That's So Metal: Tenebrae Shaped By Youth

Somewhere in the many writings of Fredrick Buechner is an essay titled something like 'Adolescence: The Stewardship of Pain'.  The essay was lovely, but it has been the title that has stuck with me over time.  Perhaps all life, perhaps all periods of stress and change could be understood more completely as a stewardship of pain.  Life can be wretched and denying it doesn't help.  Life can be wretched and throughout our lives, we hit the new miry pit moments and have to find a way to care for self and others through it.

They had a struggle to get out of the thicket.  The thorns and briars were as tough as wire and as clinging as claws.  Their cloaks were rent and tattered before they broke free at last.  ‘Now down we go, Sam,” Frodo whispered. ‘Down into the valley quick, and then turn northward, as soon as ever we can.’ Day was coming again in the world outside, and far beyond the glooms of Mordor the sun was climbing over the eastern rim of Middle-earth; but here all was still dark as night.  The mountain smoldered and its fires went out.  The glare faded from the cliffs.  The easterly wind that had been blowing ever since they left Ithilien now seemed dead.  Slowly and painfully they clambered down, groping, stumbling, scrambling among the rock and briar and dead wood in the blind shadows, down and down until they could go no further.
J.R.R. Tolkien

For many many years I have sought ways to more deeply involve young people in the practices of Holy Week.  I used to practice a young people's stations of the cross with things to touch and taste at each biblical station (which I should maybe write up sometime).  Here at St. Paul's for four years the youth group has offered the Tenebrae service.  Known as a service of shadows, Tenebrae dives into the brokenness and darkness of life that leads to the cross.  When I first began engaging the youth group in this service we had a handful of senior high boys who loved death metal music.  They described the service as the 'metal' service.  I had to ask a few questions (and read a few things online) before I realized how right they are.

This is where they fought the battle of Gettysburg. Fifty thousand men died right here on this field, fighting the same fight that we are still fighting among ourselves today. This green field right here, painted red, bubblin' with the blood of young boys. Smoke and hot lead pouring right through their bodies. Listen to their souls, men. I killed my brother with malice in my heart. Hatred destroyed my family. You listen, and you take a lesson from the dead. If we don't come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were. I don't care if you like each other of not, but you will respect each other. And maybe... I don't know, maybe we'll learn to play this game like men.

Remember the Titans

The general structure is much like other Tenebrae traditions, and some of the prayers and readings come from 'authorized' sources.  We start with lots of candles lit, and shadow by shadow, more are extinguished.  Part of our youth ministry work during Lent is looking at each shadow and talking about the 'other' readings that go with them.  The 'other' readings are excerpts from films we have watched or books they are reading in school, or in personal reading.  We keep some readings from year to year, and others are changed.  In four years we have had excerpts from Buffy and Firefly episodes, moments from The Giver, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hunger Games, the Blind Side and even the lyrics to a death metal song.

“But they were not living, thought Harry: They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents' moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.”

 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

My hopes for this service are two-fold.  First to involve our very busy young people in the real practices of Holy Week.  Secondly, to help create a practice of critical thinking about faith. Placing their experience and their leadership in the heart of Holy Week is one way to connect authentically.  We don't have the most preachy youth group, we are mostly focused on fellowship and geekiness; but always concluded in shared prayer.  We practice the rhythm of life together and I believe it is this approach that makes Tenebrae work.  Each season it doesn't take very long to come up with many many options each year, many moments of brokenness and challenge in the media.  We probably could fill hours with them.   Yet we choose just seven, seven quotes that are reflections of our lives, a way to name the pain without confessing too much of our own.  It is a service of shadows, and a service of hope.  The metal service, Tenebrae.

If you would like a copy of this years service, please contact me.

Three Mandate Thursday: Serve, Do, Love

Tonight is a night that does not need many more words to teach what it means.Like the principles of Godly Play, tonight we are immersed in the materials of these sacred stories.  We touch and feel and dive deeply into the holy word.  It doesn’t need many more words, but like our lessons downstairs,  I do want to offer a few heart shaping words. You may not know that the word maundy is rooted in the French word for mandate.  It is perhaps more understandable to call our night Mandate Thursday.  Jesus gives us three mandates this night: serve, do, love.

The first is a mandate of loving service.  I came not to be served but to serve, and you are one with me when you do likewise.  Washing someone is a fiercely intimate moment, and sometimes I think our anxiety about the foot washing of this night is less about the condition of our well to do feet and more about the intimacy it demands.  This is service that isn’t clean or comfortable or distant. Jesus’ mandate of deep muscular service to enemy and stranger is a daring invitation into holy vulnerability.

The second mandate of the night is ‘do this in remembrance of me’. What we remember this evening is often called the Last Supper. But that is confusing because while it’s not the first, it’s not really the last either.  So often when he appears in his resurrected glory his invitation is to a feast.  So I wonder what else could we call it other than the last supper?  What makes this supper distinctive is the mandate, so what if we called it the directive dinner?  This night is like and unlike most of the other times when we gather around the table, break bread, share wine and do so in remembrance of him.  Every week we are offered just a sample of the tastes, but in it we are given the full presence of his promise.  Small or large these meals are not about confessional statements or monstrous magics.  They are about the mystery of relationships made and deepened through communal food and communal prayer.  Tables are where we tell our stories, where we break bread and where we are transformed.

Here on this night family and strangers and friends gather, we hear these stories and say these prayers, we eat this food and become these people. Eat this, become me. Drink this, be united. Is there anyone you know well, who you would follow like Jesus invites us to, with whom you have not regularly shared food? Throughout Jesus’ life it is his table fellowship and his table stories that throw all standards of who is in and who is out right off the table.  ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ is Jesus’ mandate of deep table fellowship with neighbor and betrayer, is a daring invitation into a reconciled world.

Third mandate is to love as Jesus loves. Holy Week and Easter is very much about overcoming systems of injustice and cruelty and brokenness, but it is also not just about that. Holy Week and Easter are very much about the strange mystery of how Jesus is alive in us and present this very moment, but it is also not just about that. This week, this time, this day, practiced, again and again, is about God made flesh in Christ Jesus in whose life the lives and sufferings of his friends and followers are entirely bound up.  Jesus carries God’s healing presence into the the heart of human suffering and cruelty.  Love one another he says, he says it as he is being betrayed.  Love one another he says, as he is being scapegoated.  Love one another he says, as the worst of our anxieties and shame move us to strike him down.  Sometimes, most of the time, I can barely wrap my mind around the notion that God who loved us so much that he became one of us.  Became human knowing that the challenge of God made flesh would lead us to strike down this prophet, friend, messiah, Lord. How could God love such twisted and selfish children who respond to him in this way?

How is the harder question, it is a brain question, that may never be able to comprehend the answer.

Yet what the mind can barely touch, my soul can know by heart. Jesus’ mandate of living a deep abiding love for all that he loves is leaning in harder than we know how to do without having spent regular time with him in service and at table. Serve, Do, Love.  This is our mandate.  Jesus gives us not a question of how, but an answer of how.  Serve, Do, Love.  

 -
once again, the liturgy itself preaches much more than any homily.
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington, USA
April 13, 2017

Original Vigils and the Rainbow Easter

It was over four years ago now.  My first winter here in Walla Walla and the staff were discussing the Easter and Holy Week schedule when the Vigil came up.  Easter Vigil that is.  I was startled by the bellyaching: 'We put so much work in and nobody comes.  Maybe we should just encourage folks who are interested to go elsewhere.  Maybe we should cancel.'

Long before I touched down here I had been pondering the Vigil and its hits and misses.  As I explained a few years ago, it should be like Opening Day at the ballpark, and sometimes it is more like an overdone halftime show or a complete snooze.  So I took a big swing at the sudden gap in left field: I deconstructed the Vigil and offered instead an 'Original Vigil'.  It was at a home, around a fire pit.  Families told the sacred stories, we shared the parts of the liturgy, and then had an old style bread and wine and cheese and grapes and olives Eucharistic feast.  It was awesome and felt like Easter, even in the second year when it was much colder outside.

The next year, well, the short version is, there was a big staff change.  At the time we were in the Holy Week planning stages we had gone months without a settled priest, and didn't know when we would see an Interim.  One of the tasks of interim ministry (I would later learn) is to reconnect with the centers of the tradition.  I felt is was important in that time period to bring it back to the church property and into the nave.  We brought back into the vigil liturgy some of the classic pieces but strived to keep the informal and family friendly atmosphere. Sometimes we still call it 'original', sometimes we do not.  I admit that it isn't for everybody (no nosebleeds), but it felt like Easter.   All the deep meaning making symbols and actions: like fires shared and feasts celebrated, but really no trace of the sedate.

I think that part of the reason I wanted to reshape the Vigil was because done well, it teaches without saying 'now we are teaching'.  The symbols of fire and light, the dark nave, the stories that go back to the start.   I was taught to ask in each sermon, what does the congregation most need to hear?  For me, on that night, there isn't a whole lot more they needed to hear.   After having spent four seasons shaping and reshaping this liturgy in search of 'natural formation' I found myself surprisingly stumped by what to preach.  In my heart, the shape of the liturgy does that.  Yet still, there I was, slated to preach that night.  So what follows is a somewhat all over the place, but enthusiastic, homily/apologetic.

If you would like to get a look at the bulletin for this year's vigil, please contact me at St. Paul's!

All by ourselves, all on our own in the wasteland of discarded hopes and trampled dreams of Holy Week,  we might conclude that there isn’t enough of anything to undo what has been done. Our Lord and master was put to death, he was laid in a tomb.  All seems dark, all we might know is that we feel scared.  I wonder if the followers of Jesus thought to run, or if they were paralyzed.  On our best days we are brave ones, holy ones, better people doing good. On other days we give up, retreat into the ark during the storm.  We might even take what we have made and throw it in the waste bin, because it didn’t go as we had expected.

What might that first moment of creation felt like for God? What surge of delight was the big bang really like? Was it a glowing gentle tickle or like leaping from a plane? Yet, what we do know is that for all the first blush, it wasn’t long before the rejoicing was interrupted. God found something perhaps sad, perhaps unexpected.  On the other side of love was grief. Disappointment about our lazy hearts and selfishness and violence. Was it the tears of the Creator, that covered the earth in a sea of grief?  Yet then, beyond the storms, it is as if that first spark of light passed through the mist of God’s heartbreak, and from the angle of love, set a rainbow in the sky.

Again and again the story continues, with God bending down to his people sunk in terror,raising us from that miry pit.  God’s presence gives direction to exiles, brings life to futures believed dead and gone.  I could read you pages and pages of scholarly texts about what happens this night, but it probably wouldn’t do much good.  Because Easter is something that you taste and see and do.  

None of our gospels tell us what actually happened in the dark of Jesus’ tomb.  We don’t read of first heartbeats, the light returning to his eyes or breath coming to his lungs. All we are told is of the result, all we hear is ‘be not afraid’.  Christ is risen from the dead, he is not here..you have the mission, Go! God’s spark of life burns up all our lostness and begins something new.  Easter is a thanksgiving, a firework, a celebration that throws a rainbow of energy on all our flatness and deadness.

This is the Easter Vigil, and around here we celebrate it a little bit different.  A few years ago we took it out of the nave, into a home and a backyard.  We share it like we are the ancients gathered around the fire, telling our stories, sharing our grief and our joy.  We also went back to the beginning of the church, before buildings and orders and dioceses, and practiced Vigil in a home, like the first Christians did.  We stripped it back to its heart and recreated this Vigil.  I don’t know what it was like before I came, but...I love vigil, but I have also been to Vigil’s that were beautiful, but so flat and so distant and so complicated, that people skipped it, or slept right through it. Which is tough because on this night, unlike all other nights, the experience of God’s life should be like that brilliant rainbow, so  bright, so striking, that you want to follow it.

This is why we take the time to ignite the fire, burn the candles, share the voices, throw on the lights and sing the songs.  Easter is a glow that you taste and see and do.  This is why we take the time to journey through the big story of how God keeps reaching into our disasters and bringing us back to wholeness again and again and again. The angel says we are to not be afraid.  Be not afraid of all the strangeness and danger and complexity of our very real challenges. Be not afraid because Easter is a way of life that we taste, and see, and do.  Not all on our own, but together, with you and me and the ancients and the future, and with God and with Christ and with the Holy Spirit.

We do this on this night in this rainbow way (the bulletin is printed with different colors for different voices), where all ages claim a voice in the whole liturgy,  to tell an important part of the story that gets trampled over much too often.This is everybody's story it's for all of us to tell, it’s for all of us to share, it's for all people to find their part in: not just those of us who regularly wear white gowns. Don’t know what’s going on? Guess what, neither did the disciples. Be Not Afraid..Go anyways.  To quote singer-songwriter Ben Folds, ‘If you are paralyzed by the voice in your head, it is the standing still that should be scaring you instead.’  Easter is a practice that you can taste and see and do.  Alleluia. Amen.


And for a different perspective, check out this post by Steve W.
Thanks to Earl Blackaby and Michelle Janning for the Vigil photos.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Walla Walla, Washington, USA
April 15, 2017

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.

Stay Salty! Sailboats and Shared Tables

Perhaps you have seen the image, the background is a shimmering aqua blue, across which is written an invitation in paint brush strokes of white. It calls out and says to ‘stay salty.’  Seeing that invitation I am cast back in time to memories of weeks on a sailboat. I remember being literally salty, and my memory can just pick up the creaking of the boat and feel the sea spray against my cheeks. All these years later I can summon the sensation of warmth on my back, and I can hear my unkempt hair blowing around in the wind.  

‘Stay salty’ makes me think of fictional pirates, the pirates of movies and novels who live freely, truthfully, and bravely.  People unbound by convention or responsibility or cold weather.  Stay salty sounds like living the life that Jimmy Buffett songs suggest, out on the sea for adventure, tiki drinks and veggie burgers in paradise. ‘Stay salty’ feels like heaven right now.  

It is a bit strange that salt did not find itself with a prominent place as a sacrament in Christian practice. Salt had a prevalent place in ancient Jewish rituals in both home and temple. These rituals were focused on fidelity and sacrifice, two important themes for the early Jesus movement.  Plus salt does seems rather magical. The way that it changes the suspension strength of water: and we float.  The way when you put a few grains on a hot dish it spreads all the way through. Salt which preserves meat without refrigeration; and also melts ice to make paths safer. Like grain and wine and water and oil, salt is a basic necessity for life. And like light and water, there would not be life on earth without it. It courses through our veins and rests in our tissues. Salt flows out of us in our sweat and in our tears. Salt is everyday and ever present; of priceless value but also dangerous if not well used.

Salt is in our sacramental practices, but it is subtle.  Salt is in the baking of bread, and in some traditions in the waters of baptism. Just enough to taste a hint of the Sea of Reeds, to recall the sensation of deliverance from slavery to liberty, not enough to overwhelm.  Taste memory is crucial: it is survival memory. Taste isn’t just an idea or a pleasure, it is the difference between life and death.  In our primordial days we relied on taste to help us choose between safe and dangerous. We used the memory of taste to relocate the place where we found food in the past.

On shore, but you get the picture.  Action Sail 1989.

The gospel of Matthew evokes the senses of survival memory. The way the text is shaped and shared expects a community of disciples taking it in deeply, like re-membering Jesus is what they need to survive.  We, like Matthews community, are people who break bread, in Jesus’ time the equivalent expression was to ‘share salt’. Food is still our ritual of bonding, the practice in which we are bound to our companions in deep and lifegiving ways.  Most of us experience holiness not in outrageous drama but in experiences as common as passing the salt. The laughter of a child, in the smack of kisses and the sounds of sobs.  Moments of fear, flickers of serenity. Or when we forgive someone who has broken our heart.  

Most people don’t seem to experience God only in moments that are labeled as spiritual or religious. Sometimes we, we who are the chefs and cooks of the religious, sometimes we do manage to invite the holy to happen.  Most of the time however, we are just hopeful hosts and prayerful waiters.  In my experience, most of the holy moments in a religious place like this are actually very earthy, very human. They are salty moments.  

I am tired of the snow and the cold and am leaning into my salty memories and ocean daydreams.  I am also anxious and feeling lost in what seems to be the utter failure of compassion and commitment to the common good. In this sea of disorientation Jesus steers me and whispers, stay salty.   I am here with you Jesus says, I am here in the everyday strangeness  of being bound to neighbors that you cannot fix or leave behind or ignore. Following Jesus as Lord is choosing a vulnerable God, choosing one who chooses our substance, as dissolvable and crushable as it is. The call to embrace Christ crucified isn’t about inflicting pain but a call to surrender ever more of our lives to the mystery of God. The mystery of our union in Christ  is no less of a mystery because it is revealed in things no more complicated than grain and wine, water, oil and salt.  I cannot explain how and why these moments taste and feel of divine grace, I only know that they do.

Maybe salt is a metaphor for the divine in that salt is everywhere whether we notice it or not.  And that this world and its creatures are ceaselessly held by God from the salty depths of the earth through the salty streams of our tears.  Nothing in Jesus’ teaching is not also what he lives.  Sacrifice, loyalty, correction, compassion.  He says take the lower seat, and he does.  He tells us to welcome the orphan, the outcast and the stranger, and he does. So what can we know from Jesus life, death and resurrection about what it means to be salt, to stay salty?  What can we know about what this community should taste like by saying that we should be salt?

Salt once dissolved is uncontainable. That delightful pineapple that made my eyes light up, I went back, got more and gave it to friends.  That addictively good cold brew coffee, I arranged our San Francisco mission trip schedule around it, and we stood in a long line and bonded while we waited to receive it. That sandwich that could only have been made with the deepest magics, the shop burned down a decade ago, but I am still talking about that sandwich.  Salt does not need to talk about itself, but disciples like us could be better at sharing out loud the flavors of faith that rescue us. Learning to be salty may be learning to share those everyday memories where we knew we were held by Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Learning to be salty may be living out loud the holy transformation we taste.

Matthew’s Gospel expects that we are informed and imaginative and devoted and active lovers of God.  It expects us to be gourmets of the Good News. Collectors and sharers and practitioners of the Jesus movement. None of us are refined salt, yet each of us are raw salts, mixed with the minerals of our lives and the sea things of our hearts: and this is what gives us our unique flavor. God’s reign isn’t known by its purity but by its ever-present-ness. God’s reign is known by its unconventionality, by our boundness to each other and how it tastes uncommonly free.  Eugene Peterson puts it this way in his paraphrase of this gospel:

“Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth.  If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness?”  

Jesus never teaches us to be a way that the doesn’t live out himself.  Jesus was salt for the well-being of the world.  Jesus calls to us saying STAY SALTY.  My salty might be a bit more sassy than your salty, but I need your salty at the table too.  Will you wonder with me by taking a small rock of salt with you at the end of the service.  Perhaps tasting it and wondering.  And will you wonder with me now, how we can be who he says we are saying:

We are here to be salt-seasoning,

we are here to bring out

the God-flavors of this earth.

Amen.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington

February 5, 2017
RCL A  5 Epiphany

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