalms where he divides the Psalter into three categories: Psalms of Orientation, Disorientation, New Orientation. (I’d actually had a chance to learn that book in the classroom with him, in a class he called “Earthy Spirituality.”) Vicki had been a Roman Catholic nun in her previous life so she talked about the psalms shaping devotional prayer.

If you’ve gotten out of the habit of praying the psalms for whatever reason (and I don’t mean the happy ones on Sunday morning which are usually truncated and even when we do the harder ones we usually tidy them up with Anglican chant!) I mean the ones we get to pray daily (including the challenging disorienting ones.) I invite you to find your way back to those again if you haven’t already and then help your people discover them again too.

As you all know, the psalms are poems and for us in the Church many of our poems are sung as hymns. I was an English major, so poetry comes very naturally to me and it stirs my soul. I know it’s not that way for everyone. My second son, James, is a structural engineer. He actually knows how buildings stand up and how they sometimes fall down! We always knew James was headed toward that kind of work and never more so than the day he came home from school and threw up his arms and said to me in an exasperated voice: I don’t understand why poets don’t just say what they mean!

So I get it: we are one, but we’re not the same. As for me though, I returned to a lot of poetry over the past two years, almost daily. Two of my go-tos have consistently been Mary Oliver and David Whyte. I want to share two poems with you today, one from each, that have been very important to my spiritual life over the past two years. First, Mary Oliver – To Begin With, The Sweet Grass – it’s a long one:

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if you have changed.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

The second is a much shorter poem from David Whyte. It’s called “Loaves and Fishes.”

This is not
the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

So this is the last time I’ll break you up into diads, with copies of those two poems coming around. What is speaking to your heart in this time and place, right now, in these early days of Eastertide 2022? What are the new songs you have been learning or that you hope to learn? Can you begin to articulate what “song-infused days” might look like for you?

IV.            Concluding Thoughts

What comes next? I hope and pray that it is song-infused days. That metaphor is has it's roots in a big powerful Biblical experience as you all know: the Babylonian Exile, when God’s people truly wondered (with their place of worship in ruins) could they/would they ever sing the Lord’s song again? How could they? Their harps were hung on the weeping willows of Babylon.

But they did. Sure, they sang the blues for a while, those songs of disorientation, those songs of lament and protest and complaint. But those songs (as Bruggemann puts it, “their candor with God”) led them to a new day and to new songs and to a new way of being God’s people. In the end rebuilding the temple under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah was the least of it. That was the technical part. The engineers knew how to make the building stand up.

But also, by the waters of Babylon, after all the tears, they remembered God-with-them, and they trusted:

…unto us a child will be born, a son given and the government will rest upon his shoulders and his name will be called: Wonderful! Counselor! The Prince of Peace!

Those words had to wait a long time for George Frederick Handel to hear the melody from the angels and archangels. But from the beginning they conveyed hope and the promise that God still had a few tricks up Her sleeve.

And they collected up all those scrolls. They wrote it all down and they eventually became people of the Book, or perhaps more accurately, people of the library of scrolls. Because of what they did and because they knew God wasn’t yet done with them, we get to read, mark and learn and inwardly digest those scrolls. Remember that no one had been running around at creation with a clip board to write Genesis! The priests and scribes reflected when their kids came home from school talking about those Babylonian creation stories and so they carefully worked on not one, but two, creation stories, influenced by Babylon but different: both pointing toward the God of Israel. They carefully constructed and reconstructed their own stories with God at the center.

In the beginning, they said, God created the heavens and the earth. And God saw that it was good…And after six days of work, God rested.

That’s not science! It’s poetry. It’s liturgical language! And it grew out of the exile, out of the destruction of the Temple, out of something awful. It turns out God could still be God. What came next after all that heartache and trauma? Song-infused days! It turns out that God could still make a highway in the desert and most importantly, still be faithful. So they sang new songs. Isaiah: Comfort ye, O Comfort ye, my people. Ezekiel: Dem bones dem bones, dem dry bones!

There have been technical learnings for sure in this pandemic that may help us going forward. Most of us now know how to Zoom, although I wish I could do a Vulcan mind meld with those who still seem flummoxed by how the mute button works in both directions. Unmute when you want to talk. Mute when the dog is barking. This is not complicated! And we trusted the science - imagine that in 21^st Century America? We trusted the science to guide us in when and how we might assemble with relative safety. I am so grateful to have worked early on in the pandemic with you all on offering guidelines and if you don’t know it already, Bill Parnell worked like crazy on that. I was just along for the ride.

But how and what shall we sing, going forward? People are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand! Enough with the memos! We need song-infused days!

I am hopeful because I think that crisis potentially pushes us back to purpose, to our “why?” And even if those “young families don’t come back again” I think that the harvest really is very plentiful right now. Unfortunately the laborers are few, especially the ordained ones.

Did I mention that I think Verna Dozier was a prophet ahead of her time? The future church will not be all about the clergy! I love you, bishops and deacons and priests of this diocese and my own. But it’s not all about us! Our work is to rally the troops! Our work is the empower and equip the laity. It always has been.

This pushes us back to the heart of the matter: to the calling of voices, to our vocations. And also to the bonds of affection we share with Lutherans and with Luther: everybody is called to seek and serve Christ. Lawyers and teachers and nurses and businesspeople are all called to share this work with us, in their daily lives. They too, are called. Our job is to help remind them of that. Our job is to make Sunday morning powerful enough to carry them through Monday to Friday so that they respect the dignity of every human being and make choices that further God’s mission of mercy, compassion, and hope not just at vestry meetings but at the state house and in board rooms.

Some clergy said to me over the past two years: “I didn’t sign up for this!” The pastor in me received that information and tried to offer a word of consolation: ditto. Me too. I get it. It’s been hard. It’s been really hard. I’m so sorry. And I meant all that! Every word of it.

…AND, the theologian in me wanted to offer them an alternative narrative, or at least another frame. And in relationships with a high level of trust, I have. I’ll take that risk today with you because even if it’s only thirty miles I’ll head home soon after this so whoever I insult, I’m sorry, but complain to the planning committee!

Yes, you did sign on for this! Yes, we all did. It’s in our vows! We are the heirs of the Church of Julian of Norwich who lived through the plague and still said, “all shall be well.” Those words weren’t a Hallmark card without a context; they were born from her own time of pandemic life.

We are part of the cloud of witnesses that includes those martyrs of Memphis, Tennessee. Remember? When yellow fever went through Memphis in the latter part of the nineteenth century, those four nuns and two priests cared for people at St. Mary’s Cathedral and it cost them their lives.

We are part of the Church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew the cost of discipleship even when it meant standing up to Adolf Hitler and calling him out for what he was. We are part of the Church of Dr. King, whose dream was a direct response to Jim Crow and Bull Connor’s firehoses.

We signed on to be living members of the Body of Christ at Holy Baptism and in that Sacrament we have been claimed and marked and sealed. Forever. And in return, we have promised to follow Jesus in the way of love, which also goes by the name of the way of the cross. And we doubled-down when we knelt before a bishop to become deacons and priests. This is most definitely what we signed up for. And yes, it is hard.

Or did we sign on to be sacristy rats?

I preached at our Renewal of Vows Service a couple of weeks ago. It was my 25^th in the Diocese of Western Mass. I preached on Elijah the Tishbite. I’ll spare you the whole sermon and just give you the takeaway: before Elijah hears that still small voice (or if you prefer, “the sound of sheer silence”) the angel of the Lord says: Eat something. Drink something. Get some rest. You need your strength for the journey ahead.

I went on longer than that, but that was basically it. We need our strength for the journey ahead too. So do what it takes and remember you are not some disembodied gnostic soul: eat something, hydrate, and take a nap. We need to be healthy (or get healthy) because the work ahead will be difficult. What Comes Next? By God’s grace and with God’s help, song-infused days. Let us pray: 

      We are hopelessly memo kinds of people.
      So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
               give us some song-infused days,
               deliver us from memo-dominated nights.

Give us a different rhythm,
               of dismay and promise,
               of candor and hope,
               of trusting and obeying.
Give us courage to withstand the world of memo
      and to draw near to your craft of life
                     given in the wind.
      We pray back to you the Word made flesh;
      We pray, "Come soon."
      We say, "Amen."