Self Directed Way of the Cross Collection

At Grace Church in Pemberton, we have set up 14 stations around our property so that in the season of Lent one might walk the Way of the Cross, and then come Easter, the Way of Light.  This is an ancient way of spiritual growth, and we offer it with a few options. 

This journey can be for all people, those who know Christ's passion well, and those for whom the whole church thing is a mystery.

It can be done silently or reading aloud; it can be done on your own or with others.

We only suggest that you take your time.  Breathe deeply.  Reflect on the questions of how we are so deeply broken and how this Passion changes how we see and respond to cruelty and deathliness.

The stations start with a bucket of booklets and the printed options.

The bucket of options is by the 'back door' of the office on the Rectory (so within sight of the Peace Pole).  Here you will find:

· The folded Way of the Cross booklets are the most classic approach to this journey.

· The Bonhoeffer sets are 14 biblical stations paired with writings by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It finishes with a short set of prayers.

· The Bearing our Sorrows book has 14 chapters with many choices. At each stop choose one reading (or more) from each chapter.

· The New Stations book could be used by reading the scripture at each stop and a paragraph or two from each chapter. It is a good book and worth the read.

· There is also a wonderful children’s book that only has 12 readings and includes Easter, but perhaps you could use it and make two stops be for silent contemplation.

· There are two sets of 14 art images. Take this along with you to contemplate.

· There is one set of 14 ‘quotes’ to contemplate.

Then this being the modern age there are several publicly available digital options.

Busted Halo is a terrific young source of digital content for smart and honest faithfulness.  A Catholic 'Way' to be sure, but worth a watch of these 'Virtual Way of the Cross' videos, all available on YouTube.

Here is a PDF of a thoughtful and profound version of the Way of the Cross offered by the Reverend Frank Louge.  This is what is printed and put in the bucket. My only complaint is the Roman numerals.  I really hate that we make it hard for people to count.  The language of the people includes numerals!!!

This is a link to a pdf of the typical Episcopal texts of the Way of the Cross with images from Episcopal Relief and Development. 

This is a podcast explanation of the stations more than a prayerful way through, but might be what you desire. 

This is a podcast of a set of biblical stations of the cross.  Some of the traditional stations come from tradition and not a specific scriptural moment. 

May this be a blessing to your journey and may we find ourselves in union with all who suffer at the foot of Jesus' cross.

Gather the Lost: Coins, Sons, A Rancher, A Samaritan and some Green Green Grass

Imagine a lovely open field of fresh green grass, beside a clear flowing stream. In the middle of this field, stand two able-bodied men and their aged father. A few steps away, yet within easy hearing distance is a woman and many of her friends: and they are in a good mood. Also a few steps to the other side of the father and sons, there is a rancher and his sheep, a few wooly ones by his side and one across his shoulders. A bit further away beside the stream, is a Samaritan man, you know it by looking at him, and beside him sits a weak stranger, bruises on his face and his arm is in a sling. There is heartbreak and recovery, panicked despair and reckless happy abandon, and people trying to do the right thing. Why do they stand in this field at this moment? Because Jesus heard his detractors grumbling and trying to slander him by mentioning again that this man Jesus - he FEASTS with the most low life traitorous pirates of ill repute - how could he be of God? 

His response is first to tell about the rancher - well - shepherd, who loves and cares for his sheep.  Just the other day he is counting them, And whoa - one is missing. So he goes and searches over hill and dale to find that lost and poky sheep and bring it home where the rancher rejoices. Next, Jesus tells of the woman who is checking her change purse and discovers that a coin is missing. So she lifts every bit of furniture and shakes out the rug and lights a lamp to search high and low, so that she might find the coin that she has lost. When she finds it she calls all her friends and throws a party to celebrate. The point of the sheep tale is that the sheep was found and there was rejoicing. The point of the coin tale is that the coin was found and there was rejoicing. And to me lost and found should be understood as teachings about death and resurrection and eternal life. 

In today’s selection, Jesus continues the lost and found, death and resurrection series. There were two sons. Two sons of a man who has given over his life to his sons. The word that is used to speak of inheritance isn’t the bank account - the word it is substance - it can be his assets, but it can also be heard as his life. And since this is about death and resurrection - let's go with life. This man, this father, is at this point, all but dead having given away his life. The crucial point is not the division of assets or pig sty. The point is that the second son gets lost. So lost that he too might as well be dead. 

One scholar suggests that this parable should be called 'the father that forgot to count.' The rancher counted. The woman counted. The father had two sons. The older son, who stayed home and did his duty, may have been just as lost as his playboy brother, but it was harder to notice. Being responsible and sticking to the estate are good things, but not if we forget we belong to something greater than the task in front of us. And so while rejoicing that the younger son was found, the father forgot t o look around the estate and seek out and find and celebrate his older son too. 

So why you might wonder, why are the stranger and the Good Samaritan are in this field with us. It is because of the all but deadness of the lost sheep and the all but wasted of the lost coin and the all but gone father and the lost sons. The Good Samaritan is about a man who is all but dead and the entirely outcast savior - it is another lost and found story. The Samaritan goes out of his way to rescue this stranger who was left in a ditch. The question that that parable began with was who is my neighbor - which of these people do I have to love and how much do I have to love them. The answer is there is no us and them, and how do you love - you lift the lowly and safeguard the vulnerable. 

So if you gather together this whole field of lost and found things and creatures and you ask what is God’s reign like and how show we live into it - What answer do you discover? In all of the gospels, none of the stories where Jesus encounters all but dead things does he ignore it. There is judgment here, but it isn’t about lives of ill repute or numbness, the judgment here is whether or not we accept that God is raising us from all the deadness we can concoct. 

For Lent, I have been preaching through the five job descriptions of the baptized life. Continue Return Proclaim Serve Strive. This week we are on the fourth - serve.  The promise to love and serve is not just saying will be good scouts and will tolerate others because it is nice and polite. We are invited by Jesus to be making our lives an example of the love and forgiveness that is already given in his life, death and resurrection. It is a celebration of how God loves us and will send people like you and me to find all the lost. Loving service to all neighbors is the grateful response, it is the greatest command. Our loving practices and actions and attitudes for all neighbors and therefore serving Christ in all persons responds to real human needs, not just with small change, or kind thoughts.  It is instead like a rancher seeking a sheep and a woman finding a coin and a father rejoicing when his lost sons return. 

It is love that persists in following Jesus by belonging to his community and growing in Jesus by serving with his community. Imagine a field of soft green grass And clear flowing water Where all the countless lostness becomes foundness. Who and where are you in this field of lost and found, Death and resurrection? What might move you from fragmented loss to connected wholeness? 

Holy Week is coming - I invite you to come face to face with all our lostness. Easter will follow- Jesus is Sending us out To love and serve. How and with whom will you go? God’s soft green field is one of unearned foundness, selfless forgiveness, and resurrecting love. All of those stories, Good Sam and the Found Sheep and the Found Coin and the Two Sons, they are pictures of who we are supposed to be as people who follow Jesus into the lostness of the cross, and who we are to be as we go where he sends us beyond the empty tomb. Go be found by Jesus, the good shepherd. Go, Find, love, serve, and gather.  What is lost can be found.

March 31, 2019

Grace Episcopal Church

Lent 4C RCL

-the one where i had to offer it from memory cause i pushed the wrong buttons on the tablet

Infinite Ways to Pray: Pi, Promises, and Lent

If you were stuck in the middle of the ocean on a lifeboat with an animal, what animal would you choose? It is the life of pi question. A book about a young man who finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the wilderness of Pacific ocean with a Bengal tiger in the same small boat. The part of the story I want to offer today is that what undergirds the boy in the face the danger and temptations of the 227 days in the wilderness of the ocean was his life of prayer.

Back at his home in India Pi had a childhood a lot like mine we were free-range children, and what he was doing during the day his parents had almost no idea. Pi had a deep curiosity about God and in his part of India, he was able to practice Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam and Hinduism quite freely. They all have different holy days so nobody knew about his holy hobby for a while. Pi’s bravery saves his life on the boat with the tiger in the middle of the ocean. Pi’s creativity was absolutely the tool that provided sustenance in his wilderness trial. But it is the practice of prayer that keeps him going and anchors his sanity in his extraordinary passage.

The season of Lent was originally shaped to prepare people who'd been on a journey to baptism. Each Sunday this Lent I will focus on one of the five active baptismal promises, promises that we have prayed and committed ourselves to. The renewal of baptismal vows begins with a renunciation of evil and renaming the ideas and concepts that we trust in when we say we believe in God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This is followed up with five questions that are the word pictures which fill in what it means for us, as a community of people who trust in the things we just declared. It is easy to remember in five words: continue return proclaim serve strive.

The 1st of the 1st promise is will you continue in the apostle's teaching and fellowship and breaking of bread, and in the prayers. Continuing the apostle's teaching and fellowship means that you keep diving into the learning and reflection of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason in a community that is a community across time. The breaking of bread is clearly gathering for communion constantly and consistently. And the last part of the first promises is prayer.

The regular daily active life of prayer. The easiest and simplest way to think of what prayer should be is it is you and god looking at each other face-to-face it is, it is intimacy, it is candor, it is love, it is challenging, it is a relationship. Now our friend Pi the boy on the boat with the tiger in the wilderness of the ocean his relationship with God was so complex that he used 3 completely distinct traditions of religion and prayer to satisfy his longing to look at God face-to-face.

In the Christian tradition, we have dozens and dozens of ways that are real and true and holy methods of prayer. Some of them involve body movements, some of them involve reading and/or listening. Some of them working in the soil or the kitchen and some others are focused on sitting still and some of them involve lots of silence and some of them involve singing and lots of noise. If for some reason you've always thought of prayer as ___ and that fill in the blank has not held you in a regular relationship, has not invited you into that experience where you regularly look at God and God looks at you, then this Lent I challenge you to try a new kind of prayer.

The last thing I want to point out about our lesson and prayer today is that if you notice it is the spirit of God that leads Jesus out into the wilderness. And it is the Spirit of God that is calling us and leading us into challenges and the prayerful encounter with the great unknown paths that lay around of us. Prayer that is a conversation with the Lord of life will be about living more lovingly, more freely and not being stuck in temptations or selfishness or loneliness. Prayer is a deep breath of God when we are paralyzed by anxiety and fear of the future. Prayer can be the life of Jesus coming alive in you. Prayer is about living a life together in humility and reconciliation and mercy not only for yourself and others but for time and reality itself.

We promise to stick to prayer not because we get it not because we understand how it works but because we experience it as a deepening of the promises of our pledges to be with God who is here for us. Whatever your wilderness is God is with us. Whatever your ocean is, there is a practice of authentic prayer that can sustain you. Whatever the tiger in your lifeboat is, God calls us to live together in peace, whatever that takes. Continue return proclaim serve strive. Our promises are responded to with the promise of God: that we will live into this way of love with God's help forever and ever. Amen.

Grace Episcopal Church


Pemberton, New Jersey


March 10, 2019


RCL Lent 1C

Garden Playzones Breaking Open and Sprouting New Life

We have a fantastic office assistant he has bright ginger hair and today he turns 1. Gavin has people he trusts and those he looks at suspiciously, and he likes to climb when we are not looking. He can play on his own, yet even if there were other children in the room, he wouldn't know how to play with them. As he grows and develops there will come a time when he plays next to, but not with others. The experts call this parallel play: multiple children working with the same toy set, yet each is in their own story. Much of adult work life can be like this.

Later in childhood most of us develop the capacity to play with others, to play along. This is the experience of imagination where a box of sand can become an epic landscape. All of these phases are important parts of human growth and intellectual development and most of us are always utilizing different parts of these different stages as needed. Entering into another person’s story knowing how to play along how to say ‘yes-and’ or ‘no-but’ is a crucial part of lifelong human being togetherness.

When I was 12 years old I was the constant volunteer in the church nursery and there was this moment it was such an everyday moment I doubt anyone else recalls that morning at all. Yet I can tell you where I was and what the weather was like outside. I was sitting on the floor in the middle right side of the room near some mirrors. There were probably 10 other children and two other caregivers in the room, all of whom were playing or watching or napping. I was sitting on the floor with a boy named Toby, and he had chosen to play with the blue and yellow Fisher-Price Little People house. Maybe you remember those, with it's chairs and cars and swing set with holes for the round figures to fit in. He was delightfully playing through a story with this house and these figures, and it was real and it was alive, and I knew I wasn't in the same place that he was. The imaginary world that was his I was no longer able to access in the same way, and I knew it. I could see right then and there that part of my childhood-self had broken open and fallen aside. It probably had diminished well before that moment, I just never noticed it until then. To this very day I can feel the mournfulness of that moment. The loss of something beautiful and connective. It seemed as if a door to a room I loved had been shut.

This developmental shift I felt that day is completely normal part of the maturing process. It's not that imagination goes away, it's just that it's retooling, sinking in deep, interiorizing. Some people stay in the concrete factoid zone most of the time. It's reasonable to suggest that in our culture where what is valuable is what is countable and readable, that this stage of concrete thinking is even more pronounced. We build our lives and our world out of signals and data more than we dwell in the playful garden that sprouts unverifiable things like emotions and dreams and heartaches. 

Earlier in the Gospel of John Jesus said that he comes to us so that we may have life abundant and love abundant. Throughout this gospel we are invited into a non linear non data-based storytelling experience that shows that the world is both blessed from the start and now horribly gone wrong. Wrong about what is powerful and wrong about what is holy. Jesus says servanthood is union with the divine; loving your life is letting go of it; and through our union with him in his humiliation, the corrupt authorities of this world will be cast down. John’s gospel isn’t a concrete explanation of yes and no but a life story we are invited into. Where strangely, somehow, Jesus shares that love is stronger than hate, or isolation, or even death. This is an upside down story that the bitter system cannot bear.

There are dark clouds of manipulation and shallowness haunting our well being each and every day. Gloom hovers over the neighborhoods where seeds of hope have been buried. Will they be watered and fed or abandoned? Our choice. Jesus asks, are we going to be gardeners or are we going to be waste managers? Maybe there are people in your life who come to you asking why church? But they may be saying is: we wish to see Jesus. Maybe you're the kind of person that doesn't say the J word outside of this property. A person who tries to be good, and likes something unnamable in the motions of Christian worship, but who doesn't show faithfulness in any company at all. That is a tough skin a hard shell that may have carried some of us through calmer waters. Is this the time for shedding that hard shell that used to protect us but now is choking us? 

Jesus says to let his life become our life to let his story become our story. He doesn't want us playing independently of him, I don’t even think that he wants us playing alongside him, unless we are mirroring him. Jesus Christ calls us to follow him and let our imaginations weave together into lives of mercy and justice. When we enter into the imagination of life with Jesus we will change and this neighborhood and this congregation will change. Shallow, reactionary otherizing isn't that different from that selfish play of our youngest years. When Jesus says we need to be like children to enter the kingdom of God he's not talking about that selfish part of childhood, the part that doesn't know how to control the unjust passions or how to live in moral community. The part that Jesus is inviting us into is the part where we know how to play WELL with each other. Play is not leisure or silliness, but incarnate meaning-making. And every age of person does it, even if some of us keep it on the inside. The playfulness of faithfulness is to enter each other's imagination and God's imagination and live into it with our whole selves.

We can't just pretend and wear Christian-ish costumes anymore. They are too thin to answer the real questions of this hour. Why do we walk out for those who were slaughtered, because we are one with Jesus who absolutely walked out. Why do we hold hands together, because Jesus stands there with us holding our hands. He knows our unacknowledged hatefulness and he loves US and forgives US. We can experience our place in the story with daring and candor or we can bury ourselves in the little bits of truth that we like and ignore the rest.

If I were to take a guess at why the last few years have been fruitful and life-giving for St. Paul’s, even in the context of panic and embarrassment and waiting, it could be that we have learned to play along with each other and God. There's a ground of wholehearted trust that playing along well reveals. I feel like we've gotten better at leaning into each other's stories, and figuring out how dense weights could become the compost where seeds have sprouted new life. I hope we've gotten better at trying new things, of hearing our neighbor suggest something holy daring and our saying, okay, I am not really sure I get it, but how can I come along and make your dream real?

Many years after I sat on that floor and noticed that something was gone, I was watching a friends daughter after-school. Willow and I were playing out a story in their front yard. One with heroines and evil doers in a baseball game. I was so involved in the story that I believed I could jump down three steps and take off running while wearing flip-flops and holding a water bottle. I fell flat on my face. Six-year-old Willow felt no malice at this occasion, she was concerned that I was ok. And I felt very little humiliation. Falling on your face is normal when you are a child. As I got up off the ground And wiped the dirt from my skirt, I laughed. I laughed at the absurdity of believing I could have made that leap successfully. And I laughed because I could see that I really knew how to play along again. That mournful shell of unimagination of my younger self had been shed. The other side of being broken open, is getting up, stepping out, and playing again.

 Amen.

Lent 5b, RCL

March 18, 2018

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington 

Other Commandments: Temples, Getting Closer, and What We Can Hear

Cognitive behavioral science tells us that when we are in the heat of the moment when we are busy with adrenaline and excitement, we don't process instructions the way we do when we are at rest. If you see a person is running where they shouldn't be running, and you yell ‘don't run’, what our minds hear is RUN! We can't process the don't part of the instruction in that moment. In today's lesson from Exodus we are invited into a framework for an undiminished human community, or as it is more commonly known, the Ten Commandments. The people of Israel have come out of Egypt, out of slavery, and through the waters in the life-defining Exodus event. They are now in the desert, A people on a nomadic journey of many years trying to figure out who they are, and how to live together and survive. This set of commands is intended to shape our life together. Shape it into something that looks like the compassionate God who delivered us.

These commands set the framework for a bold attempt to locate the best ways to live around our fidelity to God and God's priorities. Even though the wilderness setting is anxious, This revelation doesn't seem to come from a place of fear and hurt. If anything it's trying to reduce the systems of adversity and alienation. Most of the Commandments are phrased from that do not stance, and we teach them over and over from the place of stillness because it would be hard to hear in the context of crisis. And we teach many of them from negation ‘you will not’ and ‘do not’ because there are times when saying ‘do not run onto the field’ is much clearer than the verbal gymnastics of ‘help us maintain the integrity of the game and keep all guests and players and staff safe by staying inside the guest seating area.’ However, I want to look more closely at two positively phrased Commandments: Sabbath and Elders.

In this day and age with all of our expected productivity and demands for perfection, Sabbath may be the most unfollowed commandment. The sabbath God invites us isn’t just for the elites, it is for all. It is a day of leveling the playing field. The servants have to rest. The women who do most of the household chores have to rest. For a people who had been slaves in Egypt and will later find themselves in Exile and trampled under the foot of Empire again and again, for any vulnerable people, the guarantee of rest is liberating. Sabbath is about healing and freedom and interrupting the systems that demand go go go. God calls us back to Sabbath, to honoring each other and the real weight of the gift that God believes we are.

Then we are directed to honor our elders. It says parents, but let us choose to expand its neighborhood just a bit. This word to honor in the Hebrew it means to give weight to, it is a word that implies heaviness. Honor does not demand that we obey blindly. To honor is to treat the wisdom of those who have lived before us and longer than us with hefty seriousness. I do wonder however if this one needs a footnote. Perhaps that quote frequently attributed to Chief Seattle: remember that we are borrowing our today from our children's future. In a recent interview sociologist, Brene Brown said: People are hard to disregard close up; so move in, get curious, get closer. Make connections, try to discover how we are enmeshed with each other in ways that are bigger and deeper than any of our ideas or borders are.


Part of the point of these Commandments is setting a space where we walk with God, A framework where God's presence and intention for our life is made evident. And paradoxically one of the primary points that John is trying to share in his gospel lesson today is that Jesus is the framework and shape of God's presence in this life. In the scene today we are at the rebuilt Temple with its holy of holy chamber and porticos and hallways teeming with people. A few years ago I realized how close the measurements of this sanctuary are to the measurements of the Jerusalem Temples. It is easy for us to imagine ourselves in the Temple if you just look around. Imagine the tables set up in the narthex, and sheep and oxen in the atrium. At this moment in the gospels, during the festival of the Passover, imagine it would be as busy as an arena on a game night. Now in this space and in the middle of this busyness, John wants us to see that the uncontainable God who is supposed to be held by this structure, this same God is in the whole life of this man who is here In this Jesus from before the beginning began.

With him we have the concrete presence of the absolute aliveness of God and an authentic, compelling and creative witness to who God is and who God is calling us to be. However, it is our enmeshment with the powers that be and fence builders of the world that are thrown into chaos by Jesus’ very presence. Our response to this truth-telling and brilliant holy life Is panic. The mob response to his closeness and his difference Is to cast him out to try and resolve our shame and dismay and chaos with a scapegoat. Jesus will be found at the center of a terrible game that is a murderous lie. The systems that keep us running, keep us blind and harmful and never able to sit still, these mechanisms are hidden from us because we are knee deep in them. But in Jesus’ death, we can see it. He is the victim who judges all of our unjust systems of grind and push and pull and kill. Jesus will turn the tables over and send the critters out into the streets. Jesus will expose all the little accommodations to the ways of God. All the little ignorances that give the authorities their power. Can we open our hearts and be set free from unquestioning participation in the systems of death?

I found myself wondering this week if the lovely framework of commandments covers all the complexities of contemporary life? In many ways, the whole set is broad enough to include all sorts of complexity that the Ancients could never have imagined. On the other hand, if you look at our history the people of God maybe we could have used a couple more operating instructions. One of the things we struggle with over time is fear of the other, our anxiety about the stranger, the widow, the different person who we continue to exclude and diminish. Maybe we could use the command to not fear the stranger. To see every neighborhood as a temple, every person in every neighborhood as precious and revelatory as any holy mountain could ever be.

The new commandment I'd really like to have is: don't be a jerk (or a troll or a bully). The problem is if you're being a jerk, you're probably caught in adrenaline and anger and loneliness and in that moment like that, we are the child who is running who can't hear the don't part of the command. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s book Why We Can’t Wait he outlined ten duties participants in the Birmingham protests were to abide by. I wonder if they can help us, Help us shape our lives as temples of the presence of God, Help us confront the systems of diminishment that grind and scapegoat every day. These are the duties (slightly interpreted), let us pray them together:

Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus
Remember that we seek Justice and Reconciliation not victory
Walk and talk in the manner of love for God is love
Pray daily to be used by God in order that all might be free
Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all might be free
Observe both friend and foe with the ordinary rules of courtesy
Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world
Refrain from the violence of fist tongue or heart
Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health
Follow the directions of the movement and of the Captain.

In the name of our Lord and Captain, Amen.

Lent 3  B
RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington

Danxiety: Timeliness and Grace in the Delay

Therefore, many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him.  But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

What we heard today in our Gospel reading was around 800 words of an emotionally dense few days in the ministry of Jesus and some of his closest friends.  If I were designing a lectionary I am not sure I would choose this lesson for the time of Lent, placing it here on the last Sunday before Holy Week. It isn’t a resurrection story, even though it can easily seem like one. Especially when paired with the Ezekiel lesson where the Spirit of God is putting flesh on dry bones and raising a whole valley to new life.

The sentence after the end of our Gospel reading today is this: But some of them went to Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. After the 800 or so words of our assigned reading there was a choice not to include 15 more. 15 words whose time is most certainly Lent. I am frustrated by that choice. I feel like the powers who chose the lectionary have wasted our time. I confess that I wrestle with timeliness. I was raised by parents who feel that if you are not very early, you are late.  My rebellion in adulthood was to try to learn how to be exactly on time, which I still don’t accomplish very often.  If I want to be fashionably late to a party,  I have to schedule in that fashionably late time. And I still usually get there earlier.  A Czech priest I knew had a nickname for me that meant ‘windy’. Because I am like the wind,  always rushing.

Untimeliness is a place where I experience dissatisfaction and anxiety and even shame. Nurture or nature?  Both.  I am who I am.   I come to every text with my whole life, we all do. I know I am reading more uneasiness and distress into this gospel than is probably really there. Yet when I imagine myself as Martha or Mary or one of their family and friends or neighbors...the people who loved Jesus and who have sacrificed and given much for his mission, I am bothered. I know Bethany is a dangerous place for him, Jesus was nearly stoned there.I know the cruel powers that he frightens are lurking. But if I knew Jesus delayed, when this was a life and death moment, and he seemed to pause intentionally?

If those moments where you are irritable because you are hungry is called hangry, what do we call those moments where you are irritated because of delay?  danxious?

Some commentators fret that Martha’s statement, Lord if you had been here...  isn't showing enough respect and is perhaps, whiney.  Others say it is a very plausible interaction between family and friends. But, sometimes I don’t feel like she is nearly mad enough. Yet it is exactly that emotion that forces me to ask what do I believe about time and grace.  What do I believe about God’s power over things that to you and me seem late or slow or dead?  It forces me into the question of how I can be less than gracious when I measure Jesus by blocks on a calendar.

Our text today is in the heart of John’s gospel the very center of it is the foot washing and dinner that comes on Maundy Thursday,  which is followed by the betrayal and cross and the outrageous shock of Easter.  Words on a page the binding of papers in a book lead us into an assumption that one thing comes after the other, and the end is the most important part. Yet here in the gospel, the center of the story radiates meaning in all directions. Jesus has said ‘ I am the good shepherd.’   Today he says,‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Strong echoes of the name God gives of himself when Moses asks.  I am who I am, or perhaps it should be translated I will be who I will be.  God is unbound by all the ways and means we crush each other with our definitions of alive and dead, black and white, on time and late.

My reading my frustrations about timeliness into the text is my issue, not God’s, except that God loves me, loves us, all the way through it, even when my doubt is dead wrong. God comes to us, holds us in the pauses and gaps, steadies me in my danxious moments that cause me to rush and push. When I pile all my calendaring into this gospel lesson I don’t see that everything else is taken care of over those four days when Lazarus is in his tomb.  People are fed and sheltered.  

Community gathers and attends to its duties.  Everything was fine, not perfect or comic, but more than good enough.

A thin Christian practice believes that God is a genie, that Jesus is manipulatable by human timelines. A thin practice is one governed by being easily anxious and hoping for a shiny road and simple answers.  The Jesus I know and follow isn’t thin.  The thick texture of holiness he invites us into has curves I cannot understand and a pace that is not ours.  Gods Spirit fill's those moments that feel like a delay with sustaining dense muscular grace, even in the dark valley that lay ahead in Holy Week.

We may not want any difficult three or four days ever. And when they surely arrive, we may want them to be done as soon as possible. But God is with us and for us in this, densely holding us beyond all our concepts of time and space. I don't know what time looks like to God. I imagine it like the cosmos itself or sci fi movie versions of interwoven dimensions going in every direction. I do trust that God’s time doesn't go left from right, it doesn't match with my to do lists nor fit in the grids on my devices, and will not be rushed by my coffee fueled pace.

The center of Jesus’ being is the same as God’s being, that is the good news of this day and all time. This Trinitarian center is the time and home of our true dimension. Sometimes I confine myself, and sometimes I try to confine God on the wrong page. Jesus challenges my issues around rushing and timeliness that only seem to make me feel satisfied, but ultimately leave us less at peace, needlessly exhausted, and further from the God who calls himself ‘I am who I am’. My work in Lent every year is to move from these false calendars to the true dimension of time and space where Jesus holds, guides, and forgives me, especially the rushing judgy danxious with him parts. I am the resurrection, and the life, he says.

Therefore, many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

Lent 5 A RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington, USA

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Bertie Berenger. AKA the man Born Blind

He needs a name.  This man born blind, he needs a name. There are plenty of people in the Gospels with no name and plenty of women with the same name.  Given the commonness of the name Jesus in that era, we should give thanks that the text isn’t full of Jesus’.  So many of the recipients of wonders are named by their imperfections: the paralytic man, the hemorrhaging woman. Their namelessness makes them more universal, but less three dimensional. Our man born blind, I want him to have a name.

I want to give him a B name, his name as we know it is the man born blind. Maybe Bennett, which means blessed.  Or Bohdi which means awakened.  Berenger means brave as a bear, and that certainly suits him.  Bertie is the name of one of my favorite fictional characters, and it means wise and graceful. Bertie Berenger.  Wise, Graceful, and Brave like a Bear.

Bertie is said to be a man, so by cultural standards of the time, he is at least 13. It is hard for me to imagine a person born blind who hasn’t been educated and accommodated.  Imagine all the people you know, with all their inborn imperfections, imagine their gifts tossed aside.  In some ancient and modern cultures, illness is a mark of sinfulness.  A system where shame is used to control who has power and who does not.  Bertie would have been automatically unclean from birth, never formally taught, not welcome in synagogue or temple.  He is clearly smart because while he may not have sight he has big ears to hear.  On the outskirts all his life, he has learned enough to rebut and challenge the authorities after his awakening.  It is amazing what the people we never notice know about us.

Maybe he had heard about this Jesus of Nazareth.  The wonders he had done and the welcome that he taught and practiced. This Jesus who every time he shows up at the Temple there is some type of hub bub.  We don’t know why Bertie begs outside the Temple, maybe he was hopeful, maybe he was curious.  Maybe that was the spot where the charity was better. Even with the shaming his birth creates, Bertie Berenger’s family is still in the picture.  There his parents are, passing the buck, willing to be silenced,  saying ‘go ask him’.  Bertie was known to be theirs and I imagine he still lives with them.

One of the characteristics of ancient Judaism that stands out in the simmering cultural soup of the Roman Empire was its celebration of life. We tell of our origins with the Lord chanting ‘it is good’, it is good.  With God breathing the spirit into dark earth and bringing life to life.  We hear of how we are to be fruitful and how our top priority is to care for the least.  Most other realms of the Empire had a different take. A family was a burden and children were necessary but considered germ ridden vermin.  An imperfect child, any disability, such as being born blind was a waste of time and effort.  Bertie, grown and blind and still a part of his family, would have been radically unusual in the rest of the Hellenistic world.  

It is a sabbath day when we meet Jesus today, and he had just left the Temple under threats of violence. Did he see Bertie, walk up to him, did he whisper hello, my name is Jesus, I have come to set God’s people free.  May I help you see?  He goes to this man directly in front of the temple with authorities and Pharisees right there.  Like stealing a cookie in front of your parent. Not only does Jesus work a wonder, he also makes clay.  Clay that recalls the primordial making of God, clay that fractures boundaries because making is one of the categories of things not done on the sabbath. The bold challenge to the authorities is unmistakeable.Two flimsy walls were broken and a man is healed like nothing anyone had ever seen and the powers that be are fraught.

Bertie's witness progresses steadily through the story, living a metaphor where enlightenment is about more than what is seen or unseen, it is going from the burdens of darkness to recognizing and praising and joining the saving works of God in Jesus.  This highlights a very different understanding of how Jesus saves than what we sometimes see. In John’s gospel rescue from sin and brokenness is the fact of Jesus life, even more so than his tragic death. God’s light and word were born in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus’ presence was full of God’s grace and truth and when we let our life be defined by this light,  we are brought out of the dark and the chaos. Bertie’s words clearly outline this central idea to his interrogators.  He says, from the beginning of time there has never been anything like this - THIS IS IT!  Jesus is a creation restart.  When we are oriented to the Son, we see. When we turn toward any other vision of reality, we are in the dark.

We must be careful with passages such as these where the Pharisees can be paper bag villains and the Jewish authorities more defined by their tradition than their role. By the time the author of John is writing there is a charged and fraught atmosphere amongst family and friends who are all Jewish.After the temple was destroyed in 70 there was drastic reshuffling that after a few hundred years defines the Judaisms we know today.At the time there were multiple sects and streams and groups, including the Christ followers.  The differences are not unlike some of the struggles amongst we who share the title Christian today. Important and consequential disagreements about who we are to be and how we are saved. This is true with our Anglican siblings, and it is true with our ecumenical friends and most obviously our fundamentalist cousins.  You may be familiar with authors Rachel Held Evans and Brian McLaren. They are both raised in more evangelical and fundamentalist traditions, and they are both people who over time became more ‘progressive’ Christians.  Two people who do bring light and voice to a compassionate faith in Jesus that many very much need to hear.  And they are two people who are responded to with volumes of hateful vitriol by folks some of whom are from their root communities, who are challenged by their testimony.  You don’t have to know those authors to know of an example, there are plenty of other examples of folks who play on the same team not getting along.  

However, the plain text reading of passages such as this where the ‘Jews’ are the terrible other have caused millennia of sin and massacre, and in the name of Jesus we cannot fall victim to it again. This Anglican and Episcopal tradition rarely makes straightforward directives,  but here we do.  In our interfaith relationships, especially with other ‘people of the book’ such as Jews and Muslims, any form of anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism is turning away from the Triune God and embracing the darkness. In today's gospel sin isn’t so much about things done and left undone, but about something broader and more relational.Here sin is the un-response to Jesus, it is the turning away, the refusal to hear, the blindness of not trusting the endlessness of the peaceful welcome of the Holy Lord , Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Bertie Berenger, the man born blind,  is one of my absolute favorite people of the New Testament.It really goes back to those two lines, those brave and wise and somewhat smart-aleky lines: You keep asking questions, do you want to be his disciples? Never from the beginning has there been anything like this, and your don’t know who he is? Are you kidding me??  I really like Bertie, I identify with Bertie when he says these things. However, I also connect with more of this story.  I was raised in the church, in the Episcopal church, required every Sunday unless I was ill. But I was blind to it.  I didn’t dislike it, it just didn’t connect. 

This episode of the man born blind is a story of conversion, and it has all the parts of mine. Acknowledging a moment of grace, asking questions to find out more, going from saying I don’t know who Jesus is but I am drawn to him, to proclaiming he is our friend and shepherd and savior.  I have been every character in this gospel text today: the religious authority deciding what is in and what is out, the caregiver replying to a difficult moment with I don’t know, when I did, the disciples asking provocative questions, and perhaps at my best moments the healing light of Christ.  Who have you been?  Over and over again, I visit these personas, twisting into the dark and being loved back into the light. Turning, turning till we come round right.

Bertie Berenger.  Where he is, we are to be also.  We are to be with him in his trust, in his response of commitment to the way of Christ.  We are to be with him in his response to the forces of darkness and silencing. The man born blind. Bertie Berenger.  Wise and graceful. Brave as a bear.  His smart response sees us clearly. Do you want to become Jesus’ disciples too?

Will you pray with me.. 

You are the God who unleashes well-being 
You are the Savior who lights the Way. 
May we see; 
may we love; 
may we follow. 
Amen.

Lent 4 A RCL 
March 26, 2017
St. Paul's Walla Walla

Prayer expanded from Walter Bruggemann Lent Book.

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Slaying Inner Devils: Promise, Problem, Talking Snakes and the One Girl Who Might Help

Many years ago, it was the first Sunday of Lent in Children’s chapel.  I had not gotten two sentences into the gospel story before I was interrupted.  Miss Jane.  She said it with all the scandal a five-year-old can muster. Miss Jane. We don't say that word here. They say that word at my grandma’s church. They say that word at grandma’s church a lot.  But we don’t say that word here at OUR church. Maybe you can guess which word she was referring to. There it is today in the Gospel, and the litany and the collect.  He who apparently we don’t name, face to face with Jesus.

The young girl was right. I want to skip over it.  Speak of accusers, the dark side of the force. Why does my heart race when I try to say those phonemes in a serious manner? Why is there this twinge of fear that I am summoning Beetlejuice or Rumplestiltskin.  The feeling that if I say it, it will know where I am. Like Voldemort.   Monsters of greediness are stealing God’s gift of satisfaction, giants are stacking up bones of cynicism in gruesome walls, beasts of anti neighbor-li-ness they are in front of us, growling at us, threatening us on the journey back to God’s garden.  Evilness of every variety is telling us who to despise and where to hurl the blame.  Casting a spell of weakness in our hearts and assaulting our ears with absurdity. I know that evil is real and it seems to loom big and dark and frustrated all around us.  Yet she was right. I don’t say those names.

 

In the original Hebrew, satan, is a verb which evolves into a noun, a name. The Hebrew verb means to “obstruct or oppose.” In the era when Jesus lived there were folktales, not Scripture mind you, fantasy stories about angelic beings in the heavenly courts and the one who challenges God's sovereignty. This challenger is the Satan, the devil, The Oppose-r.   

In our lesson today Jesus goes into the wilderness to fast after his baptism and at the end of the 40 days is greeted by this Tempter, this devil.  Their debate looks very much like ancient rabbinical academic duels, where instead of wands or swords the weapon is scripture.  This devil dares Jesus to accept the way things work in this world, you are here man, go ahead, give into the seduction, embrace the circus, the sideshow, the easy way out.  Come on Jesus, everybody does it.  The Tempter, whatever he looked like, whatever form he took, he stands before Jesus and proposes to the incarnate Son of God that now is all there is, so take care of yourself, all by yourself.  Me me me is the tune of the world Jesus.  God’s holy commands are to much, to judgy, to heavy.  

Which really is the same brokenness that sprouts in the Garden of Eden. The fracture wasn’t birds and the bees or the advent of death. This gorgeous and monstrously misused text doesn’t say any of those things. What it does explore is how we are the glory of creation, and tragically, also the problem of creation. This story asks everyday questions, such as why are we troubled and shameful and anxious? And the answer is because we do not hear God’s shepherding as good news.

The serpent isn’t some alien demoness come to destroy paradise. The serpent COULD BE the monster inside of us, the part that wants things easy, undemanding and self-serving.  Some of you might know that one of my favorite shows ever is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  A sometimes campy and absolutely theological drama about one teenage girl with mighty superpowers called to fight demons and hold back the gates of hell while getting on with school and life.  It has one core idea that might help us find our way into the Good News of our texts today.

The entire premise of the show is to take the notion of ‘battling our demons’ in a literal way. The show pulls the truth out of the metaphor and gives it muscle, sight and speech and fur and teeth.  What if we tell a story where we take our inner wrestling with brokenness and temptation and we put it outside where we can work together to slay it?  A talking snake is a pretty good sign that this story isn’t something we should be foolish enough to take literally, but smart enough to take seriously.

What if the serpent is an outer expression of the inner argument between right and wrong, between trust and independence?  What if the snake is our craftiness given flesh and eyes and teeth? 
What if this devil is Jesus’ inner argument between divine graciousness and human selfishness?
What would your Vindictive demon look like? How about the Apathy monster? Or your Lying beast, what is its shape and patterns?  And critically: what needs to happen to send it back to dust?

This fallen angel, this crafty serpent, these may be creatures you have run into. However, I will share that I have not, and I suspect many of you share that. Who I have met is Jesus, I have found him beside me in the deserts of loneliness I have found him in communities that sustain each other. He is my good shepherd who seeks to lead me away from my wolves of disasterizing and perfectionism. He leads us to the strength to heal the unacceptable, the inner demons and the outer terrors. When we turn and follow Jesus’ commands, Good News will emerge before us, behind us, and perhaps surprisingly, within us.

Author and Professor of Religion Stephen Prothero says that every religion says two things.  There is something wrong, and here’s how to fix it. Big categories of religion - like Islam or Jainism - they do that, and so do traditions like Methodist or Orthodoxy, and so do streams of theology like Calvinist or Womanist. That little girl, her grandma's church, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they might say that the world is broken by utter depravity and is healed by solitary commitment to Jesus.  And it seems to bring healing and solace for many people.  Yet it isn’t the way we would say it, or why Jesus matters to me.  When I say we I mean the Episcopal Church and the many of the ecumenical traditions we share so much with.  Here is what I do say. The world was made good and beloved and holy. And the world is fractured by our not trusting God or each other and turning away from both.  This is healed by reversing that.  We fix it by hearing the call of Christ to follow him, to live together what he taught and following him in how he leads us now.  

We are both the promise and the problem of Creation. We are broken in sin by the things that could make us incredible, but instead we choose the disturbing and mixed up mass of other powers instead.  Eden and our loss of it isn’t about a place a long long time ago.  It is about the current state of our lives and our world, and it is about daring to trust that God can make us whole within ourselves and in every neighborhood.  Maybe we are still in the Garden, but the monsters and demons and devils that occupy us won’t let us experience it.

The summons of Lent could be a question.  How will we confront our horrible and crafty demons? How will they be lamented and how will they fall?  When we say we trust that God created all that is, when we say that we trust in the love of Christ for all that is, we embrace the promise that our deceptions and exclusionary temptations can be slain like monsters in a garden or a graveyard.  When we say we believe in God the Father almighty, we are standing in a promise, upheld by the Holy one against the forces of demons and devils and  Satan and darkness. Can stand up, will stand up.  God calls us to be with the One, as one. In Eden, again.

Will you pray with me by repeating after me.

Gentle us Holy One into an unclenched moment, a letting go of shriveling anxieties. That surrounded by the garden, and following Christ’s call, we may be found by wholeness,  and filled with the grace that is you.  Amen.

Lent 1, RCL-A

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

March 5, 2017

And sorry folks, forgot to click 'record'.

And yes, finally, a Buffy sermon on a Sunday morning.

Prayer adapted from Ted Loder.

Boxes and Butterflies

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky.  Boxes on our calendars, boxes in our attics. We even put critters in boxes: ant farms, fish tanks, and butterfly houses.  These booths for living critters allow us to keep them in one place, to hold a precious un-holdable,  to glimpse the wonder of life itself. 

I think this gospel lesson is sort of funny. I know, I know, it is a big deal. However you might admit it is kind of weird. ,Then it also has the comedic relief of the sleepy disciples coming up with one more bad idea.  However, the part that is really amusing, is in the way that I can see myself reflected in the story.  Oooooh, precious.  Look it is Moses, the premium prophet is standing here, let’s put him in a booth!  And look, Elijah, second only to Moses, is this an all-star game?  We cannot let him fly away again, so yes,  so let’s put him in a box too!  And Jesus, the anointed, the Christ, look at him…so he looks different.   Can we make a little box for him too?  Perhaps with a light blocking curtain?  Little boxes on a hillside, it is easy to see this become a strange attraction, a mini Stonehenge, a living hall of fame.  Let’s take the radical call of God for us   to liberate all people, and let’s tuck it away where we can find it again when we want to.  Prophetic demands for justice, managed.  Holy invitations to leave everything and follow, contained.  One of the most amazing things we have ever seen and do not quite understand; well, we understand things in boxes.

Most of us are familiar with the butterfly life cycle.  Caterpillar crawling around in the dirt on all those legs, eating and eating and eating leaves.  Then a cocoon for a while, and then voila..beautiful butterfly.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar made it all look quite cute and mundane.  Here is the thing.  That cocoon, it doesn’t form around the caterpillar skin.  Nope.  The caterpillar skin rips open with the cocoon material INSIDE!!!  If I were a caterpillar, and my little caterpillar brain could wrap its head around the changes that lay ahead, I would be beyond scared.  I might eat excessively to numb the fear.  I might try to google DIY ways to stay young forever.  I like my caterpillar legs and caterpillar stripes, and, well, no thank you.  I do not want to experience such painful changes.  I will stay here, and nibble on leaves until I get nibbled on myself!

Lent begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt and angry.  

We are about to get broken open, not once, but twice.  Our veil of a caterpillar life will be torn in two, and then after a time,   that precious shell, that will break too.  There is no change without letting go, without naming our discomfort and sorrow, without scrubbing away our dragon skins.  Jesus will suffer, he will die by our terribleness, but that is not the end of the story.  The future that our caterpillar brains cannot imagine, is that wings of love, justice and freedom are already inside of us.  No matter how many ways we try to box God in, love, forgiveness and liberation can always break through.

The venerable Rowan Williams offers us this,

“So the Holy Spirit, who always brings Jesus alive in our midst, is very specially at work in the Eucharist, making it a means of spiritual transformation. Because of this we go from the table to the work of transfiguring the world in God’s power: to seeing the world in a new light, to seeing human beings with new eyes, and to working as best we can to bring God’s purpose nearer to fruition in the world.”  (Being Christian, Eerdmanns)

Perhaps the glow of Christ at the transfiguration is us. Perhaps on that day the disciples saw the world in a new light and they saw a world of disciples reflected in him.  We with our new eyes, living in a fresh light, the world of faithful people turned to Jesus. Following his call to be love, to do justice, to choose wings over boxes.  Perhaps in Jesus that day, they saw the eternal Alleluia,  the brilliance of love, the hope of the saints, and the tears of the martyrs.  Streaming through the past and the present and the future, reflecting back from him.  Or maybe, shining through this one person, this light, this friend, this Holy One who call’s you his beloved.  

Alleluia is our destiny, the resurrection of Easter will be our butterfly wings.  We are called into a brave participation in Jesus’s life, a willingness to risk ourselves beside him in this messy broken world.  To find that brilliant alleluia, we have to practice a stout vulnerability, the kind that leaves the old skin and little legs in the dust.  To live into Alleluia, we will have to be astounded by the breadth and depth of honesty we are capable of.  Ash Wednesday is directly ahead of us.  We are invited to face courageously the shedding of our old selves, to be still , yet not unchanging and not in a box.  Instead a cocoon of prayer, examination and reformation.  Yet..the thing our little caterpillar brains cannot conceive of…we are going to be butterflies!  We can emerge with wings!  Wings!  Can your caterpillar brain even imagine them?  What do your wings look like?  Christ invites us to rise, has made us to soar.  Alleluia.  Thanks Be to God for the grace of wings for which we can hardly ask or imagine.  

Alleluia. Alleluia, Alleluia. Amen.

Last After Epiphany, RCL C

February 7, 2016

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Silence and the Empty Space Beyond the Text

Passover was celebrated each year of Jesus’ life.  Yet, we know very little about what that looked like then.  There are references but few descriptions until more than 100 years after Jesus death.  In our text there is an unwritten assumption that you know what this Passover meal involves and what it means.  The telling of the Passion is a dialog with realities and remembrances about which the text is silent.  The ability of printed words to convey meaning is amazing and powerful.  However, text is limited by its own lines and curves.  It cannot convey everything.  There are infinite lives that we cannot see all around the dark lines of text.  Look at those pages.  Dark text on an infinite field of silent space.

Our four gospel accounts all place Jesus’ death in the vicinity of the Passover festival, even if they do not agree on how or when or why.  The memory and theology of the Passover is deep and personal and irremovable from the Passion narratives. It so imbedded that it is very much left unsaid.  To know the salvation of this devastating week, we have to enter the silent spaces between the words.  We have to enter the thousands of years of Exodus and Exile memories, to stand in the infinite soundless space that is a challenging re-membering of every Passover.

Biblical scholar Raymond Brown reminds us that,  ‘were scholars agreed on a portrait of the 'historical Jesus,' it would not cover one hundredth of the actual Jesus.’  If there was agreement on what happened that wretched week, it would not cover one fraction of the experience abandonment, or of the cruel agony of crucifixion.  The gospels do not clarify in words on a page how or why the death of Jesus is salvation.  They only insist that it is.  

The practices of Holy Week can only bring us into a fraction of the silent memories of that week that will live forever.  We are called to follow Jesus the Christ, We are summoned by him to enter the dark spaces where devastation and hatred laugh and mock.  We are called to follow him in this way of the cross and into a new kind of Passover.

When you eat this bitter herb, you become one with the people who cry under tyranny.  When you eat this bread, you become one with the people who flee under the cover of a terrible night.  You drink this cup and you become one with God, it is a cup of a new covenant that rises from the depths of God’s love and sacrifice.  

This Holy Week of liturgical truth-telling is a call to grasp the unfinished and the conditional experience of emptiness that lies between each line of these written words.  It is unfinished and conditional because we can never actually be in the story, and yet at the same time all these words and actions and failures are also our own story of brokenness.  It is unfinished and conditional because in all its terror,  it is told through Easter eyes.

We read from that space beyond the text, from what looks like white but is actually a brilliant spectrum of color.  This is where the empty tomb shines on his Passion.  For when we rise and live in union with Christ that is where we can begin to understand the incomprehensible silence of the words: that it was necessary.  

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Palm & Passion Sunday 2015

The 'children's sermon' portion included a brief explanation of the Passover tradition, the searching for the hidden matza and the sampling of matza and parsley.  

Recording from the 8am service.