TRINITY SUNDAY, First Sunday after Pentecost Year A
June 15, 2014
Parish of Ss. Peter & Paul
+++++
We know that nature can be vicious and violent. In the winter, in some parts of our country, a blizzard comes and encases the trees with ice, and they grow heavier and heavier until a limb as thick as a telephone pole breaks loose and crushes the spine of a 44-year-old woman; she dies instantly while her two grade-school children stand by in unbelieving shock.
But when you think about nature as you experience it year by year, the thing that stands out is the good, the dependable, the trustworthy. The bad things are real, but they are the exception. For the most part, nature is lovely, trustworthy, even lavish. Good, and not only good, but very good.
But there is still a puzzle: what does the created world have to do with the yearning for justice which is so much a part of our teaching about being Godly and Christian? What does the lying peacefully under the full moon have to do with the cry for community and liberation?
Many have travelled to Africa where they see people so malnourished that they were more like stick figures than human beings.
We love "...the easy wind and downy flake" of Robert Frost's poem. But what do they say to these cries for justice?

We love the fire crackling in the fireplace. But what does that offer to someone who is alone and alienated? We love the sunlight refracting through the ice on the window. But what does that do for the victims of poverty or racism or sexism or sexual violence?
And certainly a part of all this is what we experienced this past week, not far away from here, at Reynolds High School. Our son Christopher is a teacher at Walt Morey Middle School, just down the road from the high school, and his school served as a gathering-point for students to obtain their possessions a few days after the tragedy. Our Bishop Michael said in his weekly message to clergy on Thursday, "I would remind you that one of the responsibilities we have in our communities is to provide a sense of safety. A reminder that God is fully present in the life of Christians as represented in the Trinity might be a good addition to your preaching this week." And so I do now, and ask: What does all of our basking in this glorious (mostly) Oregon June weather have to do with Emilio Hoffman or Jered Padgett or the teacher who was injured? What does it have to do with us who have to cope with tragedy and help our children understand?
When you go back and read Genesis 1 with all these questions in mind, you begin to notice fascinating things that help answer the questions.

On each of the seven days of creation, God creates according to the same pattern. God commands, "Let there be ..." The command is executed. "... and there was ..." God assesses what happens. "And God saw that the light was good." And the text states the time, "And there was evening and there was morning ..."
This symmetry suggests that the world itself is predictable and trustworthy.
In addition to having its own integrity, each created thing is alive and responsive to God and to all the other things. We can see this clearly enough in animate things--dogs and raccoons and parakeets. But according to the Bible, it is true of all created things. To us, a rock is inert. But in the Bible, there is a sense in which it is alive. That's why the Psalmist can say, "Let the sea roar and all that fills it ... Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills sing together for joy" (Ps. 98:7-8). And in our day, the philosopher Charles Hartshorne points out that since all matter is composed of whirling atoms and subatoms, it is all truly alive. Even the bricks and blocks form which a building is built.

Do you notice this? God creates a place for each thing and frees it to be what it is to be. God places each thing so that it is related in just the right way to all the other things.
The key word is relationship. God creates all things in positive relationship with one another. As Genesis 1 comes to its majestic conclusion, everything is in a community of mutual support, mutual encouragement, mutual lifting up and building up.
We know the word does not occur in Genesis 1. But isn't this a picture of "justice"? In the Hebrew tradition, after all, justice is first and foremost a matter of right relationship, of things holding one another up as God intended from the very beginning.
The will for justice is built into the very fabric of things. The power of life itself seeks for all things to live together in community. So the Psalmist says, "The heavens proclaim [God's] righteousness" (97:6).
Now this may seem a little far-out, the frog croaking for justice. But some of us have experienced this: nature bearing its own witness, calling us to community and support in relationship. A family several years ago began a backyard vegetable garden. The father of the family says:
"At first, the garden was just a place to work. You turn the soil and water it, and things grow. But, to use Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher's expression, I gradually began to sense that the garden was a kind of "Thou." I began to sense that the garden was a genuine Other. I became aware of the constant presence of the life-force and the dazzling diversity of the vegetables. And when things grow together at their best, the garden is a picture of what God intends for all.
"I got a lot of help with sermons out there, talking things over with the potatoes. Actually, I talked with the corn (since it has ears), but the potatoes did look over my notes (with their eyes)."
So, on your way home from church today, look around. Smell the fresh air. Take a look at the trees. Taste a glass of fresh, cool water. Listen to the birds. Witnesses. At their best, they are signs of God's presence and God's grace and God's will. Partners in the search for justice. And if you listen carefully, maybe you can hear them speak to you.
In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for this glory,
And makes us each the other's inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us, and within.
(Malcolm Guite)
Phil Ayers+, June 15, 2014
archived musings and preachments
Monday, June 30, 2014
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Broken church
Saints Peter and Paul/San Pedro y San Pablo 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/HolyDays/PetPaul.html
("Lord of the broken church, whose chosen foundations are marked by fault lines: we thank you for the grace that took the denier and the persecutor and made them witness to your liberating gifts; through Jesus Christ, who sets the prisoners free. Amen")
“Lord of the broken church…” prays today’s Collect, not the BCP version, but from Prayers For An Inclusive Church.
We usually do not celebrate broken churches. We have anxious meetings about broken churches. We hire consultants to address broken churches. Some make money publishing books that give ideas and propose plans for broken churches.
We try to fix broken churches.
Today we celebrate broken churches .
It’s our patronal Sunday, Saints Peter and Paul. We celebrate two men of the New Testament—Peter the impulsive denier, and Paul the persecutor whose first career as a Jewish version of the Taliban was rudely interrupted by Jesus.
Our lovely traditional ikon shows them embracing. If you read between the lines in the NT, you know that this probably never happened. Peter and Paul were at best what the young people today might call “frenemies”, uneasy partners who rarely saw each other and who fought in public when they did.
They fought over inclusion. Do the Gentiles, the non-Jews, get to join the party meant for faithful Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah? In my opinion this is the key question of the New Testament—who gets to belong? Fully observant Jews? Or Gentiles who observe part of the Law? Peter was shocked into thinking this by his own vision where God told him to eat pig meat and vulture meat and snakes.
Or all the Gentiles, as thought Paul?
It took two personally broken people, unresolved and conflicted, to open the door for a broken church and a church of the broken.
In a community of the perfect and the put-together, there is no room for the broken. There are no cracks through which can slip the wounded, the unresolved, the doubter, the rebel, the opinionated, the painfully shy, the poor, the chronically ill, the depressed, the anxious, the excluded, the shamed.
There is no room for Jesus. Jesus is the excluded, the shamed.
A broken church is a good church. A broken church knows its Lord, the tragicomic failed Messiah whom God alone raised on high. A broken church knows its need for God and for grace.
We’re a broken church. We’re a church of many names. First Saint Peter’s, then Saints Peter and Paul, now we add San Pedro y San Pablo. How many more names shall we have? We’re in the midst of dying and rising, of a re-birth that includes smallness and vulnerability and perhaps some pain and a little blood before we’re done. (If we’re ever done.) Our questions here have been questions of inclusion. Are we a community of only the resolved and the consistent, the acceptable according to mid-20th century standards? Or are we also a community that fully affirms women in all ways, that welcomes and affirms LBGTQ members in all ways? Are we a community of classical hymn-singing English-speakers? Or are we also a community of guitar-accompanied Spanish-speakers?
Over and over, just like the early Church, the question—if we welcome, if we seek out and affirm and include the ones that are different, who speak differently, who act differently, who bring a different experience and a different culture into our midst—are we still recognizable? Far more important, are we the community of Jesus?
We have Peter and Paul, the broken patrons of a broken church, to advise us. We have Jesus, the excluded and wounded who is raised on high, to show us and to gather us.
Through the years, I have wondered at the mystery of my own call to this community. In the past few years I have wondered at the mystery of why I am still here.
I think part of the answer lies in gifts—I am comfortable with urban environments, I have a deep Catholic instinct regarding spirituality and prayer. I like a mix of cultures, I speak a useful second language, I have clinical training that helps me deal positively with deeply wounded people.
The deeper answer is—I myself am a broken man.
I left the Roman Catholic Church and incurred a sense of exclusion as a result. My parents bore a deep sense of racial and cultural and familial shame as well as anxiety as a result of poverty, and they passed that story on to me. I think that my own wounds resonated with the wounds of this community back in the mid-‘90’s and we recognized each other. We still do. We have a gift here of openness to deeply wounded people.
“Lord of the broken church…” At times we stumble over one another’s wounds here, but here there is space for grace and for light and for God.
Today’s Ezekiel reading is for us, the people of the broken church---
“I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them... I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.”
According to the prophet, it is a good thing to be in need of healing, for we have a healer. It is a good thing to be lost, for someone will find us. The shepherd promises to gather us, to heal us, to feed us.
The prophet says it is not a good thing to be among the fat and the strong, among the self-sufficient and the complacent and the over-confident.
We are the broken church. That is our hope and our gift. We are the community that has been broken time and time again, wrestling with this question—who is welcome? We are the people of the denier and the persecutor whose argument with one another was never really resolved. But in the spaces left in the fault lines, there is room for light and for hope and for Christ and for those who have been excluded. There is room for you and for me.
We are San Pedro y San Pablo, Saints Peter and Paul.
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/HolyDays/PetPaul.html
("Lord of the broken church, whose chosen foundations are marked by fault lines: we thank you for the grace that took the denier and the persecutor and made them witness to your liberating gifts; through Jesus Christ, who sets the prisoners free. Amen")
“Lord of the broken church…” prays today’s Collect, not the BCP version, but from Prayers For An Inclusive Church.
We usually do not celebrate broken churches. We have anxious meetings about broken churches. We hire consultants to address broken churches. Some make money publishing books that give ideas and propose plans for broken churches.
We try to fix broken churches.
Today we celebrate broken churches .
It’s our patronal Sunday, Saints Peter and Paul. We celebrate two men of the New Testament—Peter the impulsive denier, and Paul the persecutor whose first career as a Jewish version of the Taliban was rudely interrupted by Jesus.
Our lovely traditional ikon shows them embracing. If you read between the lines in the NT, you know that this probably never happened. Peter and Paul were at best what the young people today might call “frenemies”, uneasy partners who rarely saw each other and who fought in public when they did.
They fought over inclusion. Do the Gentiles, the non-Jews, get to join the party meant for faithful Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah? In my opinion this is the key question of the New Testament—who gets to belong? Fully observant Jews? Or Gentiles who observe part of the Law? Peter was shocked into thinking this by his own vision where God told him to eat pig meat and vulture meat and snakes.
Or all the Gentiles, as thought Paul?
It took two personally broken people, unresolved and conflicted, to open the door for a broken church and a church of the broken.
In a community of the perfect and the put-together, there is no room for the broken. There are no cracks through which can slip the wounded, the unresolved, the doubter, the rebel, the opinionated, the painfully shy, the poor, the chronically ill, the depressed, the anxious, the excluded, the shamed.
There is no room for Jesus. Jesus is the excluded, the shamed.
A broken church is a good church. A broken church knows its Lord, the tragicomic failed Messiah whom God alone raised on high. A broken church knows its need for God and for grace.
We’re a broken church. We’re a church of many names. First Saint Peter’s, then Saints Peter and Paul, now we add San Pedro y San Pablo. How many more names shall we have? We’re in the midst of dying and rising, of a re-birth that includes smallness and vulnerability and perhaps some pain and a little blood before we’re done. (If we’re ever done.) Our questions here have been questions of inclusion. Are we a community of only the resolved and the consistent, the acceptable according to mid-20th century standards? Or are we also a community that fully affirms women in all ways, that welcomes and affirms LBGTQ members in all ways? Are we a community of classical hymn-singing English-speakers? Or are we also a community of guitar-accompanied Spanish-speakers?
Over and over, just like the early Church, the question—if we welcome, if we seek out and affirm and include the ones that are different, who speak differently, who act differently, who bring a different experience and a different culture into our midst—are we still recognizable? Far more important, are we the community of Jesus?
We have Peter and Paul, the broken patrons of a broken church, to advise us. We have Jesus, the excluded and wounded who is raised on high, to show us and to gather us.
Through the years, I have wondered at the mystery of my own call to this community. In the past few years I have wondered at the mystery of why I am still here.
I think part of the answer lies in gifts—I am comfortable with urban environments, I have a deep Catholic instinct regarding spirituality and prayer. I like a mix of cultures, I speak a useful second language, I have clinical training that helps me deal positively with deeply wounded people.
The deeper answer is—I myself am a broken man.
I left the Roman Catholic Church and incurred a sense of exclusion as a result. My parents bore a deep sense of racial and cultural and familial shame as well as anxiety as a result of poverty, and they passed that story on to me. I think that my own wounds resonated with the wounds of this community back in the mid-‘90’s and we recognized each other. We still do. We have a gift here of openness to deeply wounded people.
“Lord of the broken church…” At times we stumble over one another’s wounds here, but here there is space for grace and for light and for God.
Today’s Ezekiel reading is for us, the people of the broken church---
“I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them... I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.”
According to the prophet, it is a good thing to be in need of healing, for we have a healer. It is a good thing to be lost, for someone will find us. The shepherd promises to gather us, to heal us, to feed us.
The prophet says it is not a good thing to be among the fat and the strong, among the self-sufficient and the complacent and the over-confident.
We are the broken church. That is our hope and our gift. We are the community that has been broken time and time again, wrestling with this question—who is welcome? We are the people of the denier and the persecutor whose argument with one another was never really resolved. But in the spaces left in the fault lines, there is room for light and for hope and for Christ and for those who have been excluded. There is room for you and for me.
We are San Pedro y San Pablo, Saints Peter and Paul.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Pick it up
Proper 7 A 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html
Like many new clergy, I too had a honeymoon period with the parish, now almost 20 years ago. That is a sweet if somewhat unrealistic time that a pastor and a congregation will share, similar to a honeymoon in a committed relationship. After a search process and much anticipation, the new clergy arrives, and we’re all rather enchanted with one another. Everything is new, everything is wondrous, everything seems possible, there is new energy and new hope.
During this period, a wonderful faithful member of the congregation approached me with a sense of delight. He slapped me on the back and said, “Everything is going so well! Everyone likes you so much! And there are no complaints.”
I stood there and suddenly, for me, the busy room fell silent. Something went cold inside of me. As this very kind man walked away, I thought to myself that if those words were carved on my tombstone, “Everyone liked him and had no complaints”, that I would not care to appear before God to have my ministry judged.
“Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
The cost of the Gospel is shot through all our readings today.
“Take up your cross” has, through the years, been tamed and made a private sort of piety. My long-suffering Irish Catholic mother modeled this kind of spirituality and taught it to me. Whenever something came along to test my personal patience as a kid—a splinter in my knee, the ice cream man coming late to the neighborhood—mom would say “offer it up.” The message was clear—life’s little troubles gave me material that would make God happy as long as I had the right attitude.
We miss the Gospel, and for that matter the prophets and the message of Paul, if the cost of discipleship, the cost of following Jesus, becomes for us a private way of making sense of the suffering that life brings.
To listen to God and act on what we hear, to be a person baptized into the death of Jesus, to follow Jesus on his way—is a different path indeed.
It is a way that breaks the heart, says Jeremiah. Jeremiah hears the living God but almost seems to regret listening. Betrayal and violence followed him as he struggled to be faithful to the living word he heard. Jeremiah was simply obedient to the word that the God of Israel was speaking to him, the same God who was worshipped by all those around him. But Jeremiah heard the whole word, not just the word that made life comfortable and predictable. For that he was attacked, betrayed by friends, and abused. But we do not have the bland words of comfort of his friends to inspire us. We have Jeremiah the broken-hearted man who accepted no cheap comfort, who although complaining before God opened his heart and mind to the challenging Word he heard.
It is a way of death and resurrection, says Paul. To those who simply added belief in Jesus as Messiah to their array of beliefs, Paul makes clear that to follow Jesus is to enter willingly into Jesus’ death in order to be raised with him to new life. This way would lead to rejection by faithful followers of Moses as well as by Roman Gentiles. Not a popular road, but one that leads us into the heart of God.
And “take up your cross”? We now know that the cross was an execution reserved by the Romans for capital crimes, for revolution and for subversion. The Romans did not really care what you believed just so long as you paid your taxes and obeyed Roman law. If Jesus was harmless, just a gentle man teaching a gentle personal faith, he would not have been crucified. The Romans were quite practical and consistent this way. Private faith is not threatening. Faith that challenges the empire, the status quo, the way that business as usual is done—that is threatening. The Way of Jesus threatened to overturn both the business of the Jerusalem Temple as well as the rule and priorities of the Romans. In a real sense the Romans were quite correct in crucifying Jesus. He was an enemy of the state, whose Gospel meant the end of the rule of tyrants and the powerful.
When Jesus says “take up your cross”, he means embrace my radical and life-changing, world-changing way. Walk with me on a dangerous road, a road that leads from death to life.
Yesterday at the ordination I heard from the rector of St Stephen’s downtown how they transformed their church into a congregation of radical hospitality to the people of the streets. A deacon came to church dressed as a homeless man and preached, speaking from the standpoint of the poor and their experience walking into a comfortable church. The people of St. Stephen’s heard that word and began, from that day, to take up the cross that for years they had simply adored.
And we have taken up our own cross in our bi-lingual and bi-cultural journey. Yesterday we heard moving testimony from one of our leaders who had experienced several segregated congregations in Portland before coming here and plunging into life and leadership at SPP. Life is different here, he and his spouse assert. Nowhere have they experienced a church where two language-groups and cultures are simply together as one.
This is part of our Way of the cross, as we pay the price of walking a Way that is often not comfortable, that does not “feel like the old church” or does not feel like many other churches at all. But here we try in our way to break down barriers, to address and dismantle assumptions of power, to make the concerns of all members our concerns, the struggles of all members our struggles, to welcome fully.
There are many ways to find comfort in this world. Portland is full of such comfort—a lovely privileged life so long as you have enough money for coffee shops and food carts and a couple of trips up the Gorge or out to the coast. But there is another way, the way of the cross, the way of walking with and embracing those different and learning more and more about ourselves, about others, about the Gospel, about Jesus, about the Way of God. About the Cross.
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html
Like many new clergy, I too had a honeymoon period with the parish, now almost 20 years ago. That is a sweet if somewhat unrealistic time that a pastor and a congregation will share, similar to a honeymoon in a committed relationship. After a search process and much anticipation, the new clergy arrives, and we’re all rather enchanted with one another. Everything is new, everything is wondrous, everything seems possible, there is new energy and new hope.
During this period, a wonderful faithful member of the congregation approached me with a sense of delight. He slapped me on the back and said, “Everything is going so well! Everyone likes you so much! And there are no complaints.”
I stood there and suddenly, for me, the busy room fell silent. Something went cold inside of me. As this very kind man walked away, I thought to myself that if those words were carved on my tombstone, “Everyone liked him and had no complaints”, that I would not care to appear before God to have my ministry judged.
“Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
The cost of the Gospel is shot through all our readings today.
“Take up your cross” has, through the years, been tamed and made a private sort of piety. My long-suffering Irish Catholic mother modeled this kind of spirituality and taught it to me. Whenever something came along to test my personal patience as a kid—a splinter in my knee, the ice cream man coming late to the neighborhood—mom would say “offer it up.” The message was clear—life’s little troubles gave me material that would make God happy as long as I had the right attitude.
We miss the Gospel, and for that matter the prophets and the message of Paul, if the cost of discipleship, the cost of following Jesus, becomes for us a private way of making sense of the suffering that life brings.
To listen to God and act on what we hear, to be a person baptized into the death of Jesus, to follow Jesus on his way—is a different path indeed.
It is a way that breaks the heart, says Jeremiah. Jeremiah hears the living God but almost seems to regret listening. Betrayal and violence followed him as he struggled to be faithful to the living word he heard. Jeremiah was simply obedient to the word that the God of Israel was speaking to him, the same God who was worshipped by all those around him. But Jeremiah heard the whole word, not just the word that made life comfortable and predictable. For that he was attacked, betrayed by friends, and abused. But we do not have the bland words of comfort of his friends to inspire us. We have Jeremiah the broken-hearted man who accepted no cheap comfort, who although complaining before God opened his heart and mind to the challenging Word he heard.
It is a way of death and resurrection, says Paul. To those who simply added belief in Jesus as Messiah to their array of beliefs, Paul makes clear that to follow Jesus is to enter willingly into Jesus’ death in order to be raised with him to new life. This way would lead to rejection by faithful followers of Moses as well as by Roman Gentiles. Not a popular road, but one that leads us into the heart of God.
And “take up your cross”? We now know that the cross was an execution reserved by the Romans for capital crimes, for revolution and for subversion. The Romans did not really care what you believed just so long as you paid your taxes and obeyed Roman law. If Jesus was harmless, just a gentle man teaching a gentle personal faith, he would not have been crucified. The Romans were quite practical and consistent this way. Private faith is not threatening. Faith that challenges the empire, the status quo, the way that business as usual is done—that is threatening. The Way of Jesus threatened to overturn both the business of the Jerusalem Temple as well as the rule and priorities of the Romans. In a real sense the Romans were quite correct in crucifying Jesus. He was an enemy of the state, whose Gospel meant the end of the rule of tyrants and the powerful.
When Jesus says “take up your cross”, he means embrace my radical and life-changing, world-changing way. Walk with me on a dangerous road, a road that leads from death to life.
Yesterday at the ordination I heard from the rector of St Stephen’s downtown how they transformed their church into a congregation of radical hospitality to the people of the streets. A deacon came to church dressed as a homeless man and preached, speaking from the standpoint of the poor and their experience walking into a comfortable church. The people of St. Stephen’s heard that word and began, from that day, to take up the cross that for years they had simply adored.
And we have taken up our own cross in our bi-lingual and bi-cultural journey. Yesterday we heard moving testimony from one of our leaders who had experienced several segregated congregations in Portland before coming here and plunging into life and leadership at SPP. Life is different here, he and his spouse assert. Nowhere have they experienced a church where two language-groups and cultures are simply together as one.
This is part of our Way of the cross, as we pay the price of walking a Way that is often not comfortable, that does not “feel like the old church” or does not feel like many other churches at all. But here we try in our way to break down barriers, to address and dismantle assumptions of power, to make the concerns of all members our concerns, the struggles of all members our struggles, to welcome fully.
There are many ways to find comfort in this world. Portland is full of such comfort—a lovely privileged life so long as you have enough money for coffee shops and food carts and a couple of trips up the Gorge or out to the coast. But there is another way, the way of the cross, the way of walking with and embracing those different and learning more and more about ourselves, about others, about the Gospel, about Jesus, about the Way of God. About the Cross.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
I do not know
(Note: this homily was preached at the ordination of Jonna Alexander and Brad Tobbein to the transitional diaconate)
Ordination June 2014
Jeremiah 1: 4-9; 2 Cor 4: 1-6; Luke 22: 24-27
Once long ago in the desert, a group of the elder hermit monks came to see the great Abba Antony. Abba Antony decided to turn the conversation to the Holy Scriptures, so he read a passage and asked the monks to offer their comments. Each of the monks thought long and carefully and then spoke, offering their best interpretation. Finally it was the turn of the last monk, Abba Joseph. All eyes were on him as he looked up and said simply, “I do not know.” Abba Antony said, “Truly Abba Joseph has found the way, for he said ‘I do not know.’”
It is not recommended that you try this approach on any of your papers or exams. A professor might be amused, especially if they know this story, but they will not be impressed.
I could not resist telling that desert tale today as we gather for the ordination of two very scholarly and erudite candidates. Brad and Jonna are both known by us as fine students, intellectually oriented, and ready to give richly of these gifts to us, to the church. That is a good thing, a heartening thing. We need deeply intelligent and learned people to offer themselves, and in the words of a Collect “we pray that the Church never be destitute of such gifts.”
But among your friends and family and well-wishers and those who just like ordinations, because face it—ordinations are pretty cool, we bask in the hope and the faith here and we wish to catch a glimpse of Spirit as she rushes by—among the congregation wise old Abba Antony added himself to the guest list. And his ordination gift is his knowledge of the Way—“I do not know.”
Because Jonna and Brad do not know what they are getting into. How can they? None of us do. When each of us accepted baptism, we were not promised a road-map. Instead we were plunged into mystery, into wild-waters. In Baptism we belong to Christ, forever. We dwell wherever Christ dwells. And Christ dwells in startling places—in alleys and forgotten empty lots, in houses with broken windows outside of which gunfire punctures the night, in the back wards of hospitals, under bridges, in lonely rooms where unseen tears are shed, in the depths of hearts broken by life yet often masked by smooth fixed facial expressions and the appearance of “normality”, whatever that is. At the heart of creation, a place infinitely small as well as infinitely vast, there Christ dwells. Most surprising, most mysterious and wondrous and startling of all, Christ dwells in the intricate and only partially-explored depths of our own wondering and longing hearts.
That’s where the baptized live with Christ. Anyone accepting the church’s ordination re-affirms that and commits to seek and proclaim and adore and serve that Christ.
Brad and Jonna, if you accept the church’s ordering today, you are charged to seek that Christ with your whole life’s blood and soul. Seek that Christ, in all the places where Christ is truly the hidden God. Seek that Christ in the heart of the church. The church, the kyriakon, the gathering that belongs to God. Nothing and no one that belongs to God are perfect and resolved and consistent and finished. The church is that mad merry and grieving band of wanderers, often lost and often wrong, always moving and never still, broken and sinful and capable of great good and great ill. The church is a gathering of the broken-hearted who are willing to try one more day. And the church will break your heart—I tell you that on the best authority. And when your heart is broken, yours will be the choice to walk with her one more day. Your broken heart will teach you wisdom.
And you will not know how the journey will end.
Learning will not reveal that. But the flame implanted in your heart by God will make that next step possible.
Jeremiah knew that next step. Few hearts are so openly broken as is Jeremiah’s. Few paid such a price for belonging to God. Few knew so many doubts and so much pain, pain that Jeremiah screamed into the heavens. But few there are whose words so thunder through the ages. It was not his knowing, but his surrender, his laying of his broken fearful heart before God that made the doubt-filled young man into the prophet. “Now I have put my words in your mouth” said the Holy One, blessed be the Name. We pray that today for you: words placed in your mouth even amidst doubt and fear, a heart willing to be open and to be broken. On that holy ground, ground tilled and harrowed, there God will grow the Gospel
And Paul takes you by the hand and welcomes you as kin and partners. He invites you to proclaim not yourselves but Jesus as Lord. That is hard, dear friends, take it from me, because ego is seductive and is good at hiding behind the purest of motives. Part of the journey of ordination is uncovering, sometimes by failure, the tangle of one’s actual motives. There will come a day when you will awaken to that tangle of mixed and messy human motivations and simply cry “Christ have mercy.” In that moment Christ will shine in you, not granting you worldly success but making you worthy of the trust of all the glorious sinners and ragged saints who know their own failures, and who need someone to speak Christ to them, someone who loves them and who feels their own poverty and need. On that day, in those moments, your vocation will be ratified and re-born.
Where you will be, what you will do, how things will go, who you will be is all unknown. Thank God for that. Only tourists know exactly where they are going. The church does not need tourists, people just passing through to pick up souvenirs of career or ambition or gratification. The church needs pilgrims, fellow-journeyers with all of us who have no idea what the journey’s end will be, who do not even fully know ourselves and the mystery of what Christ is working in our own hearts. But please walk with us. As you say “yes” and accept the laying on of hands, please embrace the unknowing, the deep mystery, the immersion into the church’s heart as we walk in an uncertain world where structures are fading and the Gospel is deemed irrelevant and there is no path as the poet said—the path is made by walking.
And that old hermit Antony will smile again, and say “Truly they have found the way, for they say ‘I do not know.’” You do not know, but you say “yes.”
Ordination June 2014
Jeremiah 1: 4-9; 2 Cor 4: 1-6; Luke 22: 24-27
Once long ago in the desert, a group of the elder hermit monks came to see the great Abba Antony. Abba Antony decided to turn the conversation to the Holy Scriptures, so he read a passage and asked the monks to offer their comments. Each of the monks thought long and carefully and then spoke, offering their best interpretation. Finally it was the turn of the last monk, Abba Joseph. All eyes were on him as he looked up and said simply, “I do not know.” Abba Antony said, “Truly Abba Joseph has found the way, for he said ‘I do not know.’”
It is not recommended that you try this approach on any of your papers or exams. A professor might be amused, especially if they know this story, but they will not be impressed.
I could not resist telling that desert tale today as we gather for the ordination of two very scholarly and erudite candidates. Brad and Jonna are both known by us as fine students, intellectually oriented, and ready to give richly of these gifts to us, to the church. That is a good thing, a heartening thing. We need deeply intelligent and learned people to offer themselves, and in the words of a Collect “we pray that the Church never be destitute of such gifts.”
But among your friends and family and well-wishers and those who just like ordinations, because face it—ordinations are pretty cool, we bask in the hope and the faith here and we wish to catch a glimpse of Spirit as she rushes by—among the congregation wise old Abba Antony added himself to the guest list. And his ordination gift is his knowledge of the Way—“I do not know.”
Because Jonna and Brad do not know what they are getting into. How can they? None of us do. When each of us accepted baptism, we were not promised a road-map. Instead we were plunged into mystery, into wild-waters. In Baptism we belong to Christ, forever. We dwell wherever Christ dwells. And Christ dwells in startling places—in alleys and forgotten empty lots, in houses with broken windows outside of which gunfire punctures the night, in the back wards of hospitals, under bridges, in lonely rooms where unseen tears are shed, in the depths of hearts broken by life yet often masked by smooth fixed facial expressions and the appearance of “normality”, whatever that is. At the heart of creation, a place infinitely small as well as infinitely vast, there Christ dwells. Most surprising, most mysterious and wondrous and startling of all, Christ dwells in the intricate and only partially-explored depths of our own wondering and longing hearts.
That’s where the baptized live with Christ. Anyone accepting the church’s ordination re-affirms that and commits to seek and proclaim and adore and serve that Christ.
Brad and Jonna, if you accept the church’s ordering today, you are charged to seek that Christ with your whole life’s blood and soul. Seek that Christ, in all the places where Christ is truly the hidden God. Seek that Christ in the heart of the church. The church, the kyriakon, the gathering that belongs to God. Nothing and no one that belongs to God are perfect and resolved and consistent and finished. The church is that mad merry and grieving band of wanderers, often lost and often wrong, always moving and never still, broken and sinful and capable of great good and great ill. The church is a gathering of the broken-hearted who are willing to try one more day. And the church will break your heart—I tell you that on the best authority. And when your heart is broken, yours will be the choice to walk with her one more day. Your broken heart will teach you wisdom.
And you will not know how the journey will end.
Learning will not reveal that. But the flame implanted in your heart by God will make that next step possible.
Jeremiah knew that next step. Few hearts are so openly broken as is Jeremiah’s. Few paid such a price for belonging to God. Few knew so many doubts and so much pain, pain that Jeremiah screamed into the heavens. But few there are whose words so thunder through the ages. It was not his knowing, but his surrender, his laying of his broken fearful heart before God that made the doubt-filled young man into the prophet. “Now I have put my words in your mouth” said the Holy One, blessed be the Name. We pray that today for you: words placed in your mouth even amidst doubt and fear, a heart willing to be open and to be broken. On that holy ground, ground tilled and harrowed, there God will grow the Gospel
And Paul takes you by the hand and welcomes you as kin and partners. He invites you to proclaim not yourselves but Jesus as Lord. That is hard, dear friends, take it from me, because ego is seductive and is good at hiding behind the purest of motives. Part of the journey of ordination is uncovering, sometimes by failure, the tangle of one’s actual motives. There will come a day when you will awaken to that tangle of mixed and messy human motivations and simply cry “Christ have mercy.” In that moment Christ will shine in you, not granting you worldly success but making you worthy of the trust of all the glorious sinners and ragged saints who know their own failures, and who need someone to speak Christ to them, someone who loves them and who feels their own poverty and need. On that day, in those moments, your vocation will be ratified and re-born.
Where you will be, what you will do, how things will go, who you will be is all unknown. Thank God for that. Only tourists know exactly where they are going. The church does not need tourists, people just passing through to pick up souvenirs of career or ambition or gratification. The church needs pilgrims, fellow-journeyers with all of us who have no idea what the journey’s end will be, who do not even fully know ourselves and the mystery of what Christ is working in our own hearts. But please walk with us. As you say “yes” and accept the laying on of hands, please embrace the unknowing, the deep mystery, the immersion into the church’s heart as we walk in an uncertain world where structures are fading and the Gospel is deemed irrelevant and there is no path as the poet said—the path is made by walking.
And that old hermit Antony will smile again, and say “Truly they have found the way, for they say ‘I do not know.’” You do not know, but you say “yes.”
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
The promise of empty space/La promesa del espacio abierto
Ascension Sunday/Domingo del Ascension 2014
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of absence. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de ausensia.
The beloved Master and Lord is taken from the disciples. El Maestro y Senor tan amable se tomo desde los discipulos.
Right when they need him the most is when they lose him. Cuando ellos se necesitan, el se sale.
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of confusion. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de confusion.
I wonder what the disciples were thinking and feeling when the Lord was taken from them. Quiero saber que pensaron los discipulos cuando su Senor se salio. Even the Gospel of Luke says that they were confused as to what all these amazing events really meant. Aunque el Evangelio de San Lucas dice que eran confusado que significa todas de estas cosas tan maravillosas. “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?” “Señor, ¿vas a restablecer en este momento el reino de Israel?” Are you going to defeat the Romans and the corrupt priests in the Temple? ?Derrotaras a los Romanos y los sacerdotes corruptos en el Templo?
So when the Lord was taken from them, here’s what I imagine they were thinking…Esto es que yo pienso que los discipulos pensaron cuando el Senor se salio:
Where is he going, and is he coming right back? ?Adonde va, y se regresara pronto?
Who’s in charge now? ?Quien esta encargada?
What do we do now? ?Que hacemos ahora?
And maybe, does anyone know where we parked? ?Quien sabe donde estamos estacionado?
It’s the same kind of confusion. Es lo mismo tipo de confusion.
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of doubt and faith. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de duda y de confianza.
As the disciples returned to Jerusalem, what did they talk about? Or did they share a long silence? ?Cuando regresaron los discipulos a Jerusalem, que les hablaron? ?O les quedaron en silencio?
One thing they did was to stay together. Another thing they did was pray. Les quedaron juntos. Y ademas les oraron. They went back to the Temple, the place that their faith told them was where prayers were heard by God. Les regresaron al Templo donde ellos creeian que el Dios se escucha a sus oraciones.
And they believed that that Advocate, of whom Jesus spoke, would come. Y ademas creeian que el Paracleto de quien hablaba el Senor se viene.
We also often wonder where Jesus has gone. Nosotros tambien queremos saber adonde va el Senor Jesus. We also wonder what it is we are supposed to do next. Y queremos saber que tenemos a hacer. We wonder who is in charge, or who will cut the church grass, or any number of things that seem so important to people. Queremos saber quien esta encargada, o quien puede cortar el pasto afuera de la iglesia, o muchas otros cosas que parecen tan important por la gente.
But we stay together as a new and different people at Saints Peter and Paul. Quedamos juntos como un pueblo nuevo y diferente a San Pedro y San Pablo. And we pray, here in this place where God hears prayer. And we hope. Oramos aqui en este lugar donde el Dios se escucha a nuestras oraciones. Y tambien esperamos.
We believe the Spirit of God has already been poured out upon us. Creemos que el Espiritu de Dios ya esta derramada en nuestras corazones.
God-Spirit is here. And yet, God-Spirit is coming. Dios el Espiritu Santo esta aqui y ademas se viene.
Today we meet even if we have confusion and doubt. Reunimos todavia aunque tenemos confusion y dudas. Today we meet and pray. Todavia reunimos y oramos. We look at one another and wonder who is in charge, what is the plan? A ver uno al otro y preguntamos quien esta encargada y que es el plan. But instead of easy answers or going somewhere else, we are asking for God-Spirit. Pero en vez de contestas faciles o andamos a un otro lugar, se pedimos por el Espiritu Santo.
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of absence. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de ausensia.
The beloved Master and Lord is taken from the disciples. El Maestro y Senor tan amable se tomo desde los discipulos.
Right when they need him the most is when they lose him. Cuando ellos se necesitan, el se sale.
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of confusion. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de confusion.
I wonder what the disciples were thinking and feeling when the Lord was taken from them. Quiero saber que pensaron los discipulos cuando su Senor se salio. Even the Gospel of Luke says that they were confused as to what all these amazing events really meant. Aunque el Evangelio de San Lucas dice que eran confusado que significa todas de estas cosas tan maravillosas. “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?” “Señor, ¿vas a restablecer en este momento el reino de Israel?” Are you going to defeat the Romans and the corrupt priests in the Temple? ?Derrotaras a los Romanos y los sacerdotes corruptos en el Templo?
So when the Lord was taken from them, here’s what I imagine they were thinking…Esto es que yo pienso que los discipulos pensaron cuando el Senor se salio:
Where is he going, and is he coming right back? ?Adonde va, y se regresara pronto?
Who’s in charge now? ?Quien esta encargada?
What do we do now? ?Que hacemos ahora?
And maybe, does anyone know where we parked? ?Quien sabe donde estamos estacionado?
It’s the same kind of confusion. Es lo mismo tipo de confusion.
The mystery of the Ascension is a mystery of doubt and faith. El misterio del Ascension es un misterio de duda y de confianza.
As the disciples returned to Jerusalem, what did they talk about? Or did they share a long silence? ?Cuando regresaron los discipulos a Jerusalem, que les hablaron? ?O les quedaron en silencio?
One thing they did was to stay together. Another thing they did was pray. Les quedaron juntos. Y ademas les oraron. They went back to the Temple, the place that their faith told them was where prayers were heard by God. Les regresaron al Templo donde ellos creeian que el Dios se escucha a sus oraciones.
And they believed that that Advocate, of whom Jesus spoke, would come. Y ademas creeian que el Paracleto de quien hablaba el Senor se viene.
We also often wonder where Jesus has gone. Nosotros tambien queremos saber adonde va el Senor Jesus. We also wonder what it is we are supposed to do next. Y queremos saber que tenemos a hacer. We wonder who is in charge, or who will cut the church grass, or any number of things that seem so important to people. Queremos saber quien esta encargada, o quien puede cortar el pasto afuera de la iglesia, o muchas otros cosas que parecen tan important por la gente.
But we stay together as a new and different people at Saints Peter and Paul. Quedamos juntos como un pueblo nuevo y diferente a San Pedro y San Pablo. And we pray, here in this place where God hears prayer. And we hope. Oramos aqui en este lugar donde el Dios se escucha a nuestras oraciones. Y tambien esperamos.
We believe the Spirit of God has already been poured out upon us. Creemos que el Espiritu de Dios ya esta derramada en nuestras corazones.
God-Spirit is here. And yet, God-Spirit is coming. Dios el Espiritu Santo esta aqui y ademas se viene.
Today we meet even if we have confusion and doubt. Reunimos todavia aunque tenemos confusion y dudas. Today we meet and pray. Todavia reunimos y oramos. We look at one another and wonder who is in charge, what is the plan? A ver uno al otro y preguntamos quien esta encargada y que es el plan. But instead of easy answers or going somewhere else, we are asking for God-Spirit. Pero en vez de contestas faciles o andamos a un otro lugar, se pedimos por el Espiritu Santo.
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