Meals and Eucharist, Debs too!

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.