Chaplinesque

Sermon - Epiphany 3B

2012-01-14T16:07:00.004+11:00

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

2012-01-08T11:42:00.002+11:00

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

2011-10-30T08:15:00.003+11:00

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.

2011-10-01T18:42:00.002+10:00

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.

APBA Lections 14th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-09-20T15:35:00.000+10:00

Exodus 16:2-15

2The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” 4Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. 5On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.” 6So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, “In the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, 7and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain against us?” 8And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but” against the Lord. 9Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, ‘Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.’“ 10And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. 11The Lord spoke to Moses and said, 12“I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’“
13In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 15When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.

Philippians 2:21-30

21All of them are seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. 22But Timothy’s worth you know, how like a son with a father he has served with me in the work of the gospel. 23I hope therefore to send him as soon as I see how things go with me; 24and I trust in the Lord that I will also come soon. 25Still, I think it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus—my brother and co-worker and fellow soldier, your messenger and minister to my need; 26for he has been longing for all of you, and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill. 27He was indeed so ill that he nearly died. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, so that I would not have one sorrow after another. 28I am the more eager to send him, therefore, in order that you may rejoice at seeing him again, and that I may be less anxious. 29Welcome him then in the Lord with all joy, and honor such people, 30because he came close to death for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for those services that you could not give me.

Matthew 21:23-32

23When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” 24Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. 25Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” 27So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

28“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ 29He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. 30The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. 31Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

Ten Years Ago: Notes From An American Abroad in Melbourne, Australia A Few Days After September 11, 2001

2011-09-12T19:31:00.005+10:00

Yesterday we took the tram out to the American consulate on St. Kilda Road here in Melbourne. Several other people got off the tram at the same time and walked in the same direction. You could see the building from the intersection, a modern low rise building, modest architecture, unremarkable except that people were walking around the small pattern of box hedges that marked the front entrance and which bloomed with bouquets of cut flowers in paper wrappings, with plants and sprays of roses, with candles and cards and letters printed and written on red, white and blue papers and addressed to the American people from the people of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. “Our hearts are with you,” “You are in our prayers,” “We send our love.” I watched a young teenage girl leave her mothers side to put a bouquet of daisies on the ground at the foot of the massed flowers and I went over to speak to her: “Excuse me,” I said, , “but as an American who feels very far from home right now,” and the tears started again, “I just wanted to say thank you very much.” I felt a touch on my arm and turned to see her mothers wet eyes as she smiled at me and said, “That’s OK.

That clock radio clicked on at 5:00AM that first morning and there was heard a segment of the first press conference held by the Mayor of New York. It made no sense at first; then facts filtered in, contexts drew lines, and there was a wavering instant when you hoped that it was some kind of fictional radio drama, “Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds,” but this was all true.

Two jets crashed into the twin towers of the 110 story World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. First one and then a second plane crashed into the towers, flames and fuel spilling into and through and down the building, trajectories and shards of wreckage and bodies falling down into the streets of New York like fireworks, and then the buildings themselves pancake down to the ground and thousands are killed. At the same time another plane flies into the Pentagon - 800 estimated killed - and a fourth plane crashes in a Pennsylvania wood, perhaps in an aborted attempt to crash into the White House. More deaths, and more waiting to see what is next.

After the 7:15AM Mass, which turns into a requiem, we spend the rest of the morning in dumb witness in front of the television. Most of the local broadcasting is curtailed as CNN, CBS, ABC, beam in directly from the east coast of the US with more news and pictures, the same pictures from different angles, over and over again, as the death toll rises, as suspicion points to a fundamentalist in Afghanistan. The day goes on and the flags over the Parliament building next door go to half mast, a report comes that people are putting flowers at the doors of the American consulate which has closed for the day, a service is scheduled at the Anglican Cathedral. I worry that I will cry too hard in public and be unable to stop.

Where does this begin and where will it end? Where does God meet all this? In the sad and angry tears of people left behind? In the graceful acts of courage, reconciliation, redemption: the firemen walking into the collapsing building, the doctor with a face dusted like a shroud continuing to care for the wounded and dying? In the dying victims: the two month old child carried by his father on the plane, the same father who decided to stop the hijackers, who in turn believed that this was Gods will for them? In the chaplain killed in giving the last rites to another victim. In the widespread pain of people waiting for word of a partner, a child, a parent, a friend, waiting and perhaps praying across this little fragile linked up world where we all are nerved together in the shocking light of this new holocaust. What does God mean here?

Perhaps the answer to all this is only in the attention, the listening, the very surrender necessary in prayer. Maybe there some peace is found; not certitude, not any kind of answer except that maybe God is big enough to reconcile all this somehow. There may be such love over all. But that does not ease.

In the afternoon my friend John and I drive to a meeting in Gembrook, a new retreat center an hour away from Melbourne. The people there have just gotten the news on the radio and want to talk about it, but I can’t hear more and go out for a walk on the grounds. John joins me after awhile and soon Tom, another trustee of the place, comes down the hill from the main house, crying hard himself, and the three of us end up sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the vegetable garden, empty now at the end of a dry Australian winter, and the beginning of an uncertain spring, and after some more talk and tears we end in silent prayer again.

And I remember what happened in December 1986, when an American plane flew into a mountaintop in Greenland the week before Christmas and several hundred people were killed. I was the acolyte at the midweek Eucharist at a local parish, nobody else was attending, I asked the celebrant if this Mass could be dedicated for those killed earlier in the day. And as the service went on I knew - could almost see - that they, the dead, were there; the very same ones who had been ripped out of the sky were somehow with us, that (and this is very hard to write) there was a tear in the world and the people who died could see us through the torn fabric of the cosmos, and could take comfort, solace, nourishment in our prayer, pain, remembering of connection with them, even though that very awareness came at the time when the connection was lost. And I knew with deep certitude that they were being fed with our tears, and that what we were doing and feeling mattered and made sense on a greater level than I had understood before.

Thursday we went to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The building was crowded and we sang Amazing Grace, and there were readings of Paul at his best from Romans and the Twenty third Psalm and the Beatitudes from Matthew and then the Consul General spoke briefly about how touched he was by all the flowers and tributes placed in front of the American consulate by the people of Melbourne. And at the end a soloist sang, American the Beautiful: “Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.” And so many of us cried for what had been lost and what we held dear and for what we didn’t know. And then we took the tram out to the consulate and I saw the little girl and the flowers.

After that John and I walked to the Botanical Gardens a few blocks further on St. Kilda Road. We stopped at the Shrine of Remembrance on the way, a memorial for the dead of WW1 and WW2, a tall stone building with plaques and books open to the names of people who died in Europe and the Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Far East: all the places of heroism and holocaust, places where the best and the worst of human nature was seen. From the balcony on the upper floor you can see the skyline of Melbourne and the water of Port Philip Bay, and at the foot of the monument, the eternal flame for the Royal Australian Air Force, and a small statue of a man leading a donkey loaded with a wounded soldier. The mans name was Simpson and he and the donkey tended to the wounded and dying in the midst of the battle of Gallipoli in WW1, taking water to the troupes and bringing back the wounded from the front lines for several weeks until they too were killed.

And I know that we do not need more wounded soldiers, we do not need another donkey carrying the victims of war and hatred and violence. We do not need to seek vindication of any kind. We have been there, we have done that, it does not work.

We walked into the Botanical Garden around three in the afternoon on this early spring day. Trees and flowers are starting to bloom, the weather was fine and across the pond from the tea house there was a wedding with a bride in white, men in dark suits, women in big flowered hats. Outside of the tea house we spoke to a man with three shy, grinning greyhounds named Bill, Ernest, and Wilma. In the line to be served a family in front of us - a grandmother, father and two sons around 10 and 12 - were making jokes about how much tea and how many cookies they could eat. We took our food and went to sit on the terrace outside overlooking the pond and it was a very peaceful place.

Listen: there is no reason to hate, there is no profit in anger, there is no glory in inflicting death or in dying for that matter. There is too much to love, too much to lose, too many who are worth far too much. And all we can do is keep the world open, keep our hearts open for the wideness of Gods mercy, for the depth of our connection to one another, to the constant surprise rising up of the fragility and the strength of love which does endure and will succeed. And this is heartbreaking work, but it must be done, so that we can remember again and again, how much there is to lose, how much to gain.

Pentecost 11A

2011-08-29T14:01:00.001+10:00

Today’s lessons give us three radical ways of seeing and living in the world; visions and living convictions and practices that make all things new. Moses turns around to see the burning bush and finds himself moving to enemy territory to save his people, to let the slaves of Egypt find freedom in a new and faithful pilgrimage. Paul loses his allegiance to the old laws and is enlightened by a new understanding of God’s charity in the middle of the world, God’s word of love where he had never expected to find it: and Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, and take up our cross and follow him into a future that lives beyond death, that can only be found in faith.

So it needs to said right away, that when you step on this pilgrims’ path, it’s not always an easy road. Things go wrong. Moses gets the people past the deep water, well on the way to freedom and they start to complain that they preferred the certainties of Egypt to the risks of the road. Paul calls us to the great liberty of being a new creation in God and then starts backtracking to old rules and expectations: and the day before he takes up his cross, Jesus asks that he might be relieved of it. It seems the road forward doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally go backward. That was true then and it still happens now, with them and with all of us.

Linking to this, Walter Brueggemann, in a book called “The Prophetic Imagination” talks about two ways of living with God that he sees in the Old Testament as well as in the history of the church. The first is the “prophetic” stance we see the in faithful walk of Moses and the prophets; calling and looking for mercy and justice, for faith and love, for a faithful and living relationship with God fired by, awe, love and compassion. Bruegemann contrasts this with the “royal” consciousness” that’s seen in the world of King Solomon; where the world is “safe” and God and the power structure are one, where everything under control, where the ongoing conversation between God and humankind we see with Moses and the prophets is replaced by a monotone of the more officially approved reality: God was in the temple, near the king, under wraps, and the people are living under a myth that keeps away the larger living questions about death and limits and responsibility and what it might mean to be human.

I might have told the story before about a young student who came to see me when I was a chaplain at RMIT University. Suffering from severe depression, she was a single mother, a first-generation Asian Australian and she didn’t know what to do with her life. At one point she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “I look on the web and go to the mall and I don’t see anything that looks like me; what is wrong with me?”

I couldn’t tell her at the time, but what was wrong with her was that her vision was drugged, her sight was skewed, she saw only what she was supposed to see, and in that world she would never be enough. Like the world of Solomon and the mall of his Jerusalem, that is the story of so much of what we hear and see on the web and at the mall: the world for so many of our friends, so many of the people we love.

And it is understandable. It’s a mall with great promises and shiny prizes, where all things are vaguely possible, subtly encouraging us to be self-centered, controlling, living from crisis to crisis, fighting depression and stress while we strive for some great perfection that is always found just round the corner. it is a world where everything seems possible sometime soon, an addictive world that drugs its life so that it will not feel the threat of death.

Some 25 years ago, Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral, said we are invited to exchange a living death for the dying life of Jesus Christ. It made me stop and think then and it does the same now. Because Christ calls us to look at ourselves and the world in a whole new way, his life and ministry and the family he calls us to join are closer to the call of Moses than the courts of Solomon. Look at the Beatitudes! Look at the radical inclusivity and the wide open welcome of the Gospels that are echoed in Paul writing to the church at Rome.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

The story, the reality, of the life death and resurrection of Jesus shines a bright light, a deep truth, a burning love on our own lives, makes us turn around and leave the taken for granted world and all its worldly ways, call us to walk barefoot like a child to see this new life blooming in a place where we never would have looked. Jesus takes us to learn to look at death so that we can really see and love life, so that we can really live! It is a story, a pilgrimage, that is not easy to understand because it’s hard to focus on it. It’s like the action is bigger than the stage, it’s like Jesus the actor takes us out of the theatre where we view the world, calling us to unwind the web, open up the mall, take off our shoes and let ourselves be made anew on this new road which we can only walk by faith.

And look where it goes. Jesus renews Jerusalem by dying in Jerusalem. Jesus lives out a life of love by letting it go, give himself away as an offering to the God who is who is bigger than life. Just like Moses begins a journey that will take him beyond himself and bring a captive people home, just like Paul sees a love that is larger than law; so Jesus pours himself out into the lives of people he loves, so that we may be baptized, incorporated, into his death and life; so that we can rise with him into new life. But this cannot be easily understood.

Someone said, years ago,”The real question is how uncomfortable are you willing to let yourself be for the kingdom of heaven, the new creation, for God’s kingdom to come?” It is not easy to hear this, to live with this, but it is a very real question for all of us who are concerned about the future of the church, of living out God’s life and love in a world that is so tied up with the web and the mall.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

To follow Jesus to Jerusalem is to walk into the unknown, to go into the old city in a new way, go beyond the old understanding of death into a new understanding of life. This is not easy to live with. I think Jesus keeps it a secret in Mark’s Gospel, because it is easier to talk it then to walk it, to try to think it out than to live it out. A professor of mine once said that, “Students came to seminary to learn to be godly and ended up being somewhat lordly instead”. That’s the risk, the problem for all of us. It is so easy to make our religion a way to spend time -- like the mall or the web -- rather than a pilgrimage, a place to pour ourselves out to the world God loves in the way of Jesus. To die in Jerusalem so that we might rise in larger life.

The young woman at RMIT did not just need a new credit card to buy new shoes to wear to the old mall; she needed to take off her shoes and see a new world, with a bigger vision of God than she ever knew, with a better understanding of herself than she ever hoped.She didn’t need to buy something, she needed to know there was a gift offered, that she should be ready to receive, and that is the same gift that we need to to be ready to receive, and that is why we’re here.

This Eucharist is a homecoming feast but it is also food for pilgrimage. It serves, to misquote St. Paul elsewhere, “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” It is a recipe for renewal and rebirth as well as a comfort in times of sickness and sorrow. And finally the Eucharist serves us so that we can go farther than we thought, be more than we knew, and give more than we ever knew we possessed. It is where the poet Wendell Berry tells us, we must do something that does not compute: we must “Practice resurrection.” And that is good news!

In the name of Christ.

Pentecost 4A Sermon

2011-07-10T05:17:00.002+10:00

I don’t know why it is, but in the last couple of months, possibly after turning 65 in April, I’ve been remembering the way I was when I was a young man. I had lots of opinions then about lots of things, and I made lost of lists: my top five or ten books, records, movies, places I wanted to visit, things I wanted to do, successes I planned to make. I made lists with people too. One summer I was living in a dormitory at my University and I remember sitting with three or four male friends ranking and rating other friends, people we knew, according to various criteria I would prefer not to share, because they say so much about how narrow and shallow and egotistic and insecure I was as a young man.

There were other lists that I kept on my own: I remember opening my wallet and pulling out my driver’s license, credit card, student body card, library card, gymnasium pass, Social Security card. I don’t remember what else was in there, but I spread them all out on my desk and looked at them as though they contained secret of my identity, a summary of who I was, tickets for a prize I thought I needed to collect.

So see this kid quick to make judgments, issue summary statements, offer evaluations, sum up. But know under all these judgements this there were
as a tremendous insecurity such fears that I wouldn’t fit in, couldn’t make the grade. I wanted so badly to be someone, but I was scared I would be nobody.

Fast-forward some years later when I was at seminary and a professor gave a sermon in our chapel about the parable from the Gospel of St. Matthew that we just heard. He pointed out that, if we were God’s ground, we could not help ourselves. We could not, if we were shallow, deepen ourselves. We could not, if we were stony ground, clear ourselves. We could not, if we were caught with distractions, clarify ourselves. We had, as one confession used to say, no health in ourselves to save ourselves.

And by that time I knew enough about myself to know I was a pretty mixed bag, a field which varied from dry to deep, with diversions and distractions, not much discipline and not enough dedication: I wasn’t the best bet for a plentiful harvest, and if you were making a list of likely places for good growth to take place I wouldn’t have made the top 10 on anyone’s list.

But then I thought of those people gathered around Jesus when he told the story of the sower and the seed which fell on various kinds of ground for the first time. There may have been some who live too close to the highway, got too distracted too easily; others might have been hobbled by bad habits or lack of discipline, lacked the tenacity or vision to lead new beginnings rooted in their ground. Still others would have gotten caught on various thorny issues, lost focus, lost hope, given up too soon with all the distractions that modern life is full of, there were probably some people there who made too many lists. Yet the disciples of Jesus, gathered around the Lord that day at the crossroad heard that story and they still followed him into God knows where: and then and now that gives me such a surprise of joy.

Because those first disciples are such a rag tag bunch, concerned about the wrong things, showing reckless courage when they should just be patient, being fearful when they ought to be faithful, speaking out too soon on the wrong topics when they could have learned to listen to a new way. None of them are not great ground to seed a faith that will change the world

Yet this is to be the foundation of our family of faith. They are, as Paul puts it, God’s field, and what a mixed up ground it is! Yet that gives me tremendous hope and joy and courage; because if they can make it, then so can I. And so can every one of us!

For God plants his seed in our lives; in all the circumstances where we live and move and have our being, at school or at home or at tea, in every community: For these raw towns, ranches of isolation, dysfunctional families, desperate friends, are places where, to quote Auden, “we must learn to love one another or die,” and where we must let ourselves be loved as well. That’s where the answer comes, because the seed is the love of God, and that can make miracles happen everywhere.

St. Paul says, to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. Only a young person or a very silly disciple would think that they could make a list of how the world worked and what in the main mattered. That’s so deadly, but so many of us do try to make a success of it, to get the winning ticket, the right prizes, to be anything but what we are. And God comes to love us as we are, to cast his seed amongst our barren busy fields that we may give good growth, and God does not work alone.
So we come here to be together with God, to look for life and peace and growth.

For the spirit breathes us together like love, inspires us to work for the common good, makes us see new beginnings and learn new options beyond our old and desperate ways. That’s what it means to be church! Go back to those earlier disciples and see how they’re changed: Christ forges them together to the community who can learn from God and one another, who can serve God and one another. It is the same with us.

Through good grace and God’s love, we come to see that we are not alone, in our many misunderstanding, and our little lost lists, in the juvenile judgments and those strange finalities which we follow to make us safe from others who might scare us, those sad compulsions to keep us separate from the people who could save us, who can redeem us from such isolation, connect us to community. But we are past that here. We are here to be the church, God’s great harvest, God’s good friends.

For what blooms from those many seeds, cast with such love by our Creator God, given out to people in every field of life, to the lame and the lost, the lonely and the loud, those guilty of depravity or distraction or deception, is nothing less than love, and that can open the soil, can change the world, can give us hope. The seed of God’s love can land in the center of each of our lives and gives us both growth and grace as we grow together, travel together, turn to the Son together, move to the light together. For in coming to be Christ’s Church we have found a common font of purpose that will let our very ground be renewed by God’s grace.

So in looking back to that shallow little boy all those years ago, I feel a little bit of embarrassment and a surprising lot of joy. I thank God for friends and favors I found along the way: companions and comrades who helped me clear my fields, weed my distractions, deepened my compassion and grow my understanding to help me find my way home.

It was those people, God’s friends and messengers, both then and now, both inside and outside the church, who help me to come to know the body of Christ, of which by grace, we are members. Those angels of good news open my eyes, my mind, my heart, the ground of my being, to God’s grace. And all of them together with God help me clear land, fertilize fields, deepen capacity and understanding, make me show up for the gift of a good harvest.

It is the same for all of us. For God still casts his seed wide all over the world, every day in every way, in all our soiled history and hope, to make strong green growth where Christ’s compassion and love blooms brightly: for that is what it means to be the church, to be his body, the church, a loving community renewed by faith where common ground lifts Christ’s life, rising into new beginning, to a world where the harvest will be gathered with wonderful grace and great joy. And this is our hope, for we are the body of Christ.

Trinity Sunday, Holy Trinity Church, Benalla

2011-06-19T12:45:00.002+10:00

Better preachers than I have gone down in flames on Trinity Sunday: not from Pentecostal fire but trying to describe and draw out the models and theories that are around this Christian dogma and doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Ever since the leaders of the Christian churches gathered in Constantinople early in the fourth century to hammer out the definition of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there have been so many inadequate teaching sermons. I hope this is not one more.

But in the end we are not here to understand the Trinity but to experience it: to evidence in our lives what we say we believe with our tongues, to let the daily motions and ministries of our days be manifestations and messages of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. So that the Holy Trinity might finally be less of a doctrine and more of a dance.

But how do you move to the motion of the Trinity, how do you get there here?

I want to share something called Spiritual Directions; which started out as three questions, moved into a design and curriculum for quiet days and retreats as well as parish-based program, and now one diocesan model for Group Spiritual Formation, something you might want to consider using in this parish. Here are the three questions:

Who sits at the table in the middle of your life?
Where are you taking a faithful journey?
How do you find fresh air on the way?

First, who sits at your table? Picture a round table in the middle of your head; 12 people, more or less, sit there and try to run your life. They are probably not always the same people, and maybe you don’t even know who they all are. Speaking of my own table, my mother and father are often there, good friends, heroes and teachers and characters from books and stories I’ve heard: the Bible is there as well as the BCP, T.S Eliot and Thomas Merton have seats, as well as occasionally advertising slogans and songs I know. Sometimes people show up who don’t like me very much. Some I know well, others surprise me. Everyone thinks it is a board of directors meetings and they are the ones in charge, so it gets noisy at times

I started inviting people to this table when I was a little boy: other people’s ideas of good or bad or right or wrong, popularity or principles, what was worth working for, who I could trust. And this population can be a very mixed bag. But where do they come from? I think they are our God given participation in creating, building and naming a world. It starts in the first chapter of Genesis and it continues to the present day: the creativity of God moves, from a disordered world to have balanced creation, from Chaos to Cosmos, from an anomalous mess to a world that matters. And this ordering impulse continues within the way we order our worlds. I think we all do it!

For our table-building is part of our creative life with God, our attempt to make the world makes sense, to hold together; but generally it isn’t a lively enough, it falls flat because, as Moses says, we are a headstrong people, and because it is only a child’s exercise. So we come to know that we need the help we can only get by going beyond the table.

So, where are you taking a faithful journey?

I think the most essential motion of being human can be seen when we’re walking along and the path comes to a corner, the road takes a curve, when we can’t see the way ahead, and we have to go on by faith. This happens all the time: a child starting the first day of school, beginning a new job, falling in love, getting married, getting divorced, dealing with illness, the death of a loved one, facing our own death -- any failure or success or surprise; life turns corners and in that time we must travel blindly with whatever faith we can find.

This morning’s Gospel comes from John, where Jesus always speaks with ultimate authority. But in Matthew, Mark and Luke, we can see another, sometimes subtler picture of this human being, full of the glory of God, being as surprised as we are by chaos and community and gift and grace and life and death and all the rest: There God in Christ is wholly on the human way, where open-ended quandaries and questions take us in new directions, make us new people in a new world.

And here is God’s good news, as Lord and Savior and friend meeting us on the journey, walking towards that unfinished frontier, to bring us home at the last.

In our human lives, there’s always tension between the Table and the Journey. The table argues from history and for tradition, what other people said, what has worked before: but the experience of the journey calls us to give up our lives as a committee meeting and take it up as pilgrimage, as kenosis, as a self-giving offering to God. Just like Jesus; dying to the demands of old laws so that we may rise up in new love. Do you hear the tension between the two? The table is worried it might be incomplete, the journey learns to rejoice that by God’s grace it is unfinished. These two motions seem worlds apart and there seems to be no way they can dance together, perhaps no way they can help but suffocate each other.

How do you find fresh air on the way?

The only chance to bring these two together is the place where we meet the spirit, in the middle of our daily lives, where, Augustine says, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, in a breath of fresh air. For God’s fresh air is the same spirit-breathing the words, “Let there be light!” at the start; the same breath calling “Repent” by the Prophets all those times when Israel starts worshiping money or power, or religion for that matter; The same breath-spirit in the angel speaking to Mary and the same breath in Mary’s, “Let it be to me according to your word.” The same breath in Jesus saying “Blessed are the poor”, the same breath saying, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Throughout the Hebrew scripture. Israel usually doesn’t know what to do with God’s breath and God’s word in the middle of daily life, and neither do we. Like them lie Jesus, we have to let God’s breath breathe us day by day, here and now, with all our living and our dying, with all glory and gall that Jesus found on the way, so that we all share in his resurrection. The fact is that we can’t get there from here on our own: the good news is that we don’t have to.

This does not save us from uncertainty - there are no shortcuts here - but it assures us that God breathes us, inspires us, now and always, and that there is no place where we can be separate from the love of God, from the creativity of the father, the compassion of Christ, the indwelling of the spirit, whether we know it or not.

So these three things: just as God creates a world, we build a kind of table and usually get it wrong. Then Jesus joins us in our journey, calling us to take the pilgrim path where nothing is certain except that everything can be a gift from God; joining us right though the middle of life to learn the crucial difference between being incomplete and unfinished.

And finally, the spirit, inspiring and indwelling in our bodies, sends us to speak and serve good news, to feed every table with the bread of life and the cup of salvation; to make the whole world a community called to take the pilgrim way where the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit, the most Holy Trinity is with us all, now and always. Amen.

Pentecost 2011

2011-06-12T06:59:00.000+10:00

Let me confess first that I spent too many years in school some years ago,, And though I loved it, in spite of a lot of time as a student, I often found it very difficult to speak up in class. Usually, when I was asked to answer a question or, more infrequently, when I raised my hand to ask one, my voice would break and I would either go over the top and talk too much or go down in flames by saying too little. Anyway it was not easy. But it was the worst when trying to learn a foreign language. I avoided it for a long time, but in my early thirties, after years of moving between working full-time in our family printing business and attending several tertiary institutions part-time, I was finally finishing my bachelors degree at the University of California. Except that I needed to pass one year of a foreign language and I couldn’t do that.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried: I’d enrolled more than once, tried Spanish, French, even Latin, and I’d attend for a while but I just couldn’t speak: so I’d drop the class or, if I waited too long, I would simply fail.

To make it worse, I had been accepted for a Masters degree in religion. So I remember, early in the summer of 1980, talking to the Seminary Dean, asking for a postponement into the program so I could have more time to finish my bachelors degree, then coming home and walking into the back yard and looking up at the sky and saying, “I am doing the best I can, and it’s not good enough, so I am giving it all to you.”

And the air and the light and time and my life seemed to change just for a second, in some very subtle, indescribable ways, and though I still didn’t know what the end would be, I felt better for it, ready for some unknown door to open. And six weeks later, I remember sitting in the back of a another Spanish classroom with some anxiety, but with a growing excitement that that I might learn to speak a new language after all.

And I did. I finally graduated that year, with encouraging friends, good teachers, a wonderful counselor, and a growing sense that God’s grace would keep me going, that God’s love, God’s breath, could keep my mind and my mouth open, give me good words, that God would keep me from going down in flames.

So today I think of those gathered followers of Jesus, that day in Jerusalem when the spirit came upon them like flames and they spoke to strangers, in languages they didn’t know they knew, of the mighty acts of God. What must that have been like for them? Were they scared? Did they wonder, “How do you speak God’s Word in a different language?” And how do you speak to people you don’t know?

Actually we do it all the time, and language is always situational. I don’t talk to a 10-year-old in the same way I’d talk with a 60 year-old or use the same vocabulary with a new acquaintance that I will with an old friend. Geography makes a difference too: my accent and idiom change depending on whether I’m talking to someone from California or Australia. Over there my father’s sister is my ant, here she has become my aunt. I move from “good for you!” to “good on you!”, from “no problem” to “no worries.” For words and language depend on where we are and who we’re with; because they are grounded on something deeper than words.

But there still must have been a moment of tension and grace for these early Christians at Pentecost: committed to walk the way of Jesus, realizing they were called to tell the world of their experience of God’s power, God’s mercy, God’s light, which they knew in the life of this Jesus and in their own lives. To take up the call to to speak this Gospel with the grace of God’s breath and in the particularities of their own voice, and in a new tongue. That must have given them pause, made then wonder where they were going and what they would say. That hasn’t changed much.

Listen: there are two sides to every message: first, what you need to say from within your own heart, and second, how it is heard by the person you’re speaking with. I bet we’ve all listened to speeches and lectures and sermons where we’ve wanted to go up and ask the speaker, “Who in Gods name are you speaking to? Because it wasn’t anybody here!” I think we’ve all had times like that (though, hopefully not too recently!).

So I finally learned to speak enough Spanish to graduate from University, and then seminary and, except for learning a little Biblical Greek, I haven’t taken a foreign language class since. But I still had to deal with the task of translation when I took a job as a Resident Minister working with students at the University of San Francisco.

For I had learned about Scripture and theology and ethics and pastoral care and all that stuff in an academic setting; and now I had to speak naturally about these concerns to young people who were just away from home, living in a dormitory in a new city, learning so many new ways and things that they didn’t need a long-winded lecture from me or anyone else.

So I prayed, I talked to friends and people who knew more, and I realized I had to learn to speak to these students in words and terms, phrases and images, that they would understand. We’re back to the Bible: “How do we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”.

And I learned to speak to them by listening to them. By listening to their concerns and questions, to what they feared and what gave them joy, made them laugh or cry. Then I might speak something of my understanding of how God created, redeemed, played and stayed in the world, using terms and phrases and images and hopes that came on our ongoing conversations. It took time to do this, but we came to love each other in the process. Through the grace of God and Facebook, I am still in touch with many of them. They are now in their mid-thirties, sometimes married with children, making money and mistakes and living wonderful lives. The conversations continue and I give thanks for that.

One other thing happened some 15 years ago. A student-friend told me he had been diagnosed with a “language phobia” and the University said that he did not have to take a foreign language in order to graduate. So there was finally a name for it. If only I had known, I might have gotten through those language classes a bit easier. But looking back I saw that what had seemed a liability was merely the wrappings of a difficult gift of love; a gift I needed to receive, a gift I needed to learn to give.

We are now living in a time when we need to learn to speak the Lord’s word, sing the Lord’s song, in new languages. Because the world is changing, and those of us who’ve been around for awhile are all living in a foreign world: and this renewed evangelism, both in the church and in the world, might be frightening, might cause us to break into a sweat, or catch our breath, and want to hide, and it might grow us up more than we want, but it needn’t be that painful.

For St Francis said that we should “preach the Gospel at all times: if necessary, using words”. That’s part of the life in Christ we are called to today; just like those disciples and apostles starting conversations on the edge of the Roman empire. And that conversation continues here and now; with the friend, the neighbor, the stranger, our young; preaching at all times, with words if necessary, but often in silent and eloquent actions, by holding them in our hearts and listening to them in the light of love; and only then in reaching out to meet them using words and phrases, metaphors and meanings, found in our common lives and love. That’s what friends do. That’s even what God does in Christ, meeting us where we are with love. And that’s our gift and our glory, our call and commission and our part in the ongoing conversation in the spirit which we celebrate today in this feast of Pentecost.

In the name of Christ.

Easter Sunday 2011

2011-04-23T20:46:00.001+10:00

I want to take a little circle tour here, First with a poem from the great monk and priest Symeon, the New Theologian, written about a thousand years ago and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Symeon writes:

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.  

But how does this Jesus, this dying-rising miracle man, become a way of life renewed, a pledge of love and life meeting and transcending death? How can we make sense of this crucified and resurrected one who pledges to meet us in the middle of the day and at the end of the road? And, as importantly, if this is true, how do we respond in our own living and dying, as friends and followers of this Jesus? How do we live our lives, order our priorities, spend our days?

I think we can best see Jesus with a kind of double vision; like two strands of DNA interweaving to create new life: First, there is the majesty of the savior walking through history, the son of the distant king, coming among us and reminding us who and whose we are. This is the big picture, the royal pilgrimage, Jesus as a great holy hero, a miracle man reminding us of the immeasurable distance between humankind and God, as Scripture says elsewhere, “My ways are not your ways.” As we listen to the Gospel story we come to see the immensity of God, how big the reality of God is, how far it all extends, how long it might go on.

But Jesus also shows us how close God is willing to come: close enough to meet foreigners and fallen women, noisy tax-gatherers and inquisitive temple personnel, self-proclaimed saints and sentenced sinners too. To each of them and every one of us, Jesus offers the ultimate intimacy of God, an invitation to speak love, make love, let love live in us: meeting with us in the very middle of our lives. That’s the close-up: we are face to face with the great humanity of Christ, when God comes, as St Augustine puts it, closer to us than we are to ourselves.

And that’s the surprising place where the Gospels take us, into the mystery, into the moment where Jesus prays that we may be one with him as he is one with the Father. “I in them and they in me… so that they may be one as we are one.” That is the connection, the communion we are called into, the relationship that is offered to all of us, comes to all of our lives lived in the insight of God’s love!   

All of our lives: that is the tough part of the Good News; not just in the peak moments, the happy travels, the good years, the precious harvest. But in the times when life is spare and sad, when hopes fail, when death seems to stalk us, in those times as well. When the crowd comes unfriendly and the end is in sight: Then he is one with us as well, intimate with each of us: meeting our failures and our endings: when the snakes bite, the sadness stays, the story pours out towards failure and a sad ending, he meets our death. He dies with us for that very reason.

For if anyone shouldn’t die, it would be him. So if he dies, meeting death as we all will, and if we are, as he says, one with him, then all our deaths meet his death and his life too. For in the loving life of Jesus, God love sews the thread of a majestic love and a deep connection right through the middle of everything. That amazing intimacy, where God hugs the world with the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross, threads through life and death, success and failure, ending and beginning, weaving past, present and future into one eternal now where love is all in all.

This is not easy to understand, and can be seen as a sacred mystery, as all loves are, as so much of life is. Listen: as a person who really can’t understand how his computer works, I don’t worry too much about the mechanics of it: how all the parts fit together or how it might be diagramed. As long as it works, I can’t live without it. And as I go along the Christian way, I worry less about doctrines and trust more in the love and the light, the heart of the journey, and the hope of coming home at the end.

But we’re not there yet, we’re still on the road. But the Good News is that God is on the way as well, has taken this route, walks besides, will see us home. All we need to do is live towards the light, do what we can, give over when we can’t, to allow God to live in us, love us, so that we can begin again, day after day, now after now, to learn over and over to live in that love, face that face of forgiveness, mercy, renewal, humility, hope. And to keep letting God love us - - even when everything falls flat and all we can do is cry, “Why have you forsaken me now?” For God can be there, has been there, will be there, too.  

Again, Symeon the new Theologian

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.

Amen

Dying like Jesus, a Good Friday sermon from awhile ago

2011-04-22T20:01:00.000+10:00

You don't expect to end up in a deathwatch. Nobody does. It doesn't matter what your name is or where your from, whether Geelong or Melbourne, Berkeley or San Francisco, Jerusalem or Galilee. It doesn’t matter whether its here and now or there and then, you are just one more unnamed disciple. It doesn't matter much.

What does matter is that somehow you met this Jesus one day and things turned around. He seemed to offer a way into the mystery of life, a way through the accumulated smog of evasion and denial and obfuscation: all the tired and tried and less than true ways where we fail to meet life or each other: where we waste time. He seemed to come just in time, to speak a word, to be a way to get past all the dead ends in the world into something that was new -- both more holy, and more fully involved with flesh and blood and community and relationship. More life. New life.

But maybe you were wrong (and maybe he was too) because here you are at the end of the week, where what you thought would be the new beginning and the final goal of your life will soon be turned into a tomb with a stone put across the way.

And you saw it all: the betrayal by friends, the sham trial, the worst aspects of religious and civil society, the hierarchy at its lowest. Though none of that is really new, and you can see it on your television every day. But what was different here, what showed up with such contrast, is that this death-dealing happened to the liveliest person you had ever known.

The man shone with hope! A hope that enabled you to see your own life, path, ministry and meaning with a clarity and depth you never had managed before: an enlightening love that connected you with yourself and others too; extending out like a beam of light widening out to exclude nothing and nobody! Because this Jesus made it all seem new. It was like you saw the world through his bright eyes, and all were connected, cleaned up and clarified, everyone and everything somehow born again. And now all that has gone dark and dead.

The liveliest human being is dead. After the speedy execution, the friends peeling off to their confused solitude, the rich man offer a resting place for the one who had seemed to be such a beginning. You're standing there because there seems to be nowhere else to go from here. But where can you go from here?

What do you do when hope dies? Where do you go when the ideals and ideas, the stuff, the breath, the face, that gave you joy, started your heart jumping, led you to live; when all that falls away, and you see the dead-on possibility that personal, social, corporate, religious, political, bureaucracy, mediocrity, evil might just win after all?

You turn away from the cross and look back to the City, Geelong, Berkeley, Jerusalem, here and now, then and there, wherever. And it might not be too late to go back there, to follow the herd, merge with the majority, carefully avoiding any confrontations that might lead to more blood flow, because next time it might be yours. So the safer way from here is to avoid excessive hope, stay away from too much love, keep to the shadows, live life low.

But maybe it is too late for that now. Even if Jesus is dead, even if it is or was just a glorious daydream; the idea of expecting less than a miracle of life, even in the face of the death of hope, looks like a kind of living death. And that just can't happen now. Maybe you have seen too much light, remember too much of the sun, even in this benighted land, to put on spiritual dark glasses and play it safe.

You look at the waiting city, and just for an instant it is as if you are seeing it the way he saw it, as if the light were still there, coming from somewhere behind you, but stretching out like the start of some indefinable kind of sunrise. Even if it is in opposition to everything you have ever known, there might be another way.

Maybe you will just have to die to that old way of life and try to live like Jesus too. Even if it doesn't last long, even if you end up here again, in your own time. It is not the worse way to go. It is learning to live and die in the sight and light of love. And maybe, just for a little while, his dying life can live in you, and you can remember him in your limited days.

You will go now, into your own city, carrying the seed of something you cannot understand, something that has to do with love and life and death and what will last. You will return to the city that does not know how much it has to lose or gain. But you will remember what you have heard and seen. And something more.

Amen

Evensong Sermon, 26 March 2011

2011-03-29T17:04:00.002+11:00

When the Dean asked me to give a homily tonight and to relate the readings to the labyrinth, I must admit I wondered, but when I read the Gospel for tonight, I really decided it was a questionable enterprise. So let’s start with three questions:

Where do you come from?
Where do you stand right now?
Where are you going from here?

We’ve had some pointed questions today, in the Gospel this morning with Jesus and the woman at the well, and they continue here in this evenings lesson with the accusations that are gathered around the high priests house.

Three questions or accusations to Jesus: variations on the same question and not unrelated to our first series of questions.

1 - Did you say, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and to build it in three days.
2 - Is what they are saying true?
3 (And under oath) Are you the chosen one of God?

Jesus’s response is one that is both mysterious and profound.

“You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven”

And outside of the high priests house, in the courtyard, three questions or accusations to Peter -- or variations on one question with three similar answers.

Q You were with the Galilean A I don’t know what you’re talking about
Q You were with the Nazarene. A I don’t know the man
QYou are one of them A I swear I never knew the man

Where do you come from?
Where do you stand right now?
Where are you going from here?

If you haven’t walked a labyrinth you won’t know, but there are times when you’re on the way, the path of it, and you look around, and you are a little lost, and you’re not sure where you are relative to where you started or where you want to go. And the person who was in front of you for such a long while, now seems to be far away, and you fear that you’ve crossed some line and are on the way out when you were supposed to be on the way in, but maybe that’s for the best because you’re frustrated and - “For god’s sake, it’s from France of California or something and let’s just go get dinner or something!”

But the genius of the labyrinth is that it meets you where you are, and if you continue on your way you will find yourself where you should be. You might get surprised, or frustrated, or even agitated on the way, It may take more or less time than you expected, but you’ll make it home at the last. That sometimes is not easy to take.

Almost twenty years ago I lost a job that seemed to me a very important one. It was hard to take and I started working with a priest/spiritual director/therapist. I was fighting against a growing depression and one day he looked at me and said, “I know this is not easy for you, but you are exactly where you should be.”

I could have hit him, but he was right. I was in a place where I needed to answer some questions about meaning and motives and ministry, and it would take some serious and painful introspection.

Two one liners fit here, First, shortly before his death. Dag Hammarskjöld wrote this in his spiritual journal, posthumously published as “Markings;” “The road chose you and you must be thankful.” Next, from a bumper sticker some years ago: “If you are not worried, perhaps you do not fully understand the situation.”

Jesus is asked where he comes from, what he stands for, and what the end of all this will be. And he must know what is coming if..., if what started in love, a ministry of love, of presence, of mercy will last, will continue That there might be pain, then it might hurt, then it will could take him to hell and back and beyond any human understanding of what life and death and love and connection, to God and to one another,could mean. But he’s not going to leave the way, he’s staying on that mysterious labyrinth, he’s following the path. And that is as it should be.

Peter looks, on the other hand, like he’s losing the thread, He denies who he’s with, how he’s connected, and what he loves. Peter curses the greatest blessing he will ever know. And he runs away from it all, for a little while anyway.

Where do you come from?
Where do you stand right now?
Where are you going from here, and where will you end up?

When you’re on the labyrinth there are times when you lose the idea of yourself as being on somebody else’s journey, when you feel utterly alone, and you just have to go ahead, step by step, now by now. Even if you fear you’ve lost your way, even if you aren’t even sure you want to continue, and you are no longer the person you were when you started, you just keep on the way.

Jesus stays true to the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” to the end and beyond, Peter stalls, cuts and runs, returns later and gets back on the path to the end. And in the end he goes where he’s supposed to go, and he meets Jesus again and again and again on the way.

But not right now. Can you see them so far apart, so that it is hard to think that Peter, even Peter, is where he is supposed to be: so far from Jesus, so far from where he started, so far from home. But he gets there at the last; and maybe be he needs to take all the time it takes. Maybe he was exactly where he was supposed to be in order to learn what he needed to know. Perhaps what looked like a detour was the crucial step on his final pilgrimage home.

An American baseball player, Satchel Page, once said, “wherever you go, there you are!” and this evening, if you find yourself wondering where you come from, where you find firm ground right now, and where you’ll going from here; then you are in the right place. Hold fast to the path, the way, the long route home, and if you lose the way every once in awhile,it is all right. Know this: you are forgiven, maybe even blessed, if you keep trying, come back, one more time again to walk the long way home with the God who comes to be known as the way and the truth and the life. Amen.

On The Advantages Of Being Less Sure And Seeing Clearly - rewritten from a few years ago

2011-03-26T20:07:00.003+11:00

I was pretty sure of things twenty five years ago. I was taking an intern year away from the Episcopal seminary where I had been studying and was in the middle of an intern year as a youth minister in a small town in Northern California, I had been hitting the gym faithfully, religiously even, and was in the best shape of my life, I was on a proper professional track at the church where I was serving, and I was engaged to be married to a wonderful woman whom I loved and who loved me. So everything was in place, as I was sure it should be, with the exception of the transmission of my car – which was not working at all - and so I found myself on a long and circuitous bus and subway trip to get from Eureka, the town where I was working, to San Francisco, then across the Bay to Berkeley, the city where my seminary and fiancée were waiting. I was so happy, so proud, so sure. I have learned more since then, and in most ways I think I am both happier and more real, but I have never been that sure of myself.

So I took this long bus ride down the Redwood Highway and I read a book on ministry and wrote in my journal and thought about my life, and when I got into San Francisco I went into the nearest BART station, the local interurban subway/railway, to catch the train to Berkeley. And this black guy, African American came up alongside of me on the platform and I could see that he wasn’t walking too steady and his clothes looked a little rough and he might have smelled, though from work or dirty clothes or booze I don’t remember. And he said, “Where do I get the train to Oakland?” and he was right next to me.

So I looked towards the track to our right and said, “I think you’ll find it over there.” And he raised his voice a bit and said, “I don’t want to know what you think, I want to know what you know.” And I thought, “Well, I am going to get mugged or worse, here it comes. And I said, “It’s right over there.” And he said, “Look at me!” And I took a breath and looked up at him – and I saw a man who was probably a bit older than I, and tired, probably harder working than I had ever been, who had a few scars and some real serious dignity that he had likely had to fight for over the years. And I felt sorry, both for him and, surprisingly, for me, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. And I looked at him and said, “the train for Oakland will be on this platform. And he looked at me for a minute and then said, “Thank you,” and walked away.

And I felt like I saw something about me that I hadn’t seen before. Something about how narrow I was, how snobbish, self-serving, insulated by my own concerns from a world that was big and unpredictable and unsafe and full – maybe – of messengers of God that I might have overlooked in my narrowness of vision. I saw that day that I didn’t see much, about myself and about Gods’ world at all. It’s been twenty five years since, and I can still see his face. I never knew his name, never will. But I have a hunch who he might have been and why he spoke to me.

The part of the Gospel that spoke to me in that encounter, that lit it up further and turned it into a kind of icon, was the story in John where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well. And the question that sparked for me then, and continues to speak to me today is this: What is in your vision? Who do you see? And who sees you? And how is that for you? There is so much in that biblical encounter scene that I want to cut it down from a very complicated scene in a major motion picture to a couple of photos, a few quick snaps to focus on some things so that we can see what might be happening from a different angle.

Now at first glance nobody sees anybody in the story. Jesus asks the woman at the well for some water and she’s amazed that he doesn’t seem to see she is Samaritan – someone that a good Jew would avoid, keep away from, not share water, utensils, let alone conversation, And she tells him this, then they start talking for real. The pictures become close-ups.

Now Jesus says something very direct. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

And maybe the Samaritan woman sees that there is someone, something out of the ordinary here; worth the chance of a direct encounter and she looks at him, and says, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water…are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well? She asks him questions concerned with practicality, history, culture and custom

Then Jesus comes back with one of those memorable one-liners that make the Gospel of John such a majestic document. ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’

And if they weren’t looking at each other face to face before, they are now. And she says, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’ Save me from need, from the daily walk to the well, give me some rest. Can you see them talking now?

A quick and very direct dialogue follows: like one, two three.
“Go, call your husband, and come back.”
“I have no husband.”
“Right… you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

Let’s pause for two quick questions here: what do you do when you see the Messiah? And what do you do when the Messiah sees you? What do you do when the one who is the ultimate word of God’s love and knowledge and compassion and concern is face to face with you and telling you the story of your life?

The man on the subway platform in San Francisco forced me to look at him, and in that moment I saw parts of myself that I had never seen before. But I also realized that when we were looking at each other, when he forced me to meet him face to face, that he forgave me. It took me a little longer to come to terms with the depth of my racism and classism and the shallowness of my egoism: all that took awhile and in some way it is still working its way out. But that was my problem, not his. He had already forgiven me. It was both all over and all new at that moment.

Can you imagine what it would feel like for that woman? All the mistakes made, the wrong roads taken, the commandments broken and defenses and denials made up to protect the little girl who got lost on the wrong way a long time before: most of us know something about that path. Then to have Jesus look on you and know you, and love you and forgive you: all over and all new at that moment. What if we looked at all our own history with the deep love and forgiveness of God that we see in the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the human face of God face to face with us, walking and talking along side us, in the middle of life with us, in love with us? What if we could see our way clear to forgive and love ourselves that much? What if we could forgive and love each other too?

That’s why we are come together as church, in our particular subway stations of the sprit, to look for God in those we overlook, to be forgiven and renewed by those we’ve never seen clearly before, including ourselves. As William Blake writes, we are here “to learn to bear the beams of love,” and to forgive and to see one another, ourselves, our God: in the light of grace and forgiveness and love of Jesus Christ. Sometimes it is not easy, but it can be wonderful. So we stop here on in the middle of the journey of our lives, to come to the table and take the nourishment, bread and wine, living water, the flesh and blood and love of God into our lives. So that we can see it all – the world, the friend, the stranger, more clearly when we meet them all face to face, and so that we can continue the ministry of Christ, to be messengers of repentance, refreshment, forgiveness and renewal, enlightenment. To see the world in God’s light and God’s love and God’s life. All in the name of Christ.

Lent2A - Harvest Festival

2011-03-20T06:04:00.002+11:00

What does it mean to be born again?

A Pharisee, a leader, Nicodemus, comes to Jesus by night: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God,” and Jesus answers him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

So is he saying that Nicodemus, having seen these things, has been born from above: that’s he’s been reborn and doesn’t know it. Maybe, but Nicodemus’s not sure, he asks, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? And Jesus answers, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

He says a lot more, with phrases that have given heart and cause confusion to a lot of people in the last two thousand years, and our selection from John’s Gospel ends with this phrase: “God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn, but in order that the world might be saved [made finally whole, find its right end, get home at last] through him.”

And what does that mean? How can we see the kingdom, how can we born again, how do we make it home at the last? Now you can find people who say it is a simple matter, “sign on the dotted line, simply have faith, and all will be well,” but that’s not my experience after living with this text for over 40 years, ever since I started looking for the kingdom, this new birth, this new reality of life, as a young man. No an easy answer, but maybe something better. For looking deeply into these texts might point you to a reality that is more than words: more vibrant, something that pushes back; like human flesh, like God meeting human flesh, and I want to share some ways we can explore the reality of this relationship

Many in the Anglican tradition make room with a model for learning and discernment that uses the image of a four-legged stool - with one leg each in scripture, tradition, reason and experience. It’s a way we keep our faith spacious, balanced, intimate and honest. But in no way is it easy.

First, we are people of the Scripture, and our daily lives need to be seen and understood in the history, poetry, genealogy, prophesy, revelation we see in the Hebrew Scripture, which we call the Old Testament, as well as in the Christian Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Revelation that we know as the New Testament. And don’t look for too much stained glass all the time: more politics, power plays, shortcuts, love, hate, sex, poetry, violence, history, hope, faith, bad weather and good news. This is both a family history and the foundational story of who we are a humans, the people who have tried - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, sometimes turning aside and getting it wrong, and starting again and again - to follow God.

We are also a people who have gathered, prayed, considered, and reflected in the light of those books for the last two thousand years. So there is an immense body of work, more writings, poetics, prophesy and politics, that need be considered: the work of the community gathered prayerfully throughout history, with bad mistakes and new beginnings, a deep and profound tradition that resounds and responds to the mighty acts of God over time, to the present day. So, Scripture and Tradition.

Then, we are a people who believe as well that the Spirit of God never ceases working in the whole world. In that light we use our reason to evaluate all good thoughts and actions, from all peoples and places and cultures, through education, the social and natural sciences, all technology, art and media, as ground for inspiration, redemption, recreation. We believe that the creation is good and we are not afraid to use our God-given reason.

And, finally, in light of the incarnation of God in Christ; we honor our very own lives, our corporate and personal experience. Here we take the chance that every one of us here, and everywhere, is a word of God, a gift of God: a place where God’s creativity, redeeming love, intimate conspiracy can come to new birth and speak in a new way. So Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience: these are the four components in this Anglican way as we come to consider what Jesus might mean for us.

That’s how we make sense of our part, both personal and corporate. But there is more. Jesus says, “Follow me,” follow me away from your old history into a new mystery, into a new and faithful pilgrimage to the future, through the old certainties and into the unfinished rhythm of a dying-rising life; right through the middle of life, death, resurrection and return.

How can we live with life this large, life asking this much? How do we follow the way of Jesus into these depths? Through water and the spirit, through faith and grace, being born again and again in the spirit; day by day, moment by moment, giving away and finding our lives within the heart of the Christian story, with the stories, the tradition, the reason and the community, through the way of the Christian year. Four more ways.

Listen: each one of us here has had a moment, and maybe more than one, where God opens our eyes to glory, care, compassion; to the fragile beauty of what it means to be on this tenuous human journey together. And that is perhaps a start of what it might mean to be born again, when, in a sense, our individual participation in the Christmas story comes alive: when Jesus – God’s word and work of love and acceptance and hope, God’s word for the long journey - is born in our lives. It is a kind of Christmas that grows up and moves out, enlightens us and lightens up the world we live in,;an Epiphany where people see the difference, note the newness and the change in us, taking us to a new way of being in the world, being born into a new world. If you’ve lived at all, you know you’ve lived like this.

But for most of us, it doesn’t last that long. The road gets narrow and turns, the fires or floods come, the foundations shake, and we lose the way. For life has tough times, tragic moments, dead ends. And here’s where the man on the cross is a silent and eloquent picture for each of us, a picture of each of us: caught where hope falls silent,, where all we know of faith falls dead, where we lose our lives. For every one there comes a time when you say, “I don’t know how in God’s name I am going to get through this.” and on Good Friday we see that God knows the way through.

That’s where the mystery comes: where we find the reality of the life and love of God rises up above all false hopes, and God’s life even has room for death. By grace we wake up to an Easter where new life opens in a new world, where hope is bigger than we know; where we can move to an new participation and understanding of - not only how big God is - but how intimate, how close God can come: a place where the whole creation seems to speak a new language, a Pentecost, where the deep intimacy of the Holy Spirit enlivens our lives and reforms our relations and our understandings. It may not always last, it usually doesn’t. But you will remember.

Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost! Life, Death, Resurrection, Return! The stories we tell every Sunday carry all the contradictions that come in living life on life’s terms, trying to be whole and human and holy; and Sunday after Sunday we stand in the middle of our lives, in the middle of this place, and say, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again! Life, death, resurrection, return! It’s the journey of a lifetime.

God has come to offer wholeness, salvation, companionship; and not by any kind of shortcut. “You must be born again!” Right through the middle of the world. It is usually not easy, it can hurt like hell, it made Jesus cry, there’s no room for a stained glass lens to filter out all the nasty bits, but it is worth it. For it is a way that can take you through with a kind of growing understanding and hope, through the tough times, the drought and floods, and into the last gathering, the final harvest, by the long way home.

Almost 20 years ago, when I was the chaplain at San Francisco State University, a really narrow, terribly unpleasant Christian pastor looked at me and asked, “Have you been born again?” And I said, "On a good day, at least four times!" The way God we follow is both that big and that intimate. Moving every instant: into a continuing and deeper participation in God’s creativity, God’s pilgrimage in flesh and history, God’s loving and continuing intercourse in the intimacy of the spirit. It is a wide way, a deep way, a wonderful way, a way that will grow you up and bring you back where you started for God’s sake. So we come here to learn what it means to be alive, dying and rising in a world where Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. We come here, by the grace of God, to learn who we are.

Epiphany 9A

2011-03-06T12:59:00.002+11:00

In todays lessons we look at the tension between law and love, in our hebrew heritage, our churches tradition, there is always the ongoing conversation on how seriously we are to take all the commandments, the customs, the way we always do things, in our community, and that way God calls us to live in a world that is always renewed, reformed, recalled in love. How do we balance between commandments and compassion. How do we balance between law and love?

A story: the worst dinner party I ever attended happened around 25 years ago. I was invited by a couple I knew through church to a posh private club for dinner. It was all quite grand: we drove up to the main door where their Cadillac was whisked away by the parking attendant, we were led through marble halls and seated in the main dining room with great ceremony, the menus were huge and handed over with suitable flourishes, there was lots of very french-sounding food: but the conversation was forced, and at one point after a long pause, the wife said, “Aren’t we having fun?” And we weren’t! It was what kids used to call play-acting, The conversation and the company neither reached the ground nor came to life. And we lost touch not long after that.

Now in terms of the law, all the proper actions were there, the liturgy was well laid out but the celebration didn’t go anywhere, it was just dead, there was no life, no love, no enlightening spirit connecting it all together.

Now this is not to disparage good food, good entertainment, a dinner with friends at anytime is a joy forever, but where’s the center of our gathering, what’s the focus of meeting friends, meeting the world, meeting God in daily life, what’s the most important part? In a world moved increasingly by the proper image, the right sound bite, the good appearance, Jesus says just looking good, just doing the right thing, is not enough.

Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock

So it’s not something - anything, you do - it has to be deeper than doing, it has to do with who you are.

Deuteronomy says it is “Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13and to keep the commandments”

Jesus follows that and says, you are to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. On this hang all the laws and commandments. So that’s where we build our house, our hope, our daily lives; but it needs to be buttressed up with other daily habitual moral attitudes and actions, and needs to be enlivened by a hopeful heart and a living faith that is founded and grounded in Christ, the rock of our lives.

So how do we get there from here? How do we get to a place where we can better build the house of faith, the grace of action, the discipline of daily duty and discipleship as we follow and serve Christ in our daily lives? Can we do this in a way that enlivens us, in our ongoing rituals and relationships? How do we keep our hearts and pity fresh, so that our prayers, our pieties, our dinner parties and our Eucharists don’t turn into empty rituals and joyless feasts? How do we help to keep our lives as followers of Jesus moving with forgiveness, renewal and love? Where do we find fresh air, fresh beginnings, in our ongoing pilgrimage within God’s world of law and love?

Let me give three examples;

First, the 14th century devotional book called the Cloud of Unknowing recommends a good but somewhat complex way to pray, I see it as a kind of swimming stroke: we push down on all that keeps us from God, all our past foibles and failures and put them behind us in a “cloud of forgetting”, then we strive forward towards a God who is so much more than we can ever know in an a “cloud of unknowing,” That can be a very powerful way of approaching God, and we can make progress in this way, but there are some days when it is just too complex, and then the author says you can always just say “Help!”

“Help” can be one of the best prayers: the man who comes to Jesus with a sick son says, “I believe, help my unbelief... I have faith, help me where faith falls short.” There’s faith and power there in all that undressed honesty. You can just say help, then be prepared to listen, be prepared to be surprised and renewed.

Another story. A woman recently told me that while her husband was dying of a fast-growing cancer they had a quiet moment together. She said, “Do you forgive me?” and he said, “Yes,” then he said, “do you forgive me?” and she said “Yes.” and she said the room was so full of God that she will never forget it, and it changed everything.

Forgiveness opens space, gives room for God to grow in us anew; even a half-held motion in that direction, a prayer that is a “I am not quite there yet but I am willing to try to let go of an old grudge, an old pain or scar:” even that beginning, moving towards a larger forgiveness, opens room for new hope, new healing, new awareness of God’s grace in our daily lives and ministries: get us down to the rock of right action, good faith, good living ground in Christ’s love.

We don’t need to give complex dinner parties, we aren’t called to always know what is right, we know that we’ll make mistakes, cause trouble, take wrong turns, get caught in complex situations; and there are so many customs and commandments, expectation and demands in the world around us that if is only following commandments we’re going to muck up sometimes, and it is not surprising that we sometimes lose hope. But we don’t need to lose our relationship with God.

I was priested just over a year ago, after over 25 years of a ministry spent mainly in university chaplaincy and teaching in parishes and schools, and it’s been wonderful and complex year. But sometimes there are questions of etiquette, proper conduct, custom: should I be called Father or Rob, should I wear a black shirt with collar, a white shirt with crosses, should I swear less, pray more, follow new rules, give up old ways, lose weight, gain gravity? Sometimes it feels quite complex.

Now I tend to wake up before dawn. Where I am now living the living room looks east over lawn and a stand of Eucalyptus, and a few weeks ago, after a rainy night with some thunder and lightning, I was sitting in the dark with a cup of good coffee in my hand, wondering and praying as the light of day slowly came up in the sky front of met. And I considered where I’ve been and where I might be going and how I am doing, and finally I just said, “God, do you love me?” and it was as if God said “Yes,” and I took a breath and a sip of good hot coffee with a bit more light behind the trees to the east and it was as if God said, “Do you love me?” and I said, “Yes.” and nothing really heavy happened, except for two kookaburras began laughing as the light got stronger and the rain started again, and that was enough for me to begin again.

T.S. Eliot writes: “These are only hints and guesses/Hints followed by guesses; and the rest/Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” But very simple actions can help us in so many ways to keep our daily focus open enough for listening for responding, repentance, renewal; so that our souls can be refreshed by the love of God, the breath of the Spirit, the life of Christ in our daily ministries, and that must be our hope.

Sermon, The Baptism of Jesus

2011-01-08T18:39:00.000+11:00

Sometimes working with small groups of students in my years in University chaplaincy I used to challenge students to stand up and hold their breath as long as they could. Some students did a very good job, had very good lungs, stood there for a long time, holding on to that breath, maybe turning color a little bit, but enduring as long as they could, until they had to let go and take another breath.

And then I would smile and say, “Now you know that life is not a contest, more of a give and take matter, a dance where you receive and give, take and let go, inhale and exhale, minute by minute, breath by breath, now by now.” That’s where true life, where -- to quote T. S. Eliot -- the dance begins, where God calls us to join in the dance. And that is where being baptized comes in. The writer and priest Alan Jones used to say that we’re invited to exchange our living death -- where we hold on to each breath, each right, each prerogative and plan as long as we can -- we exchange that living death for Christ’s dying life, that dance of give and take, receiving and relinquishing, taking on and letting go in the context of a blessed faith, hope and love.

Baptism is taking that breath and letting it go, holding out our hand to join in that relationship and dance with God in the very middle of this world that will, over time, move us into a larger world: a world remade in love. In baptism God recalls us in an ongoing relationship that has to do with quality rather than quantity; gifting rather than getting, taking up our call of love and give ourselves over as living members of a caring and heartfelt charity that gives it all away. Just like Jesus.

Henri Nouwen once wrote, in a better sermon that this, that there are four words to describe what it is to be a baptized member of Christ’s body: Take, Bless, Break, Give. We’ll come to these words in our Eucharist this morning as well, but let’s just go over these words now.

In baptism we give ourselves over to be taken up by God. To take on the identity of being blessed by God: one who receives life and hope and meaning, moment by moment, by the gift of God’s grace. But once we are taken into the new identity, once we start realizing the truth of our baptism, that we are God’s beloved, then somethings else happen. We start to take the world with both more openhearted seriousness and song, with greater gravity and grace, because we are sent as God’s messengers of the reconciling love we see in the life of Jesus. So, in that light, we begin to see the world as the place where God’s love seeks to be, to serve, to join, to live in love. Then we come to let ourselves to taken to the world that it might know how deeply it is loved by God.

So we bless. We begin to give what we have received. Baptism opens each of us to know how much we are loved, what a valuable, unique, fragile and fantastic package of love each of us is: and as we open up to that truth, we start to open up to the world we live in, we become ready to let anyone know, moment by moment, day by day, here and now, in word and deed, how deeply lovable they are.

And I don’t mean handing them a pamphlet or reading to them from the Bible, but looking at and meeting and greeting the whole world the way God does, with a newborn and inspired patience and kindness and love, a deep and earthy and heavenly creativity and connection and expectation that the world is better than it can ever know.

That’s our business! God sends love into the world in Christ, as messengers of that good news in the world, we deliver it to everyone!

And that can break down old ideas of self-sufficiency, breaks apart the myth that we don’t need anybody else; even breaks down that popular and cheap optimism that tells us that life shouldn’t hurt. My maternal grandmother always used to say that the shortest verse of scripture was “Jesus wept.” She was right! For the world is enough to break your hope and heart if you take it lightly enough and seriously enough and hold it high just like Jesus does; loving people at their worst and still hoping for the best.

It is not easy to stand with the world as it breaks apart, and even let love break us apart. Yet, as God’s baptised messengers, companions and friends, we do. We sacrifice ourselves, give ourselves over to be broken and made whole in sight of a love that is larger than we are, larger than life itself, a love that lives forever. Like a breath taken with care and let go, given over to a God who stands beyond life and death. We take, we bless, we break and we keep on giving: giving it over, breath by breath, day by day, now by now, in the hope and the faith that Christ’s love will live. It isn’t easy, but, by God, it can be wonderful!

Here’s how Nouwen finishes his sermon:

“We are little people, but if we believe that we are chosen, that we are blessed, that we are broken, to be given, then we can trust that our life will bear fruit. It will multiply. Not only in this life, but beyond it. Many, many people will find strength by knowing that they are being given new life by those who lived as the beloved and they can become the beloved themselves.”

And that is good news. In the name of Christ. Amen

Christmas Sermon 2010

2010-12-24T17:27:00.003+11:00

I think if we counted the number of Christmas services held in this place it would come to a substantial total. But what is at the center of it? With all the gathering and recollecting and celebrating, why do we keep coming back, what does it bring to mind, how does it make our life different? I think there are some important things we can remember at this time of year in to keep ourselves focused on the living hope and heart of Christmas.

First God comes to us as a gift. First in the gift of our being. Then Jesus is a picture of how God fits in and lives out life in the middle of the human journey. Jesus comes to Bethlehem as a child to live out the truth that the presence of God can live from moment to moment, day to day, in our world, our neighborhood, in a life as bound by biology and politics and history and economic necessity as the world we live in. Jesus knew all about being human:

And it is a gift which shares with us. That is where we might find the centre of Christmas right now, in the present moment: where, by the Grace of God, each of us is a kind of Christmas present; where each of us is given and holds a gift, a specific and unique aspects of God’s love. A gift from the beginning of creation, in each of us uniquely, each and everybody, both in the visible church and outside, world-wide, a world full of gifts and gift-givers. I think that’s the gift of Christmas!

For each of us, like Jesus, is a gift from God, and so is everybody else! So what if we open that possibility, and realize that God calls us to look at each other and at ourselves, as a personal gift, an individual package, lovingly wrapped and presented, given with love from God.
What if we look at everyone, everything with the question; "What is God giving here? What is this to Love?"

Now this can change things! It means not overlooking anyone. Instead it involves looking with love at the likes, dislikes, proclivities, abilities and disabilities, history and humor of each one of us; all the facets of who everyone is, of who we are. That might seem difficult, but it could be easy! For if each one of us is a Christmas present from God, then letting God love the world in the middle of your life means being where you are, living where you are, loving what you do, going on as you can just like Jesus!

Because, and this is the second thing, you don’t have to be important to be a gift from God, look at Jesus! Born in a small-town in occupied territory, the word of God’s love enters the human family from the inside; joins us in the fragility, the trying times, the tender mercies, the faithful process of dealing with life on life’s terms.

So that means that we don’t meet God by being more than human, we don’t have to be heroes! God knows what it is to be a baby, a small child, a youngster in a small town, a tradesman, a member of a community. Because love can live anywhere, in small places as well as large, in villages and cities, in past, present and future, through good days and bad times, in the times when life goes well and the days that go down in defeat, love lives on, even when it’s done to death, even when your best hope for life lies hanging on the tree like a broken promise.

And then it can be difficult: it is not an easy road, honoring and caring for the pain of the world, in ourselves and in others, by witnessing the places where God’s love and God’s beloved are crucified, damaged, done to death to this very day. It takes effort and time, and it can hurt terribly - it made Jesus weep – and it takes us inevitably to the middle of the day when hope will die.

We see that in Jesus, the rule of God's love, living through difficult times, through hunger, thirst, tears, with family problems, organizational difficulties, clashing with the prevailing political and religious establishment, and finally becoming one with the homeless and sinners, with those who cry and cry out, becoming one with people who have no voice and no name. And being put to death by the state, Jesus becomes one with those who are to be written off as officially expendable.

And he lives through it That is written into his life as clear as love, from the very beginning. He gives himself up in the name of the love that does not end; he pours himself out like living water, food for the thirsty and hungry, the poor and those with no home, wanderers and beggars of God. He becomes good word and loving action, bread and wine for them. He not only acts out but he serves to flesh out an understanding of how God loves us and feeds us and meets us on the road where we are and he takes us along with him!

Remember that! Learn this Christmas that God’s love and God’s life is deeper than death; and that is the gift we are given.
This is the centre of the Christmas message that takes us right through to Easter, a part of that deep surprise that the saints and the tradition and the scripture and the community of faith gathering over space and time all gather ‘round and point to. Love Lives!

In Jesus, God loves from the inside, from being as we are in every way, except he never closes the door on that awareness of connection, of creativity and love in the centre of everywhere. And in Jesus, God is willing to share that life with us!

And so today we’re asked to open that Christmas gift, to take the chance, to bet our lives, that the centre of the whole creation, our very selves, souls and bodies, connections and communities, is woven together with the deepest kind of caring: the creative love of God in everything here and now. We are called to open to the chance that the outpouring of love we see in the life of Jesus is calling out to everyone. That’s what we’re trying to unwrap here; to get that story, that hope, and that gift, that very inspired breathing into our hearts, our minds, our daily lives.

So this Christmas, as we witness the birth of this deep hope, open your present and follow this child Jesus right through the middle of life! Follow his lead, move with his rhythm, walk his walk.

For the life of Christ shows us how to dance with God, to partner with Gods love in the intricacies and rhythms of our own truths in our history and hope, our own life and times, and in all the different communities where God loves to be found. Like any dance, it can begin with a single step, but keep working on it, playing with it, living it out, and it will change your heart, it will change your mind, it will change your life!

Merry Christmas!

Advent 4A

2010-12-19T14:07:00.002+11:00

The Advent question is this: How does a word of God come among us, how is it conceived, raised up, given life? How does a message, a newborn relationship, a call to serve, to heal, to teach, to love, to live out God’s love first take root in our minds, hearts, priorities and purpose? How does God’s life live in our lives?

The answer to that question is in the history of the church, for we are the record of the life and ministry of Jesus, of God’s word in flesh, over time, seen and lived out in history, geography and community. The recorded lives of the saints, of the apostles, of the martyrs all answer that question in some detail. To start with the scripture, the wrestling with revelation and community that we see in the writing of Paul is a part of our history; and in the life of Peter, as we see the disciple changed from saying too much and doing too little; changed to see the hand, the breath, the life of God grow strong in the life of Peter and makes him strong, turning him to a rock of faith, a witness and a martyr, sending him out to preach good news, to be good news.

So the last two thousand years is enlightened by the bright witnesses of saints and martyrs, agents of mercy and forgiveness, of poetry and politics, of repentance and new life. They comes in different shapes and sizes, male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free, quite a variety. Like that rather sweet (some would say saccharine) hymn, “one was a soldier and one was a priest and one was killed by a fierce wild beast.... [and going on] you can meet them in schools or in lanes or at sea; in church or in trains or in shops or at tea / for the saints of God are just folk like me and I mean to be one too!”

Someone just like you and me was Maximilien Kolbe, a Franciscan priest incarcerated in a prison camp in WW2 Germany, he was a neighbor, a friend, a person of prayer and reconciliation to all around him. One day, standing in a room where a group of men were set aside for assassination, sentenced to death, and hearing one man cry out, “but I have a wife and child,” Kolbe said, “send me” and went to his death as an apostle, a martyr, a saint of God’s creative mercy, sacrificial love and saving spirit. These people continue the saving acts of God to be witnesses, lights of God’s love, agents of God’s love.

A lot of us simply try, day after day, with varying degrees of success, “to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.” We do what we can, and most of us are, if not rank sinners, are somewhat damaged goods, just like most of the apostles. We all start out slowly just like them: less stained glass saints than sick people getting better, made more healthy by living day by day in the light and love of the life of God we see in the life, the ministry, the death and resurrection, the sacrifice and the salvation offered by this Jesus. In this Peter and Paul are a lot like us. And so are Mary and Joseph.

Mary and her husband offer two pictures of how faith can come to us, as well as two ways of responding to God’s action in our lives. So they serve as models of witness, pilgrimage and wonder. For Mary it seems more clearcut, easier, maybe she is younger, more able to say yes, to be formed with God’s image within her, to be a vehicle for Gods action to be born out of her assent.

Sometimes the message comes and is seen clearly, and we say yes! Even if it’s a surprise, if it takes us into new beginning, if it meets us at our most inexperienced, we say yes, willing to be a vessel and vehicle of a new graceful message, and Mary has this experience.

But other times it comes slowly, over time, after deliberation and at some cost, and Joseph is a model for this experience. Some traditions states that Joseph was older and -- let’s face it, when you’re older these experience, of a new life in faith, new duties, new directions, take more time.

It couldn’t be easy for him. “The woman you are planing to marry is pregnant, and it is not your child!” Joseph shows he’s compassionate right at the start, when he decides to end the relationship without publicity. He could move to a more violent response, it would have been in accord with scripture - and there’s one more reason I am no fundamentalist - but he is merciful, determined to put her away: simply to give her up: maybe he gives the whole matter over to God. And then he has a dream.

Maybe you’re not like me, but I’ve had a few dreams in my life that have been very helpful; where a problem has been solved, a new option outlined. I’ve awakened with more than a few sermons where a new ending came into being, and sometimes my mind has been changed by an insight that allowed a new possibility.

So Joseph has a dream where he is told that the woman he planned to marry is pregnant with God’s child, Emmanuel, God with us. It is not as dramatic, as immediate, as the experience that Mary has in Luke’s Gospel, and we don’t get a pretty speech in response. But Joseph wakes up resolved to do as the angel has commanded and he takes Mary as his wife and gives his life to protect, to father this new beginning as best he can, this new birth of God into the world.

And I wonder if he always had doubts? This morning I hope so, for then he is a model for all of us who sometimes doubt. Because he still followed through, made room and gave comfort for that miraculous birth, husbanded the life that allowed God’s word to be made flesh and blood, born of Mary, “according to your word.” Joseph supported this, witnessed this, gave his life, the life he had to live and to offer, so that God’s word of hope and love and reconciliation might live.

Did Joseph live to see Jesus die? Was he there to see the resurrection light and life at the end of it all, that new beginning. We don’t know. He fades out of the Gospels when Jesus is a boy. Maybe like Moses he dies in sight of that promised land, and will be carried along in hope, like us, Maybe, like us, he gives his life to protect and honor and witness to a newborn life that he doesn’t fully understand, maybe all his days he would still look at this growing Jesus and wrestle with the inconceivable fact of him. Even as he came to love to child he raised as his own, even when he had held the child who would, by God’s grace, become a savior, held the one who would carry him to a larger life. We just don’t know.

So then Joseph is a sign of faith for us. And maybe St Joseph prays for us today, joins us in all our doubts and hopes, as we carry this surprising child, and prepare to try to care for this soon to be newborn hope once again; not with all the answers, not with the great assurance that Mary had, but with resolve to preserve and protect, to hold and watch and witness as we can, to offer support and strength, to husband that hope, to raise that new beginning, as another gift of God comes to be born in our lives.

Amen

Advent 3A

2010-12-12T12:35:00.002+11:00

I think that none of us are surprised when John the Baptist sends his disciples to see Jesus to ask, “are you the one or should we seek another?” Because we ask similar questions: Should we keep looking, is our discipleship, our understanding, our faith, our expectation in the right place, or should we seek another parish family, or another mental, physical or spiritual discipline, a better diet, maybe more interesting friends, a regular meditation practice, a new way of being in the world with God? Should we just keep looking?

And it seems like we should, because if you listen to the prophet Isaiah, bigger things are supposed to be happening!

The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy... A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way;

And that it doesn’t not look like the life we are living, our lives often aren’t as spectacular, as full of vision, as Isaiah’s vision.

So we are like John the Baptist who, waiting in jail for the death he knows is coming soon, sends to see if Jesus is the true Messiah, if he can put his hope there and finally rest in peace. And John the Baptist has reason to rest; he has come from a pretty noisy past, has lived with high hopes. Remember his works in last week’s gospel:

One...is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals, who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire, gathering his wheat into the granary; and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

And then he sees Jesus. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I don’t what he thinks, but it makes me wonder, If John is the opening act, what kind of main act will follow, what happens next? Well, if you read Matthew’s account, it seems less spectacular than expected. First Jesus turns down the chances to do three major, even cosmic, miracles when he’s tempted in the desert. Then for the next six chapters of Matthews’ Gospel you start see a different style, to hear a different rhythm and tone than John’s overture might lead you to believe: Jesus teaches, heals, feeds, gathers a community of the poor in spirit, the mournful, meek and merciful; the pure in heart, peacemakers and persecuted. To be accurate, there aren’t a lot of people who look like earth-shakers: to be fair, they look a lot like us.

And Jesus tells these people to live righteously, fulfill the law, be perfect; to pray and fast in secret: but not to worry about what to wear or eat; in fact, not to worry about the future at all. Instead to strive for the kingdom of heaven, and ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” That’s the kingdom of heaven!

But it’s not there yet. John sees that and so do we. It’s not here yet either. Because we know that some of our blind are not receiving their sight, our lame still limp, our modern day equivalent of lepers have a spotty recovery rate at best;
many of the deaf don’t hear well enough, the poor haven’t heard that much good news recently, and there is increasing number of the dead who seem to be waiting to be raised.

So when Jesus tells John’s disciples, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” We might not be offended or offensive, but just slightly puzzled, wondering where we go from here.

It’s a big question, and I offer three small and tentative practices that might make it easier to see that we could conceivably be in just the right place.

First, exercise to cultivate optimism. Several months ago I mentioned that I try to say thank you to God twenty times every day. So, following along this path, practice finding places where life goes well, changes for the good. Make a point, a discipline, of looking for them and nothing them, if not just in yourself, than in other people’s lives.

A good friend of mine and I talk on the web occasionally and she despairs of ever finding love. “It will never change” she says, “But you change!” I keep saying. You’re different than you ever used to be: better, older, more alive. You are someone who has never been before. Let the world find you anew, let your world be open to new possibilities, new life. And she can’t see it yet, but I can; so I hold that hope for her.

Hold hope for one another; that’s one way to keep faith with one another, do not grumble but be hopeful and patience and hold each other in honor like miracles that are waiting to happen.
We all know it’s easier to give than to receive; and it’s also easier to hope for others than for yourself. But I will guarantee that you will be surprised with what can happen within your own life. Hope and pray for others and let others hold you in that same way. Because hope and prayer open you to a surprising future.

Then second; know you are in it for the long run. Someone once said that we can only understand life backwards but we have to live it forward. So know that the future will be different from the past, and understand now that you’ll never know quite how it will be then. Be open to seeing life in new ways, hearing good news in a way you did’t expect, allowing room or surprise, for lives that were halt and lame to begin to dance into new ways of being. It takes awhile, often longer that you know, to see life that openly, but out just may happen, for the big truth is that we’re built for eternity.

A wise friend of mine once said, “Don’t leave before the miracle happens!” So, as we used to say in the 60s, “Keep on keeping on!” We may very well die a bit on the way, in fact we likely will: maybe the death of old hopes, often the death of youthful dreams, sometimes the death of those we love, and our own deaths too; but know this: we’ll get through it, by God’s grace and the light of Christ, the miracle will come.

So follow Jesus through the church year and right into the middle of the human condition: into this cauldron called the church; this half-baked but warming up company of people who are trying to live into and out of the love of God. That’s number three. Just love Jesus and his friends the best you can and let him love you while you walk with Him through the middle of life to somewhere beyond death.

Right into the middle of the whole mystery, into that corner where the only thing left is to give over is what you thought you earned or knew or wanted and the only thing to take is the present God offers you as a gift. Take that and get through whatever Good Friday the long week has to offer, trusting that you’ll wake up on the other side of Easter.

But know that here is where it begins, in these timid moments, in witnessing and honoring this small hope that begins right now; in knowing God loves us now and will not leave us alone. That can be just enough for the time being. Frederick Buechner put it this way:

“Our experiences of a real but limited deliverance today orient us to a confident expectation of a full redemption in the future. Christians are people who have been delivered just enough to know that there’s more where that came from, and whose experience of that little deliverance that has already happened inside themselves and whose faith in the deliverance still to happen is what sees them through the night."

And I would add, take us the that new dawn.

So, practice optimism, witness to hope for one another, and know that you are on the long run on a very Holy Way with Jesus, that can only start right here; but to know that before you are through you will see the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead raised, and the all poor rejoicing to hear this Gospel. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Forgiving it all

2010-09-19T12:31:00.000+10:00

Ordinary Sunday 25: 19 September 2010
Robert Whalley
Luke 16:1-13

Today we have the particular honor of dealing with the strangest story in St Luke’s gospel today, and I want to tell three stories as a way to make sense of it, so bear with me.

First, several weeks ago I rented the Vincent Minnelli film, “Meet me in St. Louis.” It has some good moments, but there was one scene I particularly wanted to see again. It happens when Margaret O’Brien playing a very strange child with the preoccupation of death, needing some pastoral, clinical and chemical intervention -- she keeps burying her doll’s with elaborate funeral liturgies, is obviously some kind of closet Anglican -- goes trick or treating on Halloween.

It’s a great scene! The children of the neighborhood are gathered around a camp fire trying to figure out what neighbors they will visit to demand a treat our issue a trick. There’s one house that none of the children want to visit -- let’s say it belongs to Mr Jones -- but Margaret O’Brien volunteers to go and through flour in the face of the dangerous neighbor.

Violin music builds with as the wind comes up and leaves blow past the little girl as she slowly walks up the front steps of the big house where the bad Joneses live. She looks in the front window and the old man and woman are gathered by the fire: the man looks stern, preoccupied, capable of anger, and there is an English Bulldog with thick jaws laying on the floor next to his chair

The little girl goes up the steps to the front door and stretches up to ring the bell. There is a long pause and the door slowly opens by the big man who, with the dog stands silently looking at her; the dog sniffing in a way that makes you think he might be hungry. And Margaret O’Brien rises to her full five-year-old height and says, “I hate you Mr. Jones, I wish you would die!” throws flour in his face and runs for her life. The music goes away and the camera fixes on the face of Mr. Jones as he wipes the flour away, and smiles like a patient old man who has lived through many Halloween this and still looks forward to the next one. Then the camera pans down to the floor of the porch where the bull dog licks up the flour with a great appetite. All this as Margaret O’Brien rushes away, with the violins wailing up on the soundtrack behind her as she prepares to celebrate the great victory that only exists in her mind.

Hold that in your mind as we look at the parable for today. Here I want to quote at length (and borrow very heavily here from) one creative take by Sarah Dylan Breuer in her blog (sarahlaughed.net). I’ve edited a bit here, but she writes most of the following and this is her take on the story:

A very, very rich man lives in a big city with a lifestyle of luxury from the income of the estate he owns in the countryside, run by a manager, where all of the work of planting and harvesting is done by tenant farmers, peasants. The harvest is never quite enough to pay the rent plus what the peasant families needs, so the peasants are slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what can't be paid. The immediate face of this system is that of the steward.

But things change. The landowner fires the steward because of rumors that the steward is squandering the landowner's resources. So the steward is in a desperate and dangerous place, he’s going to be homeless. The farmers aren't about to take him in either, since he's demanded exorbitant rents, run the first century equivalent of the company store, and generally dealt unjustly with the farmers. So maybe he’s without hope.

But what he does is something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the farmers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been reduced from something very large, to something that maybe could be repaid, all with a few strokes of the (forger's) pen. The steward doesn't tell the farmers that he was fired any more than he tells them that the landowner didn't authorize any of this generosity. But the result is that the farmers believe the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmers' eyes -- and, by extension, so is the steward.

So when the landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the wealth the steward has collected for him, he gets a surprise that is both exhilarating and challenging: The streets for miles before he reaches the estate are lined by cheering farmers. They're shouting his name, telling him he's a hero. Then he finds out (probably when he arrives at the estate house) he meets his old manager who trembling tells him what he’s done. And they stand there and look at one another.

Sarah Dylan Bruer says that the landowner can go outside to the assembled crowd -- the people shouting blessings upon him and all his family -- and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the steward's generosity was an act of crookedness, unrighteousness, won't hold water legally. But the cheering will turn to boos. Alternatively, the landowner can go outside and take in the cheering of the crowd. He can take credit for the steward's actions, but he'll have to take the steward back. Mistreat the steward, and the crowd might turn on him. Either way, the steward has forced a deal, gone from victim to victor, made friends and influenced people. If the landowner won't take him in, the farmers gladly will. And they stand there looking at each other.

Years ago when I was at university and was quite shy, my mother said, “when you don’t know what to say to someone or the conversation is lagging just ask someone a question, people love to talk about themselves.” One evening at a church supper at St Martin’s, Davis, I decided to test this out.

I was seated next to a student I had not met. She said she was from a town called Yuba City, I said, “That’s interesting, what that’s like?” she talked for a while and mentioned her father had been in the Air Force. I said, “That’s interesting, what that’s like?” She said that it meant that they moved around a lot, and I said, “That’s interesting what’s that like?” You get the idea. For a good hour and a half I asked questions and she held forth and the conversation went on. Finally I left the church hall and met another friend at the end of the evening and I said: “I had a really rotten time!” and he said, “But you looked like you were enjoying yourself so much!”

And I looked at myself for a moment and I realized that I had enjoyed myself, I had learned a lot about growing up the daughter of an Army sergeant in a variety of towns around the world and I had even made a new friend without really trying. People in Alcoholics Anonymous know a great one liner, “Fake it till you make it.” Sometimes you can do the right thing for the wrong reason and it will still take you closer to where you should be, who you should be, lead you to learning something about the world, things that you never thought you needed to know.

Listen: what the steward does is clearly dishonest, yet Jesus uses this as a example for us. What does the steward do that is somehow right? He forgives. The steward forgives debts. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain, to compensate for past misconduct, for the wrong reasons, and that might be the moral of this story: Simply forgive, forgive it all,. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Simply forgive, it doesn’t even matter if your hears not in it. Just do it!

And maybe God stands at the big door on the front porch of life and death and resurrection and smiles at you and me and Margaret O’Brien and our little attempts to trick the world and master dangers and get home safely while he still set stands ready to offer us the treat of our lives. So, in that hope, let us make Eucharist. Amen.

Yesterday had this feeling about it...

2010-09-12T06:51:00.000+10:00

“… I putter about the hermitage, make the bed, wash the breakfast dishes, sweep the porch; and something begins to order itself inside me as I order my external world. The ordering and puttering become a kind of prayer, a way of attending to the human which is a way of attending to the divine, charged as we are and the world is with the presence of God.

Domestic chores also become simply something to do. One cannot pray and meditate unendingly. There is a rhythm to life lived anywhere that calms the heart if we surrender to the necessities of the world around us and the world within.”

— Thomas Merton

Sermon for Pentecost 13C

2010-08-29T07:41:00.001+10:00

St Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in the Fourth century, writes that God becomes human so that we might become Godly, and that was what I was after when I joined the church. When I was 21 years old, in 1967, I joined the church to feel important. I was also planning to join a tennis club and a University club, a fraternity, for the same reason to get me invited to some big important dinner party where I’d know I had gotten it right!

It didn’t last. I quit the tennis club pretty quickly, the fraternity that I wanted to join didn’t ask me and the one that asked me wasn’t the one I wanted to join, so I passed on that too, but the church turned out to be something different that what I had wanted or expected.

For I realized, after some time, that what was more true, and what I think Athanasius might have meant, was that God becomes human so that he can meet us there, right in the middle on human being, and so that we can be fully human together, fully alive to the glory of God in being human. Jesus had a different idea of the ideal dinner party than I had at 21. Listen:

When you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

This didn’t sit easy with me at first, I wanted to be exalted right away: Godly, stained glass and organ music when I walked in, people saying: “He’s very special that one, really holy, watch out!” But that isn’t where Jesus met me, meets us; Christ seems to come from heaven to bring us down to earth, to share his body and blood so that we can be truly flesh and blood, but flesh and blood living right, as God created us, calls us, to be.

I recently watched a video on Youtube called “Breathing”, made by a group called Nooma. It’s about being both Adam and Pneuma, both dirt and spirit. For the Hebrew word Adam comes from the word for earth, dirt, and that’s where we come from too! That’s the truth of what we’re about; we are earthy, sometimes dirty too, we come from dust and return to dust. It hard to live with that, to accept that we are meant to be fragile flesh and blood, limited, aging. We start out so small and we seem to slow down so much. To make a confession, the other day I saw a young man sit down on the floor to play with a dog and then quickly jump up and walk away, and I was so jealous! I can’t move that easy, flexible way anymore. This collection of dirt feels a bit rocky sometimes! T. S. Eliot, my favorite poet, writes, “The only thing we can hope to acquire is humility, humility is endless.” That is not an easy truth. But to come from the earth, humus, and to be a person, human, we need to take up our humility, and that means taking the lower seat. For the plain truth is that unless we accept our earthiness, our dirty limits, we miss the chance to be invited to come higher up, to accept our God-given godliness, holiness. That’s the other side of who we are. We are called to accept Pneuma, breath, God’s spirit, as much of a gift as our creatureliness, and as common as our daily bread, right in the midst of who and where we are. We are called to take on God’s free spirit in the middle of all our human limits; to receive that breath that breathes us, all of us, all of creation, and to take on that gift that calls us higher up, all the way to heaven.

That’s one of the reasons I try to pray and meditate regularly, to keep open to that clear truth, the message that comes with the breath of the spirit; that God calls us, as ground up by life as we are, to breathe the spirit of God in all that we do and all that we are. For to balance both sides, the ground and the glory, to take on both as gift, takes work. To open our lives and our hands to take this gift we have to let go of a lot: what we thought we wanted to be, to do, to woo, to win, and instead accept the God-given gift of what we’ve got, to bloom where we’re planted, to take what we’re given, to, quoting a 1960s song, “love the one we’re with!”

As the letter to the Hebrews puts it. “Be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

And the good news is that graceful acceptance gives freedom, the kind of freedom Jesus lives with and shares with us, a freedom that lasts forever. Not the power that puts you at the top of the table with the select few, but an awareness that you are founded in and grounded in God, in your very humanity, humility, the life you live, the lessons you receive, the world you share with everyone! That leaves room for God to breathe, for God’s spirit to refine our daily routines and realities; to continue to redeem, renew; so paradoxically, a life that lives right now and takes us beyond death to touch the eternal.

But it it does so in the middle of the very human journey, right where Jesus meets us. So we can and must, as Hebrews says, “Let mutual love continue” at all times and places! [We] Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for [we know] by doing that some have entertained angels.” Because that common, God-given life of matter and spirit, ground and grace limit and love, opens up room for surprise, where all the world can be seen as the place where God is on the loose with a hospitality that leaves no one outside.

There’s the paradox I wish I’d known about earlier: if we don’t get above ourselves, God will lift us up, call us out, bring us home at the end. If we remember we are but dust, and let God remind us that we are spirit, breath, then God’s message of redemption, comes in breathing in and living out Good News by God’s grace, when we take the long way home, and get there living life along with everybody else.

The celebration is big enough to include those in prisons of any kind, those tortured by whatever tyrannies hold them captive; the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind in body, mind and spirit. For in God’s good reign, all of us can come to a place where blessings can happen, where new life, eternal life can come to be, to be given, taken up, offered, accepted and transformed.

To quote the song from the sixties, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” and Jesus is free, a gift from God who gives us freedom inasmuch as we let ourselves be free to follow him deep into that dance where love weaves dirt and water into bread and wine, into life, into spirit, into love that lasts forever.

This meal, this Eucharist, is the opening course in that great banquet, and we come here to confess our sins, to hear God’s word, to pray for the world and wish peace to our neighbor and the stranger, and to the accept the honor of being loved by God. This is the great feast, the heavenly table, and God is calling each of us, humble creatures of ground and grace, substance and spirit, to come further up, to join in the beginning of the heavenly banquet. Amen.

On Mini-Sabbaths

2010-08-22T19:23:00.004+10:00

In the 1980s, while I was at seminary, the professor of pastoral care had a great one-liner: “People came to seminary to become Godly, and often ended up somewhat Lordly instead.” It is so true, so often, for so many of us, and it’s always been that way. We, the church, the people of God, still tend to get caught in Lordliness as much as the religious establishment in the Gospel for today,

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”

That response takes the focus away from what had been a story of a woman being healed, removing the yoke, satisfying the needs of the afflicted, opening to mercy, healing the wounds of time, and that Lordly response confronts us with the wrong kind of religiosity, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, and the narrowing of Sabbath, time set aside for the most intentional refreshment recollection and renewal, whittled down into a time when certain things just shouldn’t be done,

But what should be done, what is the right way to live into the Sabbath, to remember our lives belongs to God? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote” "Living is not a private affair of the individual. Living is what I do with God's time, what I do with God's world." But how do we get there from here, into God’s time from the nonstop noise and numbers of our increasingly busy world? How do we remember to keep the Sabbath as a time and place we remember the big questions and the bigger answer?

My working hunch is that you start with something small and do it often. When the poet Rilke was asked, “How do I learn to love?”, he replied, “Start small: love a rock for a little while, then a tree, work your way up.” So instead of keeping a day a week to honor and remember and recall God and the who where and why of it all; maybe we just can take a few minute every day, perhaps a few times a day, for a mini Sabbath, starting small.

One of the best ways to do that is the Lord’s Prayer. Almost everyone knows it, lots of people say it every day already, we say it a little later in the service. But if we said it several times a day, taking a little time for it in our daily ritual as an exercise in sacred time, it might stretch Sabbath into the middle of everyday, everywhere: to remember the who and where and why of God’s time, God’s world.

Listen to how the prayer begins:

“Our Father in Heaven” is literally close to “Dada of the Universe.” And what does that say? That the realm of the prayer is both so big, before the sunrise beyond the night, beyond all the black holes and supernovas and any notion of space and time: and yet still so intimate, that this great God invites us to call out “Abba,” like Dada, or Mama for that matter. Common and close as the father or mother of a newborn babe, close enough to trust, close enough to call out to under any circumstances, at any time, That God could go that far yet come that close has to make us pause, begins take us to the realm of Sabbath.

Then there are three imperatives that we call for and proclaim: First, may your name be hallowed, holy, may I keep my understanding of your name, your attributes, your power, beyond my tendency to manipulate, beyond my business day trips, and nighttime fantasies may I keep your holy knowing beyond all my profane imagination. Instead may your kingdom, your values, your vision, your compassion and justice and love come and may your will be done, here, on Earth as in Heaven, and (here’s the clincher) may I be part of that ongoing liturgy, work, action.

That part of the prayer is weaving the world into one, into our daily lives, and weaving us into the world of saints, pilgrims of Sabbath times of all times: like Mary, “Be it unto me according to your word,” like Francis, “Let me be an instrument of your peace.” commissioning us as part of the great call and ministry of mercy, of creativity, as part of the ongoing work of God, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Nicholas Berdyev wrote that “we are the eighth day of creation. And it starts right here.

That is a stretch, but the genius of the prayer is that it takes up from there to the starkest necessities of human life together, to being children of earth.

“Give us today our daily bread.”

Food can mean so many things, it can be junk food, or feast, both nature and nurture, it means refreshment and fuel, ecology and economics, connection and company, The bread we eat, the wine we drink means grapes and water: yeast and fat and oil and wheat mixed and kneaded, warmed and transformed, many backs have been bent; many hands have stretched out over the seasons to give us food at our daily tables. Many have gathered to ensure this harvest to make that daily bread rise.

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 tell you I will be here, but prepare to meet me in the entire world, because in my love I have taken up with the body and blood of all humankind and all creation. This bread and wine are means of my love to you, but I mean to love you in everywhere, in everything, in everyone! Give us today our daily bread, let us know who we eat with, and how and why!

So in Sabbath we learn to celebrate God meeting us in the particulars of our own flesh and that of our neighbor, our lover, the stranger, the enemy, God is coming to meet us in the wideness of the whole world, and that means we need to be careful: because the prayer is taking us into tough territory, maybe the most difficult part of being a Christian, following Jesus, living this prayer.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us

I was in my thirties when it hit me that how you judge might be the way you will be judged, and if God were only just, than that might be all we can expect; but there may be more in the Sabbath. For Sabbath means rest and renewal and forgiveness and a new beginning; it is best if we can participate in that creative renewal fully, and let everyone else do so as well. And that means participating in God’s forgiveness fully as we participate in the rest of God’s creation, even when it’s tough, and letting people, even people who’ve sinned against us, all poor captives, be forgiven, go free, to seek their own Sabbath.

Then the second, “Lead us not into temptation (Save us from the time of trial) and deliver us from evil.” Nobody wants to go there, but the glory of the community of the church, when we gather in that place where sabbath makes an end and God grants a new beginning, to the week and to the world, is that we find out we all go there, even God goes there. Everytime we gather as the church, when we pray, when we share peace, when we eat the bread of life, the cup of salvation: someone is dying, someone is born, someone’s in trial and someone’s been tempted, someone’s found peace and someone wakes to glory. This is the way of God, where we share in the cup of salvation given by the one who knows all about it, who will carry us all the way home right through the time of trial, , like a mother hen, like a just and faithful king, like the ruler of the universe.

So wisdom adds the ending like a coda: “For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours, Now and Forever” and the prayer ends close to where it begins, deposits us not far from where we started, but now changed, by remembering the close caring and compassion in which we are held, recalling where we come from, where we’re going and the one who meets us on the way, who is our Lord and our God. Amen

Towards a Theology of Tennis!

2010-08-07T19:24:00.000+10:00

Sunday Sermon - 8 August 2010

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Wangaratta

Jesus says "Be ready", but this section of scripture, with the slave and master, always seems a little kinky to me, like that bumper sticker that says, “Jesus is coming soon, look busy!” It rings wrong, because I think the readiness he’s looking for is not that of a fearful slave, but more like a seasoned dancer or a trained athlete. So I want to talk about a theology of tennis as a model for good discipleship.

I’ve been thinking about tennis a lot lately. It’s been over ten years since the last time I was on a court, but I played tennis most of my life. I joke that, since I wasn’t raised in a church, the tennis club served that purpose. It gave us community, shared purpose, both discipline and joy and a way to meet the world. I played a lot as a kid and an my early teens, but I had a tendency to lose focus, get too tight when the score was against me, try percentage shots that didn’t pay off, and I didn’t like to practice that much.

But I will never forget my father, while we were watching a tennis match together – and either Ken Rosewall or Arthur Ashe was playing - saying: "He looks relaxed, but he’s playing smart, he knows what’s going on, nothing gets by him, he’s ready for anything."

So in my late twenties, one summer when I had been working in our families printing business for a few years and was preparing to return to University and finish my undergraduate degree, an older friend and I spent two or three late afternoons and most Saturday mornings every week meeting on some public courts and working on our game. We even went to the local club and got lessons back to back so that we could take each other through our homework which, in my case, meant a lot of work on my backhand and a lot of time on the backboard; but by the end of the summer, when I returned to Uni, my game was better, more consistent; I was more disciplined and, paradoxically, also more free, livelier and lighter, in my game, in how I met the ball, and in how I lived my life.

In the early 1980s I worked on a Masters degree in the History of Religion and I spent part of one semester working on a theology of tennis called Serving God: to serve, receive and return bright vehicles of meaning. I realise that sounds terribly California, but playing the game well taught me how to live life better.

And that’s where tennis meets the Gospel for today. Jesus calls us to be disciplined in thought, word, deed and action: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those…waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him.” Alert and ready

when he comes; prepared, ready for action, like a good servant, like a good athlete, ready to serve, receive, return, all the bright opportunities, that come in living with the possibility of God. That is why we’re here, to prepare ourselves for what is wanted of God’s servants, God’s disciples, friends, in preparing for the the great heavenly banquet which just might, by the grace of God, start right here and now.

We are here to remind ourselves, in body, mind and spirit, of what we agree to in our Baptismal vows:

“to strive to live as a disciple of Christ, loving God with your whole heart, and your neighbor as yourself.”

“to know Christ’s forgiving love and continue in the fellowship of the church…[and to proclaim] by word and example, the good news of God in Christ…

So our liturgy is a kind of practice sessions, a lesson, even a dance class, in working out, living out, moving out: a choreography of belief. Visitors and newcomers notice that more than those of us who are regulars in the weekly routine: for they see how very odd it is. We sit, stand, kneel and bow. Some of us cross ourselves this way and that, we pass and give and receive, move forward and back. Finally returning to the same place, but changed, somehow, by the motions we go through. You can see newcomers looking around, thinking, “What in God’s name are they going to do next?” But what we are acting out in this place is a kind of spiritual workout routine, for the rest of our lives in the rest of the world.

Because if you really look, you can learn to see our whole liturgy, from Baptism on, as nothing less than a dancing class or a tennis lesson. Here we learn the radical choreography, where we come to move in the world with the God in whom we live and move and have our being. In the end, it is all about the we way we prepare, wait, respond, return: all the actions that we learn here.

We come to church on Sunday, bringing nothing less than our selves, our whole selves, souls and bodies, to the Eucharist. Bringing all our particular questions and concerns, issues and ideas, histories, hopes and fears, the best and worst of who and what we are, where we come from and where we are going. Taking all that when we get here and mixing it up with this liturgy of confession and praise, mercy and glory, in listening and responding to the words in psalm and scripture, the articulation of the community of faith gathered through history into the present day. Presenting our sins, our concerns, our thanksgivings, all our self-offerings: and then joining with Jesus in his self-offering as disciples and friends, taking part in this eternal communion. Taking all that we have and all that we are, and giving it all over, giving it all up as we take his body and blood, and remember that we are members of his body. This is what we do: this is who we are.

So what you see here is really faith moving on; that’s the point of the whole courtly dance routine, the larger game. We come to reach for Christ; and Christ comes to us and uses our ministry to reach out to the world. We come to get a grip on him; and we stay to learn to hand him to the world and hand the world back to him. For the hands which grasp the body and blood of Christ here, are the same hands -same body- that touch the world in daily life in the places where we make business, peace, war and love, touch the lives of friends and strangers, spend our days. The love of God in Christ reaches into the particulars of all our daily liturgies so that we come to move like Christ in all these places.

Each and every one of our ministries happen when we create, redeem, and relate like God, wherever we are: where we give our gifts. It doesn’t matter whether it be how to throw a ball, cook a pie, write a paper, fix a fixture, apply an appliance, tell a tale or do a deed. Ministry happens when you lovingly act to share the part of the world that you know well, where the actions and attitudes are clear to you, where you act to give that clarity and light to others, so that they can take part in that relationship, that action as well. Some people heal with kindness, others love the stranger, listen well. Some make justice, visit the sick, give to the poor, live cheerfully, tell the truth. Sometimes we just show up, but we do what we can.

For each one of us, as members of Christ’s body, is called to proceed – play or dance, if you like - into the world which God loves, day after day, year after year, time after time: to take on the tasks of stewardship in this wonderful world: to be present to family, friends and strangers, in tasks, hobbies, jobs and joys, present in the times of frustrations and puzzlements, present in agreements that must be honored, in situations that must be met. All of these are places where we act out, serve out, flesh out, live out the reconciling life of Jesus - in serving love of every kind - in the ministry of acceptance, love, and forgiveness. For those are the places and the actions where we shall both find and serve the very God who loves and serves us.

May God give us grace today to take up our lives and our ministries as gifts to be received and gifts to be given, and all in Christ’s name. Amen.

Martha, Mary and other sibling rivalries....

2010-07-18T06:54:00.000+10:00

Today I want to end up talking about the two sisters Martha and Mary, these two friends of Jesus, but first I want to begin by looking at two an earlier parable in Luke’s Gospel, the story of the prodigal son.

The prodigal son is one of two brothers. While his older brother tends the field, watches the livestock, comes home every night, fills in all the required categories in the job description; this younger brother cuts his father dead, travels to a far country, wastes time and money and substance, breaks hearts and dreams and in the end loses everything except some shred of self-preservation that tells him to go back home and start over. And he heads back with a well thought out repentance speech, a plea for pardon, hoping that he’ll forge an agreement that will let him get back on the old homestead as a sort of servant. He’s willing to cut a deal.

He’s not a likable person, this wastrel son: his prepared pardon plea is designed to get him a consolation prize, to upgrade his personal comfort level, asking to be taken back into the family business as a slave, but I there is no real sign that he is sad for breaking his father’s heart, breaking apart the family inheritance, breaking down in his duty, he is really looking out for what he needs.

But when we look at the older brother, he might not be much better. When the father prepares a feast for the returning son, the elder brother breaks out with a tantrum, telling the father that he -- the good son -- had worked like a slave and never received even an expected part of what was due him; so there’s a self-righteousness there that smells a bit suspect. Both boys are less than wonderful. The elder had been living as a son, but with the attitude of a slave, while the younger, the prodigal, in asking the father to take him on as a slave - and shows quite surprisingly that he loved him and trusted his father as a good and loving man.

So to bring that story into the Gospel for today, these two brothers, next to these two sisters. See the similarities, for the moment when the prodigal begins to come home is like the moment when Martha’s sister Mary moves to sit and listen hard to the words of Jesus, to come to see him face to face. It is a kind of baptism.

Our baptism happens when our need brings us to Christ. We might have been carried into the church as children on the day we were baptized, but our baptized journey returns us to this table, this meal, this festive feast, because of our need to be renewed members of the family, our need to start over, our need to be nourished with good words, good food, good community. It is our need that brings us home again. Just like the prodigal son, that younger brother, just like Mary moving out of the kitchen to listen to the words that bring her to life with Jesus. That’s something we hear all through Luke’s Gospel: God honors us in our need!

Simply put: the prodigal gets a break because he so badly wants one. He is unashamed in his manipulation, unrepentant about his misuse of the family resources, showing little sign of proper parental respect, he’s going home because there’s no place left to go; and still the father loves him, because he is in need. And the same with the two sisters. While Martha is doing what she probably should, fixing dinner for the men, doing a daughters or sisters or a wife’s chores; Mary is pushing boundaries, hanging out with the boys, being where she certainly shouldn’t be according to the culture of the time, because of some compelling need in her to listen to and be near this Jesus: and that’s good enough for Jesus, because like the prodigal, she’s gotten there just in time.

The Greeks have two words for time: Chronos has to do with linear time, clock time, accumulating time; but Kairos means time as opportune, time for planting seeds, for making harvest, time showing up or turning around, time to come home, time to sit down and listen to the word of life: time to know what you need and where you need to go to get it. And in Luke’s Gospel Mary and the prodigal need move to that place at the right kairotic time, and that is, God willing, where the Gospel finds us today.

Go back to the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, they may be good or bad, they may be unconventional or not, they may be on the margins of society, people you would rather not meet in a dark alley; the Good News seems to be that if they turn around and reach out for the larger life they see in the Lord Jesus, then he will hold his hand out to them and bring them home for the feast.

Most of us in the church are older sisters, older brothers. We work hard to do the right thing, perform the right action, say the right speech at the right time, and the fact is that there are these other people invited to the party; people who work less, are less worthy of respect, more likely to have compromised the principles we’ve worked hard to flesh out, because we thought we were supposed to believe in: that might miff us, and it’s understandable. Because it almost seems like God loves them equally -- maybe, under the circumstances it seems as though God almost loves them more than he loves us.

And there is something in that it does not feel fair: fair for the older brother or for Martha, it feels unjust! But there is something bigger than being just, and that is being merciful, and I think that’s a better place to pitch our tent. God will be merciful to those in need, merciful to those who hunger, to those in darkness turning towards light -- half blinded by new possibilities, inarticulate of where they come from or what they want or where they might be going in the end, just beginning to listen, to turn towards the light of the Lord, and he will rush towards them with his arms held wide, welcoming them into this new Kingdom of love and that is Good news.

Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re faithful or unfaithful, if you tried so hard in the past or if you just woke up this morning and thought, “I’m going to try something new,” then, in either case, God is with you, God is loving you, and God will bring you home to the celebration party.

St. John Chrysostom wrote this in the late Fourth century, listen:

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. 
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
 as well as to him that toiled from the first. 
To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
 He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor. The deed
He honors and the intention He commends.
  Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! 
First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together!
 Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!  
You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! 
Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry.
Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

On the Good Samaritan

2010-07-11T15:30:00.002+10:00

The California writer Joan Didion wrote that maturity happens when you accept yourself, whether you want to or not, and I am almost there. I am much easier, more neighborly, much kinder towards myself, than I used to be, and I think that’s better. When I was younger I wanted very much to have my life under control, well-balanced, together. I desperately want a system that would save me from the terrible business of choosing wrong.

Once I even went to a workshop where all the participants took large sheets of newsprint and pens, crayons and magic markers to write down how they wanted to live, what they wanted to do, in the next few years. One women made a map of what and how and where she was going to be for the following five years - with a place for everything and everything in its place; it even had color coding! I could have worshipped that map! How wonderful it would be to look towards the future with such certainty.

So, when I hear about the lawyer who comes to Jesus for advice, I think I can understand him: he was looking for color coding! The Gospel also says he comes to “test” Jesus, and I think there are a lot of us who have lived our lives as If there were going to be a pop quiz, a surprise exam, or an unscheduled bed check arranged by “the authorities” in order to make sure that everything is in decent shape and approved order. So we all try so hard to keep it all together, to pass the course.

So the lawyer comes to Jesus to asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” How do I get prepared? And rather than giving him a straightforward answer, a plan, Jesus asks a question in return: “What is written In the Law? How do you read it?” (The implicit question here is, “What’s most important?”). The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus answers him, “Right! do this and you will live.” The exam has been passed!

So, “desiring to justify himself,” the lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” Do you see what’s happening? Color coding coming, easily filed categories: the most important commandment, love; the most important persons, God and neighbor. He’s building the map, and soon he’ll have a whole new system with dietary laws, holidays weekends, hints for etiquette; everything in order.

But Jesus makes trouble for the man when He tells a story about a traveler mugged by robbers and left for dead, ignored first by a Priest, next by a Levite, finally found and cared for by a Samaritan. Because what the lawyer wants are rules and regulations that stay in place, and what Jesus gives him is a story that’s a cross between a puzzle and a moving picture. It won’t stay still; it turns everything around. Nothing (and no one) is ruled out. And all the truisms that “everybody” in the old conceptual neighborhood knows -- Priests and Levites are good and Samaritans are bad -- fall flat because there is a new definition of neighbor which turns everything in life around.

You see, the person Jesus uses to show the quality of Neighbor is the last one you would want in the neighborhood. The lawyer, like most of his geographic neighbors, did not like Samaritans. They were outsiders, considered unclean, with suspect religious preferences and doubtful cultural practices. Our categories might nor be as blatant as his, but try this exercise: “if I were mugged on a city street, the person I would least like to come to my rescue would be....” and put that one in place of the Samaritan. It doesn’t matter who comes to mind, but hold on to the feeling, “I would just rather it not be...” Then think of the Samaritan! It grates our sensibility to think that person might hold the definition for neighbor. can carry the sign, be a directional signal, a call from God, an icon, for something as important as the way to eternal life.

The lawyer gets a lot more than he bargained for; all he was looking for was the master list of who qualifies as a neighbor in order to build the plan on how to win eternal life. He wanted a blueprint, a diagram that would make the world safe: but what he got was how someone might be a neighbor to him. All he wanted was a ruling; what he is getting is a community, much more than he expected about who God is and how God loves and how God’s word is encountered. Jesus tells him a neighbor is simply one who does neighboring things: shows mercy and compassion; anyone who seeks out and acts up and does the daily business of living, breathing and caring as a neighbor. That is a way of meeting the world that has room for anyone, and it is both very big news and very intimate information; it makes the world more complex and maybe much more simple too.

Let me tell a story: some twenty five years ago. I took a year away from my school to work as a youth minister in a small Northern California town.In the middle of that year I took a three hour bus south San Francisco, walk a few blocks, then catch the subway to my seminary in Berkeley to report on how the year was going. All the way down I had been writing in my journal about how good the it was, how I was getting it right, I was getting it together! And as I was waiting in the subway to catch the train to Berkeley, this black guy, African American, came up alongside of me on the platform and I could see that he wasn’t walking too steady and his clothes looked a little rough and he might have smelled, though from work or dirty clothes or booze I don’t remember: and he said, “Where do I get the train to Oakland?” and he was right next to me.

So I looked towards the track to our right and said, “I think you’ll find it over there.” And he raised his voice a bit and said, “I don’t want to know what you think, I want to know what you know.” And I thought, “Well, I am going to get mugged or worse, here it comes. And I said, “It’s right over there.” And he said, “Look at me!” And I took a breath and looked up at him – and I saw a man who was probably a bit older than I, and tired, probably harder working than I had ever been, who had a few scars and some real serious dignity that he had likely had to fight for over the years. And I felt sorry, both for him and, surprisingly, for me, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. And I looked at him and said, “the train for Oakland will be on this platform. And he looked at me for a minute and then said, “Thank you,” and walked away.

And I saw something about me that I hadn’t seen before: how narrow I was, how snobbish, self-serving, insulated by my own concerns from a world that was big and unpredictable and unsafe and full – maybe – of messengers of God that I might have overlooked. I saw that day that I didn’t see much, about myself and about Gods’ word and Gods’ world at all. It’s been twenty-five years, and I can still see his face. I still wonder who he was.

For Jesus gets sidelined, mugged, murdered on the side of the road while a lot of good and careful people: Priests, Scribes and Pharisees, overlook what is happening for fear that they might fail the exam, and they end up missing the train, they end up missing the point of it all! Just pray we don’t! And Jesus says: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself... Do this and you shall live.” in the name of Christ.

Meals and Eucharist, Debs too!

2010-06-13T12:48:00.000+10:00

I want to talk about some meals and the Eucharist today.

In 1986 when I finished a year as a youth minister in a small town in Northern California, I was invited by a local doctor and his artist wife to a posh private club for dinner. It was all quite grand: their Cadillac was whisked away by the parking attendant, we were led through marble halls and seated in the main dining room with great ceremony, the menus were huge and handed over with suitable flourishes, there was lots of very french-sounding food: but the conversation was forced, and at one point after a long pause, the wife said, “Aren’t we having fun?” And we weren’t! It was what kids used to call play-acting, The conversation and the company neither reached the ground nor came to life. And we lost touch not long after that. Meal number one.

Number Two was about 5 years ago on trip to San Francisco when I took a new friend to meet two old friends who have been together for over 20 years, had recently bought a new house and always provided easy simple and brilliant meals with conversation to match. But something was wrong here. The talk turned in strange directions, there were odd pauses, and finally, when they both left the room I turned to my friend and said, “What’s going on, there’s something happening here and I don’t know what it is!” When they came back they apologized and let us know that we had walked into the end of a major argument There was a bit of a pause there, but then the meal turned into a pretty good time with good company and I admired both their honesty and their willingness to let us into the inner workings of a long term marriage that has endured. They will likely see this sermon on Facebook and I hope to see them when I visit San Francisco in 2012.

The third meal never happened. I was on an afternoon off from campus ministry at the University of San Francisco and went into my favorite cheap Mexican restaurant for a good burrito followed by a wander through a good used bookstore and then a walk down Market Street towards the Embarcadero. Then I had a pain. Two words here: Kidney Stones. In 15 minutes I was on Market Street trying to get a taxicab and realizing I had to sit down on the sidewalk because I couldn’t stand with the pain. And when I did I became invisible: I was a large man sitting where I shouldn’t and making distressing noises I shouldn’t make and I was going nowhere in the middle of the path and people were going on their way, giving me more than enough space and looking elsewhere. The short end of story is that I got a cab and went to the emergency room of a hospital where some very kindly and professional people took me in hand, injected me with some great pain medicine, gave me lots of water, and the crisis and the pain passed with no further crisis.

Finally, the St Luke’s Debutante Ball and Supper in your Town Hall on Friday night was wonderful! I told someone that, as the official representatives I felt a bit like Anne and I were playing Camilla and Charles, but I’ll admit there was more. I felt a little like Jesus Christ! The privilege of witnessing so much love in the room. These kids were so nervous, taking it so seriously, you could see it in their brows, the way they moved, their lips pursed together in recollection and action: and they were so beautiful, and when they got to us we all nodded and said good things and smiled - with the parents and families and noisy boys yelling and all of us rightfully proud to be together in this moment of meeting and celebration. I will never forget last Friday night.

So let those four meetings be background music to the Gospel, this curious meal, with people making social conversation a bit over the top and the stranger, the crisis, the tension that’s always on the other side of town or the sidewalk sneaking into the scene. A medieval painting shows the woman under the table, almost unseen, overlooked, unspoken, unwelcome, washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Above daily life goes on, table conversation proceeds, social conventions observed; but underneath, secret stories are told, strange necessities disclosed, wrong roads are rited, returning children welcomed, sins forgiven, life begins again. “Aren’t we having fun?” Well, yes, but so much more than fun. For holiness and healing are happening here and we so often overlook it.

Twenty years of tertiary chaplaincy left me with some odd images for what the Kingdom of God, God’s reign, is about, and what we are doing here: but you have to meet people where they are and sometimes the strangest images can carry the most punch. So let me tell you about the giant cosmic pizza (and it works best if you visualize us meeting in a circle). We come together here, we came together Friday night, all those kids, all of us, like little pieces of pizza on a pan meeting in the center: all our individual histories spreading out widening out, like witnesses behind us, the people who put us forward, people who stand behind us, the moments that made us who we are, the good and bad choices that continue to this moment, the effects that continue, must be endured, all spread out behind us like mountains of sausages, piles of cheese, mushrooms and capsicum, whatever, and here’s where it gets even stranger!

All that stuff behind us is the past, the social graces, the wreckage of an old argument, the pain that’s getting worse, the glorious evening, but the future is coming too (and here’s where the image must break apart too); for what comes is the unimaginable future with unknown pains, new pleasures, forgiveness and renewal, grace and gut-wrenching glory. Remember those beautiful children Friday night, see them with their horizons stretching so far into the future. All that must be accepted, moved towards, endured, given thanks for. And these of us further on the way, facing the same, promises and pains and mystery, to be met in our travels, with that same face of grace, not Camilla and Charles, but Jesus Christ, who takes our incomplete journeys and bows to accompany us into his unfinished pilgrimage,that big and god-given future, where we too struggle to get the steps right, make the turns correctly, remember the music, keep with the rhythm, taking it with all the seriousness and the proper joy we know it deserves.

I like being here because this is a congregation that knows how to worship; and I see this is not only on Sunday morning but on Friday night and other times as well: to show up to worship and witness, to show how much it matters, how much there is to gain, how much there is to lose. It is hard work to make this ministry, these meetings happen: the dance given shape, the meal shared, to provides places for people to remember how high are our hopes, how wide our world, how good God’s grace. As Philip Larkin writes at the end of his 1950s poem, Church Going”

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I think that’s what Friday night and Sunday morning are about, and every other day too. We come here, in the midst of the living and the dying and so much more, to take the world more gracefully and more seriously, to recognize and robe up for our deepest destiny: to try great things, to stand in the middle of all the history and hope, all the pains and pretense and pleasure and to recall, forgive, renew; to love the world in all its life,to dance with it all, as the friends and followers of the great lover, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, to whom we give glory now and forever. Amen.

St Augustine's Patron Day 6 June 2010

2010-06-07T16:07:00.002+10:00

In the late sixth century, on their way from Rome to the wilds of Britain, Augustine and his companions paused on the way, lost their nerve a bit, and wanted very badly to turn back. then with the encouragement (and maybe more) of Gregory their Bishop of Rome, Augustine and his company of not very nervy missionaries and evangelists, they went on to arrive at Canterbury in 597 and stayed to recall and reform and renew the English church from that time on.

But they started small, with some fear and trembling, some shakes on the way, and that gives me hope. Because Augustine’s call as a minister of Christ is so like ours, even though 1400 years separate us. It is found in today’s Gospel: a charge with four very basic facets: you look for welcome, you eat what you’re given, you cure the sick, and you say, “the kingdom of God has come near to you”. The good news is that a very rich and satisfying ministry is found in welcoming, sharing nourishment, in the work of healing, and in proclaiming God’s good news. It Is a very big call, but we can do it, in fact we must do it, in very small ways.

Here’s my working answer on how.

First, you look for welcome by being a person of thanksgiving and mercy - and this can happen by getting two simple habits.
First, say thank you to God at least twenty times a day. Now that may sound simple, but it isn’t easy. Sometimes it feels uphill, but when I leave my home, walk out the door, I start giving some thanks; for the people walking or driving by, for fresh air, green trees, small birds singing in the shrubbery and passing parrots proclaiming their own kind of Pentecost. And slowly or suddenly I begin to see again that, “the world is charged with the Glory of God”. It almost always works before I get to ten! And I recommend it as a spiritual practice for every occasion.  It is not too difficult: you can make it a kind of fireworks prayer ascending to heaven in thanksgiving for wiggling toes, hot water in the shower, good coffee, breakfast; fire up some thanks for friends, family, passing strangers, all through the day, from morning to night. Allow yourself to give thanks for every new facet of creation that catches your eye as a very helpful habit.

Then, to balance it, ask for mercy: say, “I’m sorry” 20 times a day as well. Not just for breaches in etiquette or falling short on your own personal potential or agenda, but for the fact that life is tough for everybody, it made Jesus cry, took him to the cross, has been painful for saints and strangers throughout biblical times, up to Augustine, and every day since. So accept sorrow, penitence and empathy, then move through to forgiveness and the mercy that is found there, and go back through grace to giving thanks again. That is the texture of our life and the shape of our ministry as the people of God. Give thanks and call down mercy on the fragile world and on the friends of Jesus in all their distressing disguises.

Once, for a quiet day in Melbourne, I told people to go to a nearby tram stop and look for hidden friends of Jesus; people with sore back and bum legs, with worried eyes and furrowed brows, and prayerfully offer God’s mercy for those beloved companions on the way. I recommend this to anyone, you can do it anywhere (even facing the mirror!), and it will open your heart to find the places where God is welcome. I guarantee that!

Now sharing food means company, not just company for dinner, having friends in to share substance and spirit, though that is certainly part of it: but company as in a group of people, many, different, working together in separate ways that come together in a common cause. The Eucharist fits here. This simple meal is a sign of community. For bread and wine means grapes and water: yeast and fat and oil and wheat mixed and kneaded, work of human hands, to be taken away to warm and transform, to rest and rise. All this before it comes to the table to be broken and shared. Like the Eucharist, all food has been touched, gathered, lifted up by workers in the fields, harvesters, processors, moved to market by many hands holding, refining the food from the land; bringing it all together.

And there are so many different foods so many different tastes! To share people’s food means to meet them where they are, to honor the way they spice up their life and season their existence. It can be a surprise but it can open us to new and better ways of being in the world. I have been in Australia for 10 years now, and I still remember the first time I found there was an egg in my hamburger. At first it seemed wrong, not the way we did things at home, now it is my preferred option. I have others. I still like peanut butter and jelly with bananas on toast, and that turns many native born Australians pale. So maybe we all have something to learn from one another

And Jesus says, “This is my body, this is my blood!” Jesus says I am willing to be known in this Eucharist, and I tell you I will be here, but prepare to meet me in the entire world, in sharing food with all people, because in my love I have taken up with the body and blood of all humankind and all creation. This bread and wine are means of my love to you, but I mean to love you in everywhere, in everything, in everyone! So in sharing food, eating what’s put in front of us, giving thanks for it, calling down mercy occasionally at some meals, we experience and celebrate God’s good taste in new ways and in new company. And the world is better for it.

Then the big one. Jesus calls us to cure the sick, and I admit that most of us do not have the gift of healing to any great extent,‘though some do, and I thank God for their ministry. But I also think that almost all of us underestimate the amount of healing we can do this in so often wounded world and, again, it can start in a very simple way.

First we accept our own need for healing, then we share the journey with others who need healing, then we do what we can in sharing both vulnerability and vitality. That can be surprisingly healing in a world where so many are lonely and hurting.

For people are in pain and need, and Christ’s mandate is that people need to be served, cared for, honored, and our lives must be shared. For this work we need to be very small saints who are willing to bless the meek, meet the poor, celebrate in solidarity the very fragility of humankind. And this is a tender ministry. But the good news and the paradox is that we are just asked to participate in God’s healing ministry, asked to begin, we don’t have to know that much about how it will end.

Have you ever had someone come to you and say, “When you said this (or did this) it meant so much to me!” And you don’t remember doing it? So many easily forgettable moments of sharing and caring can blossom in the lives of other people in ways we can never foresee and need not remember. We do need to be present to win but we don’t have to keep accounts. God’s work of healing can continue with our compassion and cooperation on the way. All we have to do is put ourselves out there. All we have to do is begin, and that is why we’re here. You all know these words:

“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.”

We just have to begin, And we are not alone. Maybe that’s what Augustine found in France. Maybe that was gave him the heart to continue the journey to England to begin that great work: that in Christ God has come into the very middle of this fragile human journey, will precede us, follow us, accompany us all the way, has, in fact, been here already, “The Kingdom of God has come near!” In that call we live out our call: there’s a great paradox here; that it doesn’t depend on us, but we can depend on it: that the spirit will help us begin, that we shall see the heart and face and the God on the way and Christ will bring us home at the last. And that is our good news.

Amen

Monday morning check in...

2010-05-25T07:09:00.000+10:00

Day off, 8.30 on Monday morning, day off, on a cold day with rain likely later. I just listened to J Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland, courtesy of Youtube, and remembered what major poems they are and what a great poet Eliot is. I first read them in 1968, 42 years ago, and they were life-changers; incantatory openings to an awareness of the narrow way of doubt and faith together, not an easy piety or a master plan, but a living mystery that felt both threatening and welcoming.

That was the year after I was baptized and confirmed, discovering (the year after the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury - which I missed entirely) something about sex, drugs, rock and roll (I still like the early Jefferson Airplane) and a horizon of possibilities that was bigger than anything I had known before. So I smoked grass, made love, and got lost in the bigness of things. I dropped out towards the end of the year and went back to my parents house, worked a bit around my uncle’s ranch, took a couple of classes at the local junior college and read, several time, cherishing each chapter as a kind of song sung to me, Walden’s Thoreau; another milestone that I still carry in my heart. Not a millstone, not at all.

This week I started reading a book about Americans writers in Paris in the 1920s. In my teens and later at University I specialized in that era: Pound and Eliot, Hemingway, Stein, Sherwood Anderson, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald were all considered: the poetics of exile and pilgrimage in an era that had lost its faith. The Wasteland came from that time as well: Eliot around Paris and London and Switzerland hammering the jazz rhythms of disbelief and hope with the old classics into a composition that would be a standard of the age.

Over 80 years since the poem was written, over 40 since I read it in a survey course at the University of Oregon, in a season with too much rain where flowers grew and fell over in saturated ground, and I was changed forever.

Early that year I told a guy in my dorms that I was going to be a priest; and it took over 40 years to get there. Is that when I started the path that brought me here; or was there ever another path? Who knows? Misquoting Peter Berger, “Reflection and projection may be part of the same motion.”

I will try to make this a Sabbath day. Rest, read, pray, write, cook and clean a bit too. (I might also work on the brochure for the Fair, maybe a second one for the Bishop’s Certificate? Maybe not)

On Saturday I sat in a Mazda RX8, very sexy seat and dashboard, it felt great to be that close to the ground, ‘though it was a little tough to climb out. Face it, I am besotted with sports cars! Lord won’t you buy me (though I wouldn’t say no to a Mercedes) an MX5?

I am also besotted with priesthood (and I am aware that this juxtaposition shows me as a fairly superficial creature - which may be true!) but both show up with a young energy, a boy’s delight. Yesterday celebrating the Eucharist in Wodonga was such a measured joy. My hands are starting to feel like they know what to do and where to go, I feeling like I can lean on the text and say the words and move through the service without getting unfocused or off-centre, I can follow the path and mediate it for others without getting in the way, for me or them. And I really love it!

Pentecost 2010

2010-05-23T05:43:00.000+10:00

It is good to be here on the Feast of Pentecost, a great day in the church, and in order to try to understand what led up to that outpouring of spirit that day in Jerusalem, how it came to be, and why we are called to share in the spirit of Jesus; I want to share something called Spiritual Directions; which started out as three ideas, moved into a design and curriculum for quiet days and retreats as well as parish-based classes on building and remodeling your own spirituality, and is in the works as a diocesan resource in the coming year.

The first idea or image: picture a round table in the middle of your head; 12 people, more or less, sit there and try to run your life. They are probably not always the same people, and maybe you don’t even know who they all are. Speaking of my own table, my mother and father are often there, good friends, heroes and teachers and characters from books and stories I’ve heard, occasionally advertising slogans and songs and sometimes people show up who don’t like me very much. Everyone thinks it is a board of directors meetings and they are the ones in charge, so it gets noisy at times

I started inviting people to this table when I was a little boy: other people’s ideas of good or bad or right or wrong, popularity or principles, what was worth working for, who I could trust. They can be a very mixed bag.Where do they come from?

Let’s go back to the myth of the Garden of Eden, God takes Adam for a walk in the garden and Adam names things: cow, sheep, light, dark, good, bad, and all the rest of it. My table is my participation in walking with God, my attempt to make the world makes sense, to hold together, safe for me; but it isn’t a lively enough, it falls into idolatry, because it is only a child’s exercise. We participate in the process that God goes through, turning nothing into something, chaos into order and cosmos. We arrange the world like God does, naming it like Adam does, and we make mistakes along the way.

So the table is one idea and here’s the second. In my early 30s I realized that the most essential gesture of being human is walking along and coming to place on the path with a corner, where the road takes a curve and you can’t see the way ahead, and you have to go on by faith. This pattern happens all the time: a child starting the first day of school, beginning a new job, falling in love, getting married or getting divorced, dealing with illness, the death of a loved one, facing our own death, any failure or success or surprise; life turns corners and we must travel blindly with whatever faith we can lay hold of in that minute.

That is where Jesus meets us on the Way, the most faithful pilgrim walking the curving road, sharing his life, his teaching, his hope, his questions, his death, and an understanding of God that is open hearted and open ended, with an invitation to come together on that long journey, so that we don’t get lost on the way.

We are reading John’s Gospel this season, where Jesus is speaks as a teacher and a master, that’s John’s focus. But in Matthew, Mark and Luke there is another subtler picture of a human being, full of the glory of God, walking along a path with everyone else and being surprised by chaos and community and gift and grace and life and death and all the rest: There God in Christ is on the human way, walking our unfinished journey, where the open-ended quandaries and questions take us in new directions, makes us new people in a new world. Jesus meets us on that incomplete journey, knows the contours of the road, as God’s good news and Lord and Savior and friend on that unfinished frontier brings us home at the last.

So that’s one and two: Table and Journey, and there’s always tension between them: the table argues from history and tradition, goes on what worked before, doesn’t want to upset things, then the journey calls to give up your life as a committee meeting and take it up as communion, as pilgrimage, over moment by moment, day by day, here and now. Just like Jesus; dying to those old laws so that we may rise up into this new love. And that’s why we need the spirit, that is why we come to Pentecost..

Between the table and the journey there is nothing except a breath of fresh air and that’s number three: the same spirit-breathing the words, “Let there be light!” at the start; the same breath calling “Repent” by the Prophets when Israel starts worshiping money or power, or religion for that matter; moving away from the God of the journey, who taught them to walk by faith, leading them to the promised land by the long way home; the same breath as the angel speaking to Mary and and the same breath in Mary’s, “Let it be to me according to your word:” the same breath in Jesus saying “Blessed are the poor”, the same breath saying, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Israel usually doesn’t know what to do with God’s breath and God’s word in the middle of daily life, and neither do we. We have to be saved by letting God’s breath breathe us day by day, here and now, with all our living and our dying, with all the gall and glory that Jesus found on the way, so that we all share in his resurrection. And the fact is that we can’t get there from here on our own.

So at Pentecost the gift that Jesus calls for in the Gospel of John comes forth, to the middle of the city, the middle of the table, to inspire us on an amazing journey, in the middle of all our curving ways, to turn our wandering into pilgrimage and our pilgrimage into homecoming by the gift of God’s Spirit in our lives.

This does not save us from uncertainty, but it assures us that God breathes us, God’s spirit inspires us, now and always, and there is no place where we can be separate from the love of God, the creativity of the father, the compassion of Christ, the indwelling of the spirit, whether we know it or not.

So three things: as God creates the world, we create a world at our table and usually get it wrong. Then Jesus joins us in our journey though the middle of the life to help us to see the crucial difference between being incomplete and unfinished, call us to take the pilgrim path, leaving the table to follow the way where nothing is certain and everything can be a gift from God, and where the spirit is willing to breathe new life into our old bodies at every instant on the way.

This may not make life simpler, likely won’t lead to easy certainties, but (according to the tradition and our biggest hope) it can enable us to find God’s glory and Christ’s call and compassion in every moment on the way. And finally, that spirit, that breath will send us back to feed the hungry table where we started with the bread of life and the cup of salvation. It will let that board meeting become a community called out of love, called into community, called to take the pilgrim way. It will lead us to make Eucharist in the middle of the world. And that is why we come to Pentecost.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

A Prayer to God the Father on the Vigil of Pentecost by Thomas Merton

2010-05-22T18:28:00.002+10:00

Today, Father, this blue sky lauds you. The delicate green and orange flowers of the tulip poplar tree praise you. The distant blue hills praise you together with the sweet-smelling air that is full of brilliant light. The bickering flycatchers praise you together with the lowing cattle and the quails that whistle over there. I too, Father, praise you, with all these my brothers, and they all give voice to my own heart and to my own silence. We are all one silence and a diversity of voices.
You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as awareness, and as joy. Here I am. In me the world is present and you are present. I am a link in the chain of light and of presence. You have made me a kind of centre, but a centre that is nowhere. And yet I am “here,” let us say I am “here” under these trees, not others.

For a long time I was in darkness and in sorrow, and I suppose my confusion was my own fault. No doubt my own will has been the root of my sorrow, and I regret it merciful father, but I do not regret it because this formula is acceptable as an official answer to all problems. I know I have sinned, but the sin is not to be found in any list. Perhaps I have looked to hard at all the lists to find out what my sin was and I did not know that it was precisely the sin of looking at all the lists when you were telling me that this was useless. My “sin” is not on the list, and is perhaps not even a sin. In any case I cannot know what it is, and doubtless there is nothing there anyway.

Whatever may have been my particular stupidity, the prayers of your friends and my own prayers have somehow been answered and I am here, in this solitude, before you, and I am glad because you see me here. For it here, I think, that you want to see me, and I am seen by you. My being here is a response you have asked of me, to something I have not clearly heard. But I have responded, and I am content: there is little to know about it at present.

Here you ask of me nothing else than to be content that I am your Child and your Friend. Which simply means to accept your friendship because it is your friendship and your Fatherhood because I am your son. This friendship is Son-ship and is Spirit. You have called me here to be repeatedly born in the Spirit as your son. Repeatedly born in light, in knowledge, in unknowing, in faith, in awareness, in gratitude, in poverty, in presence and in praise.

If I have any choice to make, it is to live here and perhaps die here. But in any case it is not the living or the dying that matter, but speaking your name with confidence in this light, in this unvisited place: to speak your name of “Father” just by being here as “son” in the Spirit and the Light which you have given , and which are no unearthly light but simply this plain June day, with its shining fields, its tulip trees, the pines, the woods, the clouds and the flowers everywhere.

To be here with the silence of Sonship in my heart is to be a centre in which all things converge upon you. That is surely enough for the time being.

Therefore Father, I beg you to keep me in this silence so that I may learn from it the word of your peace and the word of your mercy and the word of your gentleness to the world: and that through me perhaps your word of peace may make itself heard where it has not been possible for anyone to hear it for a long time.

To study truth here and learn here to suffer for truth.

The Light itself, and the contentment and the Spirit, these are enough.

Easter 7C

2010-05-16T14:54:00.000+10:00

Something I really dislike is people who talk from a script. It happens mostly on the phone, customer service people, also in fast food places, but I’ve been in somewhat fancy restaurants and, when you ask what an item on the menu is, they describe the food with words that just have to be written by someone else from somewhere else, they also do it with wine and coffee, and I’ve been to a rather nice chocolate store on the Paris end of Collins Street where, when I asked about one kind on chocolate, they gave me a description that was so precise, even pretentious, and I almost turned against chocolate, though on consideration that seemed too drastic.

This week I read a David Lodge novel from the 1980s, where a man starts playing with a computer program named Eliza. This program is designed to ask the right questions, to lead you on to reflect and refine whatever you’re concerned with. It is a kind of computerised therapist, and the character in the book likes it, keeps coming back to use Eliza to work though the problems and concerns that are bothering him. And the computer responds to certain of his words or phrases with open ended questions:

Hello Rob, how are you?
Well, I am tired lately.
Tired, Rob?
Yes, I’ve been worried about my work.
Why are you worried about your work, Rob?
Well....

She seems nice, but it’s just a program, a script, not unlike those telemarketers who call at dinnertime, not unlike a lot of us I guess. Several years ago when I was Senior Chaplain at RMIT University I was working with a student who was dealing with depression. He was talking about what was wrong in his life and I was letting him feel their feelings, listening for key words, asking him to clarify thoughts that seemed unclear, helping him have room to see what options might be on their plate, while watching the clock and wondering about lunch; and then I remembered Eliza. I was getting pretty close to her!

So scripts aren’t always bad. A little later we’ll move through words that have guided people through what just may be the greatest meal on earth, but there’s a difference. This script, this gathering, this shared meal comes to make us more ourselves as well as more connected with one another and with God. And the words we use here link us up with the deepest law and life and love in the universe, line us up too with a community of caring over time and space; the confession and absolution, praise and prayers, creed and canon, moving over the world every Sunday, every day, every moment, like a ronde that rounds us up together in praise to our God, to the great creativity, the deep redemptive action, the intimate breath of inspiring spirit that animates and orders and makes our lives sing. And that’s good!

But there are other sounds out there, and we can get caught in other people’s scripts; trying to sound like what’s popular or what sells or what is on television that week. I worry about kids nowadays because the world is so noisy with other people’s scripts. I remember another student at RMIT, also dealing with depression and desperation, telling me, “I don’t see anything at the Mall or the Web that looks like me, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me” That’s getting caught, that’s suffocating, on the wrong script

And I think about that woman with a gift of divination, the fortune teller in the Acts of the Apostles; I am not sure what the spirit was, but I think her gift of falsehood, of telling them what they want to hear, was not too far away from Eliza and the telemarketers: you say what sells, for you or the people who own you. But that woman happens on an inconvenient truth: she sees the brand new, moving into a neighbourhood near you, very early church, the people of the way of Jesus come her way, and her selling and her servitude suddenly has to break through to witness a deeper wisdom, a more holy community. And she speaks out: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” You don’t see that on web or the mall, at least not in the flesh, and she keeps saying this.

This annoys Good Saint Paul, which is not a difficult thing to do, and he pulls the spirit of soothsaying, the spirit of saying less than the truth out of her, and her world will be different from now on. If the worse thing that happens to her is that she loses her job, she’ll be lucky: it could be a lot tougher for her than that. But it could be a lot better too.

Jesus asks the Father that we all may be one. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me...that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

If you see a message like that going by it gives you pause, makes you wonder about what’s been going out of your mouth, how you connect with your family, friend, neighbour you love, the neighbour you might love less, because if we are one, if God calls us to be one, if God calls us to be words of God’s creative neighbourly love, then maybe we need to give up the smooth words, the smooth tongue, the easy sell, and start looking at what a word of God, a word of God’s desire for connection and compassion in the middle of the world looks like; because if we are called to be one with God, it might look just like us. Or it might look a lot like them.

We’re here to get the words right, as well as to get food for the journey, to keep ourselves in shape for the long haul, to take the chance that God is calling us and the whole neighbourhood together to make something new out of the old place. Simply put, in making the world one God is ready to make love in places where there was only propaganda and salesmanship so far, God is asking us to to come along, be agents of change, take the chance that new words for hope, and wholeness, compassion and connection, might come to pass. That we might be those words as we move to that one love.

That’s why we’re here today, because we’re on the other side of the resurrection and moving to Pentecost as soon as possible; because God wants the world to come together in Love, and we are just the people to do it. To consent as best we can to be in the place where the spirit can come, to be willing to speak words of truth and love and justice, to begin acts of power and compassion, as best we can; to become a place where the spirit of God will rest and - quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins here - “brood new beginnings.”

And we need to start small. Just the prayers and the peace, just the bread and wine, just the journey shared, just the neighbour met, the stranger encountered, the faint and timid encouraged; just meeting the world we live in with forgiveness and patience and “a shy hope of the heart” that God will continue our small beginnings with that deeper love, that greater peace, that call to home, that hope of glory, that we will know that deepest truth, that in fact, by love, we are one.

That’s our script, we revise and move it around to fit our face and place and the people that we meet in the street and all that, but that’s our script as friends, as the beloved, of the Most High God, and that, on the week before the Feast of Pentecost, is where we start.

And now we continue, in the name of Christ. Amen

EASTER 4C

2010-04-25T12:31:00.000+10:00

Bill Countryman, who will lead our diocesan conference in Harrietville in November, talks about Jesus’ “obnoxious discourses” in John’s Gospel: when Jesus says thing that are so upsetting to the theological and spiritual sensibility of his listeners that they must either leave Jesus behind or forsake their old understandings of how holiness works in order to move into a deeper relationship with God here and now and face to face.

There are several of them: “Unless you gnash your teeth on my flesh and drink my blood you will not have my life in you” would have been highly offensive to his hearers. “Before Abraham was, I am” could have sounded close to insanity, but the last line in todays Gospel is the clincher.

Jesus says, “The father and I are one.” And there is no wonder that the people in front of him have trouble with that. How can you believe that this human being is a picture of ultimate reality, that the ultimate truth of love and grace and presence and what lasts is exactly what we see when we see Jesus? That’s stretches us beyond easy belief and beyond most modes of understanding. Maybe that’s why he says it.

An Irish poet of the earliest twentieth century wrote this prayer: “Christ, ...keep our pity fresh and our eyes heavenward, lest we grow hard.” and that kind of double vision is helpful in the practice of the Christian life: getting used to looking closely and compassionately at what is directly in front of us, as well as keeping one eye open towards the ultimate view, towards what finally lasts. C.S. Lewis writes, I think in The Screwtape Letters, that God wants us to be focused on eternity as well as on the present moment, for it is in the present moment that eternity meets time.

So when Jesus says, “The father and I are one,” the question is how we can live into it, and meet it in the give and take of our daily lives? An answer might be in watching for what one English theologian from the 1950s called “God-shaped events.”

The word “God” might mean “holiness, justice, compassion, connectedness, truth, love.” And sometimes we give or receive small packages containing those actions and events, or we see these transactions carried, acted out in the life of others. I’d be very surprised if there were anyone here today who had not recently given or received some “God-shaped” gift or event. They happen all the time: a casual but sincere “how are you going?”, a pat on the back from a friend, they are often surprising: my own lap is a frequent recipient of a package of furry brown cat-love from a Burmese named Snooks and his purr is an eloquent hymn of praise, I have no doubt he is a God-shaped event. Everyone carries similar stories and we are all called to be thankful witnesses of such occasions given and received by persons, pets or places; whatever unexpected presence presents itself, whatever reaching out in love comes our way.

So maybe there are just three reasons why we are here today: to expand our capacity for participating in that kind of event; to cultivate an appreciation and understanding of Jesus as a fully fleshed out God-shaped event in the middle of human life; and to learn to hand on more of these Jesus shaped events in our daily life and ministries.

But to take part in receiving and giving that quality of love in our daily neighborhood means to hold on to a radical hope and a radical vision in the daily shaping of our life; requires a clearer and more disciplined picture of how God meets us today. And to have God’s eternal caring come into focus might mean a kind of expansion or even explosion in the ways we usually see the world.

Perhaps there are times for visions, at least for seeing things in a new way. Two thousand years ago the taken for granted way of being in the world was worn out and a new vision was waiting to be born. Like now, the old rules and roles, the motives and mythologies, stories of success and failure, images and ideas of good and bad or right and wrong were all changing and there was a breakdown between past and future. Paul and Barnabas’ conflict with the Jewish and Greek in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles shows a bit of slippage between world-views. A bit later, when the persecutions of Christians start in the Roman empire, where people as well as institutions were dying, we find new and more radical visions in the Revelation to John where martyrdom is seen as the prologue to a future promise, a great hope for those who have died:

They are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

It’s a beautiful image but it I still think of Woody Allen wondering about how he could get to heaven on a New York Crosstown bus. Wherever you are, it’s the same question: how do you get there from here?

Someone once said that the world was a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. We come here to flesh out our deepest belief that the world is finally a love story. We come to this place to reengage ourselves in the present moment at the exact place where it meets eternity, to keep our eyes heavenward and our pity fresh, because both are needed. This is not an easy way out

Thomas Merton tells about a left-wing French Catholic mystic who used to cry while riding in the Paris Metro; crying because people were so beautiful and there was so much misunderstanding! To really look at the world that God loves can break your heart open, can stretch it out to hold both bad and good; will open it wide to the tragedy and absurdity of those young men dying at Gallipoli 95 years ago, to the loneliness of old men and women dying alone now, for young peopled addicted to sex or drugs or money, consumed by unworthy passions, in the absurdities and obscenities in the exercise of world power and politics and religion. It made Jesus weep. We may also need to open ourselves to see this madness and glory mixed together in all our daily lives, but we can only let this happen in the light of a great hope.

This liturgy is where we begin. A Lutheran pastor named Jaroslav Vajda once started noting what happened in the Eucharist. It turned into a poem and then a hymn.

Now the silence/Now the peace/Now the empty hands uplifted
Now the kneeling/Now the plea/Now the Father’s arms in welcome
Now the hearing/Now the pow’r/Now the vessel brimmed for pouring
Now the body/Now the blood/Now the joyful celebration
Now the wedding/Now the songs/Now the heart forgiven leaping
Now the Spirit’s visitation//Now the Son’s epiphany/Now the Father’s blessing
Now/Now/Now

And if all this is true, than this Eucharist, this story, this great community gathered over time is on the edge of heaven; and if Christ is the face of the Father rushing to meet us in human flesh, then every moment is suffused with eternity, every beginning blooms with love and every moment, bloodied and broken, lost and lonely as it may be, finds love at the end and a hope of Heaven. And that is our hope.

Several years after his first poem, Vajda wrote this as well. It works well as a coda.

Then the glory/Then the rest/Then the Sabbath peace unbroken Then the garden/Then the throne/Then the crystal river flowing Then the splendor/Then the life/Then the new creation singing Then the marriage/Then the love/Then the feast of joy unending Then the knowing/Then the light/Then the ultimate adventure Then the Spirit’s harvest gathered/Then the Lamb in majestyThen the Father’s Amen
Then/Then/Then

If Jesus and the Father are one, then God has come to the middle of all our daily lives and deaths, and we are all called to eat the bread of angels and drink in the surety of Christ’s call of light and love to all people, to all the world. For this is our homecoming feast and we must rejoice. In the name of Christ. Amen.

Last Sunday's Sermon

2010-04-20T08:54:00.003+10:00

Today’s Gospel deals with Resurrection and reconciliation. How do you go back to the old life after Easter, when this new life seems so much larger, how do you weave this new light, this new insight back to the old way of living? It also relates to the situation that both Gamaliel and Peter are dealing with in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles: how do you follow, obey and honor God in our human world. As Jesuit spiritual director pit it to m: “How uncomfortable will you allow yourself to be for the new creation?” How do we go back to the old life when what you understand life to be is all new, when what we thought was death and defeat turns out to be larger life and new victory? When there are no dead ends, all roads are open, all possibilities call out, it can be exhausting!

For the disciples and apostles the events of Holy week, the tragedy of Good Friday, and the great surprise of Easter move them beyond belief, beyond the way of life they had followed before into something both wonderful and very different! A nap would have looked good! It is the same for us. Both Christmas and Easter can be demanding seasons for people in the church, bringing us to new birth and the possibility of life beyond death, and that’s a stretch.

I don’t know about you but after I am stretched, with joy, with sadness, with a new understanding of what life is about and where I am, then I need some time to relax and reconnoiter, I need coffee or chocolate or a hot shower or a good nap, Thirty years after giving up smoking there are still times when I think of how I would love a cigarette. Those old common comforts are powerful!

So how do we deal with life after Resurrection? The Gospels give us several examples for this post-resurrection transition: Disciples on the road to Emmaus are walking it out, talking it out, getting out of town and taking it on the road run for a bush walk: the old geography cure. Some other disciples try the closed room and conversation mode. There’s also the way of Thomas: hiding, denial and defense by erecting a new wall based of a lack of trust, “I won’t believe until...”. In each case Jesus shows up to remind them that life is different from here on, that all things are new!

So that’s background for the overnight fishing trip we heard about in today’s Gospel, which might have four particular focal points on how to live into the new life: work, water, people and food. So I want to bring in some stories from my own life to consider how these four areas can help us in growing in faith.

Let’s go back to John: Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others decide to go back to work! It makes sense, work is the main way a lot of us spend time and it can be a very reassuring ritual, except now it is different and it is night, and they really are in the dark! Maybe there’s a hint that it takes time in the dark, to figure out where you are and what you can do after a new look at life comes into view.

In the late 1970s my understanding of God deepened, a graceful sense of God believing in me more than I believed in myself started to flower in my life and, after a few years, I found myself in seminary working on an MA on prayer and mediation while working in a printing business my family owned. You’ve heard of family businesses and dysfunctional families? Well, we had a dysfunctional family business!

In my second semester I took a unit on “Theology and Work” and the question came: if God exists, then where is God to be found in my work? For a semester I read and worked and prayed and by the end I had built a series of strategies on how to explore the possibilities of God in the printing business. One took place in a small hallway between the backshop and the front office where I formed the habit of stopping to take a breath and ask God to remind me to look for a new way, to see with new eyes, to be surprised and ready for a blessing, and it worked! My belief and my occupation came together with more integration than ever before.

Going back to John. After the night shift a dawn light comes, and a stranger on the shore throws them a question: “why don’t you try it over there?” A change of mode, a great catch, a surprise! John, the beloved disciple, says, “it is the Lord!” and Peter jumps into the water!

Water: our second focus, a place where you wash up your life, clean up your act, get baptized into new beginning. Here are three places where water marks renewal, think about where yours might be found.

First, In 1981, I was repainting my parents house and fell through a roof, compressing my spine, with a week in the hospital wearing a steel brace for four months which I could only remove when going to bed or taking a shower. I still remember the glory of taking off that metal contraption and standing naked under fresh warm water! I still have great joy stepping into a hot shower, embodied, alive, a bare beginning every morning!

In 1989 I was training to be a chaplain working in an acute psychiatric ward: intense, tragic, dedicated and wonderful work: often chaotic and always very busy. The only place where I could be along was the staff wash room, so I learned to wash and dry my hands carefully and prayerfully: creating a new and clean intention in that moment, a redemptive space in a noisy and sometimes dirty world. Both purification and dedication, washing up God’s world.

Then last Sunday, when a family presented their one year old son for Baptism (and my first as a priest) I was reminded that it’s not a bad thing to get into church 10 minutes early on some days to reread the Baptismal covenant in the Prayer Book as a reminder of why we’re here and what we’re for: ministry, friendship, sharing the love of God.

The third place in our Gospel for today is the stranger who asks a question, who calls us to new tactics, who might just be our new best friend as well as a door to new awareness, new life. How do we look at other people?

In 2003, I led a Lenten quiet day atSt Peter’s Eastern Hill in he middle of Melbourne. I asked people to walk to a block to the tram stop across from a major hospital and look for the “Hidden Jesus” hidden (to misquote Teresa of Calcutta) in the distressing disguises of his friends. To look for Christ in people making peace, feeling pain, moving in love, doing all the diverse duties of everyday life in the middle of the world, and see the people who are loved by God in a new way. It can be a good exercise.

And finally in sharing Food.

Now I don’t know much about fish, though our Bishop does; but I do know that they’re from a place where I can only swim on the surface. I also know that what these disciples, and new apostles have been fishing in the nightwatch and the new dawn ends up feeding them in community, and that takes me to a Maundy Thursday sermon I gave in 2008.

Food means company, not just company for dinner, having friends in to share substance and spirit, though that is part of it: but company as in a group of people, many, different, working together in separate ways that come together in a common cause. The bread and wine we eat and drink has been touched, gathered, lifted up by workers in the fields, harvesters, processors, moved by ship, truck and train to market with many hands holding, refining the food from the land; bringing it all togethers. Bread and wine mean grapes and water: yeast and fat and oil and wheat mixed and kneaded, work of human hands, to rest and rise, to be taken away to warm and transform. All this before they come to the table to be broken and shared. Many backs have been bent; many hands have stretched out to give us food at our daily tables. Many have gathered to ensure this harvest.

And Jesus says, “This is my body, this is my blood!” Jesus says I am willing to be known in this meal, this Eucharist, and I tell you I will be here, but prepare to meet me in the entire world, because in my love I have taken up with the body and blood of all humankind and all creation. This bread and wine are means of my love to you, but I mean to love you in everywhere, in everything, in everyone!

So through the ministry of work, the grace of water, the ministry of friend and stranger, and in the celebration of sharing food, we become ready to live in a world where God will go so far and come so close, and where it is time to make Eucharist.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2010-04-17T10:54:00.000+10:00

Saturday morning, 17 April 2010. Today I am 64 years old, Happy Birthday! John Davis called me at 6:30 and sang the song, my cousin just called from California, and several people on Facebook wished me greetings, A friend here is taking me to lunch down the street in a few hours, and I will be in Melbourne tomorrow afternoon, all good!

I have a sermon to write for tomorrow, a bit of cleanup to do here, a little more thought and organization to give to some ideas under education and formation for chaplaincy, then drive to the other side of the diocese to where I am preaching and celebrating tomorrow, and I want to take time -- on my birthday -- for some quality reflection.

I think of several birthday’s in Berkeley in the 80s when I would take my bound journal and find a congenial coffeehouse to write about where I was, what was good or bad, and where I wanted to go from there. That seems both so close and such a long time ago.

In most ways I am in the best shape of my life. I am a priest, my work, interactions, aspirations, are all-hopefully found and grounded in Eucharist, prayer, kenosis, scripture, community, spirit. It’s a wonderful feeling to finally arrive at the destination I desired (and thought God wanted for me) for most of my life. There are so many things to learn from here: discipline and dedication are important, as are following both duties and dreams. I saw some people from a parish where I preached a while back and they called me “The Happy Priest”! I don’t think I’m called to be unhappy, to be other than what I am, which is what God calls: and that is a real mix of good and bad, seasoned and new talents and liabilities. If I can just keep turning them over -- like compost -- and presenting them to God; receiving them back as gifts to be stewarded for the sake of a larger body, a greater hope, than that might to be enough.

I like working for Bishop John. He’s a complex man, nicely uneven, growing, creative, intelligent, interested, sensitive, smart. And in taking me along as his chaplain he’s gifted me with an opportunity, both in pastoral work and in education/formation, for a very creative and exciting ministry. I recently drew the bare bones of my job description in a kind of brain-mapping mode, and it is very good! I enjoy the people I work with, within the Registry and around the diocese. And we are finding the technology to work smarter and learning to work better together so both our focus and momentum are on the increase.

The celebrating, teaching, and preaching aspect of the work is wonderful! I blessed over 100 schoolchildren yesterday, and last Sunday performed my first baptism. The way I celebrate the Eucharist still feels unformed but that will take time. Yesterday I was asked to do some Friday morning Eucharists at the Cathedral and that will be good.

I am lonely a lot, that needs to be said. It’s natural, being in a new place, without real reasons to be here in Beechworth now that I am not attached to the local parish, and away from all old friends and associates in Melbourne, home for the last 10 years. But it means driving up the hill I to an empty house and an evening in solitude. I’m trying to work with that, and there are other reasons to move out of here sooner rather than later, which will happen fairly soon, and that will be good. I think I will return to Beechworth in a different configuration in the future but it seems very lonely to live here now.

I decided against going back to the Beechworth Singers for the present. I was going to go to the gym instead to work out some evenings but that hasn’t happened. In many ways I’m in the worst shape I’ve ever been physically: my right knee and shoulder are both giving me trouble and I need to look at exercise as well as physical therapy in the next month. I stopped checking my weight in the morning and I fear I’ve put on more weight. I’ve rationalized this because of some of the stresses and busyness of Lent. It’s time to change that.

The same with food: too many pizzas, too much frozen food, not enough fruits and vegetables, too much chocolate! I have been reading Mark Bittman on “Food Matters” as well as his book on vegetarian cooking, but there is less incentive to eat mindfully at the end of the day. I did bring up my slow cooker from Melbourne recently and might start to make casseroles and stews or soups that can be frozen and eaten later.

There is lots of writing to do now and I love that! Sermons, brochures and articles regarding formation and education, drafts of letters and papers for the, planning documents for diocesan matters, even my regular bits on Facebook. And I still have a constellation of ideas and images around the title “spiritual directions”, though the content varies. It would be lovely to get a real book published.

I have mixed feelings about getting older. I await and find myself stiff in the wrong places! I get sore and tired more easily: and lifting, pushing, pulling furniture or packages seems beyond the pale. The other day I saw a movie where two guys wrestled for a while and I remembered when I had the faith that my body could do what was needed, what was salutary or salacious or just fun, without any worry at all. That is no longer true. And it saddens me.

So today I write a sermon, lunch with a friend, travel to the town where I celebrate Eucharist tomorrow, have dinner with parishioners there tonight. Tomorrow after church I will go on to Melbourne for a few days at St Peter’s. I got a massage scheduled for Sunday night, as well as a haircut Monday morning, might buy new shoes, eat out at a good and trendy Mexican restaurant, enjoy Melbourne friends, get good rest and enjoy myself.

So I’m 64 years old. And in most ways I’m happier, more fulfilled, more “self-actualized” than I have ever been. God has been good to me. I am deeply thankful for the good friends, especially John Davis, have made such a significant difference in the quality of my life, and that is putting it so mildly! I am very thankful to be alive today. I am having a Happy Birthday!

EASTER SERMON 2010

2010-04-03T21:50:00.002+11:00

Something happens to St. Peter between Good Friday, the moment in this morning’s Gospel reading when he looks into the empty tomb, and the time a bit later when he makes the great speech in Caesarea we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles, and I wonder what it is?

What happens to change the way a person lives and moves and has their being; the way they meet principalities and powers, their neighbor or the stranger, the way they wait for God? What happened to St Peter, to the apostles, the disciples, all those friends of Jesus, followers of the way, who saw their best hope die on Good Friday and still came to hope anew? It’s almost the same question asked of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea in the Gospel of John, “how can a man be born again? How can Peter, who was such a sook sometimes, so quick to open mouth and insert foot, how does he come to live in the power of the Spirit, so full of the conviction that Christ lives, and that we all live in him, and will forever. What happened to him, and more importantly, how do we get there from here? How can we be born anew?

Recently I came across an essay on the web by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called “Faith Hope and Charity in Tomorrow’s World” and I want to quote it a lot this morning. He uses examples from St. John of the Cross to say that our Understanding, Memory and Will need to move into a newborn, God-given Faith, Hope and Love. And perhaps that’s how and why the church gathers after the resurrection: to see understanding move to faith, to consecrate memory to hope, and to let human will be lightened by God’s love.

Williams says one of the most crucial parts of the process of a Christian growing up, one of the most difficult parts of the journey, is coming to lose our way. That’s good news for those of us who’ve spent many years in what seemed to be detours. Getting it wrong is the start to getting it right. Williams writes:.”What we thought we understood we discover that we never did; what we thought we remembered is covered with confusion; and what we thought we wanted turns out to be empty. We have to be re-created in faith and hope and love for our understanding, our memory and our will to become what God really calls them to be.”

Does this sound like St Peter? Does this sound like anyone you know? A few years ago when I was emptying my parents house I came across a letter I had written when I was 19. I was quite clear about who I was, what I wanted to be, how I wanted to get there, and I am so very thankful for those detours!

What Peter and I both wanted - I think - was a system of how to make the world right: to know the right things to do, to say, to be. Instead Peter finds that having all the answers to all the questions is nothing compared with being in a relationship with the reality of God in human form, being face-to-face with love: but this is not easy to understand, and it takes time!

Again Williams: “...you learn somehow to be confident -- or at least to be reliant – on a presence, an other who does not change or go away. You realize that when the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is a presence that does not let you go. And that's faith, I would say, in a very deeply biblical sense. Look at the disciples in the gospels. Look at the number of times when they say something spectacularly stupid and Jesus says, 'Don't even you understand?' Look at the times when they ask the silly questions, the times when they try to turn away, when they manifestly don't know what's going on. But in the great words at the end of John 6 spoken by Peter, they also say, 'Where else can we go?'

At the end there is nowhere to go because Jesus become our home. And in that homecoming, coming in like the prodigal to be embraced by the waiting father, we both come home and are able to make home for others. Again Williams:

“By our faithfulness to the lost, the suffering, the marginal we begin to show what it is to have faith in the one who doesn't let go.”

So understanding moves to faith, and more, to faithful relationship, and this living relationship is what moves our memory towards hope.

Ah memories! I remember, some 30 years ago, laughing at my mother and father when I talked about Senior Memory, when they would pause, waiting for the right word or name or date to come to mind. If they could see me now walking into a room and forgetting where I’m going or what I want. In moments like that I have to go deeper, and remember, on the deepest level, exactly where I am, and whose I am.

Rowan Williams writes:

“Hope, when it comes to birth, is not just a confidence that there is a future for us, it's also a confidence that there's a continuity so that the future is related to the same truth and living reality as the past and the present. Hope is again hope in relation;
relation to that which does not go away and abandon, relation to a reality which knows and sees and holds who we are. You have an identity because you have a witness of who you are.... What you don't understand or see, the bits of yourself you can't pull together in a convincing story are all held in a single gaze of love. You don't have to work out and finalise who you are and who you have been; you don't have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story; because in the eyes of the presence which does not go away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze as if you were to see a pile of apparently disparate, disconnected bits suddenly revealed as being held together by a string, twitched by the divine observer, the divine witness...

Hope in Christ, then, not simply confidence in the future, but confidence that past, present and future are held in one relationship so that the confusions about memory – who were we? Who was I? Who am I, and who are we? -- become bearable because of the witness in heaven, a witness who does not abandon.”

So memory is made perfect, and can rest in hope, But what about will? How does our will, that power that makes us and move us towards what we want, turn to love?

Williams says that we have lost touch with the “deep desires that actually make us who we are...the sense that there is a current in our lives moving [and our call and our destiny is this]...to discover slowly and patiently the direction of our life and to find the context in which we will grow as God means us to. To grow into love” and that is finally to come home.

So as our understanding is made perfect in faith, our memories made sacred in hope, our will is made perfect in Christ’s love for God, for us, for all. That is our call as the church, the gathering of God’s love. We are a new people in this faith, hope and love.

Listen: the stone has been rolled away, there is no dead body, he has risen from the grave, and all our understanding, memory and will are able by God’s grace and the love of Christ to be made new in faith, hope and charity, That is our call and our glory, for Christ is risen from the grave, and we are a new people. Alleluia!

DYING LIKE JESUS -From Good Friday 2004

2010-04-02T06:02:00.002+11:00

An old sermon, but I learned a lot from writing it...

2010-04-01T06:56:00.002+11:00

FEET, FOOD AND GARDENS – Maundy Thursday 2004

Sometimes in the last part of a movie or play that is otherwise action packed with drama, intrigue, special effects, there will be a very quiet scene. This gives the audience a chance to breathe, to catch up on the themes and motifs of the drama, and to get ready for the final part. The events we remember here tonight have that flavour about them. But this is not a simple night, and each of the actions we see and hear here point to something that is rich and complex and not easy to perceive, almost beyond belief. But let’s start simply, and talk about feet, food and gardens.

When you were a kid did you have someone, parent, grandparent, family or friend, take your foot in their hands and say, “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home…. “Do you remember that? And have you ever held the foot of a child, and wiggled those little toes and listened to that child laugh? Have you ever considered the beauty of a newborn child’s foot?

Adults are different that way. A lot of people are shy about their feet. It makes sense. They aren’t real pretty and yet they are - I think - amazingly unique to each individual, containing biography in all the lines and curves, remembering all the journeys where we were pinched, stepped on, stretched. It all shows in the feet. They are also an incredible complex of nerves and muscles, delicate, powerful bits of engineering. Built to take us on the road, to link us to the ground, turn us around; set us on the way home. Feet are at the base of it. In the world of the body, feet are workers, not intellectuals. They contain no theories, have no theology attributed to them– unlike heads or even hearts – but they are crucial for knowing the difference between theory and practice, feet know the crucial difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. And - to make a pun – that’s no mean feat. Still, they are drab, utilitarian, very everyday necessary accessories, and I think it is significant that Jesus should choose to touch and wash our feet. It says something about how God loves.

Because tonight we remember and re-enact the Lord of all washing the feet of his gathered disciples and friends, to see how God cares for each of us particularly, how God wills and wants to touch us individually, in each of the unique places where we live and move and have our being. For Jesus wants meets us where we meet the road. God is holding us close here, touching us in the specific parts of our lives and journeys, and enjoying us more deeply than we might ever know. Yes, there is the cleaning up of it, yes, there is the work of hands and a fresh towel, but the chief ingredient is love: a particular loves that is both so big and so small that it comes to us to meet and love and touch each toe, arch instep, heel and sole of each of us. This transaction gives joy to God and it is a picture of love in action for each of us. It tells us something very important about the immediacy, the intention and the innocence of God. God does will to touch, wash up and love each of us. Because the love God has for us is like that we have for a newborn, no matter how tired, sore, dog-tired and sour we feel, God’s love see us as precious, innocent, newborn and creative and connected, created in that same image, and part of that same love!

Now if feet are unique to individuals, food means company, not just company for dinner, having friends in to share substance and spirit, though that is part of it: but company as in a group of people, many, different, working together in separate ways that come together in a common cause. The bread and wine we eat and drink has been touched, gathered, lifted up by workers in the fields, harvesters, processors, moved by ship, truck and train to market with many hands holding, refining the food from the land; bringing it all togethers. Bread and wine mean grapes and water: yeast and fat and oil and wheat mixed and kneaded, work of human hands, to rest and rise, to be taken away to warm and transform. All this before they come to the table to be broken and shared. Many backs have been bent; many hands have stretched out to give us food at our daily tables. Many have gathered together to ensure this harvest.

And Jesus says, “This is my body, this is my blood!” Jesus says I am willing to be known in this Eucharist, and I tell you I will be here, but prepare to meet me in the entire world, because in my love I have taken up with the body and blood of all humankind and all creation. This bread and wine are means of my love to you, but I mean to love you in everywhere, in everything, in everyone! So we celebrate God meeting us in the particulars of or own skin and in the wideness of the whole world. As the hymn says, “Oh love how deep, how strong, how wide!”

And soon the scene changes and we will come to a garden. If this were a play we would think back to the beginning: Act One Scene One: the first chapter of Genesis. Maybe not the best action, but whatever happened it got the plot rolling and the scenes changing. The focus got very wide after that first scene in Genesis. And now the action is getting tight again.

What is it about gardens? They are unpredictable places of work and mystery, seed falling into ground, summers with rich harvest or years when fire and drought kill growth and the field lie barren. There are hidden winters when nothing is seen to be happening, and warm springs when life burst into sudden bloom and promise. Gardens are like the whole world. They take time, show history, need much work, can cause calluses, break your heart and back, and yet we love them so. For time comes to bloom in a garden, it is where we see our history. And Jesus comes to meet us there. Comes to toil in a garden where
there are many weeds, sign of much neglect, much rot, much to be pruned, much that must meet the fire and die. Jesus comes to turn the ground over so that he might even be hidden in the harvest. He comes to meet us in the history of all things.

Have you ever planted seeds and waited for the harvest? God does. God’s seed is planted deep in all that is around us: all that is reasonable, holy and living. Even now, God is casting it wide to fall into all ground, letting the seed break apart in darkness, letting it be nourished over time, working the field, nourishing the crop, never ceasing to weed and watch, that nothing may be lost in life, not even death shall be lost! Jesus will walk into the garden where all hopes bloom and will defeat every falsehood with the power of that deepest truth.

So here we are. And Dame Julian says there are three things about the world that are important: God loves it, redeems it, and sanctifies it. That’s a big truth and one that is sometimes hard to get the head around. But watch, tonight, tomorrow, the next few days; walk and watch and see!

Amen.

In Holy Week.

2010-03-30T21:00:00.000+11:00

I went to the Chrism Mass today at the Cathedral, followed the Bishop and did my chaplains duties, watched and listened and prayed, plus some easy networking as well as praying and saying hello to people and deepening relationships and friendships and thengetting a tough headache and going home early to take some pain medicine and a nap and in the evening realizing how all this is beyond any preconception I might have had a year or two ago, certainly since my ordination less than six weeks ago.

The only way I can be any kind of a priest is to continually allow myself to be born into God’s will, without putting any kind of projection or desire or fear or preference into that. They will come anyway, but the handing over, “do what you will, take me along, let me try to follow you wherever,” has to be a moment to moment endeavor. I know myself well enough to know that the ides of some kind of holy momentum or goal or “gift I must give” does me harm, makes it into an ego work and a kind of architecture of memory and desire. So in the end, all I can do is begin!

God can grow me as God will, if I keep showing up and listening, honoring the people and places where God plants me, allowing myself to be shaped up by the demands and the blessings of the moment, presenting myself as I can to do what I can. That’s all I can do.

I keep looking at all the imperatives of priesthood, all the shoulds and oughts and don’t do that and do do this, and centuries of norms and expectation: and it could leave me scared stiff! All I really can do is say that I believe I am called to be where I am, that I am a wildly insufficient offering, but all I can give is what I am, and I can try to do that.

Hell, we’re back to the widow and her mite at the Temple treasury. Give what you can, what you have. Today I don’t have much, and I don’t have to have much either; just what is there.

I remember, 11 years ago when I was staying at the San Francisco Zen Center, how impressed I was when the practice leader starting talking after a time of silence; how I felt that their speech came out of the silence, was not manufactured out of business or momentum, but born out of the grace of that particular moment, out of the participation and welcoming of whatever fullness was present in that God-given moment.

Maybe that’s where my hope is: that if I can keep showing up to the present moment, at least most times, then the fulness of those times will keep me fresh, keep me a fresh offering to others, offering what is full and overflowing in the present moment. And that means presenting what is there to be offered: not dependent on great effort, ‘though sometimes requiring it, not needing heroism, although occasionally being asked to evidence it; but mostly simply showing up and letting myself be used.

I am aware that this could be a bit of an abdication of my own responsibility to God, but it can also be a waiting upon God in simplicity, with the awareness that God can furnish what is needed if I stand ready to do the work needed.

Does this make sense?

Another Sermon

2010-03-15T09:05:00.002+11:00

Evensong
Holy Trinity Cathedral
Wangaratta
John 15:1-17

Ten years ago this April, I moved into the San Francisco Zen Centre, a Buddhist Temple, for a four month period of residency. I was there as a long-time student and occasional teacher of the life and teachings of Thomas Merton, a Christian contemplative monk and scholar. Now Merton had spent many years looking at the practice of silent meditation and prayer in both Buddhism and Christianity and found a shared ground of experience and practice. Note that I am not talking about shared doctrine or dogma, but a common or similar experience of daily life; so not the way we talk about our belief, but how we act it out, live it out, maybe even dance it out in our daily duties and relationships as well as the deepest places in our devotions; So not so much a doctrine as a choreography: how what we believe works, take place, takes time, bears fruit in the places where we live and move and have our being.

And what I found at the Zen Centre was a silent place where, for me at least, the word that was from the beginning, the word that was with God and was God, spoke out with a special intensity and simplicity, yet with the same compassion and consistency and clarity that was there from the beginning. And in that silence I learned something more of what it meant to abide with God.

In the beginning of John’s Gospel we are told that God has come to dwell with us (and the Greek actually says something closer to “The Word has come to pitch his tent with us”) in the midst of the human journey, in the centre of our everyday existence in a world with so many contradictions, so much busyness, so much noise, as Thomas Merton describes our world:

Mysterious, demanding, frustrating confused existence in which almost nothing is really predictable, in which most definitions explanations and justifications become incredible before they are uttered, in which people suffer together and are sometimes incredibly beautiful, at other times impossibly pathetic... In which there is at the same time an immense ground of personal authenticity that is right there and so obvious that no one can talk about it and most cannot even believe that it is there.

And that is where Jesus has come to pitch his tent and where, in the 15th chapter of the Gospel of John, he invites us to abide in Him, dwell with him, share our daily living and dying with him, and where, as a friend in this strange and wonderful world, he will take us along with him on his journey to the Father. And my question is how, in this noisy world, can we come to understand this offer, and how can we respond?

It is certainly not a straightforward proposition. And maybe that has to do with the spiral motion that is evident in reading through the Gospel of John. The Baptist looks forward to the one who is greater than he and rejoices in the coming of Jesus. Jesus looks forward to his return to the Father and, further, he tells his disciples to welcomes the coming of the Spirit who will not come unless he goes away. Each chapter, each crisis, each corner in John’s Gospel opens up to a new and greater view of how big the world can be as well as how close God can come. It is a dance of separation and return, a spiral where what you thought you wanted and where you thought you were going turns in a new direction and takes you in a new way, into being a new person, with a new and greater understanding and a deeper participation in the daily life, death and resurrection of God in the world.

So the only way you can get there is to walk along the way of faith, to live into it, abide into it; maybe even dance along in a way you can never get your head around. That’s what happens to the disciples in John’s Gospel and that is what, I think, happens to us.

For willing to move forward into a greater understanding and participation in God’s love takes us places we can never foresee. Abiding as a friend of Christ spirals us into greater life, filled with love and abundance, in a way we can only follow by faith. We cannot prepare for it, nor do we need even take it too seriously. For Christ has done that for us.

That’s what Lent is about, what the journey is, to make us aware that Christ is taking us seriously and asking us to join with Him both in the desert and the city, in coming up against the corners and the conflicts, the powers and principalities, in seeing the liveliest man done to death on the cross, and even in seeing our old understanding of death die. That’s where it happens. On the other, unspeakable side of Good Friday, where taking the offer of abiding friendship, with Jesus saves us, makes us whole, keeps us moving with him on way beyond death. But, again, it doesn’t depend on us, so we don’t take ourselves that seriously in the process!

Commenting on Merton’s writings, Rowan Williams writes:

“a proper theology of the death of Christ tells me I'm not serious: God is serious; my condition is serious; sin is serious; the Cross is serious. But somehow, out of all this comes the miracle, the 'unbearable lightness of being' as you might say: the recognition that my reality rests 'like a feather on the breath of God'. It is because God speaks, because God loves and it is for no other reason. And if we want to know what it is to say that I am, the only answer is 'I am because of the love of God'.

We are created, redeemed and made holy by the love of God. That is the deep ground of our friendship with God and that is where our freedom abides. We sit here in silence here at a Sunday Evensong or in an early morning Buddhist Temple or alone in bed at three in the morning when the big questions come and the easy answers are nowhere to be found; and in all those places we abide in Christ. In all those times we learn to lean into him like a child leans into the body of a beloved parent, we lean into his invitation to be our friend and by grace, surprisingly he will take us seriously, take us to places we could never have foreseen, have never planned for, and, as the collect says, bring us home at the last.

So being a friend of Jesus is quite easy. Lay down your life as a right and take it up as a gift, saving nothing.

Again Rowan Williams, “when I seek to justify, defend or systematize what I am, I become 'serious'. I cease to be a feather on the breath of God and gravity draws me down into darkness.”

So take it lightly and give it all away. It’s that simple. Be friends of Jesus, share the tent, take the journey, eat the food offered, follow him past the desert and the city into the heart of the mystery of love. Abide in Christ. It is that unspeakably simple and sometimes scary and usually wonderful.

Because Jesus calls your name and calls you friend and asks you to follow, here and now, in the middle of the world, the world where God abides, to be born into the new reality where we love one another for God’s sake and bear fruit that will last forever.

In the name of Christ, Amen

Checking in a Week after Priestly Ordination...

2010-02-20T12:21:00.000+11:00

I am still slightly off the ground but I’m able to walk tall, and can accomplish simple tasks. There is still some emotional and spiritual lability that everyone I talk to says is to be expected. I am still occasionally bursting into laughter and, tears, song, and find myself both with excess energy and deep fatigue in close proximity.

When I was made a deacon I had a sense that a room in my house had been professionally cleaned: where there had been an accumulation of old ideas and arguments about whether I should or shouldn’t get ordained, get closer to or farther from the church; all that had been swept away and there was a simple icon in the middle of a new room that said “Deacon.”

At the deanery meeting last week during our check-in time I said that I felt like one wall of my house had been taken away and hand there were professional workers laying new foundations. When I explored that image later it let like it was a house in the neighborhood where I lived as a child. I feel like there is a new structure as well as a great grace building in my old neighborhood, and I feel youthful delight in seeing what will take place.

I have wanted to be a priest since I was almost 23. So over 40 years with the same dream or conversation or argument or recurrent thread going on. I used to joke that it was a kind of spiritual herpes, occasional outbursts at inconvenient times. And now that conversation is closed and a new one begins. Again there is a feeling of spaciousness and freedom as well as a tentative quality of quiet questioning in this new beginning.

What kind of a priest am I called to be? I go back and over the 40 years of conversation, consider books and articles I’ve read in the last few months and lively talks with new and old friends and is still leaves me with this wide question. How do I love God and my neighbor and myself as a minister of the Word and Sacraments in this time and place?

This sounds seriously high-minded but is actually quite basic, pointing to specific questions: do I wear a black shirt, do I clean up my language, can I be as open as I have been in the past with my opinions? In what way am I a servant or savant? How am I a prophet or a poet as a priest? How does this jibe with my rampant codependency, my need to be needed, my fragile and occasionally overblown ego, my calorie count? What does my new rule of life need to account for?

Paradoxically, one of the things I know for sure is that I shouldn’t think about it too much. I’m talking this out this morning (with my major-cool voice recognition software) to share it with the online community, old and new friends who share the journey, but most of this morning I’ve been rambling around the house and garden cleaning up, wiping down, stretching a little as I go, bringing a little order to a little chaos -- and as I do that ideas and feelings and old memories and new projections come into focus and fly away again. And all the while I get things done.

So after documenting my sobriety, tenacity, methodical nature and mature sensibility (before I go too far) let me note that I keep being surprised by how happy I am to be a priest! Something in me keeps breaking into dance, singing scraps of songs from old musicals, feeling very thankful.

Let me leave you with this: one person said of my first mass: it was “a tentative Eucharist, like a wedding night!” I’ll take that as a fair comment and an accurate one. I did feel shy and amazingly eager and ready, the absolute joy of being able to participate in that moment in that manner! I still do.

So now it is noon on a Saturday morning in Australia and I’m going to walk down the street and with a good book and get a good lunch somewhere. I wish you well.

Bishop John's Sermon should be shared!

2010-02-20T09:45:00.000+11:00

A sermon on the occasion of ordination to the diaconate of Alan Kelb and Thomas Leslie and the ordination to the priesthood of Bethley Sullivan and Robert Whalley.

Today is a great day in the life of this Diocese. We are here to make 2 deacons and ordain 2 priests. The variety of ministries to which they are called by God reflects clearly the changing face of the Diocese and the changing needs of church in the 21st century.

Thomas has completed his theological education at Trinity College, and will serve as assistant curate here at the Cathedral. At the same time he is working at Cathedral College, building and strengthening relationships between School, parish and Diocese. His path is perhaps the most conventional of all of our candidates.

Alan is travelling on the apprenticeship model of training, championed so successfully in our neighboring Diocese of Bendigo by Bishop Andrew. Alan has significant ministry skills and experienced gained over many years. He will continue to supplement his theological education as he serves as a deacon. His ministry will continue in the parish of North Albury and he will continue to work as a chaplain at Wangaratta High School. He will be an important bridge between community and church.

Bethley was originally ordained to the vocational diaconate, and has provided honorary ministry in the parishes of Alpine and Beechworth. I received advice from the examining chaplains who had worked alongside her that they sensed that she was being called from diaconal to priestly ministry; which I must say was a bit of a surprise to Bethley. After due process that sense of vocation was affirmed, and she is today being ordained priest for honorary service as priest in charge of the Beechworth Parish. Ordination in the fullness of life and honorary service represents an important transition in the models of ministry obtaining in the Diocese of Wangaratta.

The least conventional path to ordination has been followed by Rob. A sophisticated theologian, with wide experience in theological education and chaplaincy, Rob has journeyed with the church for most of his life. But ordination never seemed to be the way. When it was right for him to explore, it wasn’t right for the church. And when it was right for the church, it wasn’t right for him. In the end the hound of heaven caught him, and we are blessed that the catch was effected here. Rob is my chaplain, and is rapidly making himself invaluable in facilitating the Episcopal ministry I exercise. In addition he has become for us the champion of lay education, and is dreaming all sorts of exciting programs into existence.

Four very different people. Four very different ministries. For the reality of today’s church is that the conventional or paradigm notion of ministry as full-time stipendiary ministry in the parish context is no longer the only way of understanding ministry in the church. The face of the church is changing rapidly as is the landscape in which the church is called into being. The very nature and place of the ministry of the church is in the process of change, and it’s not yet clear what the future will look like.

Some things are clear. Conventional stipendiary parish based ministry, whilst till central to the life of the church, is already not the only form of ministry. An increasing diversity of models is likely to reflect our desire to connect with a rapidly changing world. We are all called to discover a new place for ourselves in the new landscape. The harvest is still plentiful – the labourers need more sophisticated tools to bring the harvest in.

Despite our changing sitz im leben, we can make some general observations about leadership in the church.

In the first place it needs to be said clearly that the call to ministry is the call of GOD! God takes the initiative and we respond. “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me.” Each and every account that the bible offers of the call to ministry follows this pattern. Isaiah’s call, or Jeremiah’s ordination to suffering or the calling to mission of the seventy. Ministry is not our private possession. Ministry is not something we control for our private benefit. I go cold in side when I hear the imperial claim to my parish or my ministry. Ministry in the church is the ministry of Christ in the world, to the world and for the world, and God calls us to the inestimable privilege of taking our part in this ministry. Ministry is gift and privilege, but never possession. We take our place by the grace of God alone, and not by our own merit.

It follows that God calls us as we are, warts and all, and uses us. “We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God, and does not come from us.” We don’t need to pretend to be what we’re not. We don’t need to claim for ourselves competencies we don’t have. We don’t need to be envious of the gifts, skills or achievements of others. We don’t need to advance ourselves at the expense of others. For God calls us as we are, and sets us in our proper place in Christ’s body. The ministry of the church is, then, interdependent and the very being of the church is interdependent.

What then can we say about ministry of leadership in the church? What does it look like? What are its inherent characteristics? How can I recognize if it’s authentic? At a level these are hard questions to answer. In a sense leadership is as varied as the infinite variety of people God calls to the task, and the infinite variety of situations in which they are called to operate. We can nevertheless make a couple of general comments.

A good leader in the church is one who proclaims the word of God with authority in the community in which the leader operates. Of course we must resist the temptation to play God – our human limitation needs to be frankly acknowledged. But we need not ever be apologetic – the kingdom of God deserves to be proclaimed with a shout and not a whimper. The leader is called to proclaim with authority by word and deed the good news of God in Christ in the ever changing context of the world. In his customarily profound but Germanically opaque manner, Hans Kung puts it this way:

Something like an interpreter, simultaneously representing yet independent of the ‘general will’, (the leader) emphasizes the cause, the one needful thing, for which the community is, not only on behalf of this or that individual but to the (big or small) world, with energy, tenacity, intelligence and imperturbability.

Models of leadership are ten a penny. There’s lots of useful stuff to be found to help us in our task, not the least in the terms of modern secular management theory. But we do need to remember always that the church is not a small business, or even a multi-faceted franchise operation with the bishop as Ronald Macdonald or Colonel Sanders in the centre. I don’t want to be too pious here – modern theories of management can and do provide useful insights.

But the paradigm model of leadership in the church is self-giving, loving service; and the paradigm leader is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. So if anyone should be great they should be servant of all and slave of all, just as the son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

There are clear implications for us leaders in this. The role of loving service, the call to compassion is a costly call. It requires us to surrender power and security. It compels us to operate beyond our comfort zone, on the risky ground of faith and in the landscape of the other. It exposes us, as nothing else exposes us. It lays open our vulnerability. And so we can easily retreat as a means of self-protection. We can claim power. We can put on the uniform of professional competence to maintain safe distance between ourselves and the risk of the other. We can use piety as a weapon of control. There’s a terrible ambiguity in the ministry of leadership that we need to acknowledge. It can either open us up to or shield us from God’s reality.

There is one more important point to make. Leadership in the church is as much about being as it is about doing. Of course there are myriad tasks to perform. But mere task efficiency does not make a good leader in the church.

Some few years ago now the late Monica Furlong wrote these memorable and wonderfully politically incorrect words in a letter to an Anglican priest and spiritual director called Ron Swain

I am clear what I want of the clergy. I want them to be people who can, by their own happiness and contentment, challenge my ideas about status, about success, about money, and so teach me how to live more independently of such drugs. I want them to be people who can dare, as I do not dare, and as few of my contemporaries dare, to refuse to work flat out (since work is an even more subtle drug than status), to refuse to compete with me in strenuousness. I want them to be people who are secure enough in the value of what they are doing to have time to read, to sit and think, and who can face the emptiness and possible depression which often attack people when they do not keep the surface of their mind occupied. I want them to be people who have faced this kind of loneliness and discovered how fruitful it is, as I want them to be people who have faced the problems of prayer. I want them to be people who can sit still without being guilty.

This might be a charter for idleness. Or it might be a vision of one at peace with self and with God, and so fully available for the joy and the struggle of ministry. As we ordain Alan and Thomas and Bethley and Robert, may we and they carry this vision of ministry with us as we continue to celebrate the everlasting joy of the Gospel in the places in which God plants us?

For Christ’s sake.

Just after priestly ordination!

2010-02-18T18:50:00.001+11:00

Sermon as for the Transfiguration 13 February 2010

2010-02-14T18:29:00.000+11:00

If I made a list of ten films guaranteed to make me cry, Billy Elliot would probably be in the top four. This 1990s movie about an English lad who wants and needs to be a dancer is really all about God-given identity and vocation, and innocence and sustained endurance - the good kind that comes like Auden’s idea of poetry from “raw towns” and “busy griefs, is “a way of happening” that has the passion to lift hometown and neighborhood up into a praiseful parade, redeeming them all as it goes along. Billy Elliot’s passion for dancing does that with his family and his community, and the movie always makes me cry. I never saw the musical theatre version when it was around (tickets were way too expensive), but I bought the CD last year. It’s a little bit “Sir Elton John meets Social Realism,” and there’s no great overture, but there is a wonderful song that comes in the scene when Billy sees the local dancing teacher telling her not-terribly talented troupe: “Girls,All you really have to do is shine!” And that’s good advice in light of the scripture for the Eve of the Transfiguration. “All you really have to do is shine!” Moses shines when he talks with God on the Mount Sinai, Jesus shines when he’s talking with Moses and Elijah on the Mount of the Transfiguration. But I want to focus on how it is for Peter and Paul, how they reflect the light of Christ, and how it transforms their lives and ministry over time. And I want to talk about the Virgin Mary as well. Three kinds of witness, responses, that shine.

In the Gospel of Luke, Peter sees Jesus shining dazzling white on the mountaintop and, even though he’d like to build a structure, to stay with the glory, he follows Jesus down to Jerusalem. And on the way he begins to learns how very much he needs to know and how much he needs to change.
In following that light, he ends up seeing all the places where he is dark, shadowed, in need of discernment, wisdom, more light. Two quotes: Years ago a gifted and intuitive healer told me, “If you ask God to make you whole, God might show you all the places where you’re broken! And Simeon Stylites, a saint of the Eastern church, said that often the first gift of the holy spirit is tears. Putting those together, you can see where Peter’s path will take him, down the mountain into the messy middle of his life, to do all the work he needs to do to get it right. To quote a poem:

Simon, to be called Rock;
You start out like a sandstorm on a winter day
All your aspirations blown so far from home,
Currenting between firm understanding and vague denial
All before the dusty hope that you might apprehend it all

What you might learn is your own failure;
Humility, contingency and the need to start again.
Only then the presence of faith
combusts all your grainy ways into
Something you never could have known.

But it takes time, numerous failures, with more and more good and public reasons for humility. Poor St Peter! If he had a theme song it would be that great Gerry Lafferty song from the 70s, “And If you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time.” Peter just keeps getting it wrong ‘til he gets it right, and finally he gets it just right.

For Paul, Christ comes as a blinding insight. Different from Peter, much of Paul’s task seems to be focussing on unlearning all those clear cut laws and commandments that kept him on the straight and narrow for so long, seeing their value anew in the graceful light of Christ. In the letters to the Corinthians particularly, Paul sees two things: first, that life in Christ calls for boldness, gracecalls for new freedom and faith in a bright and growing assurance; in the hope that if you call out, in all your insufficiency, in all your need, God will answer. It might take time, it might leave you in the dark for awhile, but by grace you will find you are changing, from following dead laws to living new life, from outer and inner darkness to renewed and inspired insight, from glory to glory, to finally see face to face, to know as we are known, to come home.

But the second thing for Paul is that this homecoming parade bring us together to be members of the body of Christ; leaves us linked by love with people of different viewpoints, traditions and trajectories, histories and hopes: all on their way to wholeness, to healing, to homecoming in Christ as well. So the balance of Paul’s ministry is to respect the differences and find the harmony that we all get home in the end.: blending the clarity of the personal experience of grace with the vivid complexity of the church, the community of we who are called in Christ! It’s the oil and vinegar in the salad of the spiritual life! So those are the ways of Peter and Paul.

As I remember, the 14th century book the “Cloud of Unknowing” has a threefold formula on how you might meet God in prayer. The first would fit Peter: you push upward, beyond what you think you know, beyond who you think you are, into the cloud of unknowing where God waits to surprise you. The second mode is more for the Paulists amongst us: you press down, leaving behind what you’ve done and who you were, pushing down on the cloud of forgetting, letting the history go so God can meet you anew.

Either of those models for a prayerful pilgrimage might work for us sometimes, and there is a third way as well. The author of the “Cloud” says, and I paraphrase mightily here, “If all else fails, just say, “Here I am, as I am, right, now. Please help!”

The Virgin Mary might be a model for that simpler way. Asked to say, “Yes” to the deepest creativity coming into the world, through her, opening her to be and to bear a blessing and a gift to the world. She replies first with a quick question, “How can this be?” Then with an elegant response, “Let it be to me according to your word.” You can phrase it differently, “Yes, I am your servant, helpmate, handmaid, I am here for you! Yes”

But that third way is the prolepsis, really the overture to the Luke’s Good News, making up the major themes, giving you the music, foreshadowing what will come. It’s the new creation’s opening act as the parade of faith picks up momentum with room for everybody in all their varieties of response: faith as process, faith as freedom to let God be God, faith to take part in the great adventure, and faith to let God take part in you!

Three Saints, holy people of God, and together their styles of response over time turn out to be a kind of three part harmony. Yet there is a greater music to listen for, over and under and within every note. Sometimes we can hear it clearly. First, the great cadences of the creator: “light and dark, wet and dry, mineral, vegetable, animal, humankind.Yes, it is very good!” Then a wholly human voice in the very middle (the most real one, the one that defines everyone) full of clarity and charity: “Yes! light of the world, daily bread, forgive us as we forgive, you are my friends, this is my body given” and in the midst of the music a breathing, silence and containing all silence and sound, all connection, all media of meeting. The breath of our breath, the relation of love. Yes.

But we’re not there yet, for there is more room, room just for us. For there is a place, a need, a calling for you, for me, for everyone of us to step up and tell out with all our heart and mind and soul the story of our life with God, with all the particularities and poetry, with all the pain and passion, need, nature and nurture we can muster, to stretch out like Peter Paul and Mary, and sing along with everybody else, with all the graceful music of the full symphony of the Trinity and all the choirs of heavens; to stand up, dance if you like, and sing out your life as best you can. And even if we don’t sing that well, even if we’re clumsy dancers, by the grace of God, it really doesn’t matter much, all we really have to do is shine!

5th Sunday after the Epiphany, Anniversary of Black Saturday

2010-02-07T09:13:00.000+11:00

On the Friday before last, I drove Bishop John to meet with members of Christ Church, Marysville. I had not been in that part of the diocese and was again struck with the particular beauty of northeast Victoria.

But when we came into area around Marysville I saw the remnants of Black Saturday and something more: the scars of the fire in counterpoint with the signs of new growth and recovery: dead trees cut and stacked along the road, old wreckage and new construction, blackened trunks with green shoots. It was like seeing the wreckage of a great war, but a somewhat scarred survivor in the foreground, going on and doing what must be done to build again, sharing a strong smile and showing broken teeth.

I joined the bishop at the ending of his meeting with the members of Christ Church and I was reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s definition of style: “Grace under pressure.” You could see these people have been through a tribulation and trial, and you could see that they were still going on. They might have been down, but they weren’t defeated by the tough times. There were some very gracious people there doing some very good work.

The lessons for today have to do with endings and beginnings, and doing good work in tough times. The prophet Isaiah is given the task of speaking God’s word to the people of Judah after Kong Uzziah has died. Over the 40 years of his rule, Judah and neighboring Israel had lived in peace and expanded in power and prosperity. But within a generation Israel and Judah will be completely destroyed; within a decade conquering armies of will make a vassal state and move images of Assyrian Gods into the temple at Jerusalem. Isaiah sees the nation he knew coming to an end, and his call is to watch and pray and speak at a time when people shall be taken into exile, the land will become a desolation. He lives in the midst of trying times, with the death of the old and with a new hope as well. For he is assured there will be a resurgence, renewal, unexpected birth, like the fragile green growth that comes from the stump of a burnt tree.

In the Epistle, Paul defines himself as one who has been born “out of time,” as the least of the apostles, yet - like Isaiah - he sees a saving truth in a trying time. Paul has found that this Jesus, whose followers he has persecuted and presented for trial, that this Jesus is the Christ, the holy one of God: and Paul’s former understanding of the law and the prophets, of what is required and what is right or wrong, has been terminated, put to flight by the dark death and the new light that comes to all humanity in the revelation of Christ’s saving death and resurrection, making all who participate in it part of a new creation. Both ending and beginning.

In Luke’s Gospel we move into new territory with Jesus. No longer in his hometown synagogue, he’s teaching from a boat on a lake, gathering crowds on the shore, making new disciples, and opening them up to new understandings, new ways to stand in relationship to God and neighbor. Then he turns to his disciple Peter. “Put out into the deep water and let down your net for a catch.” Jesus says, and Peter says...

Let’s detour for a moment. One of joys of the Gospels accounts of the early Christian community is the deep honesty and the great candor in the way the disciples are pictured, those assembled friends of Jesus. With all appropriate respect, they are such a mixed bunch! Often concerned with personal power and wrong priorities, misunderstanding Jesus, they often serve as wonderful examples of how not to do it! What tremendous humility and honesty they must have had to hear their stories being told over time, as the community grew, as legends and letters were folded into the growing self-understanding of the community of those on the way of Jesus, of the church. When I read the scriptural accounts of Jesus’ dealing with his apostles, I often think of the bumper sticker, “Be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet!” It gives me hope. What examples they are that the wisdom of the way, followed over time, will bring us home!

So Jesus tells Peter to take the boat to the deeper water and prepare for a big catch, and he responds, “Master, we’ve worked all night, with no fish, with no luck.” But he follows Jesus’s lead and he is overwhelmed by the size of the harvest. It is too big for his boat! His reaction is so similar to Isaiah’s some 400 years before. “Go away from me, [literally,“Get out of the neighborhood”] Lord I am a sinful man!” Can you imagine what’s happening here? What would it be like for Peter? His friend and master is the Lord! Imminence and transcendence staring you in the face! The universe is bigger than we know!
And Jesus calls him to prepare for a another big fishing expedition, to join in the new creation, the great harvest of hope, to bring all people to the kingdom of God!

In each of these encounters, for Isaiah, Paul and Peter; a person comes up against God’s proclamation of a larger life, and is renewed in a kind of death: the death of culture and kingdom for Isaiah; the death of Saul’s understanding of law and custom, as he is renewed as Paul the apostle to the outsiders. For Peter, is is the death of occupation and, perhaps, a loss of self-identity (who he thought he was), leaving all that behind to follow Jesus unto a new way, a greater bounty, a life unbelievably large. For each of them, to take a journey tied up with toil and trouble and grace and growth and life and death and resurrection. Those fiery moments that break you down and, by God’s grace bring you through to be part of a new creation. It is not easy.

Last night I shared a meal with Deb and Paul da Silva, and Daniel too, and over tea and dessert at their table we talked about Black Saturday and what followed, and they told me about the prayer and thanksgiving service here at Christ Church: how in the midst of pain and tragedy and trauma, a celebration of courage and compassion, the community came here to remember.

We come here, we bring others here, people come here, when the air gets close and life is difficult, and there is threat of fire or famine or flood and the radio is noisy and we need it most, we come here with our possibilities, and potentials and problems to be with Christ, to remember Christ.
and in the midst of that, even more improbably, we come here in the midst of it all, with something larger than life in our heart, we come here to celebrate, to make Eucharist! And that is right!

For in the journeys of Isaiah and Paul and Peter, of so many witnesses, saints and martyrs, and most fully in the life of Christ; we come to see that God has sewn his thread deep into the fabric of humankind, tight into the texture of everyday life, into the midst of all new beginnings and dead ends, miraculous births and tragic deaths, into earth, air, fire and water, drawing it all together until history is fully saturated with the grace that abides in eternity. It is not easy and we need to pray, in the words I recall so frequently,"that God will keep our pity fresh and our eyes heavenward, lest we grow hard."

But in the end we join in the Eucharistic banquet because we are the Eucharistic banquet. The feast of grace and love that we recollect today is built by God’s grace in the broken flesh and spilled blood of our own tragic tales and tough times, our incomplete lives and unfinished journeys. All washed clean here in the font of Christ’s love. It is always here and always now to give us hope and help us on the way. For God is hidden, waiting to be discovered, in both the pain and the glory, in the good times and bad, failure and fullness; waiting to be discovered here in this painful and glorious opportunity for compassion, grace and redemption in the middle of it all.

Amen.

A Sermon for J.D. Salinger

2010-01-30T20:53:00.001+11:00

Some years ago a wonderful Dominican nun gave me a one-liner that I’ve cherished ever since. She said that the reason there was a big Bible and a big Altar in the church is because there is a small Bible and a small Altar in our very hearts and in our lives. They are two complimentary ways of knowing God that have to do with formation and information. To define terms; formation has to do with listening to the story that God is telling us in the events and occurrences, praise and desolation, history and hope, prophesy and poetry of our own life as the context and the text where God tells out the Good News of our creation, of our participation in God’s creation, in the world where God is meeting us, every day in every way, moments ripening into sacraments, visible signs of the invisible gift of God, gifts given to us in every place and every moment of time.

This is not to deny the crucial importance of the church or the religious tradition and sacramental system in which we stand. That’s the big information we need! The Bible and the Altar in the centre are here so that we know who and whose we are in a world where so many voices are yelling and telling us that we are only what we eat or what we buy or who we dominate. And we’re built for a bigger truth than that! We need to know the face, the voice, the song of the one who creates, loves, and breathes us, who breathes the whole world we live in. So we need to know our Scripture, our tradition, the stories and the saints, of the family in which we stand, in the company where we are gathered. Because they all point to the formation of God in our own lives. Listen to Jeremiah:“Before you were born I knew you.” Listen to the Psalm we just read: “Oh Lord you are my hope, my trust, oh Lord, from my youth. Upon you I have learned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you.”

In Zen Buddhism they talk about “coming to know the face you had before you were born.” We come to church, we come to soak ourselves in the Gospel truth and tradition of this place, so that we might know the face of Christ, which is our true face and that of our neighbor and maybe our enemy and the stranger as well. We come together so we might become the body of Christ, which is our true body.

Two writers gave me early glimpses of how this might be true in my own formation. Does anybody still remember an English writer named Elizabeth Goudge? I recall seeing her books; “Pilgrims Inn” and “Green Dolphin Street,” in my grandparents bookcase before I could read, and sitting on the floor looking at the inside cover sketches of the main characters, the Elliot family. When I was 14 or 15 I read “Pilgrims Inn” for the first time. A family in the trauma of post-World War II England, moving to a an old house in on the English coast and finding themselves recipients of grace, unsought for favor, the gift of God. the surprise of love. And it is the mother and wife of the family, Nadine Elliott, on a walk in the woods who has a realization of the connectedness of life and the compassion it calls for. Goudge writes this:

“Quite suddenly you felt like your life was not an isolated thing, but one that existed in all other lives, as all other lives existed within yours. There wasn’t anything anywhere to which you could say, “We don’t need each other”

J. D. Salinger, who died this week at the age of 92, was another whose words formed me as a young man. His “Catcher in the Rye” was rich reading for a teenager, but his second or third book, “Franny and Zooey,” touched me deeply when I was 19. A young acting student returns to her parents New York apartment home to have a religious breakdown or breakthrough. Her brother Zooey accuses her of being a spiritual phony snob because she withdraws from the family structure to pray. At one point he says, and I paraphrase, “How can you claim to be a pilgrim, to follow holiness, then turn down a cup of consecrated chicken soup, which is the only kind of chicken soup we have in this house?” How can you seek holy information out there and ignore the holy formation you have in your own home?

Franny no longer want to be an actress because it seems to be ambitious, egocentric, self obsessed. Her brothers interupts: “The only thing you can do now,” he says, “the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier?

And then he tells her something, something their older brother told him when they were leaving to appear on a radio show together; something that the people in our Gospel reading, in that home-town synagogue in Nazareth, would never see, something, that goes back to Sr. Mary Neill and the altar and the Bible in the world and the heart of who we are.

Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door... I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what... he was talking about, but... I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and — I don't know. Anyway, it seemed... clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense. [And Zooey goes on]...

I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.... There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that... secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself...

Two modern authors with the same point: To see God present in the very midst of who and where we are. We are called here to be the family and friends of Christ, to not overlook him in our midst or even in ourselves; like Mother Teresa of Calcutta who saw Jesus “in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.” and like Thomas Merton writing: “In becoming man, God became not only Jesus Christ but also potentially every man and woman that ever existed. In Christ, God became not only “this” man, but also, in a broader and more mystical sense, yet no less truly, “every man [every person].”

St Augustine, writing around 400AD, brings us home with this prayer:

Oh God, To turn from you is to fall, to turn to you is to rise, and to stand in you is to live forever; Grant us your help in all that we do, in all our perplexities give us your guidance, in all our dangers give us your protection, and in all our sorrows give us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, our body and our blood, our life and our nourishment, Amen.

A teaching sermon for Sunday

2010-01-24T06:36:00.000+11:00

There are at least two ways we can conceive of our relationship with God; two ways we can approach God, or to let God approach us. Theologians use the terms “imminence” or “transcendence” to talk the times when God seems first very close (“imminent”) or very far away (“transcendent”), and there are good advantages to either vantage point.

For an example of transcendence, God writ large: look at the picture of God in the first chapter of Genesis: creating a world from waste and void, creating light and darkness, wet and dry, fish and vegetables and animals and humankind: all pointing to a God who is larger than creation, larger than our vision or our hope can contain. Listen to Isaiah: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” We find the prophets, again and again, recalling people to the knowledge that God is more than an idol, more than proper liturgical action, more than a familiar formula to make life safe for friends and family and to ensure victory over strangers and foreigners. God is much bigger than this.

In the New Testament we see this transcendence primarily in John’s Gospel and in the “war in heaven” special effects and themes in the Revelation to John. Amazing visions, big pictures of God. Keeping our vision large.

But then there is the understanding of God as “close” to us, which is imminent and all over the scriptures. Listen to Deuteronomy: “The word is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, that you may do it” That places us as the body of God in the world, the children of God, the family of God. And listen to the lesson from Isaiah from last week:

“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord...you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”

This is the language of an intimate relationship!

Often Scripture uses both imminent and transcendent ideas and images, together or in counterpoint, to give us a wider understanding of God. Todays reading from Nehemiah is a wonderful example. In a scene some 400 years before Christ, refugees have returned to the city of Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and gather to hear the word of the Lord being read aloud. And people get scared! Because the “law of Moses” seems so big and so strong and so demanding that there seems to be no hope. We’re talking major Transcendence here! And this still happens. There are people whose understanding of God is such that God could not possibly be honoring of our infirmities and fragility, but can only be approached as some kind of angry father in the sky. That is the reaction of the people gathering to hear the law as they assemble to rebuild in the ruins of Jerusalem.

And Ezra the priest says do not weep! For “this day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep... Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

What wonderful words. “The joy of the Lord is your strength”. Hebrew Scholars say it means that God’s joy is in giving strength to the people on the Sabbath day, because the attempt to please God, to show up to listen to God, when we’re afraid of how big God might be, does in fact please God. And maybe there’s the point; that sometimes, and I say this very carefully, it might do us good to be afraid of how God might call us and where God might take us.

I remember some 25 years ago, getting ready to move to a new town to take up a new ministry, and praying in my seminary Chapel: feeling an immense distance between what I felt God was asking me to do and what I could see myself achieving. But this tension came with a growing assurance that the open space would, in itself, provide a place for God’s will to be done in my life, whether I could conceive of it or not. I didn’t need to figure it out! So I could make the next step in my life with a growing hope that God meet me where I was, take me where I needed to go and give me what I needed; that his will might happen in my life in his good time. So both near and far, both big and small. This came when I let my hands be empty and open to God’s promise, and when I let myself be free to find out where God would take me. There’s the paradox: to keep open on both how far God can go and how close God can come.

The Gospel of Luke keeps this balance alive, moving between transcendence and imminence. Luke’s Jesus meets the people where they are: meets them in understanding and affection, and occasionally challenges them to the point of being rude and shockingly familiar; to takes them where they would never expect to go: to know that deep “joy of the Lord”

Here’s the centre of today’s Gospel:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now Jesus is in his hometown synagogue, with people who have known him for years, and in that that they might have been like many of us who have spent some time in the church, with the liturgical round of lessons and readings and hymns bringing a seasonal rhythm and reassurance that we know what’s coming next, that there will not be too many surprises from here on out.

But that attitude does not do well, either for the people in Nazareth, or for us either, it doesn’t open a faithful space to be amazed at a message that might make us brand new. Listen again! “To bring good news to the poor... To proclaim release... recovery of sight... the oppressed go free...proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

To hear Jesus anew, to allow God to be very big and very far off, as well as to be very close and very much in love with us, we must be willing to let him take us step by step and day by day to places and ways we never expected in order that we might become people we never thought to be.That is why we’re here. The Eucharist is very big and very small. It is larger than the world yet it is something that we are able to consume, to take upon our tongue, bring into our bodies, incorporate into our daily lives; taken with empty hands and a great hope that the God who is higher than all the heavens and bigger than all the cosmos is still, as St. Augustine says,” closer to us than we are to ourselves” and able to meet us in the midst of our daily lives,

We are like Jesus’ family and friends in Nazareth, we are like those wandering Israelites returning to Jerusalem to rebuild their broken hope; called to come with empty hands and hearts ready to receive grace, to hear and see, to taste this Jesus, who comes offering the bread of heaven and the sweet wine of hope, a taste of the kingdom, where we will come to know that the “joy of the Lord is our strength.”

In the name of Christ

Sermon for Epiphany 2C

2010-01-16T18:03:00.000+11:00

Weddings are strange and wonderful things. I didn’t last at the first wedding I attended. A Roman Catholic friend of my family named Noreen Gentile, was married in Sacramento, California, when I was about five years old. I don’t know if I got noisy or restless, but I spent most of the service with my grandmother in the car outside. What I remember was disappointment that I didn’t see the couple get married in what I was sure was “the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Goat!”

Since I missed that one I looked forward to the next wedding, when my brother married when I was 14. I was too young to be a groomsman but the young men who stood next to my brother made sure I participated in the reception by giving me champagne, quite a lot of champagne. I haven’t seen the wedding pictures for years, but a 14 year old boy falling down while dancing with a bridesmaid is not a pretty sight. And I didn’t see the Holy Goat either!

Then in Melbourne 5 years ago, when I was the chaplain at RMIT and part of the ministry team at St Peter’s Eastern Hill, a couple of of young people asked if I would preach at their wedding. Here’s some of what I said:

“In spite of all the predictions on the future of marriage, any marriage; people get wed in the face of God and a gathered company, because it’s reminder how good and deep and wonderful love can be. Because you’re taking it with the most serious and realistic expectation there is! What we see at a wedding is two people pledging to tie a knot to live and die together, to deepen their day to day experience of life with one another as sign and sacrament and mystery; in sickness and health, riches and poverty, life and death: All the good and bad of it. To pledge to be living in the very midst of that cauldron that Jesus tells us about in the Beatitudes: to be poor in spirit, meek and mourning, hungry and thirsty, needy and deeply human; and blessed, happy, loved, stewarded, inspired by God in an ongoing mutual ministry.”

And I think this is not just true of husbands and wives, but of all relationships; not only the bride and groom but their families and friends too. Look around at any wedding and see the web of people who are destined to meet frequently from there on; at other birthdays, baptisms weddings and funerals far into the future. So not just a man and wife, but all of us called to the cauldron of community, to take up the yoke of learning to live together, whether church or work of club or community. To take up the task of trying to love God and our neighbor, and realizing that it is the same love.

But whether wed spouse, friend or tennis partner, workmate or lover, it can be complex. As I told Mark and Sue five years ago, “there will be moments when your partner starts to tell that certain story one more time, gets a certain look, utters a certain phrase, wakes in a particular mood, falls into a peculiar trait, and you think, ‘there they go again!’ You don’t always have to like it, but you must always do your best to love them then and there!”

Some 30 plus years ago, I realized that a guy I talked to in a class, an english grad student in California, who I had an occasional beer with, had turned into a some kind of good friend. Over the years, friendship turned to honoring, and caring and sharing successes and failures, and the death of parents, and loves that didn’t last, and a deep and surprising regard and respect for the fragile gifts of the other. I spent New Year’s Eve with him and his wife last year, and we’ve gotten old together and I bless God for that.

Going back to the wedding sermon: “Love is, as they say, a many splendored thing, but love will break your heart, exceed your expectations, expand your world, slay and resurrect your ideas of what life and commitment and community and God are all about; and that’s just on a slow week! But the deeper truth is that, whether friendship or marriage, these partnerships in expectation and demand will fill your world with the most precious kind of flesh and blood holiness.”

That is why we say that marriage is a sacrament and perhaps friendship is too. And that’s why, in the second chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus, the word of God, goes to a wedding. He honors relationships, and it isn’t easy. He comes with some friends, and his mother comes by and leans on him for a favor for the wedding party: “They’re out of wine, can you do something?” They’re out of wine, meaning their friends didn’t bring enough to share, and they’re in the middle of a long party, and it’s going to end quickly and badly, unless someone does something and... Can you do something?

God can do something, In the Gospel of John particularly, God shows up doing some very odd and wonderful things. There’s a great one-liner in the first chapter of John, “In the beginning was the Word... and he came to pitch his tent with us.” The word became flesh and lives with us, the word of love becomes flesh and blood and goes to a wedding reception, the word of God’s presence in the world gets asked by his mother if he can do something for a wedding that’s going lopsided. And he does.

There are empty jugs for a religious feast, he asks that they be filled with fresh water, and suddenly there is wine, fine wine, better than they started with, better than they could afford, better than you could hope form saving the best for last.

Here’s an aside. A priest once said when he did pre-marital counseling, he’d talk about the marriage, and he could see the couple thought he meant the wedding day. They’re thinking a one day event, he’s talking about a whole life commitment. Jesus comes for the wedding party, but Jesus stays for the relationship, because Jesus is a sign of the wedding, the marrying together, the covenant of love between God and this creation, this God-made world. Here is God pledging to pitch his tent in the middle, to stay near for the whole process: the wedding, the baptism, innumerable, birthday parties, and tennis matches and cold winters, and misunderstandings and times when there’s not enough patience or money or hope. God in Christ is there with us.

When God comes to the party, each one of us is called to look to our wives and husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, tennis partners, work mates too, those we love a lot and those we love a bit less; and see that God has pitched his tent there too. And we are called to look to all those places with the hope of God’s presence in our hearts.
As I said to Mark and Sue five years ago:

“Your promise to each other in God’s sight [and that is close to our promise to God in our baptism as well] is a sign for us as well, a promise and a hope that we can live life more deeply, risk more, care more, belong more, to each other, to the world, to God. And we are here to celebrate that, as well as to pray for you, support you, love you, always, and especially here and now when you are serving as a sacrament before us, a sign of God’s love.”

To be a sign of hope in love! That takes us back to the reading from Isaiah we heard earlier, of God’s vision for Israel, which we see in the life of Christ: God’s vision for the people he loves and the places where he pitches his tent: listen to the poetry:

“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord... you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”

For Christ our God has come to the marriage feast with the wine of rejoicing in the midst of human relationship. So come let us adore him. Amen.

The Baptism of the Lord

2010-01-10T11:57:00.000+11:00

It might have seemed an ordinary day when Jesus was baptized, Maybe John the Baptist had gotten used to it, routine does that, and the riverside ritual drowning of the old life and rising to the new in hope of God’s promise to Israel had turned into a somewhat routinised wash and wipe. But then he sees Jesus; and knows him to be the one: The faithful servant, who will embody God’s spirit in a human life, bringing forth right justice, bringing forth new life. He must have remembered the amazing insight of the prophet Isaiah as he looked to see this Jesus beginning to live out his life in righteousness, as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to all who sit in darkness, opening blind eyes, bringing out prisoners from whatever dark dungeons of isolation or judgment bind them. What a sight for John! “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.” And now to see Jesus face to face, to know that greater presence, purpose, hope is finally here. “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” And to know in addition, perhaps dimly, that the beginning of the life of Jesus following his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist marks the beginning of the end of John’s own life. And still he rejoices!

It must have been true as well for good St Peter, who so often got it wrong in his earlier pilgrimage with the Lord, now full of the conviction in speaking by the spirit to a noisy crowd, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.... preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all.” He might have looked ahead from that moment, that day and seen the coming martyrdom, the waiting cross, as well as the unbelievable glory that would be his in taking up that ministry, that service, that end. And he, perhaps by grace, rejoiced as well.

For most of us it is not quite that dramatic or that clear-cut. I was baptized, became a Christian, put on Christ, a bit over 42 years ago a the age of 21. Part of it was the need for connection, respectability, community; part of it a desire and need to say both “Thank you” and “I am sorry” often and in the context of a community which would take those duties with due seriousness; to ask for pardon and to allow some potential for graceful growth, that brought me here, along with some shy hope of the heart to unfold in a kind climate of grace and growth. There was a prayer by WIlliam Temple that spoke to me at the time, gave me great hope. It speaks to me still.

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

It is often not easy to keep hope alive. Two years ago, when I was working in Chaplaincy in higher education, a young student, a single mother with a little boy, came to me with some depression, a muted quality rather than desperation, and sat in my office and said, “my life looks nothing like what I see on the web and in the mall and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” and I listened, and I let her have room to consider and think and mourn and start to grow and risk and again. And what I wanted to say, and what I hope she heard eventually somewhere else, was “Get a life, get a life with creativity, with a call to justice and community, with inspiration and some height and depth and breadth to it, get a life in Christ! Not to take you elsewhere, not to make you someone other than who you are, but to let you be you, fully and wholly and exactly where you are!

Because that is, I think, where Baptism drops us. It might be dealing with a new baby or with old age, living with disappointing relatives or sore feet, it may be enduring bad luck or a sad heart, it may be moving to new work in a new town that is exciting and demanding and lonely and lovely. It may be looking down a well worn old road or a brand new prospect and seeing a corner up ahead that signals a turn into a place you never thought to visit. But Christ’s call to baptism, to be part of the community of faith, the body of Christ called to be the church, takes you right where you are!

A friend of mine went to see a renowned spiritual leader and said, “How do I know where God is calling me?” The woman’s response was quick, “Go where the tension is in your own life. He will be there!”.
He will be there on Christmas morning or Good Friday, the wedding feast or the solitude in the desert, the great Eucharistic feast or the solitary times when you are asking that the cup might pass; wherever you go, Christ has been, will be, is there with you, will be with you always. “For there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

Our baptism, our immersion into the way of Jesus, plunges us into the depths of our real life with God: makes us companions with Christ in the deepest part of the human journey, washes us up with the most unlikely people and teaches us the surprising lessons of love, and contingency and humility and hope in the heart of all places and all things.

That is the gift of Christ, that is our heritage as children of God, where Christ calls us to follow, by his baptism and by our baptism. And that is a message and a pilgrimage that cannot be approximated by the mass markets, by the merchants of desires who rent their spaces on the web and at the mall, God is bigger and smaller than that, God goes farther and comes closer than that. And that is maybe why we’re here; alive, in this world at this time. To take that chance, to live this life!

We come to be baptized to find out where we end and where we’re for and where we begin, and it is in Christ! In Christ’s whole-hearted embrace of humanity we feel God hugging the whole of the human race, all life and death, all powers and principalities, the whole creation, into the call of love, the call of community, the command to follow, so that there is and shall be no place where we are safe, in life or death, thing past or things to come, here or in heaven, from the love to God.

Here are some words to end from the Baptismal service in our Prayer Book:

Be made one with Christ in his death and resurrection
Die to sin, rise in newness of life
And continue forever in Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Epiphany Sermon

2010-01-03T14:46:00.000+11:00

Today’s lessons point to three styles of rule and ruler, that come from the fist, the head and the heart. King Herod would like to think he has the world locked up. As the representative of Roman rule, he holds the keys to prosperity or poverty, freedom or captivity, life or death in his hands. So it is disturbing to him when there is a rumor of another ruler coming to be, another possible rule of how to be in the world, showing up on the horizon.

We don’t know much about the Magi who bring this news to him: They could be the scientists of the day, when astrology was considered a solid study for research and forecast, they could be the equivalence of therapists and social workers, examining dreams to figure out how the future might unfold, they could have been representatives of foreign powers; but any of these would make Herod nervous.

For they come to him asking if he knows where the child is who is born to be King of the Jews. This king who rules by birthright would be an obvious threat to Herod, who rules by dominance, and his own own resident experts, tell him that: “in Bethlehem...will come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” So there is a dangerous possibility that a new world might be coming into being, the old world turned upside down with new possibilities opening up: a ruler who is a shepherd to his people is not exactly the model that Herod has offered thus far. His response is politic: he asks him he asks the Magi to inform him, as soon as they know, where the child is located so that he can make an appropriate response.

And the Magi go on their way, following a light that seems to come from the heavens, and coming to a most surprising destination:

When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

We don’t know how long they had been on the road. Perhaps their wanderings had turned to pilgrimage and their pilgrimage into homecoming in the moment when they were overwhelmed with joy, when they knelt down, when they offered gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.They were three important gifts to give to a King, but surprising gifts to give to a child in a stable. Let’s look at those gifts.

Gold is a suitable gift for anyone in power. Herod would have recognized its significance, the right thing to give a king or ruler, even one who is a shepherd; but if they could look ahead in their great joy they would have been surprised to see what this ruler would ask as a response to his rule:

Come to me all Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

This is a different kind of ruler with a different set of values and demands: based on compassion and caring for all peoples, based on an awareness that we are but dust. Fragile creatures who are still the salt of creation, a city on a hill, the light of the earth. Our worthiness comes as a gift of grace and love from the God who creates us, from the God who joins us as a child in the middle of the human condition, with a rule that is set in the middle of the human condition, in the smallest and most needy as well as the strongest and mightiest.

I remember back in the 1950s when my father told me while watching a great tennis player (I think it was either Arthur Ashe or Rosewall), “he works really hard to look that relaxed.”.=So it might take a certain kind of power and grace and magnitude to be as defenseless as a child, to be open to listen and to learn and to love; but here is a God, a ruler and a king, who enters into his creation as the least of all -- as a helpless baby in an unimportant place in a single moment of time. So when you give gold to a newborn baby there is a new hope in the world.

Frankincense is used in religious rituals, as a suitable gift to bring to a priest. My sense of priesthood is that, in many ways it is a place where saying “thank you” and “I am sorry” are taken most seriously; not as just matters of custom or etiquette but as an acknowledgment that quite often we are given glorious gifts and we use them wrongly. I remember a professor saying that candidates for priesthood came to seminary to learn to be godly and ended up being somewhat lordly instead. But if Jesus is the head of the priesthood of all believers, then his community, this new creation, is something quite different:

Listen to the Beatitudes a few chapters later in Matthew:

“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.

This is a way of being in the world that is not built on being a strong winner, but instead on being a true lover of God in your own time and place. This way can get you into trouble within existing the systems of hierarchy and heroism -- where “the one who dies with the most toys wins”, and Herod and his friends certainly won’t like it -- but it can make you a real winner in the last, at the end when the biggest blessings are handed out. The good news is that you will win in heaven: the bad news is that you have to die to get there.

I was once told that the big question is this: “How uncomfortable are you going to allow yourself to be for the new Creation?” And this child will go all the way, will live life into the jaws of death to open a way we can follow, that goes far beyond death.

Here we have a hero who is willing to live simply and to die well in light of what he believes to be the deepest truth of the light and love of the world. It is enough to make those wise ones, the Magi who come from somewhere else, feel a great joy: because the holiness in the heart of the universe, the great love which is our hope that every side is seen here beginning as a little boy in a little town in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of everywhere.

In Epiphany we see the God of light and love, as a child who comes to help us to grow up the full stature of Christ. He will offer a rule of life, neither burdensome nor difficult: he will share a priesthood for humble people on the way to share great gifts of righteousness, and he will defeat death, that last impostor, so that we may live with him forever. It is enough to give you pause, and it is enough to give you great joy. In the name of Christ.

Holy Family -27 December 2009 -Luke 2:41-52

2009-12-27T11:47:00.000+11:00

I’ve always liked a wonderful one-liner from Mark Twain where he says that when he was 15 he thought his father was the dumbest man in the world, and when he turned 20 he was amazed how much the old man had learned in five years! That says something about the subjective element of our perception, that we see sometimes only what we look for. I’ve worked as a spiritual director and pastoral carer over the years, and so much of that work is simply listening, opening space so that people who see things clearly in black and white might , take a break and a deep breath to go beyond black and white thinking, be introduced to a wider spectrum of colors, shades of transparency and translucency, to shapes of encounters and ideas that they hadn’t looked for, relations with realities and relatives they perhaps hadn’t seen before, start to stretch out into where new possibilities.

When people have a chance to talk about their lives without immediate judgment to consider where they are and what they might wish to do with the degree of compassion and clarity, sometimes new things come into being, new options, new ways to be in love. Good books do as well, meditation is helpful there, and one of the reasons I love movies is that they can take you beyond words, using music color, visions, as well as irony, understatement and sometimes humor, to help you see things anew.

The Gospel of Luke, in his travel through the life of Jesus, will be doing something similar. I mentioned several weeks ago how Luke balances the characters in his narrative: old and young, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Greek. It might not be in an exaggeration to say there is a rhythm, almost dancing quality, in this gospel. He keeps you moving and he keeps you balancing with being slightly off balance as you move forward.

So let’s look at today’s Gospel where we fast-forward to Jesus at 12, traveling with his parents and larger family to a festival in Jerusalem. He becomes separated, lost and is found in the temple after three days “listening and questioning the teachers” there.

“And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.”
Then we go up close for a dialogue between mother and child:
“why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
“Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?”
But they did not understand what he said to them

I would imagine somebody was thinking oh dear, here comes Adolescence!

“But he goes home with them and is obedient, and his mother treasures these things and Jesus increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

Let me note that in another translation the word “treasures” is “ponders.” I found that defined as “sustained and inconclusive thinking.” and there’s something to be said for that, for not having easy answers, conclusive thinking. But it’s not easy. I have never been a literalist in matters of Scripture but I often wanted clear-cut answers: what is the right way to go at this crossroad, what is the right ethical action for the situation, what is God calling me to do in my life and ministry at the present moment? All big questions!

But what I find when I look at the breadth of Scripture and tradition, and when I let myself take a breath of spirit, to breathe with God, is that the Scripture and tradition that Jesus shares with us, walks through with us in the glory of God the father, doesn’t have easy answers to these questions. What I do find instead is an assurance that the way of Jesus, the way of God, is a way in which we “live and move and have our being.” And that’s more than a simple answer, to a difficult question, it is more like an answer you can live into, as a pilgrim, to be on the way with hope and faith and love. And that goes back to Mary’s pondering.

It also relates to Paul’s wonderful words and letters to the Collisions, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patients. Bear with one another... Forgive one another... Clothe yourself with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

That makes our journey with Scripture into the life of Jesus less of a quest to find the right answer, less of a quiz for which we are graded; and more of a yoga, a pilgrimage, even perhaps a dance, where we partner with God in moving into and through the midst of the intricacies and the particular case of the rhythms of our lives, living and moving and having our being.

Somebody once said, “You have to know what the rules are so that you can know when to make exceptions.” That needs to be carefully handled, but there’s a great deal of truth there. I remember a number of tennis lessons as a boy learning to groove my stroke and where to put my feet and how to bring my arm back so that I could finally be free to move into each unique moment of contact with the ball, in individual real-time rallies and matches, being both grounded and centered, but free to move in every moment of the game as it happened.

When I came to Australia, and lived in the community at St. Peter’s Eastern Hill, I learned more about cooking. In the first stage I stayed close to the recipe book; measuring according to directions and following the list of ingredients. Then after a while I became freer to add and subtract varying according to the seasons and what was available in the marketplace and how many people were showing up. Any relationship, whether with a skill or a place or a person becomes freer, paradoxically, when it is better known: more choices and options actions and motions come to be when we know more where we are, who we’re with, what we can creatively do, in the places where we work and love, where we live and move and have our being.

The poet Rilke once wrote, “Do not look so hard for the answers, first learn to love the questions, for the point is to love everything now; and then the answers will come on their own one day in the future.” I might have misquoted that a bit, but the sense is right. Life is not an examination to be graded, is not a task to be endured (though times of testing do come), but is a day to day walk with the Lord in the spirit in the midst of God’s creation and within the intricacies of our own lives. We are here to live our lives with God, joyfully, creatively, making life more livable and holy for ourselves and others, relating and redeeming as we can, calling things to greater meaning and participation in God, linking the all embracing love of God with all that is living in our everyday lives: family and work, poetry and politics, sadness and joy, birth adolescence and adulthood aging and death. The places where we live and move and have our being, where we find God and where God finds us.

The Gospel of Luke is a worthy companion on this road: the way of Jesus, in the breath and the light of the Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.

Christmas Sermon, Beechworth

2009-12-25T07:45:00.000+11:00

Christ Church
Beechworth
Christmas Day 2009
Luke 2: 1-20

The Revd Robert Whalley

The story I just read from the Gospel of Luke is a very strange one, though it is probably a story you’ve heard many times before; maybe memory connects it to other services in church buildings, connects to to old music and stained glass, or to family dinners, and times of joy or maybe frustration and dread; or maybe the story connects certain movies, either biblical spectaculars or family disaster-comedy ending with reunions in snowy villages with happy resolutions, starring Bing Crosby or Macauley Culkin, generally not in the same film, generally fiction.

But I would like to go back to that original story and retell it in a way that emphasizes its original strangeness the shock of the encounter, the journey, the discovery, and the moment of choosing where we might go from here.

The other background piece to what I’m about to say has to do with strange phenomena called “senior memory”. When I leave my glasses, when I enter a room and forget why, when I begin a sentence and pause, there seems to be more open space than it used to be. So I’m trying to be more methodical with memory.

There’s a wonderful book by Jonathan Spence called, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci” about a sixteenth century Jesuit priest who went to China with a memory method where you visualize rooms inside your head. A memory palace: where each cabinet or picture, each chair or table in the palace holds the story of something you hold dear. That needs to be seen as part of the story I am going to retell.

So just imagine that all this is taking place inside your head. You’re spending the day minding your thoughts, watching your concerns, keeping busy shepherding the various constituencies that are part of your daily existence: whether that has to do with your job or family, parents partners or children; has to do with money, health, power or poetry; love, life or death: all those concerns wandering like sheep over the meadows and mountains of your mind (And I apologize if this sounds like a 1970s song).

Then something new happens. You are surprised by a message that comes from someplace you have never considered before. The word we translate as angel originally simply meant meant “messenger;” so pretend that a messenger (maybe several, or even lots of them) arrives on the scene and you have this intuition, insight, that they are coming from someplace that is both deeper, higher, larger than the world you usually inhabit. And they tell you something new: that there is a new way of being, of living, becoming, in the world, and you need to leave aside your taken for granted everyday concerns and attend to this new possibility. These messengers may have wings, they may be in space suits, they may be dressed in an unremarkable manner; but it is their message which matters, which surprises you into taking a new step in moving towards a new discovery of how to be in the world, of how to be who you are.

So you leave your flocks, those habitual concerns, and let them take care of themselves for a little while, and you follow this promising message to an incongruous destination and find yourself witnessing something that is absolutely newborn.

No birth happens in a vacuum. This one has been nurtured and mothered in the midst of surprise and miracle, there is a husbanding hope and help alongside, and all the animals of every day life are there as well. This all makes sense to the way you see the world: odd, but not too unusual. Yet there is something completely newborn in the middle of it. Something you never thought you’d see.

Any baby is a surprise. They all used to look like Winston Churchill, and even now they seem to bring a message from another place, they’re not quite with us yet. And this baby is like that, except more so.

An English theologian from the 1950s talked about something called “God-shaped events”: assume for the moment that the word “God” might mean something concerning holiness, justice, compassion, connectedness, truth, love. And sometimes we can see small packages containing those events or transactions carried, acted out in the life of others, as well as in our own lives.
Actually I would be surprised if there were anyone in this room today who had not been at least once amazed by some surprise of caring, a “God-shaped” event they have received from another person; an unexpected gift, a quality of presence, a reaching out in love.

And it is as if this baby, in this stable that seems surprisingly unstable, both carries and is carried by that deepest current of love. It is as if the child is both a wide window into and a window, a vista, in which a depth and height and breadth, of caring is face to face with you. If the earlier messengers spoke a word of hope and holiness, then this infant is a symphony, is Technicolor and 3-D and special effects beyond belief, and in looking at this child you see yourself and the world you thought you lived in, anew.

And this is all happening inside your head. Except that your head seems to be open to something bigger than itself, bigger than what you usually think of as the world, and you have this strange perception, call it a hope, that this is bigger than you know, that the baby may be the truth of how we are related to the center of everything, to the edge of everything, to everything and everyone we know. And it has to do with love, being born in love, traveling in love, making mistakes and failing miserably, and rising up again to begin again in the name of love.

So if that is the case, then this baby, this new beginning, isn’t just happening in your head. It’s happening in the world you live in day to day, in the world of history, institutions, expectations, culture, here and now as well is there and then. And you look around at this church and the people gathered, at the old books, the strange robes, the stained glass and see a tradition and community gathered in the hope that this is at the heart of reality.

A wise man once said, “Look at everything, look at anything, until it surprises you, until it tells you something you don’t know.” I’d say this: look at the story: Luke, Joseph, Mary, Bethlehem, the shepherd and the angels, as well as the tradition, and the hope of this place, and the hope you carry in your own heart; and see if this perception, tradition, community gathered over time and space can offer you a way to deepen your daily experience of connectedness and compassion and caring for yourself and your neighbor and the stranger too.

Then go back to your daily concerns, shepherding them in your everyday fields, but remembering the Angels as well, the newborn truth, remember the possibility of compassion and connectedness, that it all may be true.

In the name of Christ. Amen

Advent 2, Christ Church, Beechworth

2009-12-06T08:40:00.000+11:00

A few weeks ago, talking of Celtic Spirituality, I quoted a favorite prayer by an Irish poet who asks Christ to... “Keep our eyes heavenward and our pity fresh lest we grow hard,” and this season, this Advent moving us to the birth of Jesus, works well for all that. Advent is a stretching time; the lessons we hear in this season, the voices of the prophets, apocalyptic visions, mixtures of mystery and promise, all work to “keep our eyes heavenward and our pity fresh” as we wait for the wondrous child who comes to make our world newborn, stretching us out to Christmas and beyond into a new world of relationship with God in the life of Christ.

The season of Advent begins, and the seasons of the whole church year provide, a way to travel with Christ and the church into the very height and breadth and depth of what it means to be a human being in company with God. For our own journey, learning to live in the light of God’s love, which we see in the birth and growth, life, the teaching and healing, the death and resurrection of Jesus; all this can be joined in the church’s journey from Advent through Christmas to Epiphany, from Lent to Good Friday through Easter and on to Pentecost.

We sing, “Advent tells us Christ is near,” and our own Advent can come with a yearning to be closer of God, with an surprising urge to take ourselves more seriously, to an awareness that God is closer to us than we know, that God has gifted us (and this needs to be carefully said) with a kind of personal presence, a Christmas present in our souls. So that the birth of Jesus, might mean taking the chance that in the very centre of each of us there is a very specific and unique aspect of God’s love and focus and presence to be found, to be born. And we receive this gift as we accept the unique configuration of talents and trials and likes, dislikes, of who we are and who we are to be, in sharing the gifts of our own unique calling and identity.

So if each one of us carries a present from God, then letting God love the world through our unique love takes us to the Epiphany, the place where God’s light shines through, shows through, the ministry of our life: this means being where we are, living where we are, loving life as we can: simply sharing the journey wholeheartedly, telling our good news in God’s good light.

That good news means hard work, because every light throws a shadow; and to walk that walk, to take on Jesus’ truth (which is the truth about our own destiny, our own true face as well as the ultimate truth, the deepest face of our neighbor), we have to will to let God’s bright light shine on the darker aspects of our own life and the life of the world around us. We have to learn to look at all things - in us and around us - with two questions: What is this to love? Where does this live in truth? And some things simply don’t live in love or truth. They fade out and burn away in that bright light, as they should, because they aren’t really real. So sometimes our growing “enlightenment,” our willing participation to live in God’s light and truth, can burn, can hurt like hell.

I remember walking though a park in San Francisco some years ago and seeing a sign on a fence built to keep people from walking across a newly seeded hillside. It said, "Short Cuts Cause Erosion!" I take that as a four-word definition of sin: a history of people taking shortcuts across other peoples lives, across geography, history, politics, sexuality, ethics, economics and religion too. So to decide not to take shortcuts in living life with Jesus and his friends means wrestling with whatever problems, predicaments, manifestations of evil, "demons", come your way; whether from your own history or that of your people, your culture. This is often the next stop on the journey, the desert of Lent, not an easy place to be.

For Lent is the times when the sky gets dark and the shadows go long, a place where we can learn to meet and treat these demons and pains and questions as ways to God. Surprisingly often, even as if they were questions from God, ways and places that can lead us to live closer to the almighty love. It is not an easy road, honoring and caring for the pain of the world, in ourselves and in others, by witnessing the places where God’s love and God’s beloved are crucified, damaged, done to death to this very day. It takes effort and time, and it can hurt terribly - it made Jesus weep – for it takes us inevitably to the middle of Good Friday, the day when hope will die.

But by the gift of God and san always surprising grace we live through that Good Friday, that death-time, into a new certainty of life, an experience of Easter that somehow transcends death, comes from beyond ourselves, opens us into a continuing and deeper participation in God’s creativity, where we can sharpen up both our questions and our hope, can live larger into the answers.

So living life in the light of the resurrection calls for a new kind of language of passion and understanding, calls us to learn new words for God’s love and mercy, majesty and intimacy, calls us to be a new word for God, speaking to people and in places where that word might not otherwise be heard. And in that place we can come to our own Pentecost, where God’s spirit speaks loud in the witness of our daily lives. It will not always last, but we will remember.

But how can we live with life this large? Partly, I think, in mystery, through prayer, and as a willing part of a living community that is committed to share the journey over the years, through numerous seasons of bloom and drought, from Advent through Advent and Easter to Easter; a community where we can tell the stories, say the prayers, eat and drink in light of God’s recreation in the world as companions, “bread-sharers;” taking it one moment at a time with very small steps. And with a seasonal, but always growing hope that the end of the day, the end of the journey, the end of life itself, may be found in love.

John the Baptist, The Apostle Paul and Timothy, this coming Christ; all bright lights, bright stars that cross the skies, keeping our pity fresh and our eyes heavenward, giving us good news that comes from a long way away, good news that will come very close.

Listen to Paul’s writings:

I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the Gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ

Advent is here; a time to turn around to be renewed in hope, that we may be awake and alert, watching, in the joyful task of responding to the love of God which we come to know in the whole life of Christ. It is time to begin again.

And here's a pic!

2009-12-04T21:14:00.002+11:00

A sermon to be shared...

2009-12-04T17:26:00.001+11:00

Ordination of Robert Whalley to the Diaconate. Wangaratta. 4.12.09
Ps 15 Gal. 6:7-10 Mt 13:47-52
Again the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.

At weddings, I usually begin by saying that John and Jenny have already made their commitment to each other and that what they are doing today is making that commitment public, before family and friends and before God, asking for both God’s blessing on their relationship and the support of family and friends in their journey ahead as man and wife.

Robert has long since committed himself to Christian ministry and stands before us today an experienced teacher and preacher of God’s word, a wise practitioner in spiritual direction, prayer and meditation and - as a former chaplain to tertiary institutions - experienced in counseling and pastoral care. For quite some time, Robert has sought to have his baptismal ministry newly “ordered”; that is, to respond to and to test a calling to ordained ministry, with the visible authority and specific responsibilities it carries. The Church, in its turn, has found Robert both suited to, and fit for, the office of Deacon. Like the man and woman who have already made their commitment to each other, Robert is today asking for the support of us all in the household of faith and for the gift of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands by the Bishop: an outward and visible sign of the grace of Holy Orders, in which Robert’s Christian discipleship continues, and under which his ministry as a baptized person is from henceforth re-expressed.

Today, the Anglican Church celebrates the witness of Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the religious household at Little Gidding, that tiny community of family and friends who in 1626 in rural Cambridgeshire dedicated themselves to a life of daily prayer and service to others. Though the community barely lasted 20 years, so profound was the sanctity of their Christian lifestyle that Little Gidding is still today one of those ‘thin places’ spoken of in Celtic spirituality where two worlds meet, holy places where one might encounter God as Moses encountered God on Mt Sinai, a place indeed immortalized by T.S.Eliot in the last of his 4 Quartets as a place where “prayer has been valid.” The liturgical guide to Lesser Feasts says of Nicholas Ferrar, rather summarily, that after his business collapsed “he took deacon’s orders and retired to the country!” What actually went on at Little Gidding was Christ’s mission to the world in microcosm - a daily round of prayer issuing in service to others - concern for the spiritual and physical needs of the local people and the education of their children.

In whatever arena - province or hamlet - the Church’s ministry to the world is a response to God’s love as revealed to us in Jesus, a response to Christ expressed in service to others, to work for the good of all as Paul says in today’s Epistle. Paul’s concept of Christian love in action is the renewal of all individual lives and, as such, he sees the whole world as our parish. The kingdom of Heaven is offered to all. It is” like a net” says Jesus “that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.” - all sorts and conditions. And implicit in Christ’s saying is that all alike need that which is offered so that - as expressed in the Collect for Christ the King - all the “people of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his gentle and loving rule.” This is the work of Christ to bring health and healing, meaning and hope to all humankind; the work of the Church, “the only institution” William Temple reminds us, “that exists for the benefit of those who don’t belong to it.”

All Christians are by their baptism engaged in Christ’s ministry to the world, but those ordained into the Church catholic’s threefold order have a special responsibility because they serve a public and representative function. As representative of the Church in society the office carries enormous responsibility and accountability; and as representative of Christ, as an alter Christus invested with Christ’s power to heal, cleanse, and renew - powers given to the disciples - the sacred office of the ordained minister is one of immense privilege.

I referred earlier to thin places’ spoken of in Celtic spirituality. John Pritchard has described priests as ‘thin’ people in whom may be sensed a world beyond, where God is, where people can be made to feel “at home’ with God. Or to put it another way, to use the words of Jesus’ wonderful invitation to those who would come unto him, where people may find rest for their souls.

In describing his visit to the shrine of St Simon Stylites in the Syrian desert, Christopher Moody noticed on the plains below the shrine numerous hostels set up to welcome pilgrims and comments he suddenly became aware of the close association between pilgrims, travel and hospitality. First, the huge variety of people drawn to the shrine, fish of every kind; and as they approached that which they sought - nearness to God - places to stop and find rest, hostels wherein to find shelter, comfort, something of God’s hospitality.

The Anglican Tradition has it that ministry is primarily pastoral - designed to attract people into the love of God, to bear the grief's and carry the sorrows of God’s people, heal the broken spirit and bind up their wounds, bring Christ’s healing and deliverance to a broken, harassed and helpless world. The Need is universal; the response by the Church of Jesus Christ is to all God’s people, to fish of every kind, even if that response is sometimes met with by indifference, hostility, and rejection: As the poet R.S.Thomas writes: The Priest picks his way through the parish / Eyes watch him, from the windows, the farms/ Hearts wanting him to come near/ The flesh rejects him! But the sacred ministry - even in the context of this increasingly secular and agnostic society - still has the power to attract, to heal, cleanse and to renew lives, to offer people God’s hospitality, a place where two worlds meet.

In ministry to the sick and dying we see it again and again. One old chap in Cabrini’s Palliative Care Hospital said to me recently, “I’m C of E, Padre, but my wife and I never go to church. To be honest, I’ve never really understood it!” We avoid talk of God, but he tells me his story over and over, always accepts God’s Blessing and weeps at the touch of my hand on his brow.

A colleague told me of a man who declared he was an atheist and had no need of a supreme being. The Chaplain replied she wasn’t so sure about a supreme being either! But in the course of several conversations, in which Jack Spong proved to be of common interest, the fellow one day remarked, half jokingly, he no longer minded the crucifix in his room. When the Chaplain took her leave for the weekend and obviously couldn’t offer a Blessing to an atheist, she light-heartedly suggested instead a peck on the cheek. “Oh, please” he responded. Quite unexpectedly, the man died that night.

The person in Holy Orders is widely perceived as a God-person, an alter Christus, as someone with Christ’s power to offer rest, comfort, encouragement, mercy and forgiveness, the love and hospitality of God, proximity to the shrine, nearness to God, a place where two worlds meet.

There is, however, nothing special about any of us called to be ordained. It is a sobering reminder that we are no better than anyone when every day we come in contact with people of greater faith and virtue. And it’s encouraging to note that the first disciples, chosen, commissioned and sent out by Jesus, were fragile human beings like us.

Rob, may you continue to delight in your vocation as a servant of Christ, and may your ordination this morning mark for you a wonderful beginning in a new kind of ministry. May you rejoice and pray without ceasing to the one who has called you to this service, and in all circumstances give thanks - for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus.

Stephen Miles
4.12.09

A Prayer to God the Father on the Vigil of Pentecost

2009-12-04T05:57:00.001+11:00

Today, Father, this blue sky lauds you. The delicate green and orange flowers of the tulip poplar tree praise you. The distant blue hills praise you together with the sweet-smelling air that is full of brilliant light. The bickering flycatchers praise you together with the lowing cattle and the quails that whistle over there. I too, Father, praise you, with all these my brothers, and they all give voice to my own heart and to my own silence. We are all one silence and a diversity of voices.

You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as awareness, and as joy. Here I am. In mew the world is present and you are present. I am a link in the chain of light and of presence. You have made me a kind of centre, but a centre that is nowhere. And yet I am “here,” let us say I am “here” under these trees, not others.

For a long time I was in darkness and in sorrow, and I suppose my confusion was my own fault. No doubt my own will has been the root of my sorrow, and I regret it merciful father, but I do not regret it because this formula is acceptable as an official answer to all problems. I know I have sinned, but the sin is not to be found in any list. Perhaps I have looked to hard at all the lists to find out what my sin was and I did not know that it was precisely the sin of looking at all the lists when you were telling me that this was useless. My “sin” is not on the list, and is perhaps not even a sin. In any case I cannot know what it is, and doubtless there is nothing there anyway.

Whatever may have been my particular stupidity, the prayers of your friends and my own prayers have somehow been answered and I am here, in this solitude, before you, and I am glad because you see me here. For it here, I think, that you want to see me, and I am seen by you. My being here is a response you have asked of me, to something I have not clearly heard. But I have responded, and I am content: there is little to know about it at present.

Here you ask of me nothing else than to be content that I am your Child and your Friend. Which simply means to accept your friendship because it is your friendship and your Fatherhood because I am your son. This friendship is Son-ship and is Spirit. You have called me here to be repeatedly born in the Spirit as your son. Repeatedly born in light, in knowledge, in unknowing, in faith, in awareness, in gratitude, in poverty, in presence and in praise.

If I have any choice to make, it is to live here and perhaps die here. But in any case it is not the living or the dying that matter, but speaking your name with confidence in this light, in this unvisited place: to speak your name of “Father” just by being here as “son” in the Spirit and the Light which you have given , and which are no unearthly light but simply this plain June day, with its shining fields, its tulip trees, the pines, the woods, the clouds and the flowers everywhere.

To be here with the silence of Sonship in my heart is to be a centre in which all things converge upon you. That is surely enough for the time being.

Therefore Father, I beg you to keep me in this silence so that I may learn from it the word of your peace and the word of your mercy and the word of your gentleness to the world: and that through me perhaps your word of peace may make itself heard where it has not been possible for anyone to hear it for a long time.

To study truth here and learn here to suffer for truth.

The Light itself, and the contentment and the Spirit, these are enough.

Amen

Two Prayers from the American Prayer Book

2009-12-03T20:58:00.002+11:00

Back from retreat, settling down to sleep and trying not to get in the way of what's happening tomorrow. The retreat was very good, now I just need to listen and pray, not necessarily in that order.

These two prayers in the American BCP have always meant a lot to me, especially tonight.

The FIrst one really hit me my first semester at CDSP in 1980 and still speaks to me:

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look  favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred  mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry  out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world  see and know that things which were being cast down are being  raised up, and things which had grown old are being made  new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection  by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus  Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity  of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Then yesterday I remembered this prayer. I kept a copy of it around for years and used it as part of daily devotions during a short period when I had a disciplined intercessory prayer routine. I found out later that it was written by William Temple.

A Prayer of Self-Dedication  

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord  and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A Review and Revision of my life on a Sunday morning!

2009-11-29T09:04:00.004+11:00

I spent a few hours this morning, abed with coffee, looking at my life over some 10 year intervals. Here it is:

1949

Almost 4 years old and two of earliest memories I can date. First, a late summer day with my parents and brother meeting my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin next to the Golden Bears at the California State Fair on the 100th anniversary of the Gold Rush. Then preparations for the New Years Eve party that year at the Sutter Lawn Tennis Club. My parents were on the committee, and some people were dressing up a mannequin from Rich’s store dressed as the old year with white robe and flowing beard), when Heiney Catrow emerged from the men’s locker room dressed as the new year, 1950, with a large white diaper over his racing trunks.

1959

Just into my terrible teens. I was not attending school, had dropped out of seventh grade the year before. My parents marriage was breaking up, we were living in a rented house on 41st street, after my parents had sold their house and his partnership in a printing business to pay back taxes, and my father was working for the State of California. My mother and I both saw therapists for a short while and then we were going to my uncles ranch some Saturdays and wondering about moving. This was the same year my 20 year old brother had an accident when an iron chip from a hammer went into his eyeball. I remember waiting with Woody Adams, my parent’s friend, in a car parked outside a market on 43rd and H streets while my father went in to buy some liquor, and looking at a hair growing on the my left big toe, knowing that puberty was coming and I wasn’t sure what that would mean. The next year my brother married his high school sweetheart and my mother and I moved to a house on my uncle's ranch, with my father coming down occasionally to visit.

1969

I was 23 and had dropped out of the University of Oregon the previous year after a total immersion in sex, drugs and rock and roll. I spent the winter and spring working with my uncle on the ranch followed by summer school at Stanford, That autumn I took 2 classes at the local junior college and started making plans to get into the University of California at Davis. I helped my parents move from the ranch to a house in Fairfield where my grandmother would join us. In the next few years I would take some classes at Davis, then drop out again, after my grandmothers death, to join my parents in starting our own printing business.

1979.

I had been accepted for an MA in History and Phenomenology of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley; but couldn’t graduate from UCD because of what felt like a phobia in learning a required foreign language. I was still working part-time in the dysfunctional family business and finally got into therapy with a wonderful Jungian who did some very good and deep work with dreams (Thank you Beth Kennedy!). This might have been the start of seeing the possibility of making some substantial changes in my life and taking on the responsibility of working for further changes.

1989

I had left an unfinished MA degree in 1985 and, after a mixed year as a youth minister and intern in a northern California parish (as well as finally leaving the family business), had finally graduated with an M.Div degree from CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific). I had been turned down by the Diocese of California for ordination, where the Bishop said, “I am not going to ordain you, but I am going to use you.” I was smoking too much grass (and starting to see how that was toxic for me), working in customer service in a retail headquarters in San Francisco, and doing some teaching and preaching at Grace Cathedral where the Canon Pastor, Lauren Artress, advised me to look into University Chaplaincy as a vocation. I told her that it would be too easy. After a fairly bleak year, I made a serious commitment to therapy with a psychologist-priest, finally stopped smoking marijuana and, in 1991, started work at Campus Ministry at the University of San Francisco.

1999

I was teaching part-time (Thomas Merton, Enneagram and Social Ethics) at USF, College of Professional Studies, had moved off campus and left campus ministry the year before to move around the corner from All Saints’ Parish in the Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. In the previous two years my father, mother and brother had all died after what seemed an endless series of crises taken from a bad soap opera. I was also mentoring one or two Spiritual Formation Groups for the Episcopal School for Deacons, and working at Henry Ohloff House, a drug and alcohol treatment centre run by the Diocese. In April that year I moved into a 4 month residency at the San Francisco zen Center and, in August returned to CDSP as the Visiting Chaplain for the student body. Within my first month there I met John Davis, a priest from Melbourne, who was to be (to put it very simply) the best friend I have ever known and (an Aussie term here) a mate for life. I starting thinking about a long visit to Australia.

2009.

I came for a Christmas visit to Melbourne 9 years ago (minus 2 weeks) and (with John’s good help) moved over the following year. I did some online teaching for USF and started the Merton Centre @ St. Peter’s Eastern Hill as a platform for teaching, preaching and spiritual direction around Melbourne; then went back to tertiary chaplaincy with encouragement and a ministry grant from a good and friendly Bishop (thank you + Philip Huggins!). After a few years I returned to teaching online and in-person at a local Anglican seminary. And then in the last year, with a hiatus in mental heath chaplaincy, have been moved (in vivid dreams, with helpful friends, and by a benevolent bishop who put my gifts to use in the Diocese of Wangaratta) to a new town, new ministry, new horizon.

So, 60 years in 7 paragraphs. I’ve left significant things off, either by choice or oversight, but that’s a fair summary of my life so far. Perhaps it wasn’t as busy as it sounds, there are a lot of hours spent when I sat in cafes with my journal and “measured out my life with coffee spoons.” There was far too much equivocation over the years. I should have stopped smoking grass, taken my studies more seriously and started therapy much sooner; and I haven’t talked much about sex, drugs and musical comedy as much as I might, but this is not that kind of blog.

What I really wish I could do is have a parade of pictures alongside these words; pictures of friends, mentors, benevolent pilgrims on their own journeys who shared and changed my life. The summary makes it sound like a solitary exploration and, by God’s grace, it wasn’t. Friends and from Davis, CDSP, and USF, Grace, S4D, All Saints’, St. Peter’s, Trinity Theological School, all were a part of it, Friends who all helped me accept who I was and what I could and couldn’t change, helped me to make changes where I could, helped me to move on. I mention a few folk, but there are so many more.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy Facebook, because so many of them are occasionally online there, and I get the snaps and snippets of their comings and going, people and places that mattered in the past and that matter to them now. I’ve always liked the fact that the early Christians were called the "People of The Way.” Probably most of the people on my way are not “professional” Christians, but that doesn’t matter much. I have learned hope and acceptance and ministry and love from them over the years, and they (even you, my reader) have helped me find my way along with them.

Let’s bring it up to the present. In 5 days and 2 hours I will be made a Deacon. Eliot writes this in Little Gidding:

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
 Every poem an epitaph. And any action 
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat 
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

Quite honestly I don’t know what to expect at the time of my ordaining, or the one to priesthood now set for 13 February. It is both the end (meaning both termination and goal) of something and a beginning as well. I am trying to be open to both these facts, as well as to a grace I cannot get my cantankerous head around, a likely and blessed surprise.

But I know that I am not alone: again Eliot,

History may be servitude,
 History may be freedom.
See, now they vanish,
 The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
 To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

You will all be with me this coming Friday, both in prayer and presence, with all your history and hope, all these communities and callings, all one at the deepest level, and for this I am very grateful.

Thank you!