February 28, 2019

Who are you?

This is my first video recording of a sermon, thanks to parishioner Mark Fearer. I preached at the Wednesday evening service at Emmanuel Church-on-the-Hill, Alexandria, February 27, 2019 (the feast of poet George Herbert). The sermon begins about five minutes in. Thanks Mark!

Photo: the chapel atop the Mount of the Beatitudes, in the Galilee region of Israel.

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You just have to understand this!!

“Bless us with anger,” Bishop Gene Robinson prayed, on Sunday, January 18, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The setting was a “kick-off” concert celebrating the inauguration, two days later, of a new president.

“Bless us with anger.”

The bishop asked God for the blessing of anger in response to discrimination against “refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.” When we witness this discrimination, may God bless us with anger.

But how can anger be a blessing? Anger so often is destructive. Anger motivates acts of violence. Anger in even small amounts can be corrosive. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you flip them the bird: This is corrosive. It damages, however slightly, our social fabric.

Often enough I feel angry. Often enough I understand the function and value, if not the “blessing,” of anger: we humans evolved this sharp emotion. Anger urges us to fight, to make ourselves bigger, to assert, to overcome. Anger has been described simply as the feeling you have when something is in your way. There’s a barrier in front of you, and anger helps you remove that barrier.

Why aren't we talking about fascism?!

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?”

That’s what someone was asking, over the past few days. I was working near Columbus, Ohio, as one of the trainers for the College for Congregational Development in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.

We covered lots of topics: congregational identity, Episcopal identity, how to map the neighborhood around your church to discern where God is sending you next on your mission, how to look at your congregation through different lenses to see different things — things like where you are on the organizational life cycle. If you’re wondering, St. Paul’s Seattle is currently in the “healthy stability” stage of our organizational life.

We learned a tool to discover who is coming to our congregations to develop their faith, and how best to nurture and lead them; and another tool to discern how the faithful enter their worlds of family, work, neighborhood, and civic life, and what (if anything) they do in those worlds that’s different or better because they said their prayers with us.

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?” the participant said again. He mentioned this concern in his small group, in our main plenary sessions, and in his written evaluation of the week, which he filled out at the end of our time together. He seemed frustrated because, he reasoned, if we aren’t talking about the crisis of fascism currently threatening not just livelihoods but lives in our nation, a crisis trapping and killing people along the Strait of Hormuz, along our southern border, inside our urban centers and neighborhoods, just outside these doors, everywhere – if we aren’t talking about this global calamity, then, this participant said, we are blessing the status quo. We are going along with all the outrageous things that are happening. We are part of the problem.

"Bless us with anger..."

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Our parents bless us. That is to say, our parents hand things down to us. Some of their gifts are conscious: they deliberately try to raise us a certain way, to instill certain values. They teach us how to treat our friends. They teach us what’s important, and what’s not. They teach us who is kin and who is an outsider. Sometimes they teach us how to vote, how to think, how to behave at dinner, even how to feel.

Other things parents give us are unintentional, unconscious… and they’re not all blessings. Sometimes parents let their children down in ways that give them deep-seated anxiety, and make it hard for their children to form strong emotional bonds with people. My parents formed secure emotional attachments with me, but I think they unintentionally taught me to suppress emotions, midwestern-style. I had to learn from somebody else that big feelings are useful, and good; that if I learn to work with them, they help me make better choices about my life.

Today we celebrate — we call “blessed,” we bless — a human being who is many things, as all of us are, but whose identity as a parent perhaps looms largest in our imagination. Saint Mary the Virgin has many titles, but perhaps her chief title, her primary claim to fame, is Mary the mother of Jesus, or Mary the mother of our Lord, or (we Christians came up with this title a bit later on) Mary the Mother of God.

The sound of silence

I will begin with three little scenes, and one song verse, about silence. Silence in its many forms.

After the fire, [there was] a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

From the works of Simon and Garfunkel:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

From the novel “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger:
You’ve even both been up here on many a weekend [since Seymour killed himself], and though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.

After Jesus had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone.

Congregant number 14

Last week, during the early mass, someone came into our church for a few moments, took one of the snack packs from the table near the baptismal font, and left. I saw this because I was up here, behind the table, getting our breakfast ready.

My immediate response was to add one to my headcount for that mass. “It’s fourteen now,” I told myself. And so that goes for a working priest who’s developing a Christian congregation in a mostly secularized urban setting: attendance is one of our lagging indicators, a metric that helps us assess the health and vitality of this congregation. I focus on attendance enough that I’ve been rightly teased about it.

But I like counting people, especially people I love. (And that definitely includes you, beloveds!) I’m from a big family, so I count my nieces and nephews, a daunting twenty-three people. I always try to count people and other creatures who matter. When I had a big aquarium in the kitchen during the pandemic years, I loved counting tropical fish. When I see videos of dog litters on the internet, I count the puppies. “That looks like seven,” I say to myself. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Yep. Oh wait, they’re squashing another one — it’s eight!”

We need help

Watch this sermon on video here.

I recall several experiences across my life, especially in the early years, when I had most of my needs met, but I really just needed a little more help. That’s all — I needed more help. Can you relate?

When I was a small child, I needed significantly more attention than my overwhelmed parents could give me. When I was a confused and scared junior in college, I had one strong helper when I came out as gay, but I needed much more guidance than that one person could possibly give.

Across the decades of early adulthood and early midlife, I needed help with career discernment, several times. Without that help, every step was slower, every transition more difficult. I finally found my true vocation, but not until a couple of months before my fiftieth birthday.

Now, please be assured that I am well aware that I am just fine. Much more than fine. By any reasonable human or historical standard, I luxuriate in embarrassing opulence with physical health, housing, and income in my fifties that would have been unimaginable for my prairie-farmer ancestors. When I was in seminary, my favorite priest and theologian lived in a small house just off campus, and she remarked that her little two-bedroom rambler was a vast palace.

Breakfast with Jesus

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”

Perhaps you are frightened right now. There is plenty to be frightened about. Climate change is causing heat waves in Europe, and hurricane season is coming: terrifying. But it isn’t just natural ecosystems that are changing or getting worse. Our political world roils in chaos, making Pride weekend all the more relevant and urgent, particularly for our trans companions. War ravages the land in West Asia, Africa, Europe, and along our borders. There was another mass shooting the other day, in Chico, California. A double earthquake has killed at least 1,400 people in Venezuela.

As we struggle through these crises, and (at our best) advocate for others in more extreme need, our chronic and intense anxiety could damage our health. Your fears about the world could finally generate a fear of their own: that your health and well-being will finally begin to break down under the relentless emotional strain.

Or perhaps your fear is closer to home. Maybe you are in a phase of life that daunts you: you are on the brink of adulthood, or you are a parent with a thousand fears about your child, or you are drawing close to the end of your life. Maybe you’re in one of the generations that can’t afford the basics, and you fear you’ll never pay your student loans; or you’re worried that your careful, reasonable plan for a comfortable and safe retirement is unraveling. Or you’re in midlife, and you’re wondering with nagging worry about the meaning of your life, worry about the health of your relationships, worry about the purpose of your career. Maybe you’re coping with addiction: no matter whether you or someone you love is the actual substance user, addiction is a social disease that damages the health of everyone involved, and locks whole families in excruciating fear.

Are you frightened right now? Jesus said to them — Jesus says to you — “Come and have breakfast.”

What are we even doing in this room?

The woman touched the fringe of his cloak, and she was healed. But this was not a magical fringe: her faith made her well.

The fringe was and is a religious artifact. In Hebrew it’s called a tzitzit. It’s a series of knotted tassels, worn to remind the wearer of the mitzvot, the commandments of God in the Torah — commandments about welcoming the stranger, about sustaining a healthy community, about living ethically and peacefully in God’s presence. A rough (a very rough) Christian equivalent might be the stole of a priest or deacon. When I wear my stole, it becomes a colorful, physical reminder of the baptismal identity we all share.

The woman summons her courage and faith, and rushes up to touch the tzitzit of a Judean rabbi. Jesus is immediately aware of her action, turns and sees her, and quickly grasps the situation. He praises her for summoning her own faith to approach him and to touch his clothing — clothing powerfully laden with religious meaning. Her healing is not only physical: her faith, and the savvy, compassionate response of Jesus, restore her spiritually and socially to her people.

Strife closed in the sod

Jesus breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

We church-going folk sure love to be nice. We love to be warm. We love to be welcoming. When we talk about spiritual concepts like “grace,” we focus on the happy part of the term: the good gladness that washes over us when the Creator fashions us from clay and breathes life into us and sets us on this green earth to live, to laugh, to love.

When we talk about the Holy Spirit, we like to focus on the loveliness of that Spirit, who blows through this community like a warm and invigorating breeze. We might imagine the Spirit’s fire brightening our nights with cozy amber colors, all of us gathered around a snug campfire. Maybe we could toast marshmallows over the Spirit’s golden flame.

Lynette is loved for eternal life

Lynette Jennifer Douglass abides for eternal life in the love of the risen Christ. Lynette herself preaches this Gospel.

Across my scant fifty-six years of life, from early childhood through a sacred-music career and onward into ordained life, I have said my prayers and served God’s people in seventeen congregations, some Lutheran, some Episcopal, and I have not known a member of any of these communities who has pressed this point as enthusiastically as Lynette: She is loved, as all of us are loved; she belongs, as all of us belong; we all abide for eternal life in the love of the risen Christ.

Lynette’s evangelism about the love of Jesus Christ is particularly poignant and powerful because Lynette has faced a lifetime of rejection and marginalization due to her physical differences. She survived the emotional abuse of religious people whose ableist religious beliefs tormented Lynette with guilt and despair: surely if she loved God enough, or prayed to God hard enough, God would heal her palsy in a wondrous sign of grace and power.