Ash Wednesday: "Takin' it to the streets..." Will we?

Maybe it is time we took the Church to the people, out in the streets, sidewalks, parks, no matter the weather...will we be so brave, so bold to do what other churches are doing around the country? Let's go meet the need...Catherine+

Episcopal churches to take Ash Wednesday services into the streets

By Jim Naughton | February 16, 2012

[Canticle Communications] More than 40 Episcopal parishes in 11 states will take to the streets on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 22, marking the beginning of the holy season of Lent by giving “Ashes to Go.”
In Chicago, St. Louis, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, Newark, Erie, Austin and other cities and suburbs around the country, priests and lay people will visit train stations, subway stops, coffee shops, and street corners to mark the forehead of interested passers-by with the sign of the cross, and invite them to repent of their past wrongdoing and seek forgiveness and renewal.

“Ashes to Go is about bringing spirit, belief, and belonging out from behind church doors, and into the places where we go every day,” said the Rev. Emily Mellott, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, Lombard, Illinois, who is organizing the initiative in the Diocese of Chicago, where more than 20 churches are expected to participate. “It’s a simple event with deep meaning, drawing on centuries of tradition and worship to provide a contemporary moment of grace.”

Mellott learned about Ashes to Go from the Rev. Teresa K. M. Danieley, of St. John’s Episcopal Church, St. Louis, Missouri, who began conducting a street corner service with the distribution of ashes in 2007.

“On the street corner, we encounter people who have been hurt by previous experiences with organized religion and who, through Ashes to Go, take a tentative step back towards attending church,” Danieley says.

Diocese of Chicago Bishop Jeff Lee is an enthusiastic supporter of marking Ash Wednesday in the streets. “My most memorable experience last year was with a woman who told me that she had left the church years ago,” he says. “She received the ashes and our prayers gratefully and then she looked up and with tears in her eyes, she said to me, ‘I just can’t believe you would bring the church out here to us.’“

The Rev. Anne K. Bartlett reflects on how "love has saved us all."

The Rev. Anne K. Bartlett, Trinity Church, Ashland, Oregon:

In the name of the Holy One:  Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-Giver.  Amen.

            Sometimes I like to imagine Paul writing his letters to those little congregations he had started from scratch and whose ongoing struggles and sorrows and joys he followed as a father follows the lives of his children long after they’ve grown up enough to be out on their own. 

            As I imagine Paul writing those letters we still cherish and read today, I watch him search for just the right words, giving guidance and counsel and encouragement, sometimes exploding in exasperation, sometimes defending his authority to teach them, patiently laying out one more time how the life and death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ has brought us all Home to God, our Creator and heavenly Father. 

            When Paul wrote to the church in Galatia, I see him at one point giving a huge sigh of frustration:  “What don’t they understand about the word all?!”  …in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith…all of you are one in Christ…

            It’s not a big word -- all. It’s a little word, a common word, a word even very young children can say and understand, an ordinary word meaning “everything” and “everybody” and “nobody’s left out.”  All.  What’s so hard to understand about that?

As Paul himself knew, the concept of all may not be difficult to understand but the practice of

radical inclusion requires all but the most saintly of us to stretch beyond our fears and self-centeredness in ways that demand our constant vigilance and effort and commitment and practice. 

There is a part of being human that rebels against embracing all, that resists including everybody in the circle. Our resistance shows up in human development pretty clearly by the time we’re toddlers, when we discover we are separate little persons, a discovery that both terrifies and exhilarates us.

            What is it about all that we don’t understand?  Oh, I think it has to do with all kinds of things swimming in the depths of the shadows of our psyches.  We don’t want to understand all because of our fears that there won’t be enough to go around, whether it’s dessert or love or money.  We don’t want to include everybody because of our fears of the unfamiliar, of strangers, of people who don’t look and act and talk like us, of concerns for our own safety and security.  We don’t want to accept all because by doing so we run counter to our own desires, our own greed and selfishness, so we dream up all kinds of logical-sounding reasons why it’s sensible and prudent to draw lines and boundaries and create hierarchies and procedures for who gets what, who’s in and who’s out, who is worthy and who is not.

            Before the Holy Spirit knocked him off his high horse on the road to Damascus, Saint Paul was an expert in differentiating between people, he knew exactly how to categorize, analyze, systemize, put people in a pecking order, deem who was worthy and who was not according to a deformed and rigidified understanding of religious law.  In his previous life (the life he had before his encounter with the risen Christ that changed everything), there was no one more zealous than Paul in enforcing life-and-death lines of inclusion and exclusion.

And now look at him, there he is writing his letters to his beloved churches, putting into his glorious words how we are now all new creations in Christ, the past no longer has any power over us, we are called to live in a new reality, a new world, as persons identified no longer by anything other the love of God in Jesus Christ who has made us all children of God. 

And in this new life of ours, this baptized life, this life in which we have vowed to respect the dignity of every human being, we are called to an astounding diversity beyond our own preferences, inclinations, or designs.

            Living into the all is reminding ourselves, a hundred times a day if necessary, that we belong to the family of God, and that is what identifies us – not our achievements, not our family background, not our political affiliations nor our social status, not even our precious self-expressions.  Our Way is not about us; it’s about God, the God whose face we have seen in Jesus.

            Paradoxically – and our faith is nothing if it’s not paradoxical! – we grow up in our faith when we acknowledge our failure to stand on our own.  Only then are we broken open to trust in the grace of God rather than in our own merits. In our dependence on God’s grace we discover we are one in the Body of Christ.  We are one in the family of God.  All of us.  All.

            Except it’s so hard to stay grounded in that new creation, that alternative reality, isn’t it?  It’s so easy, so human, so tempting to go back to the old ways of thinking that to be “good enough” means I have to be “better than,” that some people are better and more valuable than others, and that there are others who must be kept out. 

It’s hard, spiritual work to stay grounded in the new creation, to keep making the circle bigger when it’s really uncomfortable to be stretched that far. It’s not easy to live in God’s kingdom on earth right now, this day because…well, because we do get afraid, and we are greedy, we lose our grip and we lose our trust that there really is enough of God’s love to go around and we begin to doubt that all things will be well, in God’s good time.  We try to get by with being merely nice and polite, and we forget that God’s Kingdom isn’t about good manners, it’s about a life-changing alternative reality in which we are to see one another – everyone; all – as our brothers and sisters.

            The Episcopal Church has known something of the pain and the cost of enlarging the circle in Christ’s name. At our General Convention last summer, bishops, clergy and lay deputies voted overwhelmingly and without a great deal of fanfare to lift the self-imposed three-year moratorium in our church on the election and consecration of openly gay bishops, a moratorium requested by the leadership of the Anglican communion.  After three years of compliance and continuing attempts to engage in mutual dialogue, our national Episcopal church discerned, one more time, that the way we are hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit is to go forward with our commitment to not exclude any member of Christ’s church from consideration for any ministry in our church on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, or anything else of that order.

Here at Trinity, Ashland we are nearly all of one mind on this issue, so much so that I sometimes take flak because I don’t preach more about inclusion of those with different sexual orientations.  My response is that I think this congregation is at the point where the only thing that matters to us is whether a person wants to worship God with us and join with us as we try to be Christ’s hands and heart, his Body, in the world. 

A couple of years ago I got a phone call from someone doing a survey; the person asked how many gay and lesbians we had in positions of leadership in our congregation. I had to stop and think because it wasn’t a category that made any sense to me, nor, I believe, to the vast majority of us.  Male or female, straight or gay, comfortably well-off or on food stamps, of color or not of color, old or not so old, native Oregonian or from a foreign land (like California) -- what difference does it make in this place?  Democrat or Republican…well, we need to work on that one.  And I’m serious about that. We are individuals with our own distinct gifts and peculiarities, but the only thing that matters here is that we are the family of God, the church of Christ, and you are welcome. 

As you may have heard, our national Episcopal Church is again in hot water with some parts of the worldwide Anglican Communion over the consecration a few weeks ago of two women bishops in the Diocese of Los Angeles, one of whom happens to be a lesbian in a committed relationship.

Last Sunday, our Presiding Bishop, Katherine, had been invited to preach and celebrate the Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral in England. In the week prior to her visit, the Lambeth office of the Archbishop of Canterbury pressured Katherine’s office to provide evidence of her ordination to each order of ministry – deacon, priest, and bishop.  Then, the Archbishop of Canterbury directed our Presiding Bishop that she was not to wear her mitre, the symbolic hat that bishops wear. She could carry her hat, but not put it on her head.  Nor was she to carry a crozier, the symbolic shepherd’s crook that bishops carry in the liturgy.  Some bloggers are referring to this incident as Mitregate; or, Kat in the Hat.

Oh dear.  What is it about all that some of us still don’t understand?

Back home this week in a meeting with her executive council, Bishop Katherine briefly described the incident and said it was “nonsense” and “bizarre, beyond bizarre.”  When the press got wind of the story, she had her spokesperson make the following statement: “there isn’t anything more to say.  Rather, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori and the Executive Council are focused on the mission and ministry of the church.”

I must admit I’ve gotten hooked by this latest story of who is acceptable and who is not in the church. A British reporter (and I want to thank Catherine Windsor for directing my attention to this source), a British reporter pointed out that the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, The Very Rev. Colin Slee, had been put in very awkward position. He was the one who had invited Katherine in the first place, as he has invited a number of women bishops from other parts of the Anglican Communion to preach and celebrate at the cathedral.  At Evensong last Sunday, the dean addressed the situation; as I read his remarks, I hope you’ll hear whispers and echoes of the words Paul wrote to that Galatian church so long ago:

There are several reasons for the fury, Dean Slee said in his Evensong homily. The presiding bishop is a woman and some people hate the idea of women as bishops.  The General Synod of the Church of England is about to debate the admission of women as bishops within the Church of England.  The church in the United States has just consecrated an openly lesbian woman as a suffragan bishop in Los Angeles and so they are accused of breaking an embargo on such consecrations.  It is not nearly so simple.

We welcome Katherine Jefferts Schori to this pulpit, he continued, because we love our sisters and brothers in the Episcopal Church of the United States; not because she is a female, or a woman bishop ahead of us, or has permitted a practicing lesbian to become a bishop; we welcome her because she is our sister in Christ.

[The actions of the Episcopal Church] in recent months, he said, have been entirely in accord with the Anglican ways of generosity and breadth.  They have tried to ensure everyone is recognized as a child of God.  They have behaved entirely in accord with their canon laws and their freedom as an independent province of the church, not imposing or interfering with others with whom they disagree but proceeding steadily and openly themselves.

In her sermon last Sunday morning, Bishop Katherine preached on the story from Luke about a

woman off the streets who crashed a dinner party, washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with hair, offending nearly everybody present. Katherine then asked:  “What makes us so afraid of the other?” 

            That’s such a big part of the problem, isn’t it, the problem we have with all – that underneath all our bluster and self-righteousness, we are afraid of the other, the ones who are different, the ones who make us uneasy, the ones we’d rather not have to deal with.  Our anxiety ratchets up and the lines get drawn in the dirt, and people get hurt, or worse.

In the gospel stories, over and over and over again, Jesus encounters and engages those beyond the familiar inclusionary lines, he heals those whom everyone else is afraid of, he eats with those with whom no one else will eat.  Over and over and over again, Jesus shows us what all looks like.  And the picture both terrifies and exhilarates us.

            In the gospel story this week, Jesus crosses over to the other side, the other shore where the Gentiles live and where they raise pigs to feed the legions of Roman soldiers who are bivouacked near by. The first person Jesus encounters is a man half-alive, out of his mind, barely human, living among the dead; he is naked, violent, unpredictable, in every way ‘unclean’ and utterly alone in the world. Jesus drives out his demons and heals him in body, mind, spirit and in relationship.  Naturally the man begged to stay with Jesus, but Jesus says: “No, go home.  Now you have a home again; go back there, that is where your ministry is.  Tell the people you know how much God has done for you.”  For many of us, ministry is going back to our own homes and proclaiming to those we know how much Christ has done for us.

Bishop Katherine ended her sermon last week with these words:

There is room for us all at this table, there are tears of welcome and a kiss for the wanderer, and the sweet smell of home. 

Want to join the feast?  You are welcome here.  Love has saved you.

Love has saved you. 

Love has saved us all.

HEADLINE: Canterbury issues statement on Los Angeles' election of openly gay bishop suffragan

December 06, 2009

[Episcopal News Service] Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has issued a statement in response to the Diocese of Los Angeles' Dec. 5 election of an openly gay candidate, the Rev. Mary Douglas Glasspool, as bishop suffragan.

Glasspool is one of two bishops suffragan elected during the Los Angeles diocese's Dec. 4-5 convention in Riverside, California. The Rev. Canon Diane Jardine Bruce became the first woman elected a bishop in the Los Angeles diocese on Dec. 4. Both elections must receive consents from a majority of bishops exercising jurisdiction and diocesan Standing Committees within 120 days from the day after notice is sent to them.

An ENS article about Glasspool's election is available here. An ENS article about Bruce's election is available here.

The full text of Williams' Dec. 6 statement follows:

"The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop-elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.

The process of selection however is only part complete. The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees. That decision will have very important implications.

The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that a period of gracious restraint in respect of actions which are contrary to the mind of the Communion is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold."

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, C of E.

_____________________________________

That he wrongly condemns the Constitution and Canons, the polity of our Church in America, and overtly threatens us is bad. What is worse is that he fails in every way as a Christian and leader by NOT condemning the persecution of gay Christians in Uganda, who now face the death penalty for their "manner of life", and their friends and family members face prison time for knowing about them and not reporting them, and for covering up any knowledge of a friend or relative's "manner of life." Rowan Williams, you have failed in every way to be Christ-like and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Joy Evermore...

Hat tip to Kathy Jensen, friend and blogger:

Jesu, my love, my joy, my rest.
Thy perfect love close in my breast
That I thee love and never rest;
And make me love thee of all thinge best,
And wounde my heart in thy love free,
That I may reign in joy evermore with thee.

By Anonymous (15th century)

In peace we pray to you, Lord God:

We pray for all who have died, that they may have a place in your eternal kingdom...

[Silence]

Lord, let your loving-kindness be upon them;

Who put their trust in you...

Poor Gifts: A most remarkable Advent meditation

I thank Gannett Girl at Praying Advent Through Darkness for pointing us to Michelle's post at Quantum Theology for this most remarkable IV Advent meditation...the concept takes one's breath away. And now I share it with you, an Advent gift. [Hat tip to Gannett Girl for the icon at right]

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 18 December 2008]

Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus: who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of humans.— Phil. 2:6-8

I came early to the vigil Mass on the first Sunday of Advent this year. Kneeling to pray, I was distracted by stirrings at the front of the church: the jangling of a chain and murmuring voices. I looked up to see a tall young man preparing the censer, his low voice barely rippling the stillness, sweeping me into the memory of an Advent 15 years past.

That first Sunday of Advent found me early to the vigil Mass as well. It had been a chaotic week as I juggled teaching and preparing a paper for a conference overseas, all overlaid with the exhaustion of pregnancy. Within the church, the candles were lit, the light soft and gentle. I could just stop, like a breath suspended in time.

In that incredible stillness, I was suddenly distracted. The stirrings were gentle, but unmistakable. What I had rationally known for almost five months, but never quite believed, was suddenly made manifest — I carried a child within me, the same child whose movements drew my eye this year, at this Mass. I remembered the joy of cradling him in my arms for the first time, tinged with the loss of that hidden, mysterious time we shared when my entire being enfolded him.

I wonder how Mary felt after Jesus’ birth. She held God within her, knew His movements intimately, only to surrender Him to a cold, uncertain and unwelcoming world. Her willingness to be filled with the Holy Spirit was equally a willingness to be emptied of God’s Son — a foreshadowing of Christ’s own emptying so eloquently described by Paul in his letter to the Philippians.

Pondering the Magnificat, I sense that Mary was aware of this paradox, of the necessary tension between emptiness and fullness, between richness and poverty of spirit, and of the challenges embracing such a way poses. She proclaims: He has routed the arrogant of heart … He has filled the starving with good things, sent the rich away empty. Mary held the riches of the universe within her, and labored hard to surrender them to us....

I invite you to read the rest of the posted meditation here.

View from the horizon

Seasons clock the passage of time within the year and this present moment is no different. We are on the edge of a national feast day for some, a day of mourning for the First Nation people. And no, I am not being negative about Thanksgiving. It is a great day for those of us who were born in the generations that followed that first celebration for the Anglos who were seeking a new freedom, one they achieved at the sacrifice of others who welcomed these strangers and taught them how to survive, only to be betrayed by them later on. But I digress, and this is a topic for another day, another time.

There is much to be thankful for as Americans born here or those who are newly come to escape persecution or oppression of one kind or another. Really it all boils down to escaping extreme evil for the lesser types that one can find some negotiated truce with here in our land of plenty. What we chose to do with the lesser evils and the plenties that are not always beneficial, that is between us and "them" respectively. As a Christian--I like to think I am trying to be one of the real Christians who strive to be Christlike, and not Pauline, or fundamentalist, or legalistic, or completely delusional--it is my goal to be like Jesus, and care for my neighbor and to love God in all of His/Her aspects. Truly those of us who strive for this fall and fail each day, but the fact remains that we have our eyes on the end of the race, so we pick ourselves up and keep moving forward. Forward...that is the concept some find so hard to grasp. Loving all, without discrimination or prejudice as we await the coming of the kingdom. And I do not agree with those who would hasten its coming by encouraging hatred and unrepentant hearts. I believe in letting God follow His/Her own schedule. Besides who am I to tell God when to come and finish the work set out to be done? I trust my courteous Lord to know His business and by so doing I am like the child He asks us to all be in this life, trusting in His care and love, the grace and mercy that He shows us, unending.

And so tomorrow will come and we will feast, either in a home of our own, or one not of our making. For the homeless and loveless, there will be a place at a table and a bed in a local shelter, or under a bridge where some will manage to have foraged enough to have a dinner of thanks with others who share their fate at this time and place, and blankets enough--perhaps--given freely by those who work to ring bells and collect loose change--to buy the blankets to give to the cold and home-wanting among us.

But its not just food and warmth and a place to lay our head that we will give thanks for;
I will think of the beauty that surrounds us each day and more often than not goes unnoticed. The winter song bird, the soft brown rabbit, the
evergreen leaves of the laurel, a still flowering geranium or hollyhock, the vaulted ceiling of branches adorned with lovely leaves, moss growing green among the cobbled stones of walks leading here and there.




I will be thankful for my job, the home I own because my mother gave it to me before she died, the dog that accompanied me through dark times and now plays in heaven with his precedents from my earlier life. My friends scattered throughout the country and overseas, my parish family, my priestly friends, my neighbors where I live, the woman at the grocery store who checks my purchases and always wishes me a good day and remembers my name, the books I get to read, the music I am privileged to hear, the hymns I get to sing, the warm clothes I wear, the sturdy shoes on my tender feet...so much, too much to name...all things and civil rights I enjoy and wish others had too, everywhere.

I give thanks for the grumpy and often rude patients I deal with. Grumpy old men and women, veterans, who have seen misery a hundredfold, and yet I care for them, knowing they are from my parents' generation, that Greatest Generation, who sewed up not only America's freedom but that of the world. I am thankful for women like Rose Volland in Nazi occupied France. What a story she could tell, and did eventually tell in her careful catalogs of art stolen by her Nazi occupiers in Paris.

I am thankful for the occasional cranky coworkers who have their own burdens to bear, and how I manage to turn their cloudy moods with a smile and kind word. I am not boasting, but simply showing what a tiny act of kindness can do to change a person in this world. Nowadays my patients, for the most part, say please and thank you, and refrain from foul language when calling my office. Some of them actually laugh now and wish me a happy day. Or call and tell me tasteful jokes, just to connect with another person in their lonely, isolated lives. Connecting with someone who makes time for them. It means the world to them and is a lifeline to the living.

In a few days, we will be on the eve of Advent, that anticipatory time before the coming of the Savior Christ, that Jesus boy, endearing child, aggravating teenager, then soon transformed mortal to Son of God, Emmanuel with us...in a few days time. At 5pm today, I will go and give thanks corporately with my church family at our Thanksgiving Eve service...a very good way to begin the feast of thanks.

So much to be thankful for, and I am very thankful for all you.

Let us look to the horizon and coming Light...

Catherine+

"Logos"

Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into the many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it was all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

~ Mary Oliver ~

From: Why I Wake Early, written in Memory of John Paul II

Giving Thanks and A Time To Dance

And so, I return, well and healthy. NO cancer. I am blessed. Others would say I am lucky. Yet others would say "Good genes!" Some might say its fate. All I know right now is that, as I awaited my surgery on 09/07/07, I knew the kind of peace you sort of dream of or imagine. I attribute this peace to the prayers, support and love I have received since this medical ordeal began from friends, parishioners and unseen friends in the Blogosphere. No, let me correct that: it wasn't an ordeal but a situation for me. It's when you or someone you know actually has cancer that it can become, or is, an ordeal.

I have recovered sufficiently enough to return to work and to blogging. I am now 0 - 2 for cancer, meaning Cancer-0 and Me-2, just so we are clear on the scoring stats. Just as I was sharing the news with everyone that I was going to be OK, I learned that a priestly friend--Mary+--from the northern part of our Valley actually has been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. I was still happy for me and so were others, even the afflicted Mary+. I hold her up in prayer for healing and peace, and may she know the power of the laying on of hands as I have...

We are now enjoying the last days of official Summer and next week Fall begins again. I'm ready for the change, after all we KNOW we'll have summer again next year.

I wish to thank at this time all of those who have been caring for me and continue to do so, near and far. I've learned a lot about people and their willingness to put themselves "out there" for others. I thank my best friend, Joyce, for taking me to surgery that morning and I thank Ann from my church for picking me up and bringing me home. And of course, I thank my priest, my deacons and various other clergy and holy people from my church for praying for me and checking on me frequently.

And all of those wonderful Trinity women who prayed tirelessly on my behalf. I would name them all but then it would be an extremely long post, but they know who they are. And those fellow bloggers of mine: Eileen, Kirstin, Elizabeth+, Cecilia+, Jonathan+ aka Mad Priest, Quixotic Pastor, Christina, Jan, Lisa, Magdalene, Little Mary, just to name a few.

So you all have my thanks and my blessing. Pray without ceasing for all who are afflicted and show kindness to all. It's time to dance before the Lord, who has done great things for me...

Namaste'

Catherine+

The Sacred, Love and Baptism: Our Trinity

As promised, here is another sermon by The Rev Anne K Bartlett. Remarkable in its simplicity yet powerful in its message of sacredness, love and the blessing of baptism--the becoming one in Christ, as one of His own within the family of the true and living God. May you be blessed by its Gospel truth as I was last Sunday [and yes I share the pew I happen to try to sit in every Sunday...there, I said it!]. Please visit us at Trinity Episcopal in Ashland, Oregon

2 September 2007
Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, OR
The Rev. Anne K. Bartlett, Rector

In the name of the living God, who is and was and is to come. Amen.

Annie Dillard, one of my favorite authors, tells a story from her childhood about hiding a shiny penny in a tree stump and then drawing chalk arrows and messages on the sidewalk for blocks around: “Treasure this way!” “Don’t miss it!” “You’re almost there!” She would then hide behind a large forsythia bush and watch which people in her neighborhood would play the game and which ones walked right on by, either preoccupied with their own affairs or not wanting to be bothered with the prospect of an unexpected treasure.

Annie Dillard reminds me of how the Holy Spirit works through Scripture and in our lives, leaving us messages along the Way, with arrows pointing to unexpected and unearned treasures, if we’re not too preoccupied or too jaded to respond. And who knows? Why not imagine the Spirit is hiding near at hand, watching if we will become as children again, and let our steps quicken with excitement for unexpected treasure along the path if we but follow Her clear directions.

So let’s see what surprises await us this morning, first in the Scriptures. The prophet Jeremiah is dumbfounded by a people who have stopped asking the question “Where is God? Where is God in my life? Where is God in the life all around us?” Instead they have exchanged their glory of being God’s people for that which does not give life, relying instead on the prizes the culture holds out. Instead of wondering “Where is the Lord,” their question – maybe our question – has become, “What’s in it for me?”

“What’s in it for me?” is the attitude that Jesus was lambasting at the dinner party in the Gospel story. As I’ve frequently observed, Our Lord ate out a lot, and often with the wrong sort of people. Today, however, he is eating with folk like you and me, good religious people, upstanding citizens, but he notices that the guests are scrambling for the best places at the table.

I can’t help but be reminded how we sometimes choose our places in the pews. Some of us like to sit up front. Many of us like to sit in the very back. Newcomers have told me they feel uneasy, queasy because they are sure they must be sitting “in someone’s place.” As if we own our favorite spots! Jesus tells us to stop jockeying for position and instead pay attention to the needs of the other person. “Blessed are you who give up your favorite spot for a stranger. Even more blessed are you who scoot over to the center and let the stranger have the seat on the aisle.” You know, it really is unseemly to ask our guests and visitors to clamber over our knees so that they can have a place with us. Taking the less promising seat is an act of hospitality of the most fundamental kind.

Stories about being at the table run all through the Bible. We are always being fed, or yearning to be included in the party. At Eucharist, we are God’s guests, and Jesus is our host, and there is room for all. The image of the Kingdom is the heavenly banquet, the feasts of all feasts, and it’s always a topsy-turvey toss-up about who is seated where and who is serving whom. Jesus also had words for his host that night. “Don’t invite your rich friends and your family, because they can invite you back, and you’ll get gourmet food and fine wine,” he says. Stop behaving in the old economy of exchange, asking “What’s in it for me?”

Liberate yourselves from the dynamic of mutual benefit, the “this for that” mentality. I’ll pay you this for that; I’ll do this for you if you do that for me; I’ll invite you to my house if you invite me to yours. Instead, operate under the laws of God’s economy, the economy of sacrifice.

Now hold on. Usually when the word “sacrifice” is put on the table, we tend to assume we know what it means: we assume ‘sacrifice’ always entails a loss to us or at least a diminishment of our selves. Actually, the literal meaning of the word “sacrifice” means “to make sacred.” And – get this! –the origins of sacrifice are in food offered to the gods, as an acknowledgement that we are not our own, we do not belong to ourselves, and we are thankful for the sustenance that keeps us alive. So the food of the sacrifice itself became sacred, holy. And the offering of such food was a sacramental act. Which is why, in our Eucharistic prayer, we speak of “offering to God this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,” and sometimes we pray that we too may be made a “living sacrifice to God.”

So, the economy of exchange asks: What’s in it for me? But the economy of sacrifice asks: How can I offer myself fully for your sake, no strings attached? Going back to our table talk, the beatitude would be: “Blessed are you who invite those who will never be able to pay you back, for yours is the kingdom of God.” In the economy of sacrifice, we invite others to our tables as we have been invited to God’s table, with no sense of how the others might repay us, but simply to acknowledge the worth and the value of the other. God’s economy of sacrifice – of making sacred – invites us to love and care in ways which draw us outside of ourselves and into union with all creation.

There’s a new book out titled Eat This Bread by Sara Miles, an Episcopalian who belongs to St. Gregory’s of Nyssa in San Francisco, a congregation known for its hands-on service to the poor as much as for its innovative liturgy. Sara describes how they play out this “making all things sacred” way of sacrificial living. During worship, the high round table in the center of the sacred space is the altar, on which the Eucharistic feast is prepared and blessed, broken and distributed. Immediately after worship, the altar cloth is whipped off and replaced with a festive tablecloth, the coffee pot and plates of cookies come out of the kitchen and the table becomes the center of coffee hour, the feast of fellowship. On Fridays, the table is loaded with jars of peanut butter and cans of tuna fish and is one of many loaded with food for the poor, who stream through the open parish doors. Eucharist, fellowship, service: all served at the one table. All is held in God and all is holy.

A couple of years ago I heard of hot new restaurant in the Portland Pearl district. Listen to this. For $30 you can buy a place at a table with 35 people you don’t know. It’s a big long table, simple flowers, very good food, served family-style. You eat what has been prepared; no other choices. The pace is leisurely – no rushing – plenty of time for table talk. The point? To share a meal with strangers and talk with them. That’s all. The man and the woman who cook and arrange for this meal have a young child, who goes from lap to lap. The conversation, they say, often turns to discussion of the things that are giving meaning to the lives of the guests. It’s very hard to get a reservation, because many people are yearning just for this experience. And the ones who have been lucky to go once often want to come back time after time. What are those guests really yearning for? Hospitality and community and a sense that life has meaning and a desire to connect with strangers and find an unexpected treasure in the connection.

Did you know that the literal meaning of “hospitality” is “love of a stranger”. We seem these days, as a culture, to be yearning for what we don’t have: for time to sit and talk about what our hearts desire, time to be in communion with others beyond our own network of family and friends, time to be at table with all ages, time to be hospitable to one another, a chance to lay aside our mistrust of the stranger.

Hospitality is a primary Christian virtue, it is based on the economy of sacrifice, it means to welcome the unknown, especially those on the “margins,” and seek Christ in them; it means to offer food, fellowship, and full inclusion.

Annie Dillard said that many people when they came to the treasure walked right on by the shiny new penny, free for the taking. I guess to most people, when they saw how small it was, of such little apparent worth, it wasn’t worth the bother to stoop and pick it up. But isn’t that how it goes in the spiritual life? That when we can get out of ourselves for even a moment and open ourselves to the possibility that the divine Mystery has stamped upon us the imprint of itself, and that we are participating in a power beyond the pitiful little power that we think we yield, and connection to this Mystery and to this Life and to this Life is being offered to us, over and over again, if we but let go of our pride and our despair and our striving and humble ourselves by stooping to notice and rejoice.

In a few minutes, this congregation is going to have the privilege of witnessing the baptism of Colleen Graves, whom we have come to know and love over the past year. We will have the privilege also of welcoming her into our midst, to travel with us on the Way, to be pilgrims with us. We are here to lean on if you become discouraged, and we know you will be there to lend us a hand when we falter or fall. We’re all in this together, sealed by the Spirit, and made one with Christ. For Colleen to choose to take this step is an act of courage as well as faith. I cannot overemphasize the change that has occurred in our western culture in the past several decades.

Colleen’s friends no doubt find her decision to be baptized to be very strange if not downright incomprehensible. She is daring to do a profoundly counter-cultural act this morning, and I want us all to be aware of that fact. In that respect, her generation of Christians is more like the earliest Christians than any of us ever were. She will pay her own form of sacrifice in order to throw in her lot with Jesus. She knows what she is doing.

You are not alone, Colleen. That we can promise you. And we rejoice in you and your decision, and we thank the Spirit for guiding you and we thank you for noticing the arrows of grace and of promise that have appeared to you on your path and for your courage and your joy in valuing the treasure of grace which is being given to you, this day and always.

Colleen has chosen Jodi and Paul French, who brought her to Trinity and with whom she shares her ministry of music to be her sponsors on this day of her baptism. Will the three of you now please come forward….

And so it was...a glorious baptism, one more Episcopalian, sure, but truly, one more disciple of Christ. And the pundits say the Episcopal Church is losing members. I dunno, at the rate Trinity is adding members, I doubt that the pundits really know what they are talking about.

That said, this will be my last post for a bit with my surgery the day after tomorrow. I hope to recover quickly so I can be up and writing again. Keep one another in love and joy, and show love to a stranger...show them how sacred their life truly is...

Catherine+

The "Compassionate Samaritan": A new take

The following sermon was delivered on Pentecost 7, July 15th, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Ashland, Oregon by The Reverend Tom Murphy, one of several "Wise Guys" that think they are retired clergy and who are occasionally called upon to deliver the sermon by The Reverend Anne K Bartlett, rector. Though the sermon is great reading and holds a myriad of truths about how we should live the Gospel, to have heard it "LIVE!" was a real treat and had us laughing in our pews with wholehearted agreement. I even heard some well-placed, rumbly AMENs that I have only heard in Baptist congregations to go with! But there is no time like our present to hear this Gospel parable again and to savor and soak in its message.

Catherine+
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I got to thinking that maybe the most useful response for us to this compelling story of the Compassionate Samaritan would be to just sit together in silent reflection on it for 6 or 7 minutes and think about how the meaning of this story gets worked out in our lives, or needs to. It doesn’t seem to need a lot of interpretation. It just grabs you. Its force is just unavoidable. I’d guess it’s one of the most accessible and best known portions of Scripture there is even by folks who don’t go to church and don’t know much about the Bible.

It’s one of the few Scriptural images that’s still part of our common culture, and the idea of being a Good Samaritan is still widely understood even if maybe in a rather superficial way. It’s even the name of a club for recreational vehicle owners – the Good Sam Club, with its promise to come to the aid of a fellow-RVer in distress! Some of you may be or have been members of the Good Sam Club. I hope before I’m through to suggest our membership in an even more profound and all encompassing Good Sam Club!

And, as you can plainly see, I’m not going to shut up for a few minutes while we all meditate! I haven’t got the intestinal fortitude to do that. I’m a weak person, and to give up the chance to yak at you for a few minutes is a sacrifice I’m not prepared to make, although you’re perfectly free to tune me out completely and do your own meditating on this magnificent text – probably be a better sermon than this one! Besides, it’s my sense, from my observation of the passing scene these days that it’s easy to overlook or ignore the real heart of this story. It’s about a lot more than just letting the guy next door use your weed-whacker or deciding to pick up a hitchhiker or giving a buck to a pan-handler. It’s really about our understanding of where the boundaries of the human race are, and how we behave on the basis of that understanding.

I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence and I assume we all understand that Jesus’ story about the abundantly compassionate Samaritan is His vigorous attack on all ingrained institutions of race and ethnic hatred, and by implication, any other dehumanizing ism, and all attempts to reduce the limits of the human race – those who have a legitimate claim on our care and love – to just those who are like us. The assaulted traveler was a Jew. So were the religious figures, the priest and the Levite. The one who came so overwhelmingly to his aid was a Samaritan.

In the culture of Jesus’ day one of the givens of social life was that Jews and Samaritans – who shared a common ethnic and religious root – had a virulent group hatred for each other. In His encounter on another occasion with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, in which Jesus asks her for a drink of water, she puts the tension succinctly and starkly when she says to Him, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans”!

You may be thinking, “Well, not much has changed in two millennia, except now it’s Israelis and Palestinians!” But things have changed, because the ethnic hatred and exclusion that was considered normative and even a good thing in the First Century has been replaced among many, not all, participants in that struggle today with an eagerness to really find a way to live harmoniously as good neighbors in that tiny place, and we have to believe and pray that out of the present maelstrom the forces of reconciliation and authentic neighborliness will prevail. And from this distance in time and in vastly changed historical circumstances from those of the first century, we can’t ever let Scriptural texts like this be used as an excuse for any kind of anti-Semitism.

When I think of this story that reveals so gloriously what the real depth of authentic neighborliness means, I think of other ideas and words and images that help me enter into the heart of this stunning and transforming incident and give some direction for myself in trying to conform to its challenge for my life – and one of the things that comes to my aid is the Baptismal Covenant in the Prayer Book, part of whose language arises directly out of this parable.

The Episcopal Church gets beaten up in certain circles including from many of its own members, for being “deficient in theology” – for not having clear and forceful teaching – for being wishy-washy and crippled by theological relativism – too much of ‘on the one hand this, and on the other hand that’ – for being vague and vacillating and excessively open and inclusive! What this usually means is that the Church doesn’t endorse the critics’ narrow, rigid, reactionary and exclusionary ideas. Anyone troubled by this complaint would be well advised to take a good look at the Prayer Book Baptismal Covenant. It’s found in two places – in the Baptismal liturgy itself beginning on page 304, and in a slightly altered form in the liturgy for the Great Vigil of Easter.

This brief statement is of immense importance because it represents the consensus of the Church at this point in time as to what the components are of a viable and authentic Christian life – what it means to be and to live with integrity as a person in Christ.

The Covenant is rendered in traditional question and answer form, and each word is carefully and thoughtfully chosen. It’s the last two questions I think of when I reflect on today’s Parable. We are asked in the fourth question, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” That’s what the Samaritan did – and that’s what it means to be in the real Good Sam club! Then the final question in the Covenant really puts it over the top when it calls us to be Samaritans and asks us:

“Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

And my knees shake at the challenge as I say in response:

“I will, with God’s help”.

The Episcopal Church doesn’t teach or believe anything, and has a deficient and vague theology? Don’t make me laugh!! To live into the meaning of those breathtaking words is the challenge of a lifetime, and to accept the identity they suggest and move toward it is the most thrilling thing in the world.

What the Episcopal Church does not have, thank God, is any system of punishments or sanctions or penalties for not ‘toeing the line’. We don’t have any “shape up or ship out, our way or the highway, kick-butt theology or spirituality”. You will never hear an Episcopal Bishop threaten to excommunicate some Episcopalian senator for not supporting the Church’s teaching on reproductive issues! What we do have is an invitation to a journey to the lifestyle of the Samaritan.

It’s an invitation that says “whoever you are, whatever you bring, whatever you do or don’t believe – if this journey with us and with Christ toward a life that seeks Him in every single person and respects the God-given dignity of every single human being - if that journey calls and excites you then come join us - and we never are successful, we never arrive in this world, we never do it perfectly or even very well, we fall and fail over and over again, and we pick ourselves and one another up and dust each other off – or as that other phrase in the Covenant calls us to do, we “repent and return to the Lord” - but being on the journey together is everything – because He is the journey and the End of the journey and we believe that in walking in that Way with Him and one another, we will assimilate Samaritanism and be “changed into Jesus’ likeness from glory to glory”. Amen.

The Rev. Tom Murphy
Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, OR

The art work, "Good Samaritan", is by He Qi at heqiarts.com.

From "The Answer" by R S Thomas

Is there no way other than thought of answering the challenge?
There is an anticipation of it to the point of dying.
There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of Love’s risen body.


Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913, the son of a sea captain. He was educated at University College of North Wales and later undertook theological training at St Michael's College in Cardiff. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1936. He died at the age of 87 on the 25th September 2000. He wrote prolifically during his lifetime and his work can be explored at OldPoetry.

Tomb stone photo from Ascension Research Organization.
Linen image from Google Images.

Loving Your Neighbor...

"Christians have to find a way--a lens--if you will,

through which to interpret this body of text [the Bible] on which our faith is founded....

My lens--and in this I am not alone--is the two great commandments.

You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your soul, and you must love your neighbor as yourself.

YOU MUST LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.

And I don't see the word "straight" in there anywhere."

--The Reverend Lily Conner, Episcopal priest, in the mystery novel by Michelle Blake, "The Book of Light", page 41, published in 2003--

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Why does it take a fictional character to explain the obvious about scripture?

Photographic images courtesy of Google Images.