First Sunday After Christmas

(Guest preacher: Malcolm Heath)

The gospel today was the first thing we tried to translate when I took Greek in college.  We sat down, with very little of the language under our belts other than a rough approximation of how we might pronounce the words, and attempted to apprehend the meaning of this passage.

En arche – we sounded this out

En arche ain ho logos – In beginning was the word

kai ho logos ain pros ton theon – and the word was towards the God

This is heady stuff to read in the original.  We got the meaning, but not necessarily the _meaning_.  The translator is a traitor, goes the old saying.  How else could it be?  Take a text, any text, in any language far removed from your own, in time, in space, and attempt to figure out what it meant to the person who wrote it, and to those who first heard it.  What, indeed, would an ad for post-Thanksgiving “doorbuster” deals mean to someone 1500 years from now? 

And this particular text, well this particular text is among I think the very hardest to really understand, because it deals with who Christ is, and was, and perhaps even, who He is to be. 

We just celebrated the Incarnation, Christmas, and we say that this is the time we celebrate a remarkable happening – that God became human, manifest in flesh, and came into the world. 

But, what does that mean?  As it turns out, this has been a central question for Christians for centuries.  And it’s an important question, even know, and I would say, a question that will always be important to us.  It’s a question that’s fraught with complexity, and no small part of danger, theology so thick and dense and difficult that it’s the life work of a believer to attempt to apprehend it.

If we place too strong an emphasis on the divinity of Christ, we may make him too much a God, and too little of a man.  God becomes human, but only in appearances, not in reality.  Clothed in flesh, certainly, but not actually human.  This has all sorts of implications, doesn’t it?  That he didn’t _really_ suffer on the Cross (for how can God feel pain?)  That he knew all the answers, and never doubted himself, and thus, never cried out, never wept, not really, and always knew exactly what to say. 

If, on the other hand, we place too much emphasis on Jesus as a man, we run the risk of making him merely a sage, a wise man, a leader.  Indeed, in the Jewish conception of a messiah, that’s exactly what he was supposed to be – a leader, a king, someone sent and inspired by God, but not God himself.  And if we believe that Jesus was that sort of messiah, then he failed.  After his death, the Romans still ruled over Jerusalem.  The temple still stood.  No golden age followed. 

He must be both – both the God who existed before anything else, in the beginning, but also the babe born of Mary – the one who will come again, to judge the quick and the dead, but also the man who cried out on the cross in pain and fear. 

The god who healed the sick.  The man who yelled at his mother.  The God who walked on water and calmed the storm.  The man who overturned tables in his Father’s house.

The man who was more than just a man, but wasn’t any less than one.  The sort of man who could convince fishermen to follow him with a word or a glance – and the sort of God who could conceive of a victory not over another God King, like Ceasar, but over death and fear and sin.

I find it odd that we’re so quick to think we understand the powers of a God.  That we can detail those qualities of the divine which we seem to easily be able to summon up in our minds – overwhelming love, powerful justice, miracles of healing, and vast creative energies.  And I also find it odd that we are so terribly slow to realize that the power in this story comes not from the powers of a God, but the powers of a human – a human who would stop to heal a leper, who would try to help the blind see and the lame walk.  It’s the God that he is that did those things, but the human he was that thought to do them in the first place.   That thought that it would be good to teach.  To wander far from family and place to try, in however small a way, to heal the world. 

Jesus the Christ – who said his father was God.  And who said that we, too, are children of the most high.  And who raged and cried and laughed and drank and ate, and eventually died.  The secret here, my friends, is not that he was God who was man, or that he was a man who was also God, but that by his very life, he showed that the two are not that far apart – that there can be a union of the divine and the human, with neither sacrificing what each is to join with the other.  God and human, together, at long last.

And now, and still, and forever.

Amen. 

Recognize

CHRISTMAS DAY, 2012 10:00 a.m. - Low Mass with Carols The Parish of Ss. Peter & Paul, Portland
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Biblical scholar and teacher of preaching Fred Craddock tells the story of a missionary sent to preach the Gospel in India toward the end of World War II. After many months, the time came for him to return home for a furlough.

His church wired him the money to book passage on a steamer; but when he got to the port city, he discovered that a boatload of Jews had just been allowed to land temporarily. These were the days when European Jews were sailing all over the world, literally looking for a place to live. These particular Jews were now staying in attics and warehouses and basements all over that port city.

It happened to be Christmas, and on Christmas morning, this missionary went to one of the attics where scores of Jews were staying. He walked in and said, "Merry Christmas."

The people looked at him as if he were crazy and responded, "We're Jews."
"I know that," said the missionary. "What would you like for Christmas?"

In utter amazement, the Jews responded, "Why, we'd like pastries, good pastries, like the ones we used to have in Germany."

So the missionary went out and used the money for his ticket home to buy pastries for all the Jews he could find staying in the port. Of course, then he had to wire home, asking for more money to book his passage back to the States.

As you might expect, his superiors wired back, asking what had happened to the money they had already sent. He wired that he had used it to buy Christmas pastries for some Jews.

His superiors wired back, "Why did you do that? They don't even believe in Jesus."
He wired in return: "Yes, but I do!"

Jesus will not always be found where we expect to find him. We tend to look for him in the easy, the nice, the clean, the pristine, the proper: we look for him in churches and in other Christians, in Scriptures, and in our Christmas carols, in church-sanctioned activities and clearly-defined tasks of ministry. But if these are the only places we are looking for him, then we're not looking in the stable, in the dirt and the straw and the deprivation where the real story, the actual birth took place.

We are not looking for him at a shopping mall a few blocks down 82nd Avenue from us. We are not looking for him in the faces of children and their mentors brutally murdered by a crazy man with a powerful weapon available to the public. Or at the little ones who will be forever traumatized by that horrible day a week ago last Friday.

Michel Quoist, the late French Roman Catholic priest who's quite famous for Prayers, his monumental small book of personal, and yet very profound, prayers for everything from "Prayer in Front of a Dollar Bill" to "Prayer of a Priest on Sunday Evening." He wrote about Christmas:

I am not made of plaster, nor of stone, nor of bronze. I am living flesh throbbing, suffering. I am among men and women and they have not recognized Me. I am poorly paid, I am unemployed, I live in a slum. I am sick, I sleep under bridges, I am in prison. I am oppressed, I am patronized. I sweat men's blood on all battlefields. I cry out in the night and die in the solitude of battle. And yet I said to them: "Whatever you do to My brothers or sisters, however humble, You do to Me."

Gathered at Bethlehem's manger, we are poised between love's completion or frustration, between love's triumph or tragedy. God's enfleshment in Jesus is love's risk. It is God's vulnerability. God's fullness made empty. God's richness made poor. God's "otherness" become flesh and blood--for us and for our salvation. The power of response is in our hands.

Let us pray, then, for the gift of recognition, which is indeed the message of Christmas. Today we can contemplate together what has unfolded at Bethlehem and acknowledge the meaning of Jesus as the holiest, riskiest sacrament of God's love that ever occurred.

"The things she knew let her forget again:
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the strange old men piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one.
Teach her the endless tuneless songs to sing.
Grant her the right to whisper to her son the foolish things one dare not call a king; keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of roughcut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go,
And boast his pretty words and ways,
And plan the proud and happy years that they shall know together, when her son is grown a man." (Dorothy Parker)

Delivered by the Rev. Phil Ayers

The Christmas sermon I need to hear

Christmas 2012
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/ChrsDay1_RCL.html


Light is for traveling.

Just the other day we drove through the usual Portland winter mix of daytime murk and rain. I strained to see out of the windshield. The windshield wipers, de-fogger, and the outside washer did not seem to clear the glass. I realized that the inside of the windshield was lightly covered with a haze that comes simply from people breathing. Only if that would be washed away could enough light break through to let me see.

And light breaking through is necessary to travel anywhere.

Another Christmas has arrived, thank God. Frederick Beuchner said that no matter how commercial and crass and clichéd we have made it, we simply cannot quite ruin Christmas. This is due to the absolute power, the unthinkably pure and bright Light that has blazed upon us, the outrageous claim that not only in the polite and well-ordered portion of our lives, but in the darkest corners, in the earthiest and most shadowy parts of our lives and of our world, uncreated Light has blazed forth. I have seen the gentle light of a single candle in a quiet room. I have also seen a lighthouse beam lance dazzlingly across storm-tossed waters. I have seen gentle, silent dawn. I have also been blinded by a headlamp in my eyes when I lay lost and helpless in a tunnel in a Missouri cave. I have opened a door in a tenement apartment to reveal the lonely, impoverished elderly woman living in fear in a crime-infested neighborhood. I have seen the Light, in many different forms. I suspect you have too.

It’s all light, and at the risk of using another old cliché it is all good. The Light reveals us and reveals what we need to see. The Light reveals what is real. In the New Testament the same word is used for “truth” and “real.”

But we do get used to the dark. That’s good, because darkness is everywhere and if we could not adapt then we could not survive. Eyes grow accustomed to the dark, if we wait long enough. People grow accustomed also to other forms of darkness—sadness, hopelessness, fear, oppression, poverty…how easily things become the “new normal”, and we accept what before seemed unthinkable. Most recently we have been tempted to accept as normal a world filled with violence and with the ready availability of weapons that should never find their way into the hands of the irresponsible or the mentally ill, perhaps into no one’s hands at all.

But the Light that has come into the world, the Light of the Incarnation, the light of Christmas, chases away every shadow and allows us to see clearly. All we need to do is clear our sight just a little, just like clearing the glass from inside a windshield.

A contemporary church thinker sent out a post entitled “The Sermon I need to hear this Christmas.” I think his title works well as a question—what is the sermon you most need to hear this Christmas?

That is a question worth chewing on, and perhaps we can all chew on it during these 12 days of Christmas. I share with you the sermon I most need to hear this Christmas, because preachers usually preach what they themselves most need to hear, what they most need to work on.

This Christmas I most need to hear the message of the Angels, that born long ago in the city of David was the Messiah, the Lord. I need to hear that that birth is not a long-ago truth, as beautiful as that truth may be. I need to hear that the Son of God is always being born, in our midst, especially among the poorest and most forgotten. I need to hear that God-made-flesh is born in me, is constantly coming to birth in me, that the new Light of Bethlehem is the new Light made flesh in my flesh. This is no new idea; it is good solid orthodox faith. So many saints and scholars have said it. So many quiet people have lived it. That gift, the birth of the Christ-light in me and in you, is the gift that lies always at the foot of the Christmas tree and lies at our feet ready each day of our lives. All we need do is unwrap it.

I most need to hear that the Light of the world shines not only in a lovely church service and in cherished family gatherings, but also in the darkest and most sorrowing places of the world. The ever-new Light shines in Newtown even though the grieving people there are not sure if it is time to celebrate it. It shines in Palestine, in Bethlehem of today which is surrounded by a 25 foot high wall that would keep the shepherds from visiting the manger without passing through a checkpoint. It shines in the shadowy corners of the city where homeless people will huddle tonight, just another night of seeking warmth. If these dark places threaten to eclipse the Light of Christmas, then I have not heard the message of the angels and have not opened my eyes to see the true Light that enlightens everyone, everywhere, for all time.

And I most need to hear that the Light of the Incarnation, the Light of Christmas, will follow me from this place and will follow me after this night and the day after, and will stay with me to throw light upon my path. I need to hear that during whatever challenge or trial the days ahead might hold for me and for the world, the Light will show me what to do and give me strength to do it.

And I most need to hear that I shall not be alone, that the Company of the Light, those who seek to live by the Light of Christmas, of the Christ-Mass, are with me, both here in this church and abroad in the world. I need to hear that others who seek and serve and delight in the Light will be with me, will join hands with me, and that together we will be vessels of the Light of Christ in a world that has adapted to the shadows.

That’s the Christmas sermon I need to hear.

Light is for traveling. We are here so briefly, together, by the light of candles, basking in the glow of song and prayer and sacrament. When we leave, we will switch on headlights or bicycle lamps, or maybe walk by the glow of street-lamps to find our way home. Light is for traveling. The world grows accustomed to stumbling in darkness. May we gently wipe our eyes and our hearts, that we may receive each day the uncreated Light that illumines our souls.

Tears and joy

Advent 3C
http://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv3_RCL.html

Today is Gaudate Sunday – Literally “Be Joyful” Sunday. It is quite a paradox – this command to be joyful - standing in stark relief to the overwhelming sadness of this week. I do not think there are adequate words to make sense of the violence, the loss, the pain, the darkness of our world that was so violently made clear in Connecticut and in Clackamas this week. So this is real – at first all we can do is wail and cry and pray: Here is a prayer from a Christian Century in response to Friday’s shootings:

God of the broken-hearted,
God of the broken heart,
Receive our sighs
too deep for words.
In your time
by your grace
heal us.
In this meantime
hold us
as we weep.
Hold us and rock us
with the rhythm
of your own
grief-struck
quaking
body.
Amen

We start there, crying the tears that are our own, and crying the tears that belong to the God of love. Perhaps this is where the paradox of joy enters, that we have a God who weeps and wails at this loss.

Kafka tells a story of a little girl who was late coming home. When her mother inquired about where she had been she shared that she had stopped to help a friend who had broken her doll. When the mother asked if she had helped fix the doll the girl proclaimed, “oh no, I do not know how to fix it. I stopped to help her cry.” We cry and pray today for our own grief and for those who are too sad, too angry, too lost to do it for themselves.

This broken world – this is where God chose incarnation – vulnerable flesh – a quiet light in a world already filled with darkness. There were perhaps not guns, but he chose to come into a world in which a King would kill innocent babes to secure his reign, where oppression and occupation dictated daily life…and he chooses to come now, into this world where innocents continue to die – a world as much in need of a savior as ever. We wait again to experience his choice to come willingly into this darkness, to love its people.

And so it is the wisdom of these lectionary texts and of the traditions of the church to command joy in the face of the evil of the world. Because, as Paul proclaims, “the Lord is near” and the story of our faith would proclaim that this violence, death, and pain do not have the final word but that “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it!”

So, what does it mean to be joyful in the face of such tragedy? The readings today give us a very different picture of joy than we expect. They tie up this experience of joy with repentance, with hope when things seem lost, and with generosity. The theme of joy here is this: Hope and generosity must rule our hearts even when we are tempted with fear and despair.

After getting the crowd’s attention with colorful comparisons of the crowd to a frightened, spawn of snakes John presents the first step in the life of Joy… “bear fruits worthy of repentance”.

To talk of repentance in the midst of tragedy perhaps seems harsh. And I want to be clear that I am not in any way suggesting that these events are God’s wrath in response to our sinfulness, but am talking about that sense of repentance in which we are able to see the ways that our choices embrace rather than reject a culture in which such tragedy could happen. All of the readings today, to some extent, equate the depth of joy with turning away-repenting from- death.

Can we tolerate asking ourselves today what parts of our existence contribute to a culture of death? Can we, like the crowds stand before John and our God and ask, “what then shall we do?”

One thing I believe repentance means today is a turning away from what would be our natural response to violence: fear, a desire to lock ourselves away, to choose protection above connection to the marginalized people of our world…we would wish to seek comfort. But John doesn’t let the crowds fall back into comfort and safety. He defines this fruit, this joy, very differently. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” They will not be able to hold onto the safety of their careful planning or to their strength, they are asked to risk their safety and comfort for their neighbor. He asks for an act of trust and hope. Here it is again, hope and generosity must win over fear and despair.

What does this mean for us today? I imagine a contemporary writing to include language like: “If you have power, use it for the powerless. If you have a voice, speak for the unheard. If you have been heard, give your ear to the discounted. If you have been loved, love the unloved.”

What is it we hold onto that John would challenge us to share? In what places do we allow fear and despair to trump hope and generosity? Do we trust that in sharing we will experience joy?

I think it is a natural temptation, but one we must resist, to respond to the events of this week with fear of those struggling with mental illness. Every day that we open our doors here at Saints Peter and Paul we are gifted with the face of Christ in the poor and his voice in the often confused, lost words of those who are plagued by insanity. We could, right now, choose to close our doors, or at least our hearts, out of fear. But joy means holding on to hope for each of those souls. It means trusting and giving even when we are afraid. If we have ten dollars we give five…if we have two cups of coffee we give one. And maybe like Kafka, Paul’s message echoes that of John: “Rejoice in the Lord always (not sometimes…not only when times are good) again I say rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all” –Hope and generosity not fear or despair. And how can we do this? Well, Paul proclaims, “the Lord is near!” Weeping beside us, lighting the path in the darkness. This is the source of our hope, the motivation of our generosity.

As we light the pink candle this week we are called, like Mary, so long ago, to sing a song of rejoicing to the lord - even in the face of very real brokenness - and to wait expectantly for Light to come into the darkness of the world.
Gadaute!
Amen.

Preached by the Rev. Tracy LeBlanc

Casting off

1 Advent C 2012
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv1_RCL.html


It was my job to cast off the lines.

My earliest memories are of salt water and my father’s boat. In those days, back on Long Island, any working-class guy could have some sort of leaky wooden boat and old, worn-out motor and spend time out fishing. That was Dad’s great joy, and so little Kurt just like my older brothers before me would be bundled in a stained orange life-vest and would help Dad get the boat ready.

There was a lot of “get ready”—mixing the gas and oil in the old-fashioned orange tank, gathering the gear and loading it. The boat would rock gently, tied up there next to the old wooden dock with its planks bleached grey by sun and salt. But finally the time would come—the time to cast off.

It was my job to move first to the stern, then to the prow, and slip the loops at the end of the ropes off of the cleats that held our old boat safely to the worn, familiar dock. It was a moment that placed us in the ancient tradition of sailors and voyagers, even if we were only going a couple of miles out to fish. The weight of the boat would hold the line too tight to easily slip off the cleat, and so I would have to exert a moment’s effort to pull the line taut, then suddenly slacken it so for a moment it was loose enough to lift from the cleat. As I slipped the final loop from the cleat, I would always glance down, and even the oily water next to the dock would seem deep and mysterious below our fragile wooden shell.

Finally, a shove would give the boat enough of a surge of motion away from the dock that it would float free, rocking gently, making itself and we who depended on it creatures of the restless water. A philosopher said that you never cross the same river twice. It is even more true of the sea—it is restless and ever-moving, never the same from moment to moment. I would sit and as the motor sputtered into life and the boat surged forward, I would feel a momentary thrill, a sinking in the pit of my stomach as if I were flying. You never knew what awaited you, even in the harbors and bays of Long Island. You never knew where the voyage would take you, once you had cast off.

“Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness…”

Most of us love Advent and find many words to express that. This first Collect of Advent is filled with contrast—“cast away”, “put on”. This Advent it is the “cast away” part that snatches my heart. I love this Collect, but often find myself a little embarrassed by that expression “works of darkness.” I am certainly a sinful man, self-absorbed and petty, but my sinfulness never quite seems to live up to the ominous grandeur of “works of darkness.” Voldemort and Sauron and the White Witch in fantasy books do “works of darkness.” My sins seem to lack the kind of evil courage and initiative implied by the majesty of “works of darkness.”

But there are many “works of darkness”, and most of them are not fame-worthy. I also remember, when we would cast off from shore how many years ago, how littered and shabby and drab was the dock and the shoreline where we would ready the boat. No one would want to spend any more time on that grubby shore of Centerport Harbor than they needed to.

The “works of darkness” can be that familiar and drab and hope-less place where we have been accustomed to hang out in, for no good reason other than it is familiar. What is our equivalent of the dry, dirty, familiar harbor-side in our own lives? A faith that has grown cold and routine? Habits of resentment or self-pity? A general hopelessness that does not cripple us, but casts a shadow over every day? A pattern of distraction, of noise or virtual communication or repetitive entertainment, that keeps us from seeing the heart-breaking beauty and wonder of the world around us? Or keeps us from seeing the pathos and silent courage and struggle of those around us?

Today our patron Saint Paul reaches out in hope and love and pity to us, wishing that we ccould recover that beauty and delight that we may have lost even without our knowing. “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may …restore whatever is lacking in your faith… And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”

A Celtic Christian said, “Jesus is the memory of what we have forgotten about God.”

As we cast off on this Advent Sunday, what have we forgotten? What is lacking in our faith? What part of our hearts has grown weak, even without our knowing?

Years ago, we would usually cast off before dawn. As it rose and fell with the surge, I used to imagine that the boat itself was remembering that it was not just a rickety old wooden shell flipped upside-down on sawhorses in our yard. It was a free creature of the sea, part of the surge and swell and power of the waves.

The sun would rise and turn the waves into gold and fire. We too were creatures of the sea, and of the dawn, part of the surge and the light. I would wake up from the drowsy, chilly walking dream in which I had helped to get the boat ready to cast off. That’s right, I would think. I remember. That’s why we came. This is who we are. This is why we cast off.

Looking for the king?

Christ the King 2012


Barbara Lundblad, a professor and ‘blogger, tells this of her friend Delores Williams. Delores grew up in the South and remembers Sunday mornings when the minister shouted out: “Who is Jesus?” The choir would shout back, “King of kings and Lord Almighty!” Then, little Miss Huff, in a tiny soft voice, would sing her own answer, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Back and forth they sang – KING OF KINGS…Poor little Mary’s boy.

On the feast of Christ the King, we cannot and should not fill our minds with images of a regal Jesus seated in majesty without hearing little Miss Huff say softly, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Any language, any image we borrow from the archaic world of royalty enthroned with pomp and panoply needs the counterpoint of Miss Huff’s truth—that this King is an anti-King, a King whose royal robes are rags and whose throne room is the place where, as the ‘60’s song said, where the ragged people go.

This feast is a latecomer to the calendar. A Pope created it in 1925. I think he took a long, horrified look at the tyrannies and dictatorships and ideologies that were brewing to make the 20th Century such a blood bath and placed this feast as a contradiction to all those forces. A simple Sunday feast is a fragile statement to make against the forces of power and violence.

“Christ the King” is a paradox, a paradox as deep as that choir shouting its proclamation and little Miss Huff whispering her deeper, more powerful truth. The early Christians were very clear that proclaiming Christ Jesus as Lord was a very different thing than proclaiming Caesar as Lord. The Christians were seen by the Romans as subversive, enemies to peace and order, worshipping a Jew who had been executed under Roman law. Merely suggesting that there was any king besides the Emperor was treason. Proclaiming that this Jesus was King was treason and insult both.

Is it still treason? If not, is that because we have forgotten the scandal, the outrageous nature of the Kingship of Christ? Have we placed King Jesus, the rejected and abused and condemned King, in a safe seat dressed in Caesar’s robes? Have we forgotten how astounding it is that we proclaim the marginalized and rejected One as King?

Thomas Merton wrote:

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it –
because he is out of place in it,
and yet must be in it
- his place is with those others who do not belong,
who are rejected because they are regarded as weak;
and with those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
and are tortured, exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.”

If we wish to see Christ the King, do not look in a palace. Do not look in a place of power or prestige. Do not look where everyone sits content with their privileges or their rightness or their security.

Look instead to the rejected, to those invisible, to those whom we are tempted to dismiss with pity or with condescension. Look to those for whom each day is a struggle to simply exist, who do not have the luxury of a sense of security. And look too at the impoverished, vulnerable, wounded parts of ourselves, those parts that do not fit, that are inconsistent, those parts that we least wish to own or admit.

It is with those and it is there, in those forgotten parts of our world, that Christ the King stands at home. It is there that the pure love and grace of God shines forth. Into this world, this demented inn, the uninvited One whose own people did not receive him—here he reigns. Here he is strong. He stands because he has not been offered a chair, or he finds a cardboard box, or he takes a plastic chair with dozens of others in a crowded waiting room. Here the love and humility of our King shines forth with hope.

Everything from nothing

Proper 27 B 2012
1 Kings 17:8-16; Ps 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44


Facebook reported this week on Jose Mujica of Uruguay, proclaimed “the world’s poorest president.” Mujica drives an old Volkswagen Beetle, lives in a farmhouse with his wife and dog, and donates 90% of his salary to charity.

The comments after the article were full of praise for Mujica’s example. But President Mujica falls short of the unnamed women in the Bible today. He has a nice salary to give away. They did not.

I always felt it unfair that Elijah first asked the unnamed widow in Zarephath for some of the last of her food. Why doesn’t God through the prophet simply help her out, first promise her an endless supply of meal and of oil and THEN ask for some dinner? And what happened after that poor widow in the Gospel gave her last two cents to the Temple? Did Jesus send one of the guys scurrying after her to hand her a few coins out of their traveling purse?

It is a luxury to be rich enough to give. It feels good, like the day we gave $5 to Trumpet Man as he sat at the on ramp on the Hawthorne Bridge. It was not our last $5. What if it were? Where is the Gospel in these stories?

Maybe the Gospel is found here: it is when we think we have nothing to give that we have everything to give.

Today is a good and rich day. We gather after the Mass to share food generously prepared. We gather to be with one another, and weall enjoy that. And we gather to share hope and vision for our future as a congregation. We have begun to talk of “renewal” this year. That conversation will go on, but for today we all may speak to where we feel our parish is called this coming year.

The Vestry and clergy will take this input and form a budget with a mission focus for 2013. And in the weeks to come, we shall be invited to commit to this vision, to this ongoing energy of God’s own fire and invitation among us. It is a time of vision and a time of choice.

All during my time here, we have been tempted to think of Saints Peter and Paul as “small”, as “struggling”, even as “broke” and “poor.” The truth is we are not so small, we are not so struggling, we have been blessed in so many ways, and others have been very generous with us. Over and over we have tried to fight the language of poverty and of scarcity.

Perhaps we need to look at things a different way. Perhaps we need to listen deeply to what God says in his Word. If we’re rich, we’re rich, and like President Mujica we may do generous things with our wealth. If we are poor, well then: when we feel we have nothing to give, then we have everything to give. The poorest people can claim the dignity of giving back, of living generous lives. People who come to our doors hungry often insist on picking up litter or doing other chores in order to give back. A crumpled dollar bill will be left on a table at Brigid’s Breakfast.

If we are feeling we have nothing extra, nothing more to give, then we have everything to give.

We can give ourselves wholly to the inspiration of God as the Spirit leads us. We can give ourselves to the molding, transforming Spirit of God as Spirit shapes us into a community both new and old. We can take a chance on a vision, on a dream. Remember: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail.

And we can smile at President Mujica, knowing that we have taken his example one step farther.