Epistles for a Friend: Episcopal Encounter with 'Other Christians'

Dear Daisy,

I have been thinking about your message, about how you are spending the summer with people you adore and respect, and who clearly love you, yet they sometimes make you wonder if you believe in any proper churchy ideas.  I have a sermon to write, and so I need to download a few thoughts and guesses for you so that I can focus and not get these two topics all mixed up.  So I am going to make a few guesses and share a few points. After I share a little ditty about tension. Which has a few words that are not camp appropriate. It is actually a mashup of two songs, but I love this guy, so here it goes.

I don’t recall I ever told you about my olden days, you know the ones in the 80's. For all except the end of my high school experience, I didn’t believe I believed in God at all.  The God thing didn't seem to be rational and I liked logical things.  I would have told you that I paid as little attention as I could to church or Sunday school until I got out of going (and worked in the nursery) at age 12.  

In the many years since I have discovered that I learned a whole lot more than I realized while I was ‘not paying attention’.  My antagonistic agnosticism, remember that I lived in South Texas for the end of high school, began to slowly dissolve through experiences that I could name, even then, as Grace.

Still, when I was your age I would have told you I was Episcopalian, but I didn’t know enough about Jesus to tell you whether or not I believed that he was anything more than an ancient teacher. I would have unlikely to have checked a box that said 'Christian'. That young person still hangs around in my self-perception, when I wonder what the heck I am doing pastoring people in their faith.  I admit that I still wonder regularly if I haven’t lost my mind, if I made up the holy moments I experienced, and I wonder if I trust in a fantasy novel. Yet I also know that such wondering keeps me searching (and healthy).

The most difficult tensions in religions are not between different ones, but within themselves.  I don’t have any investment in Hindu theological debates, however I care a whole lot about Christians who claim that Jesus is in favor of oppression or sexism or hatred.  You have stepped into this high tension place, not the oppression place but the tension of living together as 'one church'.  

The Episcopal tradition you were raised in has some rather different assumptions, foundations, and understandings of the who what and why of Jesus than your hosts this summer. My guess is that you are encountering people who talk God, Jesus, Spirit in ways that are quite dissimilar from the way you might use such names.  And I am confident that in a worship setting this distance wasn’t as evident.  I have known plenty of folks who love our liturgy, but they don’t know they have any holy imperative to take responsibility for their neighbors (which we teach and preach consistently).

Maybe you will find something you have been missing with the new friends you are spending your summer with.  Or maybe it is going to be like the hymn whose tune you love but whose words make you ill.  There is a gracious space of holy self-giving in that choice. I already recommended the book 'Searching for Sunday', and I want to suggest that again, and add a book that DOES NOT have an audio version, yet is quite elegant to read and look at, 'Tokens of Trust'.

Keep wrestling and thinking and conversing, and singing.  There is deep growth to be found in the act of performing the faith while asking big questions. I am proud that you can name that you are in a place of tension, and that you have asked for help rather than stewing in your discomfort. Rather like a more advanced yoga pose, you have to breathe into it, set your intention and listen. If you fall over, so be it. You can always get up again.

Peace and Camp Appropriate Hugs!
Jane

These two epistles are rooted in actual replies to an actual young friend who found herself far from her faith home. Names have been changed to honor the beloved and the situation has been cloaked for the same reason. Still, while making myself sometimes feel like Paul writing to a distressed congregation, maybe it will do you some good too.

Listening to the Real: Snuffy, Teresa and Dietrich Bonhoeffer Walk Into a Neighborhood

When I was a child, Snuffleupagus was imaginary, or at least he seemed to be.  Like a gigantic furry ant-eater, or like a slender mammoth without tusks.  Snuffy, as he is sometimes called, was frequently seen on Sesame Street, however, only known by the viewers and Big Bird.  For 15 years he was spoken of, but not touched Snuffy was named, but not heard.  Part of his story was that he was crippled by shyness.  He was bound by anxiety and after so much time, he became more and more distressed by the idea of connecting with the neighborhood.  Snuffy’s story also seemed to be a 15-year metaphor for the unnoticed elephant in the room.  

Interviews with writers and actors years later show a muddled memory about Snuffy’s existential crisis.  Writers claim he wasn’t supposed to be imaginary, and the actors share that they absolutely played their role from the stance of believing this creature to be the make-believe of Big Birds joyful heart.  Big Bird is an iconic and an ironic Muppet, a giant who is a child.  His heart and mind are about 6 years old, even though his stature is about 8 feet tall. Imaginary friends are normal for a young person, and so the ambiguity around Snuffleupagus had natural causes.

Yet over time, the writers and producers became concerned.  Troubled about the example they were setting for real children, real people daring to speak of an experience and neighbors not believing them.  Learning to listen, learning to hear real stories is as crucial to human development as knowing that cookie starts with C.  So, after 15 years of storytelling confinement,  the process was begun to bring Snuffleupagus into relationship with the whole neighborhood.  In the book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us of the following,

            Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening

            has been committed to them by God who is the great listener

            and whose work they should share.

            We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

Perhaps you are startled by Jesus’ healing of the woman who had been bound by her illness.  She really needs a name.  Let’s call her Zoe.  Zoe steps out of her captivity, walks out into a difficult world on a Sabbath day, and seeks after Jesus. Amazing how simply seeking Jesus’ hearing, raises Zoe to strength.  The neighborhood,  however, is outraged.  Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and that is not a resting thing to do.  This episode happens repeatedly in the Gospels.  Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath and the system freaks out.  Sometimes we are Zoe, sometimes we are the folks who are focused on the wrong syllable.  To which Jesus’ whole ministry lends us an ear and asks, Why are you living this way?  You know what matters: Come….Seek, Serve, Strive, Share.  Listening, being real, is what God asks.  Sesame Street simple and as hard as life together gets.

During my babysitting years, when they made Snuffy real,  I was aghast.  I liked the idea of that imaginary friend. Yet as an adult, I understand moving him from an unheard story to a known one.  Neighborhoods with stories that they agree not to tell or not to hear are systems that fail to thrive.  Re-watching the Snuffy scenes this week I was once again disappointed.  But this time, my feelings of dismay come from hearing how the people and Muppets in the neighborhood did more than just not listen to Big Bird over the years.  They ridiculed and shamed him so much that it had me uttering ‘stop it’ at the screen.  No wonder Snuffy stayed hidden, unheard and unseen.  

Maybe this is part of what our gospel neighbor Zoe faced.  Not only an ailment, but a system so caught in their own noise that her home of constant denial was easier.  I am in awe of her Courage.  It took a wellspring of courage to bring her whole story to Jesus.

After all those years of un-knownness, there stood before them a kind shy neighbor.  The whole cast of the Sesame Street neighborhood stands there, a camera panning over jaws wide open.  One by one they walk up to Snuffy.  They touch his furry snout, and they finally hear Big Bird.  Dan Rather, CBS anchor, once asked Mother Teresa what she said during her prayers.   She answered, "I listen."   So Dan returned a new question and asked, "Well then, what does God say?"  Mother Teresa smiled with gladness and replied, "He listens."  

Listening is transforming. We who follow Jesus are called to listen with the ears of God that we may live the Word of God.  Being committed to Christ and his church  is not being devoted to sunny or saccharine.  It is about being real.  Sunny days, rainy days, all the days.  Jesus beside us, before us, behind us, with us in holy listening to the whole story of the neighborhood. 

Here at St. Paul’s we have been circling just outside the process of what comes next for most of the last year.  And today, Andrew will invite this community to enter the next stage of the Interim lifecycle.  Standing up straight.  Naming and listening, being real. 

As we pray, Be Still and Know that I am God.

Amen.

Proper 16c RCL

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

August 20/21, 2016

If you are a friend of St. Paul's and were not able to gather this weekend we hope you will check in with us so that you may offer your part to the project began by Andrew this week.

A link if the WIDGET does not play on your browser.

Unexpected Treasures: Hey You Guys!

When I lived elsewhere, there was this guy.  He was a friend of a friend and I could not stand him.  We had spent enough time around each other that I believed that we had nothing in common.  His name had syllables that echoed a name for the Devil, and I confess that I referred to him that way more than once.  However, for today I will call him, Mouth.  I disliked Mouth so much that on a World Cup afternoon, when the café I was at was packed to the brim, when I had a seat right in front of the screen, noticing Mouth coming in the door, I put my head down, and wished that he would not notice me.  I figuratively walked to the other side of the road.

We spent the week diving into the Good Samaritan who is the outcast, the unwelcome stranger who is the most unlikely hero, the unexpected bearer of grace who carries a beaten man to safety.  We explored how God has already gifted us with everything we need for the rescue of the whole creation, it is already here, often in unexpected people like us, and waiting to be revealed and put to good use.  We also strangely enough, spent the week following the Goonies.  A group of outcast teens who are about to lose their homes.  They were looking for rescue, they were hoping to save their neighborhood.  And we met Sloth, a beaten and deformed and uncared for man who calls out to them, an unlikely superperson.  Hey you guys!

So these Goonies teens, they followed a whispered rumor of treasures underground.  Those Goonies were just kids, however they dared greatly and entered into the adventure of hope. They went through dark tunnels,  full of booby traps and dangers.  They find their strength in each other, they find that there is something that matters more than their pain.  The Goonie journey is a metaphor of bold trust, transformation of hearts, and a metaphor for the treasures that await when we step out with the trust of a child.  It is amazing what big whole hearted love can do.  It is stunning what daring to welcome a stranger can do.  Loving the hard to love neighbor is a treasure that can heal, loving the scary creature is a gift that can feed, loving the outcast is a holy blessing. 

The treasure that waits right underneath our feet is the good news that Christ is a gift for us.  Jesus wants us to shout love and whisper kindness and live his call to love the whole neighborhood.  Jesus invites us to embrace his whole life in the center of our being.  He wants for us to discover the gifts of love that are already present, precious jewels in us and all around us, priceless good news which can shine bright enough to transform all the dark tunnels we find ourselves in.  These Goonie friends rescued one another, liberated a broken stranger, and in so doing rescued their neighborhood.  Jesus calls to us in his parable, calls to Go and Do Likewise.  Go Love God with all we have.  Go Love All People as Much As God Loves Us.  Go Rise By Lifting Others.  Go Be a Gift Giver.  Go Pay Attention, because treasures come in the most unexpected ways.  

So my friend of a friend, the one I am calling Mouth, the one I needed lots of help learning to love, one day he surprised me.  We were chatting at one more gathering of mutual friends, and I was hoping for social rescue.  Somehow the topic of the Governor came up.  And he said, ‘I just love that woman’.  I knew enough about Mouth to know that his political opinions didn’t jive with anything she ever did or said.  So my ears perked up and my lips uttered the word ‘Really???’ ‘Yeah’, he said.  ‘I don’t like her policies, but one day last year I decided to pray for her. Everyday. So I do. And man, I gotta tell you, I love that woman.  I don’t like her choices, I ain’t gonna vote for her, but I love that woman.’ So here was this guy, who I derided and avoided the company of, showing me how to truly love the other as Jesus commands us to.  Showing me how to heal.  Unexpected treasures, right in front of me. 

The question posed to Jesus is ‘how do we find union with God, how do we make God’s reign real on earth and in our lives?’  His answer is by loving God with all your heart, and loving all your neighbors as much as God loves you.  All of them.  Sometimes our rescue comes in unexpected treasures and unfriendly faces.  Hey You Guys…Go! Love, Serve, Heal, Pray… and Wake the World!

Camp Cross Closing Eucharist

August 6, 2016

Unmentionable Walls: Permission to Speak Hard Truths

Cindy’s religious childhood was first Mormon, and then evangelical for a while.  Her memories seemed to be a mash-up of prayer meetings and Sunday school flannel boards and red punch. Nice people, nothing shocking, nothing very exciting either.  Over time she fell away.  Believing, but not belonging; curious but living beyond any organized spiritual practice.  She grew up, and married, had children, divorced, remarried, and still she was a n-o-n-e.

You may have heard the advice that there are two things you do not discuss in polite company. Religion and politics.  Cindy was my hairstylist and she owned the salon.  This advice was important to her livelihood.  As we got to know each other, she began to murmur simple religious questions beyond the full roar of many hair dryers.  Eventually, she began scheduling my appointments after hours, when she could ask all the politely undesirable religious questions she wanted.  A short while later her husband would join us too, and when my regular appointments were not enough, She would call and say, ‘I need to practice prom up do’s’, when are you available?  Cindy needed a way and a place to have the conversations she felt were unmentionable during business hours.

Our lessons today are highlighted with a variety of undesirable subjects and polite company unmentionables.  Scanning the lessons on Monday, I asked across the office: who our lectors are this week?  I was uncomfortable with the idea of having these lessons read by a child. Yet right there in the Colossians reading is the transformation of that gut reaction.  The fullness of God was pleased to dwell and live and be fully human in Jesus.  A human who burped and had fungus between his toes, and did all sorts of unmentionable and very human things.  Again and again in Christian history we have forgotten this part,  we clean Jesus up, think his space cannot bear messier words, and we settle for a philosophy  that offers a precious plastic Jesus who has no scriptural heart.

Colossians is asking the Christology question, and the Christology question is why Jesus matters. For me the answer is that, Jesus continues to hold my curiosity and love because he is God who said bad words and sneezed up flemm and ate things that gave him heartburn, and whose disappointments kept him up at night, just like you and me.  I love this God, this God in Jesus who is foolishly human.  All of which means that all the unmentionables of our lives are capable of bearing the divine.  All these lost and defeated and demeaning moments, are beloved by God.

The prophet Hosea is telling a hard story about how precious we are to God,  it is an extended metaphor which rightly accuses us of being broken, cruel, wanton and sold out.  It says something like, I set you down a miracle among miracles and you don’t love yourself like I love you. Hundreds of years later Paul is rebuking another foolishness saying, Jesus became one with us, he wiped the slate clean, and you think you can find eternity through secret paths or magic words or clean diets???  Paul and Hosea, like late night comedians, they grab our attention with cringeworthy metaphors on topics you might rather have left unsaid.

While Cindy and I had our religious salon in the evenings, I served a church where part of my duties were supervising a tutoring ministry.  One day one of the students didn’t show, but her tutor Ella did. Ella asked if I had anything else she could help with, and I did, so she went to work in my office assembling binders or something like that.  At some point, my young friend Darla passed through a doorway of my office. Darla was 13 and active in the choir and youth group,and the most common answer uttered in our time together was you don’t love yourself as much as God loves you.  As was typical in our life together, her conversation wandered from unmentionable question to an undesirable story as salacious as any cringe worthy word in our lessons. This wasn’t a teary confession or a fearful drama,  instead a casual conversation.  Which concluded when Darla cheerily said, ‘I have to get downstairs for choir’ and bounced out the other door.

Now you may remember that the doors were wide open and a stranger, a guest was sitting in my office the whole time Darla was speaking.  I could see and feel that Ella, sitting there with her binders and hole punch, was stunned by what she heard.  I said to her, ‘the rule around here is that they can say anything in my office.’  Ella’s reply was something like this. ‘Oh I’m not offended, that was awesome. That she could be so honest, and you wondering when she would make the better choices, and so nonjudgmentally!  I just never in a million years would have shared those things, said those words, to anyone at my home church.’  Growing up I thought the same sort of boundaries applied. Church was glistening brass and frosted cupcakes where cringeworthy things were left unsaid.  I was mistaken.

This is not a place for unmentionables.  The fully human Jesus is who we bind ourselves to in Baptism and Eucharist. We bury ourselves in the earthy holiness of all of it, Jesus nails himself to our disturbing stories, to our hungers and our plasticity and our ungratefulness.  And his being there with us, is the forgiveness that raises us with him. Maybe we need to be better at telling our whole cringeworthy story, just as it is.  Maybe I need to give you the same permission I give young people, maybe I need to say it out loud.  Anything can be said here, anytime, anyplace.  Maybe the space you need to name and pray through the strange discomfortof fractured dreams is small and personal, like Cindy’s salon.  Or maybe the space you need to speak of sad memories is more open, like Darla,who would breeze through my office and freely speak all sorts of honesty's.

So that rule about my office?  It was more about permission than the office itself.  It looks like we have walls and doors, but truly we do not.  Brokeness is inside and outside and Jesus redeems it all when we name it as our truth.  Church isn’t a building word, it is a relationship word.  So even though you can see the walls and the doors and the locks, in Christ’s church, they are not really there. The rule is that you can say anything here, wherever here may be.

The open doors didn’t change the choices Darla had already made.  It didn’t solve anything in the short term.  It was an ongoing relationship and dialogue.  One of love and honesty, about how she confessed things like this because they didn’t meeGod-given given expectations for herself.  Flannel board and red punch Jesus is too flimsy and sweet to meet the challenges of this day and time.  Our God given expectations take whole hearted courage:  and all of it grows out of our union with him.  Union with a vulnerable, honest, forgiving and storytelling human Lord.   Does your nose run or are you embarrassed by the sound your stomach just made?  Me too.  Do you forget to floss or fail to live up to expectations?  Your neighbor does too.  Does your heart burn or are your hands scarred?  Jesus’s too.   Knock, Open, Ask, Share.  Alleluia.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

July 24, 2016

RCL Proper 12 C

Potatoes are Enough: Arts Camp meets the Good Samaritan

It is a privilege to say that I have had a rock star for a mentor.  Not a musical rock star, but an ecumenical church priest kind of rock star. Jerome Berryman is the name most associated with the Godly Play method, a Montessori-based approach to what we usually call Sunday School.  Perhaps you are familiar with the method.  The core of his gift to the world is that young people learn by playing, and that to invite young people to both know God and about God’s people, we needed to invite children into a setting that is serene and loving, structured and open, and filled with 3-dimensional opportunities to jump into the sacred stories of the Christian traditions.  Jerome first got to know each other over a lunch conversation many years ago.

One of the core values of Godly Play is that the materials offered are all natural materials, that they be of fine quality, perfect and, well, expensive.  I told him how I had been telling all of the parables using his storytelling scripts, yet I had been doing this with a basket full of children’s toys.  The Weeble Wobbles and Little People and Playmobil figurines that inhabit their everyday lives.  At some point in our little dialogue, I said something like, ‘if you really believe in the holiness of these stories, you could tell them with potatoes.’   I still believe that the hope and the invitation of the storyteller, and the life-giving potency of the living word, is more important than the materials.  The word is holy and precious, but so too is the whole creation, so too are all the plastic toys that children imagine with.  We have more than enough materials and hearts to share this good news, we have more than enough without anything being fine or perfect.

Every character in this parable of the Good Samaritan has gifts and talents and treasures.  Gifts that they choose to use, or not use, for healing, for shelter, and for compassion.  There was enough to care, enough to show mercy, from each of the neighbors.  Yet only the despised Samaritan chose to use his gifts, and to use them generously, to rescue an unknown stranger.  A stranger who could be Jesus himself.   

“If there is any ministering to be imitated in the Good Samaritan's example, it is the ministry to Jesus in his passion, as that passion is to be found in the least of his brethren, namely, in the hungry, the thirsty, the outcast, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned in whom he dwells and through whom he invites us to become his neighbors in death and resurrection.”   Robert Farrar Capon

The question of the summer at Camp Cross is: how do we wake the world?  The answer is that we go and do likewise.  We go love, all, all, all.  We go serve, all, all, all.  We seek forgiveness, all the time, and everywhere. We do have enough to wake up, to become the reign of God. 

Making sacred meaning through play doesn’t end in childhood.  We learn to take it inside.  When we are sitting in traffic, and coming up with ideas about how to get out of traffic, we are playing.  We are manipulating what we have to create a new future, in our minds.  So my conversations with Jerome didn’t end with a conversation about potatoes.  He was an important advisor for a paper I wrote about how adult faith formation needs to play, and to play outside of our minds.  That teens and adults need to be invited to use the materials around us to jump into the story, to make it our story in flesh and blood.  This experiment in the first ever Arts Camp is an expression of that proposal.  We have leapt into the parable of the Good Samaritan with our hearts and minds.  We turned it inside out and upside down and let it speak to our lives and our world and the ideas that surround us.  Our campers and volunteers and staff have played with it in amazing new ways that I could not have imagined.

One of our goals for each camper this summer is that they learn this parable well enough to be able to tell it in their own words.  I am pretty sure that we have met that goal, and they will be doing that later in their show (MTV Good Sam!). Our friends have leaped into the parable of the Good Samaritan and play with it, and used only the items and talents and passions we have right here at camp to make a play like none other.  We had everything we needed right here on camp.   The opposite of scarcity is not abundance, the opposite of scarcity is enough.  And we have more than enough to proclaim Good News.  We had the talent and the materials and the energy and the heart to embody Christ’s call that we are to show mercy, to be a neighbor to all neighbors, that our backyard is as large as the whole universe.  So we send you out, to go and do likewise.  Jump into the story, play with the story and make it your own, because only when we live it will we will actually, wake the world in Jesus name.

Camp Cross

July 9, 2016

Parable of the Good Samaritan

Sphere of Love: Paul, Chaos and Trusting the Design

Would you do it? No seatbelts or airbags.  Would you be placed in a sphere whose engineering in beyond our understanding.  A created thing the design of which came to earth in pages and pages of digital text. The message was an invitation embedded in a booming tone from the sky.  They heard it, they stepped up, they followed the directions, they built the machine.  Would you climb into this alien sphere, trusting that they, this incomprehensible other, would you trust that they have a purpose and a meaning that is life-giving?  Would you walk into it,  believing you would travel by a wormhole?  A wormhole is a theoretical concept, for which we have no objective proof of.

Source:deviant art lucina_brera_3-d5ykuar

In Paul’s day the Mediterranean was an awkward mess of trade routes and Imperial frameworks.  A time of angst and need where the old ways were exalted but didn’t seem to work well anymore.  The earliest phases of the primordial Church were birthed in this unbounded chaos.  Little churches in far flung places we cannot even find anymore.  Paul had been there in Galatia, proclaimed that our One true God, revealed to Abraham and to Moses and their children, God has done something new in Christ Jesus. The hundreds of rules of the Jewish practice, they were all drawn into one body, one promise…Love with a capital L. 

Paul is writing to communities.  No letter he writes is intended for one single person.  The list of brokenness is a design for disaster that rips apart the fragile connections that are the difference between a crowd and a church.  Paul started these churches, invited them into the way of Jesus, a free way that has fulfilled the law because if we really truly love all as God loves us, we don’t need any other instructions.  But the reign of God isn’t fully here yet, this living in love has never been a well-organized religion.  The flesh that Paul keeps referring to isn’t really a body thing, it is not ‘carne’.  It is an ancient expression that refers to what I might call the twisted imagination of our hearts.  The ways in which we want an easier route, a tastier route, a way of self-satisfaction before self-emptying.  

It is this twisted inclination,  that makes it crucial that we have structures that guard against behaviors that harm a community, and that we offer the expectations we do have.  I expect generosity, daring, leaning into discomfort, trying new things, asking real questions.  We always dwell in this tension between holding a hand while you learn to walk, and walking into the gift of freedom.

An alternative approach, something firmer to grab onto, has come to the churches in Galatia.  It has come with a group, I will call them the Observers, they believe in the Christian proclamation, but they also believe that those who follow Jesus should observe most of the Jewish purity laws.  This isn’t an illogical notion, and it has repeated itself again and again in Christian history.  Some forms of biblical literalism are not that different from these Observers in Galatia.  What we have here in this reading is the heart of Paul’s rebuttal of these Observers. 

Now Paul was creative and persuasive, however he was not a scholar of Greek.  One commentary suggests that the opening sentence of today’s epistle selection ‘is so messy and awkwardly written as to be nearly incomprehensible.’  So the translation is process is just as chaotic as the churches it was sent to. 

If you so desire, I invite you to a bit of clarification in today’s lesson.  I have sent out little blue notes with an expanded version that might bring us more trust in this structure of Love that Paul insists on.  We will start with summed up, which is better translated as fulfilled.  Jesus isn’t the Cliff notes, he isn’t a sum total.  Jesus fills the covenant with his own life, his own beautiful words and gift of healing grace.  Where it says commandment,  lets use the greek word in the letter, logos.  The Logos of God became flesh and dwelled among us.  And word/logos in this sense means promise.   A holy promise of Love that we are invited into.  If we keep going ‘shall’ is a bit gentle.  Let's amp it up with the greek meaning, choosing to use WILL in all capital letters.  It is a prophecy, it is an invitation into something that is going to happen.  You can walk this way.  

Now the letter is a work of craft and ideas ebb and flow, so if we move ahead we find the word Live, the plain transliteration is the same as the root of the word pedestrian.  Walk.  It is a moving word, a going somewhere, stepping into freedom idea.  Our favorite office assistant is about to walk.  She can stand on her own, and I call to her, knowing that she will walk.  It is going to happen.  Which is the anticipatory and positive sense of this reading…which we should read together.  ‘For the whole law is fulfilled with Christ’s life and the way is an inviting promise that you WILL walk in love; loving your neighbor as yourself, you are capable and it will happen, it will happen with God the Spirit’s help.’

In the movie Contact,  humanity receives a signal from deep space, a signal in the form of three-dimensional texts, which offer plans to build a machine.  A machine which will somehow, invite a person from our planet to theirs.  The engineers who build this most expensive project in human history, they trust the unknown civilization enough to build a gigantic and complicated machine whose function they do not understand.  They trust the all of the plans, until they get to the actual vehicle.  Human engineering really likes safety nets.  We wear helmets on our bicycles and have airbags in our cars.  That spherical vessel, as it is given these designs don’t have any type of restraint for the passenger.  None.   Just a sphere. 

So the engineers add a seat with a harness.  They bolt it onto this smooth elegant sphere.  As the journey proceeds it this chair, this extra contraption that has been attached  into the transmitted design, it nearly ends the mission.  The seat rattled the passenger fiercely until she released the harness and floated freely and safely.   Likewise, the Observers desire to attach old designs to the way of Christ, it is wholly unnecessary.  The design as transmitted is all we need.  No breathing apparatus or seatbelts are needed, but a headlamp won’t hurt.  

The gift is enough if we can only trust its sufficiency.  Trust that this one life is strong enough to carry us, Trust that this one elegant sphere comes from wisdom far greater than ours.  Christ’s self-emptying Love is our sphere. It can keep us safe, take us deeper and farther than we can ask or imagine.  How will I lean into the fear and enter into his gift? How will I not overthink and over engineer?   Trust that this one SHAPE is strong enough to carry us, trust that this one elegant sphere comes from wisdom far greater than ours.  Trust that it can lead us through the chaos we cannot comprehend, if we only follow the design.  L   O   V   E. 

St. Paul's Walla Walla

June 26, 2016

RCL Proper 8 Year C

A homilists note, the recorded sermon is different from this text, as in on Sunday morning I realized during the Gospel reading that I didn't have the most current revision downloaded!  The text here is a mashup of what I wanted to share and what I actually said.  Oh well.  Paul isn't the only one with transmission problems.    

Trinity Sails: Play with the Mystery!

The sailboat was 47 feet long,and just wide enough, for nine people to live and move in close quarters.  The food stores were full, the water tanks brimmed.  The stereo could only seem to play reggae music.  We were in and out of the water so often,  passing showers so common, We became used to being neither clean nor dirty, smelling of sunscreen and the salty Caribbean sea. A Texan, an Indian, an Iowan, a Georgian, a Japanese girl, two Floridians,  and Australian and my American nomadic self.  It was sea camp, three weeks learning to sail and scuba and windsurf.  Seven teens, two adults, alongside a dozen other yachts just the same.  We had everything we needed in that fleet and on that sea.  Food for bellies and shelter for bodies and rest for busy souls.  Bold blue firmament above and sparkling blue firmament below.

The captain of my sailboat he loved the ocean.  For decades he loved inviting young people to the paths of the sea.  Teaching us how to hoist the sails,  handing us the steering wheel,  guiding us in how to dwell together, two parts Jimmy Buffett, one part Stephen Covey, one part Mister Rogers.   And this captain of my boat,  happened to be the director of the whole program. There is something quite daring about inviting boatload after boatload of teenagers to sail p precious ships.  Young people with their whimsy and curiosity and enduring sense of their own power, brimming with hope, romance, brokenness and challenge.  I once asked the captain if anyone had run a yacht aground.  He said oh yeah, once a decade ago,  really bent up the rudder. Cost a bunch to get it fixed.  I asked him if that kid was allowed back for another year.  The captain raised his head,  looked around toward shore.  Sure he said.  He is right there…our windsurfing instructor.

The Holy Trinity,  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This Triune God gives shape to the experience of the disciples and early Church.  The experience that God who is the ground of all, and somehow is the same as this Jesus, inviting us into God’s self, and somehow is the same universal potency of deep wisdom and energy called ruach in the Hebrew.  It is hard to collapse into ink and paper, and the Trinity is a holy mystery, fascinating and tremendous, something to be known and trusted whether or not we can capture it with words.

The Captain figured out early that I was pretty good at cooking, and not so good at cleaning, and rearranged the chores accordingly.  Yet I was not known as the pancake maker, and the captain was never the paperwork filler-outer, even the windsurf instructor was not called ship runner a grounder.  We were called by our names, and not our chores or things we have done.  We related to one another as friend, leader, bunkmate.  A God who is known in plurality can of course be illustrated by a range of words, they do not have to be precise or perfect, they can bend to fit the moment.  

However we should recall that the potent life of the Trinity is rooted in its relationships, not responsibilities, or duties or characteristics.  You can memorize all the orthodox definitions about the Holy Trinity, or lean on a dozen verbal configurations of the triune, but that is not the Trinity itself.  Knowing all the parts of the sailboat is very different than working together to set sail and make it to our destination.

Maybe you would rather just step over this Trinity nonsense, sing the words and hope nobody brings it up.  Let me offer two reasons why the Trinity matters to the practicing Christian.  First it is the hallmark of Christian unity in all our diversity.  The rock bottom characteristic of what makes us Christian and not Christian-ish is: Holy Scripture as word of God, Trinitarian Baptism,

Holy Communion.  A world of graceful diversity and opinions and practices can dwell within that definition.  And diversity is the second reason why trusting in Trinity is not just an abstract argument.  The Trinity tells us that God is diverse within God’s self.  God is plurality within God’s self.  All our bloodshed over theology and practices, who is in and who is out: the testimony of the ages is that this does not matter if we do not act with the love for God and neighbor that has been poured into our hearts.

God can handle our wayward categorizing and over defining, what God wants is for us is a human race that is an image of the divine relationship: self giving,   ever original,  diversity bound to one another.  The Holy Trinity is a sketch of how God is, never-ever ending as the sea nor ever casting overboard, God is a moving community, reaching back and sailing onward.

So here is where I invite you to do something wholly outrageous.  Make a trinitarian metaphor, illustrate with word pictures your experience of the mystery of the Trinity.  Let it be a quark with its three moving parts that are the same stuff and what everything is made of.  Or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or three ladies dancing. Humans build trust through relationship, people have relationship with ideas and concepts through play.  Metaphor is playing with ideas like a child plays with objects, and God invites us into relationship with Godself in three shapes, or matrixes, or names or whatever frame you need.  So go for it.  Make a trinity metaphor.  Spend enough time with intention and study and originality to make your wise and ancient and modern Trinity metaphor.  I promise, God can handle it.

In case you missed it, here is mine for the week.  God the Boatmaker separated the waters above from the waters below, God crafted the boat, filled it with good things and made it a safe place for us to dwell in, and equipped it so that we can sail home to him.  God the Captain invites us into the sailboat, teaches us to navigate, sings songs about where we are going, gives us the wheel and sails with us on our journey home.  God the Youthful Guest fills the boat with laughter and energy and frivolity, and maybe occasionally tries to get a bucket of water while sailing.  

It’s not perfect, for many reasons, especially remembering the pranks we pulled with all that passion and creativity; I am not to sure what to make of the Holy Spirit being a prankster.  But this holy exploration is essential to living into our Baptism. We promise lifelong formation upheld and guided by God’s foundational, motivational and sustaining help. Whatever creative act can lead you deeper into relationship with the living God, whatever song you need to sing to invite surrender into Jesus’s healing embrace, whatever picture you need to paint of the Spirit’s dream, DO IT.  hoist the sails, take the wheel, you have all that you need, the greater shore lies ahead.  Do it with the love he has poured into your heart.  God rejoices in it and says that it is delightful.  In the name of the Holy Trinity, a fluid foundation, an ongoing guide, and an energy beyond our imagining.  Amen.

Trinity Sunday, May 22, 2016

Year C, RCL

St. Paul's Episcopal Church   Walla Walla, Washington, USA