Living with Law and Love, Easter 5B

The thing that gets me wondering in John’s Gospel today is the question of pruning: “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” And I am not too sure about this pruning,

But the night before last I gave a talk to the young men and women at the Debutante Ball hosted by St Stephens’ in Rutherglen and I told them they should learn to make  good mistakes. I even quoted T S Eliot: “‘Life is what we make of the mess that we make of things” and that wreckage is the raw material where we find the force and the fuel to make our lives our own. The kids looked at me with some disbelief, but a few adults smiled and nodded; I might not have reached many of the younger people, but it was something I wish I had heard when I was younger.

Because I think we have to  get it wrong before we get it right in a lot of our life and certainly in our ongoing journey with the Lord. That’s the reason for the pruning shears, that’s what we need to lose at the last; we need to move from the love of law to the law of love.

Let me put out some definitions: the love of the law is that concern, that interest, that occasional compulsive fixation on who or what is right so we don’t get it wrong. The love of the law worries about how we miss the mark and tries to make a map to take us where we’re supposed to be. It starts small; most maps we make to learn to love the law start with the standards of our friends or our family or our neighborhood or our nation: some standard of law can simply be a way to say, “everybody should live life like we do” and they can be pretty basic.

Some examples: when I was a kid, my mother had old Blue Willow dishes in the kitchen, so that was right; but my aunt had a brand new set of green and yellow melamine resin dishes, called, Melmac; and I wasn’t too sure if they were right.

In school all the kids looked more or less like me; except in fifth grade we were joined by the daughter of a family of refugees from Estonia, and she was different. By the seventh grade, there were what we called colored people in our classes. I thought these people were probably all right, but I wasn’t sure, because they looked so different from what I had grown up with.

I grew up around a small tennis club in Sacramento, California in the 1950s. And in those days tennis was all white clothing and no arguing allowed, a sport for ladies and gentlemen. I remember sitting in the grandstand watching a tournament when I was a little boy, and when a player lost a crucial point and threw his racquet on the ground, I spoke out with all the authority of a precocious seven year old and said, “Just for that your score goes down to zero!” My parents were embarrassed but I was proud! I knew the rules; the ones who played by the rules and observed the law were right: Ken Rosewall, Arthur Ashe, Margaret Court, Chrissy Evert. When Jimmy Connors came  along the game changed; he was noisy and that wasn’t right: it might have been more exciting, but there were still rules for things like that.

So when I joined the church in 1967, part of the reason was so that I might find more rules to follow. But something else happened: a certain growing edge, a somewhat  uncomfortable feeling, like I was being turned around, learning to live into a growing tension and understanding how we might try to act in respect, to get it right, in our love of the law, and yet grow to prayerfully and gracefully live out our lives in the light of the law of love,

John writes this: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.”

As I came to know Jesus; I saw that he wasn’t the lawgiver, the judge or the son of the big policemen in the sky; rather he was the icon, the model, even, if you want to use tennis as the metaphor, the teaching pro who shows us how the game really should be played. In his relationship with his father, with his family, with his friends, in his relationship in the Spirit which he sends to share with us; he shows us how to play out, live out the law of love we see in his life and death and resurrection, and that makes it all a whole new and different kind of game.

And it wasn’t, it isn’t easy, trying to connect this new life and law of love we see in Jesus back to the old laws we might have seen so clearly before; those customs and expectations, the etiquette and law that we so wanted to use to order our ideals. It is not easy to try to leave those old laws behind as we move to live in this new love.

Paul puts it his way in the letter to the Galatians: “The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.” But there comes a time when we must graduate to the law of love.

And it can be tough to face the fact that a large part of us would like to keep those old expectations as we come to understand ourselves in a new family of relations. For the fact is that Jesus’ family keeps getting bigger!

Some examples going back to John, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” and “those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  That sounds easy at the start, but the plain truth might be that the rules on these relationships, the law of love, might be wider than what we find immediately comfortable!

Look at Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus is told that his mother is outside waiting for him,. He replies, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers? whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Remember the definition of neighbor that the lawyer in Luke had to come to; the neighbor is “the one who showed mercy.” That is not easy to see clearly if you’re carrying around the love of law. This is an offense to many of our old familiar sensibilities. How do we make sense the of the law if we’re called to live with a family that just might include everybody, if love can be that large?

Let’s go back to tennis for that lesson! I didn’t learn easy, and remember having to take lots of time to groove my stroke in tennis before I could be free to move it out, to play well. But  following the rules and the ritual finally made me fit to play the game freely. And the same when I learned to cook, I was tied to the recipe book:  how many “quarter teaspoons” was important! When I learned more, then I knew better; when I knew what rules could be moved, overlooked, set aside for the love of a good family meal.

Moving from law to love takes us to a different focus. It could be the difference between the sensate thought (the part of us that knows how much and how many) and the intuitive idea (the surprising hunch that comes out of nowhere and is right on the money). Perhaps it’s the difference between slavishly following the recipe and formula;or carefully, prayerfully, lovingly preparing the bread and wine. Maybe it has to do with what tastes better, is more real, lovelier to the touch or the tongue at the last.

But as I grow older, I find by grace that the law in me grows less and love seems to matters more, and this may be true for you as well. It has not always been an easy process, and sometimes there’s been pain. But, for the most part, the rigid rules and roles I followed faithfully for such a while have faded away, burned out, maybe been pruned back, to be replaced with a new and abundant  neighborhood of sharing and caring that tries to makes room for not less than everyone.

So perhaps that is where the lopping off of the old limbs makes sense: to help us be free to live in that larger landscape; where, as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, “what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”

For we know that love never dies, and pruning just might be what it takes, so that, in letting go of the love of law and faithfully following the law of love, we might live both wilder and deeper, making better, more charitable mistakes in all our ministry with family, friend, neighbor and stranger, in a world that grows ever larger,  less concerned with law, more infused in love, more grounded in  grace, rising with the gift of the spirit, coming to live more life and bear more fruit, as we come to abide with Christ in the love of God.

Amen

Easter Sunday and the three witnesses

I want to start this morning with the very end of a poem called "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" by Wendell Berry. I first read it about 25 years ago and it often comes to mind at Eastertime. He starts out:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.


And then he shares his antidote to all this deadly business: 

So, friends, every day do something 
that won't compute. Love the Lord. 

And he ends the poem with a two word prescription: it simply ends,


"Practice Resurrection"

“Practice Resurrection.”  Maybe that is what we are starting to see in the Gospel of John we just shared. in the way that the three main characters, these three witnesses, in the Gospel work through a new understanding of where, how and why Jesus lives. This isn't easy. To practice resurrection means to practice life and death as well, because the three seem to be tied up together, and this is not always easy.

So many of us long to not be afraid of death. To live our lives as through nothing could destroy us, nothing could wipe us out, could separate us from the rest of life in the largest sense: for is this were true, then we might live life more freely, less concerned with survival and competition, and more in touch with the caring and quality of life – for ourselves and others – on the way. If the end of life were seen as good, godly, connected to God; then the way we travel, the present moment, here and now, day by day, might be seen in a different light.

"So, friends, everyday do something that wont compute. Love the Lord."

But how do you get there from here?

Let's look at the three ways we see touched on, lived out, by the three witnesses we see at the tomb this morning.

First, for John, Scripture simply says, "He saw and believed." For some of us  there can be this given miracle of faith, the gifted sudden insight, the new understanding, when all the old ways we've often seen the world fall away and we look on a truth that surprises us with new life. Even if it look like nothing we've ever known before. That can be mystifying, for as Thomas Merton writes, "If a message has no clothes on, how can it be spoken?" But this fresh love, this new life, the reality of this relationship, rising up in a new understanding, a new creation, the old clothes put aside, the naked truth, and the peace of a new beginning, can come in simply witnessing the moment when the world changes.

It is not that uncommon. Every so often I wake before dawn, put on a robe and make coffee, then move to the living room where there are windows facing east. And I simply sit and watch the light change, the shadows move, the sun rising. I don't say anything, It's a quiet time, but sometimes, as I sit there in silence the changing beauty of the new day reminds me of how and why we live, it reminds me of the truth of love and life in a way I might never learn from any other source. That sunrise makes me remember how light comes in darkness, how new beginning comes when the old times are moved aside, when I simply wait some newborn angles of sight and insight come that I had never expected to see. One morning recently, I just sat there watching; and when the light came and the room was bright I turned around to see the place where I lived like I had never seen it before. Suddenly I saw new life in the middle of my old world, and it was a wonderful day. Sometimes God gives us that gift of new beginning, and  we simply need to simply take the gift of a new insight, a new vision, and live into it like John.

But more often, I think, we're like Peter and it takes more time. We rush in, look everywhere, get confused and unsteady if we can't make sense of it right away (if the burial clothes are gone and the body nowhere), and then we  head out again. No sudden insights there one , but sometimes grace and time and habits and community can arrive over time and help us move into that new world of possibilities.

Peter's faith, like so many of us, is one that is fed in community, one that can be carried by the church. That's what happens for him a few days later, he's back at work fishing with his friends, and he sees, with a little help, what John had seen immediately, the Lord is alive! And this time he moves by faith: he takes off his old work clothes, leaves them  aside like a burial garment, and dives into the deep water of new life. It's almost like another kind of baptism for him.

 It takes Peter time to see, follow, watch; to be washed and found and fed by this new understanding of living with Jesus: it takes good time for him to learn the dance of faith. Those of us who aren't natural dancers can appreciate this: a 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3 rhythm that helps us finally move into living in the rhythm of the resurrection: conversation, communion, community; again and again and again, until we can meet with and move like Christ. Peter even gets a threefold call from Jesus. It's not that he's slow, it just takes time until he finds the message he's made to carry, the life-giving faith that he must live for, the truth for which he can give his life. For Peter, the living body of Christ is found, is seen, in the company of believers, is known in the hands outstretched, the storied shared, the lives knit together in caring company. That may be the model that makes sense for us,

We don't know much about Mary. She may have been a rich woman, one of those who supported Jesus and the disciples in their journey; she may have been a prostitute, perhaps the woman who poured oil on Jesus' feet and rubbed them with her hair; some would say she was the sister of Lazarus, but we don't really know. There are all sorts of stories of who she was and what she means, but this we know; that she was the first at the tomb, she stayed with the mystery of it, she saw the stone had been  taken away, she asked the angels, heavenly messengers, where Jesus has been taken; she cries until a stranger, a gardener, asks her why she cries and she suddenly realizes that the one who asks the question is himself the answer.

John is given sudden insight, Peter's faithful call comes through the grace of the community and the sense of the sacraments and the scripture, Mary is saved, sees the Lord, comes to know Jesus resurrected, because, even with all her tears, she keeps on asking questions. The tenth century Saint, Symeon the New Theologian, says the Spirit is most often shown in the gift of tears, and The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century text, says that sometimes the best prayer is simply to say "Help!" Perhaps it is that our desperate desire for wholeness, to find the face of hope, will take us along some mysterious way to find ourselves face to face with the Christ we seek, for that's what happens to Mary.

May we, today, be willing to join this company of witnesses, may we be ready to receive the insight of John, to take the road of sacramental community and ministry of Peter, and to let our tears and our desires lead us, like Mary, to the Lord of Life; that we may join in that company and add our voices to that chorus, "We have seen the Lord."

For Christ is risen from the dead, Alleluia!

Sermon: Palm Sunday in your City, in your Heart.

This morning I want to start with a story.

In March of 1972, a bit over forty years ago, my grandmother, Eva Storey, came closer to dying. She was just eighty, had been dealing with leukemia for several years, with a few remissions and one time what seemed like a miracle recovery, but now it was coming closer to the end.  Her eldest child, my uncle, flew out from the East Coast to be with her and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day he carried her in his arms, followed by his younger sisters, my mother and my aunt, across the lawn to the car to take her to the hospital for the last time.

 I stood watching from the kitchen window. I might've been crying. But two things happened that I remember: first, something like the music of the Sanctus, a sense of bells and music sung by some great choir; “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, Heaven and earth are full of your glory.” And, second, a conviction that came into the middle of my pain and felt like sunlight in the center of that dark day. “Thank God,” something in me said so deeply, “Thank God we matter this much.”

Now the moment that touches me from the Gospel for this Palm Sunday is at the very end, when Jesus looks "around at everything" before heading out to Bethany with the twelve.  I wonder what he saw: and my hope is that he sees, everything, all of us, exactly as we are, in all our living and dying, and he knew – he knows – how much it matters. And that gives me great comfort.

I don't know about you, but there's been lots of living and dying in my life this year, this Lent.  Early in the year my best friend John Davis' father died after a long life. His family has adopted me as their American son so I was part of the mourning and preparation for the funeral, and that time reminded me of deaths in my own family: father, mother, brother, nephew; good friends who died too young and too soon of heart conditions and HIV, suicide and substance abuse. And then last month I spent a few days around Numurkah after the floods hit; saw people whose homes and hopes had been  flooded out, washed away: great courage and great sadness.  Then two weeks ago I got a call from California that my niece, Lisa, had passed away after courageously living with cancer for several years: not yet fifty, loving husband, two children still in their teens, a beloved younger sister; and her mother at her bedside at the last. Then finally last week, Fr Glyn Reese of St John's, Wodonga, who I am proud to call a friend, found that his  elderly parents  had been murdered in their home in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Glyn and his son Anthony flew over there right away, his wife Liesl and daughter Laura are joining them for the funeral tomorrow night. Too much life and too much death.

 And I think Jesus sees all that as he looks around Jerusalem, sees all our fears and anger and anxiety about death, see all the trials and tragedy of our everyday lives and he walks right into the middle of it all: maybe he even carries us along like an elder son into the middle of that very noisy city. And even though it might not feel like it, I think there is some good news there.

The English theologian, Austin Farrer, writes that we are invited to exchange our living death for Jesus' dying life.  We are invited to stop holding on so tight to our fears and our hopes and our tensions and our ideas about the times we live in; and instead to have faith that Jesus will take us in his arms and guide us through the middle of it all. Now (as they used to say) that's the good news; and the bad news is that we can only get there from here, from exactly where we are, by being exactly who we are: being mixed bags of fear and hope and hate and love and longing and death and life, just being who we are as the Lord hugs us close in the life of Christ and takes us right through the middle of each and every death into the heart of God's eternal life.

 So the events of the coming week in our church calendar give us a kind of circle tour of all the sites of the human condition: we see power politics and cunning betrayal, compassion and community, virtue and violence,  death and resurrection. And, for each of us, that will resonate with our own histories and hopes, stories we remember, people we miss, things we fear. Holy week can be a difficult way to follow. But Jesus knows this route, looks and sees all there is in Jerusalem, in every city, in any city and country, in our own homes and hearts: so that nobody and nothing shall be outside the loving embrace of his ultimate love.

Sometimes it's not easy to take this in. We might not always think that the universe could be knit together so carefully, we might not be able to hope that the holiest One will hear our fear and hope and loneliness. But we are called to have faith that Christ holds us close through these crises, these dangerous opportunities, that Jesus will take us through every turn, every tight corner of the human journey from birth to death and beyond, will take everybody everywhere, and bring us home, to what we call heaven to what we hold in hope in our hearts at the last.

That's why we call it Good Friday, because God meets a every needless tragic death, all the violence and the shortcuts of the city, all the separation from what we  care for, and Christ carries all that home in love.

So this week stay close to your Bible and prayer book, to your church and community, to all your friends, feelings and your fears, and to your hope and your heart too: because the heart of God, the God of love we see in Jesus Christ, journeys to Jerusalem to meet His death and to bring us life. And we must thank God that it matters this much.

Amen

Mary, Movies and the Mother's Union

 Everybody has a bad movie that they like, though sometimes we keep quiet about them. If you ask me to list my favorite films, I will come up with some well-known movies that show a wide variety of good taste, perhaps with too much fondness for low comedy and full-color musicals. But if you ask me for a film that I'm I want to see when I'm recovering from the flu or feeling slightly sad then I might come up with a different list. One on the middle of that list is a film called “Foul Play” starring (are you ready?) Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. She plays a serious but slightly wacky librarian who gets involved in an assassination plot. He plays a creatively crazy policeman trying to win the maiden and solve the case. All this in 1970s San Francisco, a city I knew and loved. It has one of the best car chases you'd ever want to see, though it goes on a bit too long, but in the middle there's a bit of a love scene that is just wonderful.

It happens when Goldie, who has just missed being murdered by an albino with a knife, being luckily saved by Chevy, is now, for security reasons, going to spend the night at his Sausalito houseboat. Nothing's really happened romantically yet, but there seems to be an possibility of something else on the horizon, and they begin talking.

He says, "What if you think of me when you first met me?" She says, "I thought you were  a bit of a fool." He says, "But what did you think before that?" She says, "I thought you are arrogant." He says, "And what did you think before that?" She says, "I thought you were cute." and He says, "And what did you think before that?" And all this time they're getting just a little bit closer and they're taking very quick little looks, sort of snapshots, at each other's eyes and each others lips. And he says, "And what did you think before that?" And she says, "I thought you might be nice to kiss." And they do, and the lights fade, and the next thing you know they're having breakfast or something. 

And it seems to me in every one of these interchanges, these playful and erotic and building dialogues, that each one of them is getting younger.  It starts out with a guarded quality, yet with each response more honest innocence shows forth, they look at each other more openly, more keenly, sharing perhaps both their fear and their desire for completion, for wholeness, for the moment that connects, and they look younger every time.

And I think that happens with Mary and the Angel. 

Mary starts out a little guarded, "What can this mean, how can this be, this cannot happen to me" But she keeps coming back to the angel, they keep looking at each other, they keep being surprised by how deep and honest the interchange, the affection, the opportunity for a great joy just might be. What must she have looked like in that final Yes?

It must've been like a little girl, not knowing that anyone was watching, dancing before a lighted Christmas tree. What they call an authentic gesture, not tentative, but opening and articulate, allowing  space and making song and sense of the opportunity that has arisen.

And I want to say that that moment, a moment like that, is at the  ending, middle and beginning of every encounter in the Gospels. The preliminary question, the more direct response, the eyes searching, the faces facing, two people getting closer when desire and want meet opportunity and love, when healing happens and when new creation comes out of nowhere:

 Think of these people in the Scripture who are face-to-face with Jesus: putting their incomplete questions to him in the middle of that unfinished journey; just a bit awkward: because it always happens that way when we risk, when we're unsure, beginning, opening a new, just starting out, but it is still a kind of blessed poverty; think of the Beatitudes in Luke: 

"Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are you more hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who we now, for you will laugh, Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on  account of the Son of Man; rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven."

 So every dialogue, every dance with the Lord, with God, is an opportunity to grow younger, is a chance to wake up to life, life larger, life containing more contradictions, life pulsing with possibilities, life birthing a new way of being beyond any ending we might've seen before. That opportunity is there every time anyone takes the risk to seek Jesus face to face and ask the crucial question that waits to be asked in the middle of their life.  As the philosopher/theologian Suzanne Langer says, "If we would have new knowledge we must get a whole new world of questions." 

Still, some get it wrong, can't take the risk, have no room for questions. Instead, they hear a challenge and tried to choke it off, they hear an opening and try to close it out, they see a door opening to a more loving life and they try to nail it down; and they shut themselves off from so much.

Yet others listen, those who want to live larger, those who want to go beyond limitations, those who have to endure great suffering and deep pain but still hear in their hearts that hymn that keeps hope alive. And when they come to Jesus they get younger.

Look at the disciples in the Scripture, they start out as such staid people, such old fools, asking silly superficial questions. They consistently misunderstand Jesus and, when he gives them parables of opportunity and freedom and grace, they ask for security and positions and powers. It has to make you laugh!

  Thank God we have models of the faith like that, because they give us room to begin, and then they grow in faith and dedication and discipline and heart and hope through from those shaky beginnings to the ends of their lives.

 We talk about people maturing in the faith, getting wise sometimes and in some ways, and maybe we do; but I'll bet we get younger in the bargain.  We might not look younger (though that would be nice too) but we're still more likely to take it on living faith, more likely to let hope fly, maybe even foolishly, more likely to dance in front of the Christmas tree, and every other tree, every chance we get, every day of the year.

 It isn't always easy, and sometimes it will hurt like hell. Even for Mary. Later in Luke you get, “And a sword will pierce your soul,” and still later Mary will see things that no mother should see: witness that love and life to which she said "Yes" meeting a bloody end, a "No" that seems to have no hope for hope. She must have wished that cup could have passed by her child 

But perhaps she realized that she had taught him to walk that way, to dance in that direction. After all, Jesus', "not my will but thine” is not too far from Mary's, “let it be to me according to your word." Her hands lifting in that girl's garden to accept the Angels mission is a kind of overture to this solemn celebration he will enact, arms open wide, on the  Mount of Calvary. Perhaps she had helped to teach him to be the Lord of the dance, even with that damnable tree.

Thomas Merton writes this: 

"It is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness of what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown which is His Human Nature. Thus her consent opens the door of created nature, of time, of history, to the Word of God...

She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.

She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible mercy, to die for us on the Cross."

By Our Lady's mindful mercy we see the almighty grace of God take baby steps into the middle of our humanity. With her innocent ascent we see caritas and courage meet on a dead tree and make the whole world bloom anew. In her accepting witness and her walk of faith we join with her to meet the angel proclaiming that, "He is risen from the dead" so that the whole creation may rise and dance in love. 

Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you, Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. 

Holy Mary, Mother of God: pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen.

Lent 4B, "Snakes, Sunsets and the City" St John's Wodonga

I have to admit that when I first looked at the lessons for today, I was less than thrilled. They're all pretty packed: the Israelites remembering all charms of  Egypt, and complaining loudly at the beginning of their desert pilgrimage to the promised land; the letter to the Ephesians talking about being lost in the desires  of flesh and senses, requiring a rescue of vast proportions; and Jesus continuing his dialogue with Nicodemus on how we might find refuge and hope in holding tight  to the death and resurrection of the Son of Man; all packed together pretty tight.

But Robert Frost, the  20th-century poet, once said something like "you should take the light things seriously and the serious things lightly." So I want to move into these complex readings with a couple of simple images that might help us, make sense of where we are in this journey with Jesus today

First a story about what happened to me and my family when I was in early adolescence and when It seemed like my world was falling apart: the death of a beloved grandfather, an idolized older brother getting married, starting his own household, my parents having trouble with money and their marriage; and in 1960 my mother and I moving to my uncle's sheep ranch in the Sacramento Valley. So visualize this 14-year-old boy, his back against the wall on the front porch of a  1930s California ranch house in territory that looks a bit like the land you see between Benalla and Shepparton with some hills to the west. This kid  in early adolescence sitting there with T-shirt and shorts on a warm summer evening - maybe late August or September -  watching the sunset over the Coast Range.

Now this kid thought he might have been smart, but vigilant would be a better word. He was trying to make sense of the world around him, had abandoned formal education and was educating himself by watching television, reading popular novels and books on psychology and sociology; figuring that if he looks for all the clues, eventually the puzzle will make sense, and the chaos will turn into some kind of order that he can control, or at least make peace with. He thinks, worries, wonders, about these things a lot. But that particular evening, just for a moment as he watches the sun begin to go down between the two distant mountains, he becomes aware of a subtle change in the air. It may be something you know. This moment when the earth baked by the sun since the morning starts to give up its heat to the cooler evening, with a bit of a fresh breeze; the threshold of  the day ending and the evening beginning, with a a kind of give-and-take, relinquishing and recovery, a rhythm, and a sudden unexpected sense that some sort of silent music might just be under everything.

 As I say he, will keep himself busy with his plans to move to the city, to be a successful person, to know what needs to be done, to be able to answer the questions of what matters and who is in control. But this silent music gives him pause for just a moment.

And that was one moment when I realized for a very short while (over 50 years later I've never forgotten it) that where I was, even though I thought it was in a cultural desert and a land I needed to escape from, might instead be a place for faithful pilgrimage, for a knowledge and a wisdom that was more than information.

Now fast forward some 30 years. A middle-aged mean is walking across a park in the middle of San Francisco. I joke that I spent my 20s making up for my teens and my 30s making up for my 20s, but there's some truth there: I was a bit of a hippie in my 20s, then  a perennial student and graduate student in my 30s, and when I got to my 40s I was doing campus ministry and teaching part-time as an Anglican layperson at the Jesuit University of San Francisco. I was somewhat underemployed and very underpaid but after a number of years wandering around doing a bit of everything I was working at something that seemed to connect, not only with what I needed but with what the world needed as well; an effort that seemed right and true, with some real mercy, making a difference in a very small way.

So I was walking across this open space and up ahead there was a hill of newly replanted grass set apart, circled by strings tied to sticks stuck in the ground and one small sign in front with three words printed in big black letters: "Shortcuts Cause Erosion" and I saw marks of dog paws and peoples shoe heals cutting across the new growing grass and realized I live in a world full of shortcuts. crowded with erosion. And that I was part of that world

Now this could be San Francisco in the 90s, Egypt or Babylon or Jerusalem a few thousand years ago, or Wodonga, Wangaratta, or anywhere else now: a green field of a world scarred by a lot of shortcuts, And I am a part of that world, we all are. It starts in Eden or anywhere,  whenever some snake in the grass tells us to take shortcuts to find a place where we can feel at home, be in control, on top of things at whatever cost. But it doesn't work and those shortcuts never fail to turn around and bite us in the end, painfully, while we're just trying to just holding on to what we thought we wanted, to follow those noisy and conspicuous desires of ego, of flesh and senses, cutting through to the place we thought we wanted to be. Those shortcuts end up killing us, like the letter to the Ephesians says, with our hands full of treasures that aren't worth it and our hearts aching from all the trespasses that took us where we shouldn't go.

Now I'm not bragging about my sins, the fact is they weren't that flashy, anymore then anyone else's, and the fact is too that everyone does the best they can. But I did see, that day at the park, that there were some serious reasons to avoid the shortcuts and get back to Jesus; there always are, and it's often isn't easy.

Because, as Sebastian Moore writes in a book called, "The Crucified Jesus is no Stranger," when we look on Jesus, God's light of love, we can clearly see our own shadow, all those mindless worthless shortcuts, and it burns like a snakebite as well, and there is something is us that wants to push him away, to protect what we thought we wanted to have, to hold on to that old history of who we thought we wanted to be.

That's part of the story of our lives, everybody lives: just jump forward to Holy Week, where todays lessons are taking us. Where are you as that week winds to an end? Are you with the faithful women watching from a ways off, are you with the scared and scattered apostles, running from their own denials, are you with so many in the crowd, feeling the sting of this Jesus, and pushing him away at any cost? Most days, I will confess, I am all over the map.

Here's a quote from, I think, Austin Farrer: "We are invited to exchange our living death for His dying life."  That's the good news from todays Gospel. We are invited to take up the truth that to hold on to your life, no matter what the cost, is a shortcut to nowhere, and to go beyond that. Instead to lay down our history and our burdens and our prizes and to take the chance to open our arms wide like Jesus for a bigger hope and a larger life. For when we listen and learn and look at the Lord, at what he says and how he lives and dies, we can see that sunset in the middle of the City, of every city, and every place; a certain promise, calling us to give up our ego and come to our heart and soul, to give our life away in love, to take the long way home in the surprise and hope of that God-given sunrise.


Here's how John Donne finishes his poem Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward. We can end here too.


O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree...
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face. 

Amen.

Sermon for the Transfiguration

Here are some reflections as we move to Lent.

I was figuring, since I joined the church in 1967, when I was 21, and since I turn 66 this April, that I've been through 45 seasons of Lent. Often, in the early years, I would get a little tense in this season, 'though I loved Easter, loved the church for all the history, mystery hope of it. But when the priest read the part of the liturgy in the American Prayer Book calling us to the “observance of a good and holy Lent,” I wasn't quite so sure.

But the church had given me so much, telling me, to quote a poem from that era, all these rich stories of where we come from where we're going, and why all the traveling; helping me see new vistas, meet new possibilities, make new friends who loved me and who all told me, by word or deed, that I was the salt of the earth, a light of the world, a city on a hill. The church gave me some wonderful gifts and I was thankful

This came to mind reading Diana Butler Bass’ book called “Christianity for the rest of us” where she defines ten “signposts of renewal;” which she is finding in some thriving and growing  mainstream Christian congregations. I found these gifts in 1967; maybe you did too: Hospitality, Discernment, Healing, Contemplation, Testimony, Diversity, Justice, Worship, Reflection, and Beauty. I might just make a poster with those words to put on my wall, to make me remember that was the background music, the melody that gave me a sense of the Good News of God in the community at Grace Episcopal Church, Fairfield, California over forty years ago: offering friendship, a safe place to grow, to hear, and to begin to tell my story anew and in the light of God's love.

So like a good adult convert I got to be very religious! I read, I took up the offering, I sang in the choir, I even became an assistant leader and then the leader in the parish youth group. I loved that, but when a new priest, somewhat Anglo-Catholic, came in, I became even more religious about ceremony and liturgy; I learned to cross myself three ways, I started to site my breast during the Mass. I whispered, “I am not worthy” and almost believed it.  and then when the season of Lent began in 1972 or 1973 I pledged to spend every Friday evening on my knees in the Lady Chapel following the stations of the cross, following Jesus through Jerusalem on that fateful day.

But then a young man I had known from the youth group, the grandson of an old and faithful member of the church, who was the occasional boyfriend of a girl who was more active in the parish, phoned me to ask if we could talk. He had got caught making some stupid mistakes, common errors for the young, all of us, which was caused severe pain to people he loved and others; and he saw something about his own selfishness, and  he wondered if God was angry at him, was finished with him, could forgive him. He wondered if he could forgive himself. I asked him to meet me at the church early Friday evening and we talked it over, prayed about it, and I was able to share with him something of the God I was coming to know who loved each of us, even with all the sad news, even with all the mistakes, even with our mixed motives and limited means. I was able to share, deeper than ever before, more than I knew I knew, something of what Paul talks about this morning, something of the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God”. And there was some real healing, even in the pain, and a new resolution on his part, to do the right thing, to do God's will, to seek the kingdom.

So he left with a lightened load and I walked into the Chapel, feeling like I had witnessed and participated in a mountaintop experience, a transfiguration, a new understanding about how history, mystery and hope meet us in the middle of the journey. and I knelt to pray, "Lord, I am not worthy,"and it was as if God said, "Just stop praying so much; just go on to Jerusalem."

A pretty holy person once asked me, "How uncomfortable are you willing to be for the kingdom of heaven for the reign of God?” Like good St Peter, I talk too much, listen too little, and don't allow grace to grow in my experience too easily. But what I know was that my life in the church, my journey with God had changed me for the better, and though I wasn't real sure just yet how I would do it and what I’d do, I knew I had to head out of the quiet chapel and off of the mountaintop and into the nearest City of God, to those confused, noisy, contaminated places where God is willing to give himself away on purpose, into the very world of the Beatitudes. Listen:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

That's what Jesus preached, that's how he lived, that's what took him and his growing group of friends and followers from the clear light of the mountaintop and onto Jerusalem to a dark day dying on a hill on the edge of that unquiet city; leading them into the depth of the City, into the heart of contradiction, to a crossroad where there was an almost unbelievable breakthrough of death over life, of love over hate, of God's word speaking clear truth in a noisy world: a truth that lasts, that changes the world we live in the present day.

Today, some forty years of Lent later we're in a significant place in the church, not only in this diocese but around a lot of the world,  our numbers are down, our ages up,  averaging around 72, and that’s not uncommon in the Anglican world. We need to look at that, at our heritage, our heart, our hope, in light of where we come from and where we're going and why all the traveling. Jerusalem is waitingIn those difficult and serious questions; and that is where Jesus is calling us to go. So we need people to walk that way, to take up the call of a new church community serving Christ in the world he loves. And the truth is there won't be many; some won't be interested and some can't (for very good reasons, and that’s fine).

But I believe there are some, a significant number of us who are called to stretch and grow and pray through and work out how these ten  signposts that Diana Butler Bass writes about: Hospitality, Discernment, Healing, Contemplation, Testimony, Diversity, Justice, Worship, Reflection, and Beauty. might show up as signposts of prayer and practice around the diocese. And I hope that a few people will join in, ‘cause it’s a better road when you walk together.

But it’s the same question then as now: How uncomfortable are you willing to be for the kingdom of heaven, for the reign of God? How far will you go to meet the stranger, to welcome the poor in spirit, the meek and those who mourn, the hungry, thirsty, pure in heart, somebody else's grandchild, or your own: people who don't know they are light of the world, the salt of the earth, a city on a hill? How far will you go to be the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God”? Those are the questions that Peter was facing than, and the questions we we are facing now.

May God give us the clarity of the mountaintop so that we may follow him into the CIty he loves. And may we all have a good and holy Lent.

In the name of Christ. Amen

A celebration of new ministry, St Augustine's Shepparton

In the early 1980s I took a fall, went through a roof to spend a week in the hospital and three months in a metal brace and it pulled me out of graduate school and shook up my soul; made me wonder what I stood for. So several friends suggested I meet with a man who was a bit of a guru. He had started out in medical research, studied meditation and Buddhism, grown his hair out, was contemplative and kind and wise, and so I went to see him. I talked a lot. I outlined my background, talked about my troubles and the injury, shared my hopes and fears: and he finally looked at me, paused, and said, "Be a brave hero, but don't tell anybody."

It was very good advice and it was very difficult to take because, as a fourth generation Californian, I share too much; it's genetic! It you ask me, "How are you?" Then stand back, sit down, get coffee, light a cigarette, I'll tell you! So if I were going to be a brave hero, then I would have a very tough time not sharing that slogan, telling that story, over and over!  Peter Berger, the sociologist, wrote we must talk about ourselves in order to know ourselves, but I think sometime that deep need to tell the stories and share the slogans, can keep us from simply living our lives and meeting our ministry.

So I think that's why that healed leper couldn't follow Jesus' advice, why he had to tell everybody, why he couldn't rest in and live out of the simple reassurance that he had been visited by, healed by, touched by the human hand of God. Because he lived, like us, in a world where we are so often defined by what we know, what we buy into and what we can tell about; our simple stories, our popular slogans, our easy answers.

It's all around. I remember, some years ago, a very sincere minister assuring me that, if I could correctly answer the four questions contained in one small pamphlet, I would be assured of my place in heaven. Just go down the list and sign on the last page. It was better than insurance! Then several years ago I gave a homily on the mysterious ways of God and a visiting man from a small Protestant group told me that his faith taught that God's laws were simple and always easy to follow. I didn't say it, but I thought, "I'm sorry, but I've never even visited that universe!" The God I've come to know and try to follow, to be true to, is as mysterious as sunrise and death and love, as much a mysterious gift as the healing touch of a friend or stranger, is a lot like life.

But we keep settling for easy slogans, hoping for easy answers. Several years ago when I was the chaplain at RMIT University in Melbourne a young single mother dealing with deep depression came to see me. She said, "My life looks nothing like what I see on the web or at the Mall, and I don't know what's wrong with me!" What was wrong was that she was looking for easy answers when she should have been considering difficult questions. Because the easy answers, the slogans we can buy from the mall to cover our doubts and dreads, don't wear well, they aren't designed to last. She needed to look for the deeper questions that endure, nurture, and finally take us all the way home.

But we're all so used to settling for snappy slogans and proper packaging. And that's not new! Look at Naaman the Syrian, forced to wash in the local river even though he'd like a bit more flash: "I'm willing to pay the price, I just want a bigger river, a better presentation!"

And what about Paul on winning the race? I do love Paul, really,  but I think this is not one of his best moments; because that kind of heroism: taking the prize and winning the race, can lead to that peculiar piety you see on football fields, in a military campaigns and in the talk that leads up to an election campaign: all these people striving to win the prize, in ways that justify winning by any means necessary, striving to be brave heroes who tell everybody everything.

So what do we do instead?  How do we witness and work to reignite our church in a world that's fast moving in another direction, What do we do where slick slogans and quick answers are shouted at every corner?  Well, we don't stay quiet as the greatest ethical, spiritual, wisdom tradition within Western civilization moves slowly towards the sunset? And we don't let the last person standing fold the tent and turn the lights out? What we do is simply remember who we are. Because it is not what we say, it is what we do, and it's who we are!

Remember St. Francis' great one-liner, "Preach the gospel at all times, use words if necessary." What a slogan to end all slogans! That's where we go. Be a brave Christian and don't tell anybody, but follow Jesus into the middle of your life and to the crucible of your own unique ministry!

For it is in the very depths of your life and your living where the Gospel must be proclaimed: not in easy answers, sweet songs and snappy slogans, not in judgements or jargon, but in the living sermon of sharing your purpose and passion, your losses and loves, your cares and your convictions, in the great gift you have been given in being you. That's what we do, because we're not here to build another mall, we're here to proclaim a new humanity with ongoing actions of mercy, justice and love!

Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the rest of us: How the neighborhood church is transforming the faith, defines ten “signposts of renewal;” actions she finds in some thriving and growing  mainstream Christian congregations. They are Hospitality, Discernment, Healing, Contemplation, Testimony, Diversity, Justice, Worship, Reflection, and Beauty. I really want to print out that list in big letters and put it on my wall. Those aren't answers, but a life-sized lifetime ministry ! That's not "take my test" or "read my creed," but follow Jesus' life of love, of self-giving, of really living! Follow the Lord into the middle of right here and right now.

That's a vision that gives me hope. For Butler Bass sees thriving congregations forming people in faith, linking a progressive vision to a new sense of spirituality and a renewed appreciation for Christian tradition. And that means "Walks for the homeless and walking the labyrinth. Living wage and a way of living the Benedictine rule. Attention to inclusive language and deep attentiveness to the Bible. Social justice and spirituality joined in an open community of practice."

That's where ministry happens, that's what the church means when it proclaims good news, not buy my book, but live my life of love.

So that brings us to this morning, to installing two people to do new ministry in this parish. I have known Grace Sharon and John Hanley (and Nettie) for awhile now, have shared meals and meetings and questions on the way and they're great people prepared to do wonderful ministry. They bring substantial gifts (which you'll see and share over time), and they can be a great asset as we as God's church, God's people, move to renew the vitality and vision of the church. But if we're talking about ministry, about the renewal of the world in light of our faith in Jesus, then this isn't just about them, it's about each of us, it's about all of us.

Let me tell you this. One of the loveliest parts of being a priest comes in the middle of the Eucharist. To walk out in front of God and everybody and say, "We are the Body of Christ", and everyone responds, "His spirit is with us." It is a pure joy, this great truth. His spirit is with us, with Grace and John and Nettie and everybody up here and everybody out there and everybody everywhere. Because, by the Grace of God, we are the body of Christ, that is the crucial piece of our identity and we share that call, that ministry, that peace that passes understanding, that brings the world alive.

So Grace, John, everybody here, this is for you. "Be a heroic Christian but don't tell anybody." Just live it out, just like St Francis: learn to look at everyone and everything with the question, “What is this to love?" Every time you spend time and money, passion and purpose; everywhere and every way you can live and give, with people you like or love or look upon or overlook, at each open opportunity to live out your life and ministry, learn to look to see, to ask, "What is this to love?" For we are the Body of Christ.
Amen

Epiphany 5B (draft for later)

Sometimes I just like to note the verbs, the actions, in the lessons of the day. Today, on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, there are more than a few:

First Isaiah on the actions of God: He sits, stretches, spreads, He calls us all by name, he is great in strength, mighty in power...The everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. It's not a bad start!

Our selection from the Psalms continues this: The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts... heals the brokenhearted.. determines the stars and gives them their names...[and we are called in turn to] make melody to our God for he covers the heavens with cloud and he takes pleasure in those who fear him, who hope in his steadfast love.

That's a kind of background music to the whole creation, the selection from our basic theme song.

And in the Epistle, Paul proclaims, in his own way, the love of God that he sees in the light of Christ. Both verbs and prepositions here. He is under the law, outside the law, he becomes weak to win the weak, becomes all things to all people, "so that I might by all means save some... For the sake of the Gospel [and[ to share in its blessings."

And then towards the end of the first chapter of Mark; more significant actions, more verbs:

For Jesus is gathering a community and they're on the move: they leave the synagogue, they enter Simon and Peter's house where Jesus heals SImon's mother in law, and she rises to serve them; and after sundown all who are sick and possessed, the whole city show up, and he cures many and casts out demons and keeps this growing gathering from getting too far out of hand.

And then after that long night and before dawn Jesus goes to a deserted place to pray and his new disciples find him out and tell him that everyone is searching for him. And He says, "Let us go on..."

All these actions! Jesus comes to a particular community and opens it up to a new message and a new life; Paul stretches out to meet a wide variety of people with his understanding of a new way of receiving and responding to the reality of God's life and love in the light of Christ, with the background songs and sagas from the Hebrew scripture, of a world, a cosmos created and guided and loved and enlightened in every moment by the One who goes farther than we can imagine and comes closer than we can ken, the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

So all this makes for a busy day! And my question today is, how do you, as members of this community, the good Anglicans of Mansfield, live with that, come to respond to that reality, that call for relationship: not only with God but with the community, the neighbor, the enemy, the mystery of our own deepest identity?

What does the light of God's creation, the love of Christ's life, the breath of the Spirit in our hearts, mean for the parish of Mansfield on this February morning in the season of Epiphany in 2012 AD as you prepare to welcome a new Rector and renew an established ministry?

Now, my short answer is that I don't know, and I would bet some of you don't either, nor should you. Rather, it is a time when, as Rainer Maria Rilke's writes in his "Letters to a Young Poet," where you might, "try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue." Rilke says, "Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything." That's not a bad way to move in the season of Epiphany as well as into the welcoming of a new priest and a new sense of call in your parish community.

It is also true to the tradition in which we stand. For the seasons of the Church year move from question to answer to question, with seasons of celebrations and solemnity, alternating times for tears and joys, and for moments of mystery and instances when new meanings come clear. Just look at the Christian year and the seasons of your own life and you can see that dance: actually it's all found in the liturgical calendar of the church.

For each of us here has had at least one Advent (and I would bet a few more than one), a time when new beginning comes to our heart and opens us up to letting new life live in us, impregnate us with a sense of God's seed sown in our hearts: a baby-beginning which changes the way we look and learn and live, changes our relationship with friends and family, with work and wisdom, with loss and gain, with what we do and where we go and how we make sense of what we think we are about.

Each of us has had that kind of new birth in our lives: new beginnings that can come in small steps taking us to new destinations, open us to be new people, taking up a newborn understanding of how we carry God's sacred word in our workaday world. Any Christmas can be a time when you give presents to others, But Christmas can also be a time when God gives you a present; Christmas can be a time when you become present to a new way of being in a new world. And when that happens, you know you are called, to share that, and that takes you to a season of Epiphany.

Again, not an easy time, this growth to living out into new realities and relationships. Listen to Paul, reaching out beyond his old understanding to connect to a community that's bigger than he ever expected, that turns out to have room for so much more than he thought he knew. Epiphany! To consent to let your little light shine that wide is not easy. It eons' for Paul, it isn't for any of us. It can break your old sense of self, your old idea of who you were and where you belong. It can break your old heart.

Go back the the Gospel. What must Simon and Andrew have felt when they saw the crowds outside the family home, when what was to be a private healing turned out to be a public gathering. This reign of God, this community to which Christ calls us, is bigger than we know, can be larger than we might like. To quote a line I fear is awe-fully true. "Christ calls us to exchange our living death for his dying life."

And that needs to be dealt with, that deep demand for rebirth that can isolate the old self, send it to the desert, give it long nights of wondering and arid days when old certainties seem to dry up like weeds.  Some nights that feel like betrayal of your best beliefs, some days that feel like crucifixion, of your best hopes of your life. That is often a necessary step in following Jesus. Because God is bigger then the life we though we were called to live.

But, as Auden puts it, God's will will be done, and, if we can follow along, we can come to know Christ's new life in a wider mercy and a larger world; for this journey past Easter can open us up to new understandings, new community, a new vocabulary of compassion and connection that takes us beyond what we thought we knew of ourselves:  so that we can speak immediately to people who we never knew we knew of the good news of God's love and presence. That is a part of the feast of Pentecost, this is a part of the church of Christ, And this is a lot to handle!

So what has this to do with you? Because you, as the Anglican Church of Mansfield, here in the Diocese of Wangaratta, are in a special place, a sort of tender threshold, a slender limn between possibilities, where new understandings of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost can come to life in your corporate and personal lives and journey. And that needs to be taken seriously.

So I am asking you this morning, as you prepare for a new priest and perhaps a new understanding of your individual and corporate ministries, to prepare as well for a renewed understanding of what it means to be the people of God, the Church of Christ, in this place, here and now, "to keep your eyes wide and your sympathy fresh."

So go back to the prepositions and the verbs we started with; the images and actions and relations of a God who creates a cosmos that is bigger than we can easily know, and more intricately and intimately wrought than we might perceive; a spirit that comes closer than we can easily see, intimately breathing us into deeper life and fresher beginning; and a  Lord who calls us to take up and live out the rhythm of a life filled beyond belief with healing and wholeness and hope.

In the name of Christ.

Amen

Sermon - Epiphany 3B

I used to hope that someday I’d meet a holy person who knew it all, who could tell me where to go and what to do and how to live and what to think so that I’d be the right kind of person, so I would be better, kinder, smarter, somehow different, somehow somebody else. So I am very lucky I didn’t fall into some cult for people who have trouble making up their own minds, I am lucky I didn’t get brain-washed: I am lucky I didn’t end up my life trying to be somebody else.

Because for most of the journey I had just enough faith and hope and sense that God was calling me to be myself, to find myself, through trial and error, through a lot of history and with a little hope, with the help of good friends and gentle strangers, and the sense of Gods goodness and guidance lighting the way, sometimes, not always; and after awhile I came to a sense that I was somewhere near where I should be. But it didn’t come easy, and it didn’t come simple.

It wasn’t simple for Samuel in our first lesson. He was living in difficult times, when the voice of the Lord was not often heard, when the world was noisy with other slogans and goals and Gods, and it took Samuel time to take in the voice that was different from the power and principalities he was primed to listen to, and what he finds when he listens is a voice that calls him away from living life with those powers, in those usual places. He finds he belongs to another kingdom, he must give his life to another way and vision, that he must learn to speak the truth of another viewpoint, he must learn to see things the way God sees things, he must live out God’s love, he must live out God’s life.

And in the Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul is speaking to people who are caught between visions. The popular culture in Corinth embodied the belief and action that you could use other people, their bodies, their purpose and passion, without connecting with their minds and their spirits, without linking their lives with your life; that you can serve your own ends, without being tied to other people, that in the end other people don’t mean much, don’t matter, that the power of an individuals spiritual life doesn’t touch the life of the common body.

But, as Paul writes elsewhere, If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, part of the body of Christ, a member of the church. And that means seeing a difference, seeing a different world with different relationships between people, with different values, different visions, different voices to listen to; living in a world where everyone is conceivably a member of Christ’s body the church, a different kind of body, and that means waking up into a new world.

Simeon the New Theologian writes this a little over a thousand years ago.


We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.


I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly 
whole, seamless in His Godhood).


I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightening.
Do my words seem blasphemous? - Then 
Open your heart to Him


and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him
We wake up inside Christ’s body. 


where our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it, 
is realized in joy as Him, 
and he makes us, utterly, real,


and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed


and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in his light
we awaken as the Beloved 
in every last part of our body.

(Symeon the New Theologian [949-1022] translated by Stephen Mitchell)

But what does it mean to be wakened, found, seen, found out, called by God to live a new life,  and, more importantly,  if God calls us to be born into this new life of the baptized, of the body of Christ, how do we live out that calling, live into that new vision and vocation, live with that new constellation of caring and community called forth by Christ?

Here are three very tentative answers that I sometimes find helpful.

First, look at everything as if you’ve never seen it before, asking, what is this? What if everyday was the first day for the rest of your life? What if God was giving you just one day, one moment, one instant of your life to live, day by day, moment by moment, now by now? Could you learn to look at everything like you’d never seen it before, like you’d never see it again? Could you learn to love the questions even before you learned to move towards the answers, knowing that God was in the questions as well as the answers? Could you look at everything as if it might be a gift from God, a gift to God, that was waiting to be discovered, uncovered, right now?


Second, can you learn to look at everything with the question, “What is this to love?” As if the world were full of hidden icons, gift-wrapped mysteries, secret sacraments that might open up, uncover, everywhere? Can you allow the hopeful question; “What is this to love?” with every possibility, every way you spend time and money, passion and purpose, every way you can live and give your life, everyone you like or love or look upon. At each open opportunity to spend your life, can you look to see, to ask, What is this to love? How would love look on this moment? What would Jesus see here?”

And finally, can you tell the truth of the good news of how God sees you, where God has found you, how Christ has called you? Under whatever particular fig tree you were loving or looking or loafing when Jesus was looking upon you and calling you by name, calling you to be who you are, calling you to live in his love and live out his life in the world he creates and redeems and breathes love into every day? How can you tell that story in all your live, in everything you do, everything you are, to everyone you know? How can you, as St Francis puts it: “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary using words!” To look to it all with the question, what is this to love in the life of the body of Christ, and to live that out from here on to the end.

W. H. Auden writes this as the end of his great Christmas Oratorio, “For the Time Being”


He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.


He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.


He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

So Jesus says that Nathaniel will “see greater things than these... Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Just like Jacob that dreamer and schemer, who wrestles with God in all the intricacies of his life, the good and bad, the lost and found, that whole holy mess and mass of it; just like Samuel, who will learn to speak peace and justice, to love his neighbor and the stranger and to make the world a better place; just like Paul, who will learn that the law is a schoolmaster to lead us to the love and freedom of Christ, to be a new creation waking up in his graceful body. Nathaniel will follow Christ into being another unknown disciple, apostle, witness, seeing the Lord in places he would have never thought to look.

Amen.

Baptism Sermon

The First Sunday of the Epiphany
The Baptism of the Lord
January 7, 2012
Holy Trinity Cathedral, Wangaratta
Fr Robert Whalley

We’ve just heard Mark’s account of John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River at the beginning of his ministry and I want to connect that baptism with each of our baptisms, whether they took place recently, or some years ago, whether we remember them vividly or not at all, and how each of us participates in the life and ministry of Jesus by offering the sacrifice of our lives in his service as baptized members of his body, which is the church.

Listen to what Rowan Williams wrote a few years ago:

The Christian Church began as a reconstructed version of the notion of God’s people – a community called by God to make God known to the world in and through the ... model of action and suffering revealed in Jesus Christ.. a pattern of common life lived in the fullest possible accord with the nature and will of God ... in which each member’s flourishing depended closely and strictly on the flourishing of every other and in which every specific gift or advantage had to be understood as a gift offered to the common life.

This is how the imagery of the Body of Christ works in St Paul’s letters. There is no Christian identity in the New Testament that is not grounded in this pattern; this is what the believer is initiated into by baptism. And this is a common life which ... depends on the call and empowering of Christ’s Spirit.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about the two biggest questions about our baptism in Christ which are these: First, how do we take that in and, second, how do we live that out?

For when we really look at it, we see that baptism is more than just a friendly ritual, something pleasant to do to an infant before a festive brunch with family and friends (though it can certainly be that, and that’s not a bad thing at all), but it can be so much more more. By the grace of God it is a matter of life and death, of dying to an old life so that we can be part of a new partnership, a new community, brought together, quoting Rowan Williams again, in “the call and empowering of Christ’s Spirit.” it's a real renewal!
 For Baptism means we don’t have to live for ourselves or by ourselves anymore and it points to the true promise that our participation in the baptism of Christ enlivens us to a larger purpose, opens us to the greater gift of a larger life that shared by God, enlightened by Gods life, living within the reality of God's love.

And that is only the start! For the liturgical ceremony of baptism at the font, that lasts a few moments, turns out to be something that lasts well over a lifetime. That ceremony of baptism is just the beginning; for in that we are enabled and called to take up the work and ministry of the baptized, to take this new life that Jesus shares with us, and to spread it around, to join Him in washing the world and helping to make sure it shines with the love of God.

Now, to take a step back, I’ll admit that it is not always an easy task, and so in many ways, I think that’s one of the best reasons for coming to church every Sunday! We might have been washed up at the font in our baptism as a baby or as an adult, but we still need to  keep coming back to learn more of the basic steps  and basic shape of it in the motions of the Eucharist to learn to let it move into all the ways we live our life from here on.

You see, we might have come here to reach for Christ; but what we find is in doing that, in reaching for Jesus and asking him to be part of our lives, we get a bit more than we expected. Grace works that way. So if we come to get a grip on him, we can find that we’re called to hand him to the world and hand the world back to him. It can be a bit of a stretch at times, but it seems that’s part of God’s economy, that’s part of what it means to be part of God’s household, God’s ongoing and outpouring ministry.

For the hands which reach for the body and blood of Christ here, are the same hands, same body, same love, same life, that reach out to touch the world in daily life in all the places where we make business, or peace or war or love: everywhere we move to touch the lives of friends and strangers, every place we spend our days. The love of God in Christ reaches into the particulars of all our daily liturgies through our baptismal ministry, and we come to move like Christ in all these places. We just come to remember it here.

Look at what we just did in the center of this Cathedral with the reading from the Gospel. We stand on our feet for the Gospel here in the center of the church, but we do that here so that we can learn to stand for the good news of God everywhere; so that we can learn to stand individually and corporately  for God’s caring, connection, judgment and renewal of the whole creation; again, not just in church, not just here, but everywhere! Standing in witness and wonder and partnership for Gods’ loving action in the whole world.

So this shared liturgy in church helps us exercise our ministry muscles when we move it out! So everything  we do in here helps us remember and renew everything we do out there! Because by God’s grace it is one world! And what  we need to remember, in singing hymns or wishing Peace to a neighbor across the aisle, is that we’re exercising the same voices, same hearts and minds, same bodies, which takes showers, eats breakfast, goes to the market, talks to friends and strangers, lives life in all its daily demands and complexities every day.

So here’s a few ministry exercises you can do on your own: First, try wishing the peace of God to the person who calls to sell you long distance phone service when you just sat down for dinner; pray for the talkative person with the full cart in front of you in line at Safeway or Cole’s; try piling blessings on the person who took your preferred parking place on a warm day; simply love your neighbor and the stranger and your own self as best you can, and make that an offering to God every minute of your day, every day of your life.

It’s not always an easy task, an liturgy, and that’s all right. You won’t always get it right, and you don’t have to, you don't have to make it a big thing. In fact it’s better if you don’t, ‘cause it’s not all about you at all; it’s just giving a gift that you received in your baptism. Just try to make your daily life a kind of silent Gospel procession and proclamation, a sustained hymn of peace and praise, a reaching out for the body of Christ in all his distressing disguises, a kind of continuation of the communion you take in here. Take that out to the world.

Remember what we say at the end of the Eucharist?

“We offer ourselves to you as a living sacrifice through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory.

For in the end our baptismal ministry happen every time and every way we take time to  create, redeem, and relate like God. It’s how we live our lives. Some people heal with kindness, others love the stranger, others listen well. Some make justice, visit the sick, give to the poor, live cheerfully, tell the truth. Everybody does what they can, and that’s why we come here today, every day, to remember that this is God’s good world and  we are God’s good friends, and the good news is that we are here to remember and renew our call, by the grace of our baptism and the love of God, to be the body of Christ.

Amen.

Sermon: Wangaratta Jazz Festival Jass Mass, Feast of All Saints', Holy Trinity Cathedral

Maybe everyone here this morning has been asked this question: So how do you like Jazz?

The question was asked of me by the son of some friends of my parents in 1961, when I was just 15 years old, living near Fairfield, California, an hour northeast of San Francisco and not far from the Santa Rosa you’d see in George Lucas’s  “American Graffiti”

And did I like jazz?

Well, I knew my mother liked Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Forrest, Turk Murphy, Paul Whiteman: I knew my Dad liked Benny Goodman, the Dorsey’s, Red Nichols, George Shearing and Lionel Hampton,

But did I like jazz? I liked Spike Jones and his City Slickers and still do, liked Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bobby Darin, Movie musicals, and sometimes Vince Guaraldi: Hell, as a tall scared teenager, I pretty much liked anything that liked me back. I liked the Kingston Trio! And I didn’t know if I liked jazz.

But this California kid who was a year older and therefore knew more about everything in the world put an LP on the turntable and handed over the red and black cover to a record called Round Midnight by Miles Davis and we listened to the cover track, and I liked it a lot and it touches me still 50 years later.

Listening to the soft sexy sullen sound of Davis’ trumpet, muted yet moving you on, weaving with an elegant, economic sound; recasting Monk’s original melody, by minimally curving the sound in a way that remembers the music that isn’t played, teasing out the intentions, the intervals, the pauses, pointing to the silence,

Then Coltrane comes in with his saxophone and warms it up, ebullient, effervescent, bubbling up with real enthusiasm, and pointing, in all his breathing joy, to what truly holds it together, those connecting links we can’t quite hear. And in the end the wit of Miles Davis and the warmth of John Coltrane dance around all the notes of the song and leave you with something that feels like loss and gain and joy and jazz and love. And I liked it a lot!

For maybe that’s one of the first moments, the places where I became a little bit of a theologian, a bit of a believer and a priest and a fan of jazz all at the same time; because I heard something of the joy in the middle and the silence under it all, of what hangs it together, holds it tight enough that you can play loose with it: the foundational sound, the salutary note, that song and that silence that has to do with wholeness, with holiness  with each of us and all of us, and not only here and now, but  always.

So when T.S. Eliot writes: “you are the music while the music lasts,” I think he’s on to something.

Because putting voice and instrument to music and melody is what we’re about, because the way we sing our song is our basic task, liturgy, vocation; It’s both where and why we meet the world, and how our ministry works it out.. Because what I got that afternoon with Davis and Coltrane, with Monk in the background, was an entrance into a deep sharing, discovery, discernment, delight in all the great and lively sounds of life: and I remember it still and it still leads me on to practice, to stretch out, to play with more expectation, more risk, more joy, more life!

For you are the music while the music lasts.

Because everybody makes ministry and music, as they make love and life. As they make sense and sound, sharing their take on the business of being alive: all the tones and turns and tunes, times and places, all the criticism, caring and crying and crowding, prayer and power and praise that happen in all the living and dying moments that come along and are over too soon.

For you are the music while the music lasts.

So we listen and replay and sing out! From nursery rhymes to funeral dirges, from bar room ballads to football club songs: From Hollywood to Tamworth, from Stephen Sondheim to Slim Dusty, from cacophonies to carols, as the world goes wrong and ‘round, as facts and finances and friends rise and fail, even as life runs short in the in the face of death, we still sing.

For God makes this gift of music and we take up our vision and voice and instrument, rhythm and rhyme and melody and make sound and song and  joyful noises in the world, because it keeps us breathing deep and together and sounding good and because nobody shuts their mouth when they’re making love!

Because you are the music while the music lasts.

That’s what this building, this tradition, this place we’re in today, really stands for: a two thousand year old melody played out in stone and brick, stained glass and wood and tapestry and flesh and blood and word and voice: a sustained tune on what the world might mean and how we can sing along, play along, improvise in our own way to all those old songs that tell us where we come from and where we’re going and why all the traveling.

This Cathedral is named for the Holy Trinity, which points to this trio of trusting in the happening and heart and hope of God, meaning love; that God, meaning love, makes, meets and mends the universe in every moment of time and every place and space; that God, meaning love, is the beginning, end and centre of our shared reality, that God, meaning love, is the light and the life and the lead that we follow when it comes time to take our turn and breathe our breath and sing our song.

For you are the music while the music lasts.

And that just might be what Jesus is about, right there in the middle; someone who teaches and walks and lives and breathes and dies and breaks through all false notes and all wrong rhythms with the promise that love wins in the end, will outlive the deadening demands and expectations of any little world that deifies money or violence or lust or power over one another. Jesus takes another route through that world and says a self-giving, neighbor-loving life, connecting with the whole of life in love is the right way home, back where we started from, and he lives out what he says in every way

You’ve heard the Beatitudes this morning and they’re pretty words, but Jesus walks that talk; his life sings that song: poor, meek and mourning; hungry, thirsty, merciful, a peacemaker who is persecuted, reviled, left out, pinned down to die on that inevitable intersection between what we say we want and how we are prepared to live and give in a world double-crossed with shadows and shortcuts.

And He dies on a cross in Jerusalem and Rome, London, and Wall Street, Melbourne and Merimbula. And in the end it doesn’t matter if he’s Jew or Greek, Male, Female, young old, straight, gay, winner, loser or also ran. He is the forgotten and remembered face of the love and the beloved and the lover, the meter and the music and meaning of it all.

And if we listen to his dying life meeting our living death we can still hear the song that says love lives and is reaching out and singing out and making out new ways to make it true and new and through together in every moment, and we’re here to learn to take up that song with whatever talents we carry with our voices and our vision and our hands and our hearts; and with whatever gifts we live out and give away on purpose and in love.

For you are the music while the music lasts.

In a little while we’ll break bread and share wine, his body and blood, his life and death and life, his magnificent defeat and victorious uprising as we take on the possibility of living that out ourselves, as our daily tune, in our living ministry, how we stand up and sing out and let that love live in our lives. That’s why we’re here in this soft spring morning:. To listen to the music, to sing the songs, to take on death and life and love and to let that melody and meaning and music be heard and handled, make sense and song in our own voices, our own way, our own world, even and especially now, in all the days of our lives from here on.

For you are the music while the music lasts.

Amen.

A funeral sermon from last week.

Earlier this week I sat with ----- and ----- looking at pictures they had of various times in ---- ----- life. you’ll see some of them later in the hall: pictures, as a  girl and a women, young, aging, older; as a girl,  a bride, a mother, with family and friends, here and ‘round Victoria, around the world, enjoyment, exploration, tasting life. There was one picture that really touched me, I think taken in Queensland. She is reaching out, standing on a narrow platform above a large pool, reaching out with a fish in her hand, as a large dolphin rises to take the fish from her. She looked both scared and delighted, willing to risk a little, to explore, to stretch out to meet something new. And it takes a certain kind of faith and style to do that kind of stretch - plus some nerve and more than a little faith and trust: that you won’t fall in, get knocked off balanced, and even if you do, you will live through it.

And that reminded me of two moments in my own life, one a bit of a shock, the second, a wonderful breakthrough. The first was when I was a teenager and my own mother arranged a family gathering to see world on the shores of San Francisco Bay we went to see the performing fish, dolphins and whales, and my mother was happy to see that there were seats available in the first second and third rows facing the water. She led us down there quickly, and I wondered why, in a busy arena so full of people, those rows were conspicuously empty.

The show was good: with seals and porpoises, magnificent  mammals, rushing around in circles, jumping out of the water to fly through hoops of fire, leaping to catch  balls and batons and delighted to catch the fish thrown out to them as rewards for their actions. Then a whale came  out, circled the pool three times, moved to the center, leapt up higher than you could believe, and came back with a thundering sound and a great wave came up and soaked us and the first three rows of seats with salt water and it was wonderful!

Because it reminded me of something I had forgotten until that day and have always remembered since.  When my mother and father and older brother and I took a summer vacation Sacramento to Carmel, California. I was about eight or nine years old, loves the water, loved diving off a little diving board, maybe 3 feet above the water, at the tennis club where we swim every summer, and I was excited to see that we were going to swim a larger pool on the edge of the ocean with a great big  dying board. Just like I had seen on television, just like I had always wanted to try.

Except when I started climbing the ladder and realizing that I was going higher and higher than I had ever gone before and the board was narrow and the water seemed far below and the wind was coming on the ocean and I would’ve turned around if I had been able to accept there were other kids on the ladder and my big brother was watching too. So I didn’t turn around that good morning but I took a deep breath and went forward with a big jump and bounced higher than I ever had and went farther and hit the water with a bang and it tasted of salt and I went deep and touched the bottom and rose up and took a breath and life was bigger than it ever had been before.  You couldn’t get me off the diving board for the rest of our stay in Carmel.

If the church makes sense, it does by providing food, for the mind, for the body, for the soul, for that risky journey, that tall climb, the reaching out, the jumping off, into new dimensions, into new ways of living, into something you can’t believe, can only dive into, by a blind leap of faith.

 “in my father’s house there are many  rooms... I am the way the truth and the life... love never fails... For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

---- ----- was part of this church, she was sprinkled in the water in baptism, she was renewed in prayer and worship and community, and every week Fr. ----- took her the meal that faithful people share, and she would reach out for the Eucharist, bread of heaven, cup of salvation, food for solace, food for community. A meal made for faithful traveling. And now she’s made the jump, and now she knows, even as she is known, and for this, the journey and the arriving, we give thanks.