Easter 2B Vigil Mass

Here’s a confession: I like Thomas, who figures prominently in the Gospel lesson we just heard, for the same reason I like Peter, who shows up in so many Gospels as well as in the Book of Acts. Because they both do stupid things, they say things which make no sense, which show their lack of faith, their cowardice, their lack of self-knowledge, their utter unworthiness – and yet  Jesus still keeps them around, and keeps them as disciples, even better, as friends. That gives me great hope for myself, for all of us!

Thomas shows up earlier in John’s Gospel when Lazarus gets sick. When Jesus and his friends are keeping a low profile because they’re afraid Jesus might get murdered by the local religious and political leaders. Jesus does a funny thing there, waits until Lazarus has died, and says, “We will go to him now” — and Thomas, worrying that there will be an assassination attempt on Jesus, still says, “Let us go with him that we may die with him.” That says something about their friendship, Thomas’s commitment to the Lord.

But a strange thing happens then, when they go to Bethany in Galilee: instead of Jesus getting killed, he raises Lazarus to life, and paradoxically then, I believe, something in Thomas dies, because, for him, nothing will ever be the same again.

It’s a big one: what if the dead are really raised? Not only Lazarus but Jesus, not only Jesus but you and me, not only you and me but maybe everybody raised to new life by the grace of a love that will be “all in all.” That can be a hard one to swallow — it isn’t easy to believe that the resurrection might end up that large — and to begin to take refuge in that truth, that where Jesus is now is where we are called to be, and to make that faith the hopeful heart of our lives. It can be a demanding ask.

Because sometimes it’s easier to not expect too much, to not have your hopes that high, to not to see forgiveness and renewal and resurrection in the future for maybe everybody. Sometimes it’s easier to keep it quiet, sometimes it’s easier not to believe much. So when Thomas, who saw Jesus die on the city crossroads, hears that the Lord is alive you can see why he might not want to take up that deep hope again. Because it’s hard to keep hope alive when the mob rules, when justice and compassion and mercy seem far away, when, to quote a poet, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” Can you see then where it might be easier to let faith die, to hide out from the possibilities of an ever renewing love?

Someone once said we are invited to exchange our living death for Jesus’ dying life, and that’s what happens here. Jesus shows up and invites Thomas, in the midst of his living death, to stretch out with all his unbelief and grab hold of the fact of Jesus’ dying life and the bright almost unbelievable reality of the resurrection: here’s where Jesus calls Thomas to be alive again – alive to faith, alive to hope, alive to the love that will haunt him with holiness and the promise of new beginning from here to Pentecost and beyond. And Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God!” And Jesus calls us too, like Thomas, as disciples, as friends. And I’ll cheerfully admit that gives me hope, but it still can be a stretch.

So that’s why I think it’s important to remember that there are forty days in the season of Lent and forty-nine in the season of Eastertide — maybe because it’s easier to live with the inevitability of suffering and death and, surprisingly, harder to learn to live with a life that is both broken apart by the promise of resurrection and held together with the hope of the Holy Spirit, who is closer to our hearts, as Augustine says,  than we are to ourselves. That’s a brave, even a merciful, new world, that’s a hope for Thomas, and for us to hold on to.

So my prayers tonight is that this Easter season enables us all to take up the resurrected life and the coming promise of Pentecost in our hearts. Like Thomas, may we walk with our faith and fear and doubt and love even deeper on this further journey with Jesus, into the heart of the goodness of this God who is alive and will reign forever. Amen

Easter 2018

So “Christ is Risen” and I want to talk about the Lord’s Prayer as one way of understanding how we participate in that today. So bear with me on this one. 

The Lord’s Prayer has four parts: first dealing with creation, second with human being (particularly one human), third with the fact of evil and finally, in the end, finding out why the beginning is important. 

So “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” In the Biblical Greek “Our Father in Heaven” is closer to “Dada or Mama of the Universe” and what might that mean? Maybe that the consciousness, the conversation we’re in, is one that begins to be woven before sunrise and darkest night, behind all black holes and supernovas, beyond  any notion of matter, space and time we might conceive: yet is still deeply intimate — close enough to trust, to call in under any circumstances, at any time. You might want to breathe with that one for a while. 

Then there are three imperatives, and the first, “May your name be hallowed” makes me want to take a detour right away. It seems to me that the name (when we use the word “God”) is so overladen with various cultural wars and judgments that it needs a reboot. What if we — like so many of the mystics — named this creating, companioning, conspiring ultimate being “Love, companion, good company close on the way.” And what if “your kingdom come, your will be done” means, “May I incorporate your eternal vision, values, compassion, justice and love into my life here and now. May I be part of the ongoing weaving of earth and  heaven into the present moment as well as with what lasts forever.” Take another breath here, for I think that’s what we’re about here on a good day - You’ll find it in every one of our church services: collects, confessions, lessons, psalms, sermon, intercessions; the memories and hopes from other seasons, learning from history and holding hope high, here is love lasting forever.

That's what God’s reign is about. In John’s Gospel Jesus is asking Abba that we be one: “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” This prayer, is here and now,  weaving our daily lives into the world of saints, pilgrims of Sabbath times of all times. We are invited to just say yes, to say Amen like Mary, “Be it unto me according to your word,” like Francis, “Make me an instrument of your peace” — even with a degree of ambiguity like Augustine, “Make me pure, but not yet!” Because receiving a love this honourable means you can be more honest than you are devout. For God (Love) is always willing to be one with us as we are, with all the mix and mess that means, incorporating us into this ministry of mercy. As one Eastern Orthodox theologian put it, “We are the eighth day of creation.” And that starts right here.

So, “Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” The prayer goes from that high point to the deepest necessities of human life together. Just the first six words cover so many things: refreshment and fuel, ecology and economics, connection and company. Bread and wine means flour, grapes and water fermented, mixed and kneaded, warmed and transformed, backs bent, hands stretched out to ensure our share in this harvest.

And when Jesus says, “This is my body, this is my blood,” He is saying I am willing to be known in this Eucharist, and I will be here, but in my love I have taken up with the body and blood of all humankind and all creation, with each of us here today. Jesus says, “This bread and wine are means of my love to you, but I mean to feed you, forgive you, renew you everywhere, in everything, in everyone!” And we have the blessed nerve, the amazing arrogance to respond, “We are the body of Christ”  and move to incorporate God’s rising promise, presence, passion in our lives. 

Here’s where you’ve got to gulp because we’re gathering courage and a amazing amount of bravado and betting the universe hangs together in compassion that tightly, and we’re aiming to give it all we’ve got with the sure and certain  knowledge that we almost always will get it wrong. We deserve to take a breath here — But there are ways to make it easier. When I joined the church fifty years ago at twenty-one, and first came to this celebration, I took the bread and said, “Give me the strength to live this way,” and when I drank the wine, I said, “Give me the spirit to really want to!” I no longer think that God serves two course meals, but I’m glad there is still room in our gathering to pause between taking on the bread and wine to say, “Give me the strength to try hard to do good and (deep breath here) keep giving me a renewing spirit, a forgiving heart for myself and others - or at least as some saint somewhere said, ‘Please make me want to want that.’” In my own experience some days that comes easy, other times you can only want and wait. 

“Lead us not into temptation (Save us from the time of trial) and deliver us from evil.” Here’s the home stretch and it can be more hard going. It’s important to note that nobody wants to go there — even Jesus asked if this particular cup could pass. It didn’t for him, and it doesn’t always for us either. There’s no real satisfactory answer, no reason here, but maybe that makes it more real because the weaving gets particularly thick in that place. And maybe the glory of the church comes when we gather to tell the stories and pray, share the peace, the bread of life, the cup of salvation, and someone is dying, someone’s getting born, someone’s in trial, someone’s found peace, someone’s gone missing and someone wakes to glory. Maybe that’s the way Love weave us through the heart-breaking times of testing and trial, when we share that cup with a friend, with a just and faithful servant, with the love that walks with us all the way home. 

In the oldest copies we have of Matthew’s Gospel the prayer ends there, which makes sense simply because death makes you pause and resurrection is a tough possibility to swallow. But not long after the faithful body begins to breathe into this new beginning and the wisdom of the Christian community, these followers of the way, add this ending like a coda: “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever. Amen” 

Maybe because they were convinced (and we’re invited to believe) that Love lives, and they were preparing (and we are always invited to join) in living out that belief, embodying it from now on. So the prayer ends close to where it begins, not far from where we started, but now we’re all changed, renewed in beginning again, recalling where we come from and where we’re going and remembering the one who cares so deeply to join us on the way.  

For Christ is Risen, Alleluia! 

An old sermon on Thomas Cranmer, Martyr

We are here today to recall the ministry and martyrdom of three men: Nicholas Ridley was a chaplain to Henry the Eighth and eventually the Bishop of Rochester. He was part of the group who drew up the first English Book of Common Prayer. Hugh Latimer was the Bishop of Worcester, a reformer who resigned under Henry the  Eighth and was tried for heresy and sentenced to death under Mary. He was burned with Ridley on the 16th of October 1555 and assured his immortality that day with the line: "Be of good Cheer, Master Ridley,…. For we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace will never be put out."

Thomas Cranmer, in addition to be being the chief architect of much of the Prayer Book we use today, was the Archbishop both under Henry and Edward his son. The accession of Mary put him in the difficult position of obeying a monarch who reigned, he believed, as ordained by God, and who commanded him to return to a Roman Church. he could no longer serve. The path he traveled took him in the same direction as Ridley and Latimore, but because of his political acumen, it  took a bit longer, and perhaps enabled him to do more lasting work. As one historian writes: "The extreme prudence of Cranmer, his timidity, his want of decision, his pliability, deplorable in certain cases,preserved him under the government….and thus saved, with his own life, the work for which he was required." He was burned on March 21, 1556.

Now this is no longer that world. You might get fired from a job, be on the hot seat from a boss or a committee, you might even have to jump through hoops in the various processes of the church, but it is unlikely you  will have to go through fire. We now live, as T.S. Eliot writes, in "an age of

moderate vice and moderate virtue, when men will not lay down the cross because they will never assume it." And here in Berkeley, at the start of the 21st century, we reside in a calm and tepid climate and a lukewarm, post-Christian world, on the left margin of the prevailing power structure; a place where it is easy to overlook the fact that the church is more than a voluntary organization; that it is necessarily born out of, takes its place in, and is constituted by repeated onslaughts of life and death, flesh and blood, water and fire.

The fiery business of living and dying has come to be an invisible strata of modern American life, something hidden and often a little shameful. Lenny Bruce, the sixties comedian, called death "the last great obscenity in America." And yet it is death that calls to be reckoned with, that is at the heart of our spiritual life. the heart of living and dying. Death. Whether with the family gathered around the bedside, alone in the board and care, or with assembled crowds at a noisy bonfire; as well as the subtler deaths, the death of relationships, convictions, or love, or faith, or hope. Death is also, perhaps, the locus of something else. But my question is, how do you do

death? Where do you catch fire?

A year and  half ago, three months before I came to CDSP, I became a short-term resident of the San Francisco Zen Center, partly because of my love for Thomas Merton, partly because I am so noisy for a contemplative, and partly, because of the death of several close family members and a brush with cancer (a melanoma that was contained), I was going a slow healing from tough wounds. And I thought that two hours of zazen meditation a day would hasten healing, calm me down. Fix me up. Major wrong move. Meditation is a cool way to allow the spirit to warm your heart, but it isn’t easy. All the pain jumped into the silence and the stillness and claimed allegiance, made noise, asked to be heard,. But after a time it got a little better and one day I was sitting there with a measure of peace, alone in the silence facing the wall in the morning silence of the Zendo when it hit me: this might be the way I meet my own death, death would be like this, I was facing the blank wall of my death. But it was also the same as the moment of birth, a vast opening, a breath of fresh air. And I knew that God is in either place, up against every wall and every threshold. at all times, in each death, peeling away the evasions and burning away all that is superfluous, abiding in all that is eternal, so that finally all that is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

So as every martyr’s death is a point of new creation is well as a kind of death in the old order; so every holocaust of the old, is a sort of Pentecost, a fire-work in which the spirit continues to brood over and refines creation;. a flaming birth of new possibility.

Cranmer writes this at the end of his life. "I have learned by experience that God never shines forth more brightly, and pours out the beams of his mercy and consolation, or of strength and firmness of spirit, more clearly impressively upon the minds of his people, than when they are under the most pain and distress."

We come here to taste death and learn life, to be warmed in the light of the saints and the martyrs. To catch fire for the kingdom .So come in further this morning, live and dwell into the deepest contradictions of your life and times, and combust there by the grace of God. And bring it all to the table, so that you may be reborn, again and again and again.

In the name of Christ.

The Feast of Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer.

Bishops and Archbishop, 1555,1556

All Saints’ Chapel

Church Divinity School of the Pacific

October 16, 2000

Robert Whalley, Visiting Chaplain

Early images of "God" for me...

Since I was a kid I’ve often had the sense of being accompanied, regarded, refreshed by some kind of compassion and sweetness. It wasn’t constant, but there was somehow often and consistently this surprising inbreaking, awareness of a welcome and sacred dimension entering the scene, lighting it from within, enhanced but perfectly clear in the middle of what it meant to be human: sometimes it comes with the changing light in the morning, the rhythm of breathing, the fact of our flesh, the sad and amazing, fragile and magnificent world seen face-to-face every moment, every day. These still seem to me plausible reasons to believe in a creation made, met and mingled within a conscious and continuing act of love.

Looking back I can remember digging in my parent’s garden when I was four or five, using a water hose to create a river under a rose bush, building a dam with one gesture of my palm, feeling the warm dirt and cold water as I rebuilt the world. I can remember learning to swim under water a few years later, diving into a pool and moving from the noises of people talking, children playing, music in the background, and finding a realm of cool silence, bright with bubbles and water, refracted sunlight, moving into new dimensions of motion flying down to deeper silence or up into the noise and breath and air again.

I remember the joy of riding a bike, pumping my legs and turning corners and exploring new neighborhoods when I was ten or twelve. I remember playing tennis, shifting weight and leaning to read the court like a songsheet, responding to the rhythm of the opponent, the court, the flight of the ball, the air and light and weather, arms and legs and sweat and joy. I remember dancing and dating and exploring other people’s bodies and my own with all the intricancies and exegencies of flesh and blood. I remember realising this dance was shared with all the world — everybody could do it, had done it, might do it again, soon, and wondering why we all didn’t.

Some of the memories, images and fancies for God are ephemeral, fanciful but still powerful; others held a serious stake in my heart for a time, made life painful for years.

When I was around 5 years old, a young Italian woman who had been one of my baby-sitters was going to get married in a large wedding at the local Catholic Church. My parents thought I was too young to go to the wedding ceremony so my grandmother stayed with me in the car across the street from the red brick church and I remember looking out the window at the building wondering what was happening inside. Maybe it came from something I'd seen somewhere else, maybe a scrap of conversation overheard, but I was sure the couple would be married, ”In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Goat.” After all these years I can still see the goat clearly; clean, white, with a necklace of colored bells and all the assembled company looking at the goat with the respect one gives a to visitor from a very foreign country who carries an important message  not easily understood.

One other image from a few years later stayed in the shadows and only came to light the same  during a meditation excercise while in seminary in my mid-thirties. Do you remember Judge Doom in the movie, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Tall, dark, menacing, covered with clothing from tall hat to a long overcoat and heavy rubber gloves; the one who knew all the weak points of the law, all the codicils to hidden wills. The one who was out to dissolve the characters of Toon Town.

He cme to mind when I remembered the landlord of a house my family rented when I was 10 years old, who, when my parents had fallen behind on their rent, came to the house and knocked on the front door. I had missed school that day and when my mother had gone to work that day she told me not to answer the door if he came. So I stayed silently inside as he walked around the house to try the back door and looked into various windows. I thought, as the landlord, he had the right to do whatever he wanted, and I was terrified that he would open the door and come into the house and throw me out.

I moved between those two childhood images of the Almighty for a lot of my life. On one hand was God as the silent judge who holds the rules and standards, keeps secret fate up his sleeve, always watching and never to be trusted. On the other hand was the sacred one as bellwether, member of the flock as well as leader of the pack; the holy one as a delightfully omnivorous and polymorphous explorer of the antistructure; getting on top of anything, smart, interested and tenacious; not easily herded.

Looking back I have spent so much time vacillating: not being sure whether to trust the journey or look for the rulebook; to consider the lesson of the sunrise or look for the hidden agenda under the stated expectations. I know that a lot of this is the story of my family background, but it is also a recurrent and unconscience lens through which I see the larger scape of the universe.

Then in 1965 when I was nineteen, I went to a suburban Episcopal church service where people followed a simple ritual of confessing their sins, receiving forgiveness, listening to some lessons, praying for themselves and others and incorporating the human love of God into their lives. All this, with music, took less than 55 minutes and I was surprised to realise that it was part of the same sweetness I found with gardens and water and exploration and getting lost and found and sweat and sweetness and lovemaking. It was another view of life that was bigger than I knew and it left me wondering how many other ways there might be to enact and understand, incorporate and ideate this participatory dance with something which might be in, with, under everything that is, which might be love.