Mother Nancy's Blog

Radical Welcome

2011-08-20T23:03:00.000-04:00

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8; Matthew 15:10-28

"In the fashion world, as in this competition, you're either in or you're out." So says Heidi Klum in one of my favorite TV shows, Project Runway. Now, she has a very fetching German accent, which you will notice I did not even attempt. In the fashion world, Heidi Klum is very definitely in.

There are a lot of things that I love about Project Runway, but the chief thing is that it appeals to my sense of order. They start with a lot of designers, and one by one they are eliminated. Each episode ends with Heidi looking sad, and saying to one hapless contestant, “I’m sorry, that means you are out.” And then another host hugs the loser and sends him or her upstairs to clean up the work room.

Top Chef is a similar show, only it is about cooking instead of fashion design—and the experts aren’t quite as cute as Heidi. But at the end of each episode, a host says, “I’m sorry, please pack your knives and go.”

In both shows, the season starts out in chaos—designers and chefs are everywhere. Whether they are fitting chiffon or chopping onions, the mess flies around. Gradually, some beauty develops—in constructed garments or delicious dishes. And if I cannot taste the food on Top Chef—well, there’s no way I could ever wear the clothes on Project Runway—so it is all about considering and discerning which look or which taste I think I might like the best.

Week by week, a designer and a chef each leave and order begins to emerge, until finally the work room and the kitchen aren’t so terribly messy. The food becomes more complicated and the outfits more elaborate. And for both shows, as the season proceeds, we get to know the designers and the chefs. We begin to make favorites—and to root for them—even if they seem to make an odd choice of fabric, or get caught over-poaching the salmon. And as we get to know them, it gets harder and harder to hear, “I’m sorry, you are out.” Or, “Please pack your knives and go.” Even so, the competition is part of the thrill.

And it makes sense, because who doesn’t like to be in with the in-crowd? And as long as we remember to tune in again next week, we can be with the ones who are flinging the chiffon and chopping the onions. Heidi Klum would never dream of telling us we are out.

The desire to be included is as old as human nature—and right along with it is the urge for order and thrill of competition that makes us exclude one another. It is exactly these contrary impulses that struggle through our lessons this morning.

The prophet Isaiah is telling the people that they can return from their centuries-long exile in Babylon. And when they do, God will welcome them. And not only that, God understands that they have been away for generations—it’s okay that they made relationships while they were in exile. It’s all right if foreigners come with them when they return home. For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples, says the Lord. You might call the prophet’s attitude “radically welcoming.” And Isaiah knows that this is a new thing for the people to understand about God.

All through the Old Testament, the people busily define themselves as the ones—the only ones—that God loves. And God plays the in-and-out game, too. God finds people difficult to handle and so decides to destroy us by flood. But then, Noah seems righteous, and is saved. God decides that Abraham should be the father of a nation that is under God’s direct sponsorship, and so grants him children even though he is in his 90’s.

Abraham favors Isaac, so his older son Ishmael is—out, clean up your workspace before going out into the desert, please. God favors Isaac’s son Jacob, and he gets the blessing and the birthright instead of his older brother Esau—he cheats by presenting his father with a better tasting and more timely presented stew. In an interesting twist on this in-and-out business, it is Jacob who packs his knives and leaves, but later seems to have been under God’s protection the whole time.

It is this same Jacob whom God names “Israel”—and then there is a grand game of in-and-out among his twelve sons—first the construction of a high-fashion coat of many colors and then all that nastiness about selling Joseph into slavery. And it is Jacob’s sons who become the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. By the end of Genesis, they are very definitely in.

All through the Hebrew Scriptures, God is faithful to this one nation of people—the nation who were born of Abraham. The children of Israel believed in God, and made attempts at faithfulness, more or less. But whether they were faithful or not, God never forgot them. The children of Israel were in—in God’s favor, even when they were thrown out into slavery or exile. God knew them. He knew they weren’t perfect, but they had developed a special relationship over the centuries.

And now, millennia into the relationship, Isaiah declares a new thing—that God will welcome everyone to God’s holy mountain—the exiles returning home, the outcasts among the exiles, even the foreigners who follow along—not sure where they are going, but sure that they are looking for welcome.

Five hundred years after Isaiah’s new thing, Jesus is all about the welcome. Drop your nets, he says to Peter and Andrew. I will make you fish for people. And off they go through the Galilean countryside, gathering people, just as Isaiah predicted. The outcasts of Israel were the first to get on board. The sinners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes; widows and orphans; women and children, all fell into Jesus’ wide-open embrace.

Those Pharisees had a harder time of it. They couldn’t seem to get with it. We might think of them as spiritual exiles. They concentrated so hard on God’s justice that they had trouble with the mercy that Isaiah’s prophecy required.

And so Jesus taught them, in a passage so graphic that we will surely remember it—it is not what goes into your body that will make you sick. What goes in comes out just as quickly. No, Jesus said: What makes us sick is how we think about one another, how we treat one another, how we use one another for our own advantage.

Well, you cannot blame the Pharisees for not wanting to be schooled by someone as obviously “out” as Jesus. I mean, really, he hung out with all the people who knew how to clean a workroom and pack up their knives. What could the least and lost of the children of Israel possibly know about God?

Well, how about what Isaiah knew?

Thus says the LORD:

Maintain justice, and do what is right,

for soon my salvation will come,

and my deliverance be revealed.

The ones who followed Jesus understood the yearning of Isaiah. They understood that coming home was more than about where they lived—what they wore—or what they ate. They understood that coming home was about being accepted—that coming home was about being welcomed in.

And so, we have to ask, what were the disciples thinking when they asked Jesus to send the Canaanite woman away? Okay, so she wasn’t a Jew—she was a foreigner. And she was yelling at them—she a woman, was yelling at men—definitely not good manners. But those fishermen and tax collectors weren’t known for their manners.

Why did the disciples find her so disturbing that they begged Jesus to send her away? And come to that, why wasn’t Jesus nice to her? "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Really? Didn’t Isaiah settle all that centuries ago?

This is one of those times when I really wish I could see Jesus’ face. I want to see a twinkle in his eye—and I want to see him nod his head toward that grumbling group of Pharisees standing a little way off.

We do not know what Jesus was thinking when he said, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But here is what we do know—as bad as her manners were, the Canaanite woman’s story gets told. As loud as she was yelling, as foreign as she was, she didn’t clean up her workspace or pack her knives. She walked right up to Jesus and told him what she needed.

And we know this, too: Jesus recognized her faith. It didn’t matter that her shouting was annoying, or that her daughter’s illness would make them both outcasts, or that she was a foreigner. What mattered to Jesus was her faith. Jesus was faithful, too. And her daughter was healed instantly. And Jesus showed again that even though he understood our human inclination to bring order through exclusion, God calls us to something better.

When the woman came up to Jesus, when she called him by name and begged him for mercy, he could have told her that she was out. He could have turned his back on her. Instead, he engaged her in conversation. We may not like or understand what he said—but we know that there was a power to heal in the connection that he made.

The radical welcome that Isaiah proclaimed and the Canaanite woman claimed for herself and her daughter is the very same welcome that God offers us today. Thus says the Lord, Maintain justice, and do what is right. If we are to heed Isaiah’s proclamation, it begs an important question: just who are the foreigners today? Who are the outcasts?

Maybe it is the child who hates to go to school because the way she looks or the way he speaks draws the attention of bullies. Maybe it is the father who cannot get a doctor’s appointment for his son, because the insurance company doesn’t think the kid is sick enough. Maybe it is the couple that wants to be married, but lives in a state where only some couples have that privilege. I’m guessing you can think of others.

Week by week we come into this holy place—and the truth is, often we know that in one aspect or another of our individual lives, we are the outcasts, we are the foreigners—we are out! We should be cleaning up our work space and packing our knives. But in this place, we claim God’s radical welcome. And more, we are invited to welcome others—any others—outcasts, foreigners, even those who are in with the in-crowd.

All these years later it is up to us to offer the radical welcome of God, to make friends and strangers joyful in God’s house of prayer. When we do, then we will know God’s power to heal and God’s salvation and deliverance will be revealed.

August 14, 2011 Proper 14A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

These Feet Are Made for Walking

2011-08-20T23:00:00.000-04:00

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

1 Kings 19:9-18;  Psalm 85:8-13;  Romans 10:5-15;  Matthew 14:22-33

I have been thinking a fair amount about shoes this week—and not just because I finally made my way to the Lee Outlets earlier this week, and came home with a carful of good bargains—but also because I am in the midst of renovating my closet. I have tried to figure out how many inches of shelves I need to fit all of my shoes. It is a daunting figure, but I am sure that the good folks at Home Depot will be able to help me out. And then, on Friday, my husband and I attended a planning meeting for the upcoming Tornado Relief Mission Project that will take place this Labor Day Weekend. And of course, we had to spend precious Friday evening minutes discussing whether or not one really had to have steel-toed boots to participate. . . .

Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, quotes Isaiah, the prophet of the one, true God: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" We human beings certainly seem to think that feet are important, if not beautiful, for we seem to design a remarkable number of ways to cover them.

But have you noticed that the most lovely shoes and boots are surely the least practical? Watch a talk show sometime, when the guests walk on and off the set—isn’t it amazing that a woman can stand in those six-inch heels; that a man can walk without sliding on slick leather souls? And I wonder sometimes how anyone can walk down a hospital or school or office corridor without succumbing to the fashion no-no of just wearing sneakers. It seems that the lovelier we make our feet, the less likely we are to be able to walk very far.

And although God’s servants through the centuries have found our feet to be beautiful, it seems that their value is more in where they can take us than in how beautifully we can gussy them up.

Elijah trudged up the mountain. It was a lonely journey. Elijah was the lone prophet of God in the land. Oh, he wasn’t the only prophet, you understand. Lots and lots of folks thought they could make a pretty good living being a prophet and interpreting the mysteries of the universe to the King. It’s just that the other 400 prophets were the prophets of Baal. The fact that Baal was just a big old statue that sat around doing nothing did not seem to bother the prophets. In fact, I am sure it made their job easier.

Elijah’s God was always suggesting that he make difficult journeys, and listen in trying circumstances. But Elijah didn’t just have beautiful and valuable feet, he had deep integrity, and an open heart. And Elijah heard the voice of God. The people, led astray by their own noisiness, and by the noisy prophets of Baal, were quite convinced that if God existed at all—he would be found in wind and earthquake and fire. Only nature seemed to have enough power and violence to be what God was. And so they tried to convince themselves that the weather and God was the same thing.

But, God was not in the wind. God was not in the earthquake. God was not in the fire.

God spoke from the deep silence. And in the integrity of his heart, Elijah heard the voice of God in the silence. And God let Elijah know that he was not alone, that God was with him—and that through Elijah’s witness, the people would return to God.

And then—God told Elijah to walk down off that mountain and into the wilderness of Damascus. "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" After all that tramping around in desert and wilderness, I’ll bet that Elijah’s feet were dirty and calloused, and yet, we can guess that God saw beauty in their faithful journey.

Early in the morning, Matthew tells us, Jesus came walking toward them on the sea. Have you ever wondered how that felt on his feet? Once Jesus begins his ministry, he seems to be walking all the time! He walks up mountains to pray, or to teach, or to feed a crowd. He walks from village to village to spread the news that God’s kingdom has come now. He walks through fields of wheat, and on dusty paths, and by rocky shores. We don’t know if he was barefoot or if he wore sandals—but we do know that the kind of cushiony, high traction material that makes good hiking boots would not be invented for two thousand years. I would guess that walking on the water after that tramp down the mountain felt pretty good on Jesus’ feet—cooler and softer and less slippery than any walking he had done in awhile.

"How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" Of course, the disciples weren’t really concerned about his feet. They were having trouble with the physics of the thing. Jesus should be in the water, not on it!

But Peter was another one of those servants of God with strong feet and deep integrity and an open heart. While the other disciples were puzzling over the impossibility of it all, Peter called out to Jesus. And when Jesus called him to come, he got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.

And it all would have been fine, really, if Peter had just kept walking, and just kept listening to the voice of Jesus calling his heart. But like the people who heard only the clamorous voice of the prophets of Baal, who heard only the rumble of the earthquake and the roar of the fire, Peter noticed the strong wind and began to sink.

God was not in the wind or that water on that amazing morning when Jesus walked down off the mountain and onto the cool water of the Sea of Galilee. God was calling to Peter.

And here is the good news for us this morning. When Peter failed; when his ears began to take in fear and became dull to the voice of God; when his strong and faithful feet began to sink into the water, when he cried out in fear to the man in whom just a moment ago he believed—then immediately, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.

"How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" For Isaiah and for Paul—this is, of course, a figure of speech, a synecdoche for those of you who, like me, are old English teachers. In a synecdoche a part stands in for the whole. It is not just the feet that are beautiful—the whole person who brings good news is beautiful!

And so, care-worn, lonely old Elijah is beautiful in God’s eyes. And rough, anxious Peter is beautiful to Jesus. And Paul would suggest that we can be beautiful too—whether we wear orthopedic oxfords or Manolo Blahniks.

One of the things that always strikes me about the heroes of the Bible is how physically fit they were—they walked everywhere they went! The thought of all those rocky, dusty paths make my feet hurt! For those of us who live and work in the suburbs, it can be a challenge to have strong feet. In just one day last week, my professional duties took me to a home in Westfield, another in Southwick, a restaurant in back in Westfield, a store just off River Road, and St. Andrew’s Church in Longmeadow. There was no way to make even one of those visits on foot and still have time to make the others. And so, I try to fit in “taking a walk” as a separate activity.

It’s an important thing to do—to keep our bodies fit—and if you want to be better at it yourself, you shouldn’t follow my example. "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

But Paul wasn’t using the image of beautiful feet to stand in for just our bodies—he used the image to mean our whole selves—bodies, yes—but hearts and minds as well. Paul wasn’t concerned with beautiful feet, he was teaching us to have beautiful souls.

In our lessons today, God comes to us—in silence to Elijah, and walking on water to Peter. That is, in seemingly impossible ways—God comes to us, and calls us to walk alongside. God brings the good news, and calls us to bring it too.

And just as we have to practice to be physically fit—we have to practice “soul fitness” as well. Forgive me for saying it—but we have to walk the walk! That is why we gather for worship every Sunday—even when it’s hot, and even when it’s icy, and all those other Sundays in between. And that is why we pray every day, when we have lots to be thankful for, and even when it seems hard to find anything to be thankful for. And that is why we give blood, and work on Habitat projects, and give up part of our Labor Day weekend to help rebuild Springfield.

There is a powerful amount of noise in our world. There were devastating tornadoes in June. But God was not in the tornadoes. There was poor leadership in our nation this month. But God is not in our credit rating. There is a shortage of blood in our hospitals. But God is not in illness and disease.

God calls us to clean up the mess, to raise up effective leaders, to give what we have to those who have less. And when we do, God calls out to us “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news!”

August 7, 2011 Proper 14A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

What to do with the leftovers

2011-08-06T20:12:00.002-04:00

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 14:13-21

For the last several weeks, our Gospel lessons have presented Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is like this; the kingdom of God is like that. . . . Jesus wants us to know that the kingdom of God is a present reality: whatever else the political landscape looks like—whether we are living under harsh Roman oppression in the first century or crazy-making representative government in the twenty-first century—either way, our lives are lived in the constant presence of God.

In today’s Gospel lesson, it seems that Jesus wants to be alone with God. He has much to think about. In Matthew’s Gospel just before the portion that we have today, Jesus goes back to his hometown and begins to teach in the synagogue there. For the first time, his stories don’t get a good response. People know him there—they know his mother and his siblings, they remember him as a boy in the carpenter’s shop with Joseph. The people in Jesus’ hometown are harder to impress than the crowds in the countryside.

Just as he realizes that his ministry is not going so well among his friends and family, Jesus gets some bad news. His cousin, John the Baptist, has been executed by the king. All of this time that Jesus has spent teaching about the true kingdom, the kingdom of God, John has been in prison. Herod, a minor monarch of the region, and a collaborator with the Roman oppressors, this King Herod has John the Baptist beheaded after a wild evening of drinking and lewd dancing.

Now when Jesus heard this, Matthew tells us, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. Discouraged by his family and friends, and grieving over the loss of his first partner in ministry, Jesus just wants to be alone.

The tradition of the Church is that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. And when I read about Jesus getting into that small boat all by himself, because he needs to be alone, I see a very human person. Tired, discouraged, and sad, Jesus just wants to be alone. And who among us doesn’t know how that feels?

But of course, Jesus knew that he was never alone. Jesus came to show us that God is a very present reality. And that is why he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. There he would have taken the time to pray had not the crowds found him. Here were more people who wanted to learn about the kingdom of God. Here were more people looking for the present reality, who followed him on foot, Matthew tells us. Some of them were running, no doubt, to keep up with his boat as he sailed along, and but I’m guessing that some were walking, and some were struggling to get there at all.

And Jesus realized that for him, the constant presence of God was something that would always draw him back to the people. His desire for the refreshment of prayer was not just a sign of his human need for quiet and comfort; it was for Jesus a sign of his present reality—but so were the crowds who yearned to touch him.

The people followed him, running and walking and struggling along. They needed him. Matthew tells us that Jesus had compassion on them. And as the day wore on, the disciples got worried. Talk of the present reality of God was well and good. And curing the sick was compassionate and powerful. But the day was lengthening, and there were a lot of people here. And as the day wore on, everyone was getting hungry.

The disciples begged Jesus to let the people go, so that they could get back to their villages to take care of themselves. But remember that Jesus wants us to know that the kingdom of heaven is right here and right now. Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat."

And we all know the miracle. The disciples had nothing but their own dinner: some loaves of bread, and a couple of fish. It was an adequate picnic for thirteen men, but it was nothing for the five thousand who were in front of them, besides the women and children, who seemed at least as hungry as their husbands and fathers. And Jesus took the loaves and fish, and he thanked God for them, and then there was enough for everyone to eat. It was quite a show. It is one of the few stories about Jesus that is told in every Gospel: Jesus took almost nothing and fed an entire crowd. Jesus did more than just teach about a kingdom of heaven that changed lives; he actually changed lives right before their eyes. Sick people were cured and hungry people were fed. And when we hear this story, it is easy to affirm that Jesus is not just fully human, he is fully divine, as well. The presence of God is a present reality.

And we are deeply grateful that God is a present reality—especially after the week we have just lived together. I am not going to comment on what is going on in the government of our nation except to say this: I am beyond grateful that I am called to put my faith in God. I will try to have compassion for our elected officials this week, but I sure don’t have any confidence in them at the moment. Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus made a miracle and helped these people get along well enough to figure it out?

And while we are wishing for miracles—there are plenty of hungry people today. Half the people of the world live on less than $2 a day. Half the people of the world couldn’t by a loaf of bread and a whole fish in a month, much less for a single meal. Why isn’t Jesus making a feeding miracle for them?

And then, much closer to home, this has been a very difficult time for our parish family. Most of you have heard by now that this week the Vestry of this church made the very difficult decision to close the Preschool at Atonement. After 51 years of service to the little children of our community, we simply cannot afford to keep the school open. Just because the decision makes good financial sense doesn’t make it an easy or happy thing. A little miracle of enrollment or endowment would have come in handy this week—it would save us worry over the future of our teachers and our children. It would save us from the trouble of re-envisioning how our ministry will proceed from this building.

We know that God is with us, a present reality amidst political turmoil and uncertain times. And so I wonder, 21 centuries later, what are we to make of this story of the loaves and the fishes? We, who come here Sunday by Sunday, and acknowledge the present reality of God—where is the miracle for us?

We usually say that the miracle of this story is that the loaves and the fishes were multiplied. Five loaves and two fish were not enough to feed them, and yet everyone had enough to eat. Something happened that could not happen, and that is a miracle.

But it seems to that there is more to this miracle than just enough to eat. If Jesus is divine, it stands to reason that he could make any kind of a miracle that he wanted to make. If all that Jesus wanted was for the crowd that day to have a nourishing meal, wouldn’t he just have multiplied enough bread and enough fish to go around? Why did he make more than they needed? It seems wasteful—or at least untidy—that there were so many baskets of food left over.

The multiplication of the loaves and the fishes is a sign of the presence of God on that day and in that place, to be sure. But maybe the miracle in this story is not that God is present. The presence of God is just the reality. Maybe the miracle in this story is the opportunity that God’s presence gave the disciples. Maybe the miracle is the opportunity that God’s presence gives all of us.

Before the food is distributed, Jesus looks at his disciples and says, you give them something to eat. Later, Matthew tells us, . . . all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.

Twelve baskets full of leftovers: twelve like the twelve tribes of Israel. That is, there were enough leftovers for everyone to have enough. Twelve baskets of leftovers: twelve like the twelve disciples. That is, there were enough baskets so that everyone had the opportunity to feed the hungry—the ones who were there right then—and the ones to whom those baskets were taken later. You give them something to eat.

Sunday by Sunday, we come to this place, and we are nourished by Jesus, the bread of heaven. Sunday by Sunday, we know the present reality of God. And Sunday by Sunday we are filled, and we find that there is more than enough. We find that we have what we need and more besides. And we know that the miracle is the astonishing abundance of God—that we are full and there is more to nourish others. And more, we know that the miracle is the amazing generosity of God who allows us to participate in the feeding. As we take what we have been given and share it with the ones that God loves, we know the miracle.

July 31, 2011 Proper 13A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Resurrection: Not Just for Easter!

2011-07-30T21:22:00.000-04:00

For the Westfield News

From the Greater Westfield Clergy Association

Friday, July 29, 2011

Because the Greater Westfield Clergy Association shares the privilege of writing this column, I only contribute four or five times a year. But my parishioners are devoted to the Westfield News, so occasionally, one will tell me that he or she saw an article with my name on it. They are usually good enough not to say, “Wasn’t that what your sermon was about last week?” Most often, I write about what is on my heart and mind—and that is usually whatever sermon I have just preached.

What is on my heart this week is resurrection. Or rather, my longing for it. On Monday evening, the Vestry (our governing board) made the terribly difficult decision to close the Preschool at the Church of the Atonement. For 51 years, the Preschool has served children and parents of Westfield and the surrounding communities. Atonement Preschool graduates are everywhere in Westfield—and far beyond. A family friend who lives in New York City started her education in the rooms below my office!

Declining enrollment has made it difficult to continue the program in the last several years, and this week we faced the reality that we simply do not have the money to fund the program for an entire year. It was very hard to make a decision about money when our decision about people would be entirely different. Our dedicated director and teaching staff, our caring parents, and our fabulous children make Atonement Preschool a fun, loving, nurturing environment. Who doesn’t want fun, love, and nourishment? But without funds, the program cannot exist.

Jesus spent his years of ministry caring for the least and the lost, the marginalized and the oppressed. He taught, he fed, he healed. The people loved him—and grew in their love of one another. His death at the hands of oppressive civil and religious authorities might have ended that culture of love and concern. But God would not let love die: Jesus was resurrected. His return to life—his return to love and concern and nurture—meant new life for all of us.

We at the Church of the Atonement are experiencing a kind of death—the loss of a beloved program. We are concerned about the teachers and children we will no longer see on a regular basis. But we know that the fun, and love, and nurture that existed here for 51 years will continue in other forms. We know that we now have new and different opportunities to offer God’s love to this community. We are already eagerly exploring just how that will be—just what plans God has for us. God does not let love die. We have resurrection on our hearts.

by The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Rector, The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Astonishing Woman Baker

2011-07-30T21:14:00.000-04:00

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

For three weeks now, our Gospel lessons have been Jesus’ parables of the kingdom. For most of us here, I think, the idea of the kingdom of God is a spiritual tenet—because few of us have lived in the kind of kingdom that Jesus’ followers knew. The first people who heard these parables lived under Roman rule. They knew the physical reality of a kingdom, and most of them experienced it as deeply oppressive. But two thousand years later, we are happy with our participatory democracy. Well maybe this week we are not so happy—but if the behavior of our elected representatives leaves us less than pleased, at least we know that we can vote them out at the next election!

Maybe it is because we live in a democracy that is founded on principles of freedom and religious tolerance that we have grown accustomed to thinking of “the kingdom of heaven” as something that affects our spiritual lives—or rather something that will affect our spiritual lives after we leave this material life.

But Jesus was teaching about much more than what would happen to us in the sweet, bye and bye. Jesus was talking about life right now, life right here in this world. As Paul tells us in today’s lesson from his letter to the Romans, neither death, nor life. . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So when Jesus tells his parables of the kingdom of heaven, he is not getting us ready for life in paradise. He is trying to get us to think about right now.

Of course, I know a lot of people, and sometimes I am one of them, who come to church exactly because it is nice to shut out the world for an hour a week. It is nice to come into this space—not as cool as we would like it to be today, of course—but still a holy place, a place where shadows glow in the colors of the stained glass and candlelight, where we are accustomed to speaking in hushed tones, where the reverberation of the organ seems to tune our hearts to hear God’s whisper.

And on a week like this week—when our government seems to be heading toward financial chaos, when the capital of world-wide peace is racked by a crazed terrorist, when nature seems intent on bringing us to unknown levels of discomfort—well, the idea of a weekly escape seems like a good thing.

There’s only one problem with the notion. It is not what Jesus taught.

Jesus cared for the people right where they were. He healed them and fed them and taught them. He cared deeply for the least and the lost of society. He gathered the children to himself, not because they were cute, but because they had so little power in their society. He engaged in theological discussion—sometimes with scribes and Pharisees, but much more often with women and fishermen, with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus cared for the lives of the people, and so he cared that they understood that even as they suffered under the oppression of Roman rule, they were important citizens of the kingdom of God. Today’s Gospel lesson gives us five quick images of the kingdom of God.[1]

The kingdom of God is like the tiny mustard seed that grows into a plant so large that birds may nest in it. And so we know that the kingdom of God can grow from the least auspicious beginning.

The kingdom of God is like treasure hidden in a field. When someone finds the treasure he first he tucks it safely away in a field and then he buys the field. And so we know that the kingdom of heaven is worth obtaining and protecting.

The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great price, so beautiful that the pearl broker gives all that he has to get it. And so we know that the kingdom of heaven is worth giving up all that we have.

The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet thrown into the sea that catches all manner of fish and is full to overflowing when it is pulled up. And so we know that the kingdom of heaven is available to all.

My favorite of Jesus’ images of the kingdom is this one: The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. There is a wonderful commentary on these parables, written by Robert Farrar Capon. Father Capon is an Episcopal priest, a theologian and a cookbook writer. In fact, I first came across Father Capon’s work when I was a teenager learning how to cook. Capon points out a couple of things about this parable that may have seemed obviously striking to Jesus’ first listeners.

First of all, Jesus uses a woman as the agent in his parable—just an early acknowledgement of what we—or at least of what our children—have taken for granted, that women make for just as good a metaphor about God’ action in the world as men do. It may seem obvious to us that Jesus was speaking to everyone, men and women—but to the first ones who heard the parables Jesus’ inclusion of women was a shocking upset to their world view.

Another thing that we might miss that was obvious to Jesus’ listeners is the abundance of the bread that the woman bakes. As Father Capon tells us, “Three measures . . . is a bushel of flour, for crying out loud! That’s 128 cups! That’s 16 five-pound bags!” (Kingdom, Grace, Judgement, p. 100). For those of you who enjoy the visual image: if Father Capon’s calculations are correct, then the woman in the parable mixed the yeast into enough flour to fill 40 of these bags. I baked bread for our Eucharist this morning, using just half of this bag of flour—about three cups. I made enough bread to offer Communion to about 150 people! The woman in Jesus’ parable took that yeast, and mixed it into enough flour to offer a mouthful of bread to 12,000. If it sounds like a lot of bread to you, imagine how you would feel if you were truly hungry this morning. Imagine how you would feel if you rarely had a meal that filled you up. The woman in Jesus’ parable was making an astonishing amount of bread. She was making enough bread to feed many, many people. And so we know that the kingdom of heaven is amazingly abundant and astonishingly nourishing.

There is a third obvious thing about this parable that may be easy for us to miss. The yeast and the water in the bread are mixed together from the very beginning. When we make bread these days, it is usually with dried granules of yeast, but in Jesus’ day, the baker kept back a lump of dough from a batch of bread, and mixed it with water and kept the gluey mess in a jar or pot until the next time she made the bread. The yeast and the water went into the flour together. Indeed the flour never knew the yeast without the water that carried it. And so we know another thing about the kingdom of God—just as the flour never knows the water without the yeast; we have never known a time outside of God’s grace.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. Jesus worked with what was obvious to show the people the astonishing love of God.

Jesus taught us all he knew about the kingdom of heaven, about the new life lived in the Spirit of God. He taught us that is life that can start small, but it will grow big and strong. He taught us that it is worthy of protection, and more valuable than any other possession we might have. He taught us that the new life lived in the Spirit is available to all of us. And in the parable of the woman baker, he taught us that the Spirit of God has been there all along, and yearns for us to join in the new life we are offered.

Perhaps that is the most astonishing thing of all about the kingdom of heaven—we are invited to participate in it. Paul says it this way: The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. That is, even though we don’t really know what we are doing, the Spirit is right here with us, holding us up, helping us to live in God’s love right now—in the heat, whether we are poor or rich, whether we live in places of political stability or frightening fragility. But there is even more—because with God, there is always more—and that is, we have the power to be the ones who bring God’s love to the people. When we join in the new life lived in the Spirit of God, then we can be like the bread that is mixed and kneaded, is leavened and rises, and expands in the baking to nourish all the ones whom God loves.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

July 24, 2011 Proper 12A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

[1] This would be as good a place as any to say that I am indebted to the Rev. Robert Farrar Capon for his insightful interpretation of this parable. See especially his three-part work, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 2002.

Weed Seeds

2011-07-30T21:11:00.000-04:00

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

And he told them many things in parables (Matthew 13:3a). . . .So begins the section of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus teaches the crowds about the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like this; the kingdom of heaven is like that . . .. And usually, at the end of each little commonplace story, Jesus says something just a bit edgy. At the end of the parable we have in today’s gospel, he says, Let anyone with ears listen! Now, there were great crowds gathered around him, to hear what he had to say. Of course they were going to listen! It is almost as if he is daring[1] them to really hear him. It is almost as if he said, “Are your minds and hearts really open to what I have to teach you?”

Now what Jesus wants to teach about is the kingdom of heaven. And the truth is the crowds that were following him had much more experience with kingdoms than we do. Kingdoms are about the few who have power and the many who are oppressed. Kingdoms are about the few who have enough wealth to get what they need and the many who struggle to get through the day on what is left over. The crowd who followed Jesus around and heard his parables for the first time knew about kings—the king, or at this time in their history, the emperor in Rome—had all the power and all the wealth. And just in case there was any bit of power or wealth left anywhere in the known world, the emperor sent his legions in to occupy the territory and plunder whatever they could find.

I look around this room and I have to wonder, how much meaning do we get out of the image of “kingdom”? We got rid of the last king that was bothering us, and that was over 200 years ago! Oh, we in this room might not have all the power and money we want. We might feel oppressed by our tax burden, or wish we had more power when it comes to getting an insurance company to pay a claim, or making sure our kids are better off than we are. But the kind of oppressed, even dispossessed, understanding of kingdom that Jesus’ first listeners had? Probably not.

Well, when the people first hear this parable, they may know more about kingdoms than we do. But we know more about Jesus than they did, because we know about the cross and we know about the resurrection. We know that Jesus came to the people—not to save their lives from a few years of tyranny and oppression. Jesus came to give them something altogether new—new life lived in the Spirit of God. And this wasn’t a gift to be opened sometime in the future, either. This gift of new life was not reserved for those who died. New life in the Spirit of God is life to be lived right now. But how do we do it?

Listen! says Jesus. And then he tells his little parable. A man sowed good seed in his field. That night an enemy comes along and sows weeds. The man who sows the good seed is out in his field at the usual time, where everyone can see and know what he is doing. The enemy sows his bad seed when everyone else is sleeping. No one knows anything about the sabotage until the plants begin to grow. But right away, we know something about the kingdom: good things happen when everyone is around to see and know what is going on. Bad things happen in secret.

As the wheat and the weeds grow up, the workers on the farm want to take out the weeds, but they look so much like the wheat and they are so tangled in with the wheat that the farmer knows that they cannot be removed without damaging the crop. And the crop is important, because the fruit of the wheat will become bread that will nourish the people.

And now we know more about the kingdom: sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between what is good and what is bad, but there in one whose eye is on everything. And we know that what is good will serve the people.

It seems like such a simple story that it is kind of surprising that Jesus has to explain it. But Jesus doesn’t use the parables because they are easy. A few verses before today’s Gospel, Jesus explains that he is using the parables precisely because the people are having such a hard time understanding about God. He quotes the prophet Isaiah,

“For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn—and I would heal them” (Matthew 13:15). Jesus tells the parables to try to find a new way into the minds and hearts of the people, so that he can heal them—that is, so that he can bring them closer to God.

Later in the chapter, Matthew tells us, Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing (13:34). That is, Jesus is telling us everything he has to say about the kingdom of God. Jesus is telling us everything he has to say about the new life lived in the Spirit of God—but it will be hard for us to open our minds and our hearts.

And so Jesus explains his little parable, using a neat allegory. Jesus tells us that the seed in his parable are children—the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one. They grow up together, these seeds. They look very nearly the same. It is not possible to tell which of the seeds are the wheat and which are the weeds—it is not possible to tell until the fruit of each can be examined. But when it is possible to tell the difference—then the farmer will separate the weeds from the wheat. The weeds, which are useless, will be burned—but the wheat? The wheat will become bread, and the bread will feed the people.

The first house that Bill and I lived in had a generous yard, with a small garden bordered by large rocks. Every year we planted a few tomato plants and some zucchini, and lots of herbs and lettuce.

As vegetable gardens go, it was not very much, but it always tickled me to eat a salad that came from my own yard. We were never very tidy, and the weeds often grew up in and around things. A couple of times every summer we would spend a couple of hours on our hands and knees pulling out the bad and admiring the good. Toward the end of August, we would go on vacation for a couple of weeks, and when we returned, we would be greeted by herbs gone to seed and zucchini that looked more like clown shoes than food. In the next few weeks, we would harvest our pumpkins and sometimes even clean things up a little before it got cold.

We made the garden a little bigger and a little more organized every year. Then came the summer, 20 years ago, that I realized that I would be having my third child right in the middle of the growing season. Somehow, the thought of tending the garden while tending two children and a newborn baby just defeated me. If I couldn’t really keep the garden tidy and the herbs trimmed back without a babe-in-arms, how on earth was I going to do it this year?

So I bought one of those containers called “Meadow in a Can.” Sprinkle this on the ground, read the directions, and in a few short weeks you will have a beautiful meadow of wildflowers! Well, I handed the can to Bill and put my feet up to wait for the baby to arrive. Edward came in July as the flowers were just starting to show their faces. All through the summer we were treated to flowers and flowering grasses in a variety of sizes and colors. It was quite lovely and it attracted butterflies, and unlike the baby, it never had to be tended—it just grew.

After the first frost, Bill mowed it down. The next summer, with Edward firmly established as a member of the family, and Julia and William busily engaged in day camps and swimming lessons, I felt ready to tackle the garden again. And so Bill tilled the little plot, and we planted our usual collection of lettuce and herbs, tomatoes and squash.

I am guessing that some of you knowledgeable people have discerned my folly. That “Meadow in a Can” could have been called “Can o’ Weeds”! When Bill tilled the garden, his careful work aerated the soil and spread everything around, making a lovely, fertile field for all of those beautiful perennial wildflowers and flowering grasses. And so along with my lettuce and basil, tomatoes and thyme, grew a thick and tenacious bed of weeds—weeds with beautiful flowers, to be sure, but weeds that all but hid the tomatoes and got all mixed up with the tarragon and tender nasturtiums.

But really, the only difference between the weeds and the good plants were the use to which they were put. There was the summer when the fruit that nourished me were the beautiful flowers that grew without my tending them. And there were the summers when what nourished me were the wonderful vegetables and herbs that grew despite the weeds and flowering grasses.

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. Jesus is telling us everything he has to say about the new life lived in the Spirit of God. The gift of new life is freely given to all of the children of God. We are like the seed scattered in a fertile garden. We will grow and grow and we have the possibility of bearing fruit. Jesus tells us that in the kingdom of God, good fruit will be like the wheat, that feeds God’s people: the wheat that heals them and makes them whole.

The plants grow and grow, always under the watchful eye of the one who sows the seeds. And in the end, the only way to tell whether we are the weeds or the wheat will be whether we serve the people.

Amen.

July 17, 2011 Proper 11A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

[1] This would be as good a place as any to say that I am indebted to the Rev. Robert Farrar Capon for his insightful interpretation the parables of the Kingdom. See especially his three-part work, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 2002. Fr. Capon is a retired Episcopal priest who also writes elegantly and deliciously on food.

The Burden

2011-07-16T20:14:00.000-04:00

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145: 8 - 15 ; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

When I was a little girl, I had a picture book about a silly little boy and his mother. The mother would send the boy on errands, and he would try his best to remember what he was supposed to do, but he usually messed it up. He would follow the directions that his mother had given him for the task before the one he was doing now. She sent him to the henhouse to gather some eggs, and he tried to carry them home in his hands. But of course, some of them fell out of his hands, and broke. So his mother told him that when gathering eggs, he should take his hat off his head and put the eggs in his hat to carry home. The next day, his mother sent him to visit his aunt. His aunt gave him a pound of butter to take home to his mother, so of course, he put the butter in his hat. And he put the hat on his head. And the butter melted down his dusty little face as he walked home. My favorite picture in the book was on the very last page. The little boy’s mother made several pies, and she set them out on the step outside the kitchen door to cool, before she went out for a walk. On her way out the door, she turned to her little boy and said, “Do you see those pies, cooling on the steps? You mind how you step on those pies.” And of course, the last picture in the book is of the little boy, stepping very carefully into the center of each pie.

Jean Kerr, the playwright and humorist, wrote a very funny little book of essays called Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. In it, she tells stories about her literal-minded young sons. She was having a dinner party, and as she relates it, she “told them not to go into the living room, not to use the guest towels in the bathroom, and not to leave the bicycles on the front steps. However, I neglected to tell them not to eat the daisies on the dining room table. This was a serious omission, as I discovered when I came upon my centerpiece—a charming three-point arrangement of green stems.”[1]

The funny in these stories comes from the children’s lack of experience and knowledge. The kids aren’t trying to be wasteful or naughty—they just don’t know any better. And so their parents try to lift them up by teaching them to avoid those mistakes.

In our house, when my mother wanted us to pay close attention to something, she would wag her finger and say, “Now mind how you step on those pies!” My friends would look at me as though Mom had lost her mind—but I knew that she meant that I should be careful with her things. I’ll bet that long after the Kerr youngsters had given up sampling the flower arrangements, “please don’t eat the daisies” was on the list of household rules—and they understood that it meant to pay attention to their mother’s plans.

All of which is to say that we live a life that is more than literal. Sometimes the best way to teach something is to say what you don’t mean—“please don’t eat the daisies” instead of “pay attention to me”—“mind how you step on those pies!” instead of “be careful!”

Some 500 years before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Zechariah told the people what it would be like when the Lord led them out of slavery and back into their homeland. The king would lead them. Think of the king, strong and powerful—ruler of everything—rich in might and material. Zechariah tells us, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey. Wait a minute—the king is humble? How can he be the king? Doesn’t a king need arrogance to get through the day?

Not according to this prophet—according to Zechariah, the king who finds favor with God is the one who is powerful and humble at the same time. Powerful and humble are words that just don’t go together. Where are we going to find a king like that?

Those of us who have observed Palm Sunday year after year know exactly where we will find just that kind of king—the one who is powerful and humble, both.

Jesus spoke to the crowd and tried to explain to them the craziness of their culture. They were like children playing games. They ignored one another. They misunderstood the good things they saw. John the Baptist lived a spare and simple life—he drank no alcohol, he gave no thought to what he ate or wore—and the people said he was nuts. And then Jesus came, and he knew how to party! He was happy to sit down to a good meal with anyone who asked him, outcasts, sinners, and Pharisees, too. And the very same people said that he was a glutton and a drunkard.

Jesus spoke to the crowd and tried to get them to understand that power—political power—economic power—cultural power—power in and of itself has no way to get anything except more power.

But Jesus knew the truth that Zechariah foretold all those years before—in order to live in the power of God; we must be able to take on humility. Humility doesn’t speak any better to our generation than it did to Jesus’ generation. It doesn’t make sense. We spend our lives trying to learn our way up and out of the humility that leads us to step in the pies and eat the daisies. What is powerful about humility?

Mind how you step on those pies, children! Please don’t eat the daisies! By talking about power and humility in the same teaching, Jesus is trying to help us understand something that goes against our reason. When we are powerful, we are in the position to get more power—and yet, Jesus would have us know that we won’t be any better off with more power than we were before.

I think that is what St. Paul is trying to get at. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Paul was one of the powerful men of his generation. He had a good education, he had good business connections, he had plenty of money. And if he had continued in that way—a multi-national businessman of the first century, he would have died, rich and powerful—and we never would have heard of him.

But one day, God knocked him down and blinded him. And from his humble position, there on the dusty road to Damascus, he met the Risen Jesus. Jesus recognized the incredible gifts that Paul had used to acquire all that cultural power. And Jesus knew that if Paul were able to accept the power of God—to use his gifts to spread the love of God—that God could change the world.

Triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey. There is no record that Paul actually rode a donkey—but we know that he embraced humility. He gave up his career as a wealthy, multi-national merchant. He became an itinerant preacher, making just enough money to support himself (when he wasn’t in jail) by making and repairing tents. Quite a humble profession for the man who spread the Good News of Jesus all over the known world.

All this weekend and into tomorrow, we celebrate a most glorious experiment in government. The founders of this nation were proud, and smart, and ultimately very powerful. And the best of them knew that the only way our government would work was if it served each and every citizen. Insofar as we fall short of that goal, our nation is not powerful or good enough. Insofar as we are able to serve—even the youngest, even the poorest, even the most recent newcomer—well then, the resounding booming of the fireworks last night is a just a pale imitation of the real power we can wield.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Remember that it is Jesus who is saying this. He is gentle and humble of heart? Jesus is the power of God come into the world! His yoke is easy? His burden is light? Jesus carries the weight of the world on his shoulders!

Children, mind how you step on those pies! Jesus begs us to accept his teaching on power and humility with the open minds of children. Not because he doesn’t want us to use the gifts of intelligence and courage that God has given us—but because Jesus knows that what he can offer us requires all of our trust and patience to accept.

Jesus allows us to walk with him, to bear the yoke of his burden with him. That is, Jesus calls us to walk beside him and work with him as he cares for the world he loves so much. And together—together with Jesus—together with our neighbor—we will live in the power of God.

[1] Jean Kerr, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc, 1954, p. 26.

July 3, 2011: Proper 9A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

We are not left behind

2011-05-27T22:18:00.001-04:00

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

May 22, 2011; Year A

Acts 7:55-60; John 14:1-14

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. For those of us who are baptized, these might be the sweetest words we will ever hear. We are in! We are baptized into the life of Jesus. And really, that is all we need, that little bit of water, that sign of the Cross on our foreheads, and we are good to go!

And where are we going? Why to heaven, of course. If you have been watching TV news or reading the newspaper this week, perhaps you heard about the Christian broadcaster who predicted that the beginning of the end of the world would come with an earthquake at 6 pm on May 21^st, and all the righteous would be taken straight to heaven. Well, it’s been 6 pm on May 21^st all over the world by now—and here we all are on May 22^nd. So maybe he calculated incorrectly, or we maybe are all the un-righteous, and God didn’t want any of us.

A lot of folks have had fun with this prediction. On Facebook, I had the opportunity to join a world-wide party: the post-rapture looting. The idea was that everyone who didn’t get to heaven yesterday would go around today (after attending church, of course) grabbing the stuff that the righteous left behind.

Well, here we are, the world has not ended. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for any post-rapture parties. There is a stack of bills on my desk at home waiting to be paid. And a couple of folders of paperwork on my desk here at church waiting to be gone through. And a half an acre of weeds—I mean lawn—that needs mowing. And laundry, and thank you notes, and mending, and that’s just my stuff! And there are children in Westfield who went to bed hungry last night, and whole towns in Haiti waiting to be rebuilt, and women in Africa who have no chance at all to be educated.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, says Jesus. And he is saying that to his disciples, whose troubles were surely different from ours, but whose troubles were just as many, and just as consuming. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. Jesus is offering these words of comfort to the disciples as he is preparing them for his Crucifixion. He knows what is coming. He knows that he will not be with them forever—that they will have to go on without him.

That is, Jesus knows what every human person knows. We are born in human bodies. And we live lives that are almost always mixtures of sadness and joy, of easy times and difficulty. And after living, our bodies die. But Jesus knows more. Jesus knows God. Jesus came from the heart of God, to live with us—to show us that God understands how we live. But Jesus did not come from God just to touch us, or just to comfort us. Jesus came from God to call us to God.

We human beings, we created ones, cannot know any more than what we have experienced. We know the importance of our lives. We know the importance of our sadness and joys. And the culture that we live in reinforces our interest in self. You might say that our culture reinforces our selfishness.

And so Philip says, Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied. And you can understand why Jesus would be disappointed in Philip’s short-sightedness. Look at all the trouble Jesus went to, to experience human life. And there he is, preparing calmly to face pain and death—and Philip still doesn’t get it. By knowing Jesus, we are experiencing the life of God.

This is not easy stuff. It seems to require us to live on two levels—the level of our experience, our day-to-day lives, and at the same time, to live a spiritual existence. It’s not so hard to live the day-to-day. We can see it, and feel it and touch it, and share those sensations with those around us.

It is our spiritual existence that is so hard to describe, and explain. But, thanks be to God, we can live spiritual lives right now—we don’t have to wait until our bodies die. And we don’t have to wait until the end of the world. We can live our lives as earthly and earthy human beings, and as the spiritual children of a loving God at the same time. And so, whatever may happen at the end of the world, we will not be left behind, because we are already there.

The call of God to live a spiritual life comes to us at our earthly birth. It is God’s gift to us, that we are composed of body, mind, and spirit. And just as we use our minds to understand our bodies: we think and we do—we can also use our minds to understand our spirits—we love God by loving others as we love ourselves.

Body, Mind, Spirit: three ways of knowing that form a complete self. I do not know why the world did not end yesterday, but I do know this: We don’t have to wait for the world to end in order to live our lives in God. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, says Jesus. That is how Jesus understood his Body, Mind, and Spirit.

And it was not a holy accident that Jesus described himself in three ways. Because the God that we love and worship is so often expressed in three ways: three ways, because one or two are not enough to express the completeness of God. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—or if you like, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. That is: the essence of God is loving relationship. The Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier know one another and love one another and exist within one another to the point that the three persons are truly one loving relationship. And the gift of God to us is that each of us has the capacity to understand our own selves in that same relational way: body, mind, and spirit make a complete person.

And it is comforting to know that in this life of joy and sadness, of difficulty and ease—it is comforting to know that Jesus understands us—indeed that Jesus made us to be capable of knowing and living more than what we can learn from our bodily senses alone.

But Jesus did not become one of us just for comfort. Jesus became one of us to claim us for God, to call us to God. A group of people thought that yesterday was going to be the end of the world. A lot of folks spent all their money, and gave away all their stuff, and stopped living their ordinary lives, expecting that today they would be with Jesus in heaven. And today, those same folks are very disappointed.

And can’t you just hear the voice of Jesus, Have I been with you all this time, . . .and still you do not know me?

It can be very heady—all this talk about the nature of God and the nature of humans and how we understand our existence. It can be so heady that we are in danger of getting lost in our minds—and leaving our bodies and our spirits far behind. And still there are the hungry and the homeless, the sick and the needy—the bodies and spirits of others who need care.

Four hundred years ago, an English priest and poet named George Herbert reflected on this passage of the Gospel—and on the Revelation to John that describes the end of the world. Herbert was one of the brightest men of his time. His poems are intricate puzzles of intellectual and spiritual puns. But he wasn’t a professor at Oxford or Cambridge. He wasn’t the chaplain to royalty. George Herbert was not well-connected by birth or acquaintance, and so a choice appointment was not for him.

He was sent as pastor to the parish of Fugglestone and Bemerton—villages as far buried in the English countryside as they sound. As elevated as his mind was, it was intricately bound to his body and his spirit. “Nothing is little in God’s service,” he wrote in The Country Parson, a kind of manual for priests and pastors. And then he urged pastors to visit their flock even in “the poorest cottage, . . .and though it smell never so loathsomely; for both God is there also, and those for whom God died.”

In The Call, George Herbert’s poem on our Gospel passage, he plays with that word call. Who is calling whom? Is God calling us, or are we calling God? “Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life,” Herbert begs God to come to him personally. And here we thought that it was our culture that invented selfishness!

“Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength,” and the poet struggles to understand Father, Son, and Spirit in ways that will speak to the struggles and joys that fill his days.

“Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart” and finally he realizes that everything that he does is wrapped up in the joy, and love, and heart of God. The poet calls God to come to him—and receives the gift of God calling him to enter God’s heart of joy and love.

Four hundred years later, things are not so very different. We have a choice. We can live our lives, with their individual joys and struggles, and wait for God to come and get us. We can try to order our lives so that we will not be left behind when God gathers the righteous.

Or, we can realize that God calls us, right now. We can realize that it is God’s call that makes us righteous, not anything that we can do on our own. And we can live our lives: bodies, minds, and spirits together, in the service of God and God’s beloved people.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Hooray for Hollywood

2011-03-05T00:06:00.000-05:00

The Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 27, 2011; Year A

Isaiah 49: 8-16a; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5; Matthew 6:24-34

A generation of us came of age with the Star Wars movies. Many of us girls spent a Hallowe’en with big cinnamon buns pinned to our hair and covering our ears, pretending to be Princess Leia. I, myself, had a formal gown—well, I will spare you the details, but it flowed prettily; I left off the honey buns—and the fashion was influenced by the movie to be sure.

Even if you don’t remember all the details, maybe you remember Carrie Fischer as Princess Leia: “Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope—over and over again, projecting her hologram onto different frequencies and storing them on the cute little robot R2D2—and hoping that someone would find him, see the message, and get Obi-wan Kenobi to save the Rebel Alliance.

I thought of Princess Leia this week as I read today’s lessons. “Help me Obi-wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” Well, no, he wasn’t. In fact, it took Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and a pair of robots and a big thing that looked like he was covered with a 1970’s shag carpet, and a whole cast of other worldly creatures to beat back the evil Empire—at least until the next movie.

It turns out that Obi-wan wasn’t their hope at all. He told them, and showed them, that their hope was something he called the Force—a power that flowed through anyone who paid attention to it. The Force was a power that could be used to save all the creatures that populated that galaxy long ago and far away.

The Force was their only hope. St. Paul said it this way, [T]he Lord. . . will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. It seems that it is not only in the movies that the forces of darkness and light are at war.

Paul’s concern was that the new Christians in Corinth were judging one another. Who was faithful? Who was a good leader? Who followed God’s laws the most faithfully? All that time and concern spent judging took their attention away from those who needed them. But most important of all, judging was not their job. Even Paul, who, as he was always happy to say, had not done anything wrong—even Paul would be judged by God.

And God gives the power that can save the people.

Well, perhaps you don’t remember the Star Wars saga. Maybe you are more of a Tom Hanks fan. It’s hard not to like Tom Hanks—such a friendly face—I can’t think of a time when he wasn’t playing the good guy. I am thinking back today to his splendid tour de force Castaway. For nearly two thirds of the movie, Tom Hanks is alone on the screen. As the Fed-ex executive Chuck Nolan, he survives a plane crash and washes up on a beautiful and deserted tropical island.

We learn right away that Chuck doesn’t believe in God. The dead body of the pilot washes up on the island, too, and Chuck does his best to bury him. And with that proper kindness done, he looks up to heaven, and then directly at the camera, “Well, that’s that,” he says, at the time when we were expecting him to say the Lord’s Prayer, or a prayer of some kind, or an acknowledgement of a power greater than he is. “Well, that’s that.”

I said that Chuck Nolan was alone on the island, but of course, he wasn’t really. Shortly after the crash, Chuck finds several of the Fed-ex packages, washed up on shore from the wreckage. He opens them methodically, after carefully setting one aside. That one is a beautifully addressed package—along with the name of the recipient is a wonderfully painted set of golden wings. Perhaps, we think as we watch, there is something of God in those wings.

But the winged package is soon forgotten as Chuck opens the other boxes. In one he finds a Wilson volleyball, in another a ballerina’s tutu, in another a pair of ice skates. Chuck is remarkably Stoic throughout this experience, but the day that he tries to create fire by rubbing sticks together, he finally loses it. After hours of rubbing the sticks, his hands have become raw, and finally they slip and the rough stick opens a wound. With his bloody hand, he picks up the Wilson volleyball and throws it as hard as he can, screaming and cursing.

A little later, we see him, fire successfully made, talking to what looks like a head—and gradually we see that it is the Wilson volleyball—the bloody print of Chuck’s palm has left an impression that looks like a face, and he has managed to weave dried grasses into slits in the top of the ball to look like a shock of blond hair. Chuck names his new friend Wilson. And Chuck talks everything over with Wilson, including, eventually, how to build a raft to get them out to the open sea where Chuck is rescued.

At the end of the movie, we see the golden wings again, when Chuck props the beautifully decorated package against the front door of a house—years after the plane crashed, Fed-Ex finally delivers.

You could argue that Chuck’s guardian angel was there all along in those wings—that package whose delivery gave Chuck a purpose. Or you could argue that Chuck turned a volleyball into a false god when his bloody hand print made what looked like a face. Or you could remember what Chuck did not, but what saved him anyway. Isaiah proclaimed the Lord’s faithfulness: I will not forget you.  See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.

But enough of all this adventure. Many of us are old enough to remember a sweet little story called The Lilies of the Field. And if your mind didn’t immediately wander toward Star Wars or Castaway during today’s readings, I am guessing that I am not the only one who had a flash of Sidney Poitier trying to communicate with a stubborn nun whose German was much better than her English.

Poitier plays Homer Smith, an unemployed construction worker who is driving through a little desert town in the Southwest when his car overheats. He stops at a ranch house and asks the woman in charge, who seems to be the mother of many grown daughters, if he can have some water for his steaming radiator.

Now here is a story where we don’t have to look very far for faith. Mother Maria and her tiny convent have fled Communist East Germany. They are trying to scratch out a living by growing vegetables in the desert. They dream of building a church so that the people of the town can worship properly, not waiting for the circuit riding priest to show up once a week with his Altar in the back of station wagon.

Homer Smith is the answer to Mother Maria’s prayer. She is sure that she has prayed him right into her life and her plans. Homer Smith has never seen a nun before, and it seems unlikely to him that he would be the answer to anyone’s prayer. But he begins to get fired up by the unlikely project of building a beautiful church all by himself.

The story is kind of predictable, but that doesn’t make it less fun to watch. Mother Maria learns to become flexible—maybe her prayers do not control God after all. And Homer learns to trust others and accept help—maybe he can enjoy the fruit of his labor even if others help him put the heavy roof beams in place.

Jesus says, Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?

I didn’t just remind you of three movies because tonight we will watch the Academy Awards, and this night is at least as important to our culture as any old Super Bowl. Each of these and many, many other movies, and books, and TV shows—products of our irreligious, unfaithful American culture—each of these stories echo our own stories.

We all want to be saved. We want to know God and to know that we are loved by God. Many of us think that all it takes is some hard work, and we can get there ourselves. Some us are wise enough to look for friends along the way. And so Princess Leia looks for a Jedi knight, and Chuck Nolan talks to a volleyball. Mother Maria thought that she could pray her way to salvation, and that Homer was the answer to that prayer.

Princess Leia staked her hope on Obi-wan Kenobi. Well, she was wrong about the person—but she wasn’t wrong about the hope. The Force was there all along. Chuck Nolan thought he was alone, talking to a volleyball. But volleyballs don’t provide that courage and ingenuity that brought Chuck home. Mother Maria thought that her prayers directed God to send Homer to build her a “shapel”—but the community that Homer and Maria built was on a foundation laid before either of them was even born.

God loves us already, there is nothing we can do to earn it. Jesus sat on the rock and opened his hands to the crowds when he said, Do not worry. Through those same loving hands, Jesus was nailed to the cross. And Isaiah knew it already, when he gave us the word of the Lord, See I have inscribed you in the palm of my hands.

Amen.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Prayer Shawl Ministry

2011-03-04T23:10:00.001-05:00

From The Westfield Evening News

February 25, 2011

The last year of my studies toward ordination, I attended a seminary 100 miles away from my home. I took a dorm room part of the week, away from my growing family. I struggled with elation over a wonderful vocation and sorrow and guilt over leaving my family.

The day before I left for my first overnight, my best friend arrived at the door holding a beautifully knit, multi-colored prayer shawl “I have been working on it for a while,” she said, “and praying, and wondering who it was for, and then I realized it was for you. Wrap yourself up in it in your dorm room and think of how much we love you.”

I had heard of prayer shawls before, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I would ever receive one. I was ordained at the end of that academic year, and called to serve a parish that had a kind of hidden prayer shawl ministry. Shawls would appear at the church office from time to time, knit by people at home and brought in. Whenever we had a basketful, we would bring the basket into church on Sunday morning and present it at the Altar, along with the offering plates and sometimes cans for the food pantry.

My friend took me to the store and showed me which yarn to buy and what size needles. There were a couple of hilarious sessions of teaching, trying to get me to see the difference between a knit and a purl. 3 knits for God, the one in three, 3 purls for the holy Trinity. 3 x 3 x 7 for all the days of the week = 63 stitches a row. My first shawl took me a long time and somewhere along the way, I was called to a different parish.

The prayer shawl ministry there was quite visible. A group of about thirty met once a month. The knitters shared ideas and helped newcomers. Sometimes we knit in silent prayer, and sometimes we told stories of people we knew who were struggling with illness or loneliness. Once or twice, a knitter took my shawl, fixed my mistakes and knit a row with 63 evenly spaced knits and purls. As shawls were finished, we tucked little leaflets with prayers inside them.

Sometimes we knew who we were knitting for, and sometimes not. We sent shawls to friends of friends, and we gave them to our own members who were facing health challenges or loss. At great length, I finished my first shawl. I realized that the whole time I had been making it, I had been praying for one particular friend who had been grieving the devastation of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina. She also had a cat! My shaggy, prayed over, misshapen shawl would be a perfect gift for her. I mailed it off—a tangible sign of a year of prayer and concern. She told me recently that she and her cat still love it.

At the Episcopal Church of the Atonement, we gather to knit on the third Saturday of every month from 10 am to noon. Lots of our shawls go to Noble Hospital, where the wonderful chaplains there give them to patients who a little extra warmth. Once, at Noble, I realized that I had recently blessed the shawl over the shoulders of the woman I was visiting. We discovered that her children and the children of the knitter were friends.

In making and giving our shawls, we have come to see that we are knit together in a community of care and concern and the tangible love of God. We welcome you to join us in this ministry. For more information about us see www.atonementwestfield.net or join us on Saturday.

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Remember the Gesimas!

2011-03-04T22:36:00.000-05:00

The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

February 19, 2011; Year A

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

In this season, the time between Christmas and Lent, the church gives us a specific task: we are to look for the light of Christ. We see that light shining in the Bible lessons appointed for the day. And light is surely one of the good gifts of God, and aren’t we grateful for it as our days lengthen?

And we should be grateful, and not just because of the increasingly long days—but because just a generation ago, this Sunday was called Septuagesima. Do you remember the gesimas? For long generations, the gesimas were three Sundays prior to Lent to help us get ready for Lent. A little like going steady before getting engaged, I guess—three more weeks added to the six we already have to focus on our human frailty and weakness. I think I like Epiphany better than the gesimas.

I bring all this up because this week, I was asked a question that I could not answer: who wrote the collect this Sunday? Well, I hate not knowing the answer to a question,

so I went looking, and found all sorts of fun churchy information that now I just have to share.

You have heard me say on more than one occasion that our lessons every Sunday morning are chosen to work together to uncover the theme of the season. In addition to the lessons, the collect of the day, that prayer that we offer at the beginning of every Sunday service, is chosen to go along with them. The collect collects the theme of the lessons, and helps us to pray it even before we hear it.

This collect was originally written for the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote it for Quinquagesima Sunday—the last Sunday before Lent. He wrote it, scholars suggest, to lighten up from the medieval practice of praying from the depth of our sin before the beginning of Lent. Instead of focusing on the penitential season to come, Thomas Cranmer found his theme in the New Testament reading for the day.

And so, for more than 400 years, those who followed the Book of Common Prayer—Anglicans and Episcopalians all over the world, offered this prayer on the seventh Sunday before Easter, just before they heard a reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians—faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love (1Cor. 13:13). And then they went into a long season of fasting and prayer, to prepare themselves to receive the love of God expressed in the Passion and Resurrection.

Please take your leaflet and look at this lovely little prayer. You will find it there at the beginning of the service, just before the first lesson. This collect has the virtue of being brief as well as beautiful—just two sentences to describe and beg for God’s greatest gift.

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Even though this prayer has been moved from Quinquagesima Sunday to the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, and even though it is no longer on the same Sunday that we read Paul’s great treatise on love from the 13^th chapter of First Corinthians, and even though the whosoevers and liveths of the good Archbishop have been modernized—even with all these changes, this is a prayer that it shiny and sparkling with the light of Christ.

Love, peace, virtue: life itself—all these in the longing expressed in that little phrase: pour into our hearts your greatest gift. And so today, our weekly challenge is just a little stronger than usual, for we must go looking not only for the light of Christ, but the love of God as well.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I am looking for the love of God, I don’t normally think of Leviticus. Leviticus is the rule book of the Old Testament, and rules don’t make my heart flutter. But we have just begged the Holy Spirit to flood our hearts with love, so let’s take another look. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. . . . you shall leave them for the poor and the alien.

I used to live in a town that was built on a railroad line: the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad as it travelled west from Philadelphia to Harrisburg. A friend told me that when he was a little boy, growing up during the Great Depression, his father gave him and his brother a weekly chore. They were to walk along the tracks with a bucket and collect the lumps of coal that dropped from the trains as they chugged down the line. And when their buckets were full, they were to take them to families where the parents were out of work. “One of my first memories is my father’s concern for those who had less than we did,” said my friend.

Do you see the love of God in the light from those chunks of coal that kept some children warm? Do you see the love of God in the barley that grew on the edges of the fields of the children of Israel when they came into the promised land, and remembered how to work the fields and always left that edge of the harvest for bread for the poor?

Ten chapters before Paul gets to his treatise on the greatness of love, he writes to the Christians in Corinth who are squabbling amongst themselves over who should be in charge of the church. His advice is, let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

Around the time that the Church of the Atonement was moving into their first church building a couple of blocks from here, a second congregation was forming in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania. The parishioners of St. Mary’s were the maids and gardeners, the chauffeurs and the shopkeepers who served the parishioners of St. Paul’s—the large, Gothic stone structure that housed the first Episcopal Church in Chester. For decades, the congregation of St. Paul’s met on Sunday mornings and hospitably allowed the congregation of St. Mary’s to worship in their building in the afternoon. There is some evidence that the segregation of the two congregations was not entirely about race. Some of it seems to have been about socio-economic status, at the beginning, at least.

Eventually, St. Paul’s built a building for St. Mary’s and suggested that they moved into it. A hundred years later, when I served the parish, they were still in the tiny brick building with a moldy basement and the wheeziest organ you have ever heard. Lots of the children of the original parishioners were the old folks of the congregation. And they came faithfully—some still lived in the neighborhood—but many had long since moved away—gone to school, become lawyers, teachers, social workers and continued to look for God’s glory in their worship together. When I was there, the congregation was maybe forty people on a busy Sunday. But every month, St. Mary’s food pantry provides groceries for 100 families in Chester.

Do you see the love of God shining in the lives of those good people? It has not mattered, through the years, if their leadership was wise or even just: they know how to pray and how to serve and they belong to Christ.

Jesus sat on a rock above a crowd of people and taught them about God. He taught them that they were blessed, even when they were poor, or sad, struggling against injustice. He taught them that the commandments that God gave the children of Israel were just the outline of how to live lives that were always focused on the other. And today we have more of this teaching that we call the Sermon on the Mount. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. . . . if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you. . . .be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.

Every third Saturday, a group of us meet here at Atonement to knit prayer shawls. Often when we knit we do not know who will receive our shawls. We choose yarn and colors and patterns to please ourselves knowing that our creation will be given away. Sometimes we pray as we knit, and sometimes we just beg God for the mercy of not getting so tangled up in needles and yarns and knits and purls that we have to pull out our stitches and start again. Yesterday, the woman sitting next to me stood up and held up her shawl to see if it was long enough. I complimented her on it, and she laughed and said, “Oh, do you see that big hole? But someone told me how to fix it.”

Someone hearing the conversation reminded all of us that the Shakers, a religious community known for the wonderful handcrafted products, always purposely made a mistake in their work, as a token that only God is perfect.

And that is tempting, isn’t it? Who wants to be as perfect as God? We cannot do it, so why should we try? And yet our Lord begs us, be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. Do you see the shining love of God in the prayer shawls made by knitters who aim at perfection, and accept it with good humor when they cannot get there? Because whether that shawl has a hole or not, knit into it is the care and concern and skill of a woman whose love is given to someone that she does not even know.

There is only one way to get to that perfection that Jesus is talking about. Let us pray with Thomas Cranmer and the little boy picking up the coal, with the people running the food pantry, and the woman at her knitting, send your Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love.

Amen.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

God of the Billy Club

2011-03-04T22:30:00.000-05:00

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 13, 2011; Year A

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37

This week our Gospel lesson is a continuation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is a long speech, a collection of his teachings that Matthew puts very near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. It begins with the Beatitudes that we heard a couple of weeks ago, that lovely, long and surprising list of all the blessed people of God: the pure in heart, the poor of spirit, those who mourn, the peacemakers. That list of all the blessed people draws us in, makes us want to be a part of this change of heart and life that Jesus is talking about.

And it’s a good thing that Jesus begins his teaching this way, because I think if he began with what we heard today, a lot of us might not be sitting here. I can’t tell my little brother that he is foolish, really? If I sin with my right hand, I have to cut it off? Then it’s a good thing

I’m left-handed! That whole thing about divorce—are you kidding me?

The Sermon on the Mount goes on, by the way. It was during this teaching that Jesus gave us the way to pray—what we call the Lord’s Prayer—and in a couple of weeks we will have that lovely bit about the beauty of the lilies of the field.

And I am grateful for those beautiful bits. But if the words from the Bible are really holy—if we hold them to be sacred words, words that draw us closer to God, then somehow we have to make sense of the off-putting bits—the teachings that seem to us to be incomplete, or even impossible.

How do we do it? Well, for one thing, we do it together. That is why it is our custom to share the reading among members of the congregation. When the reader stands in the lectern, or in the middle of the aisle, he is allowing his voice to be the voice of all of us. And when we listen together, we realize that God is speaking to each of us in our individual need—and that at the same time, God is able to hold all of our needs together.

And here’s something else. We don’t just read the lessons and move on with the service. It is tempting sometimes to want to do that. How dare we comment on sacred Scripture? It says what it says; why not let it stand? But 500 years ago, good men and women fought and died over the privilege of learning to read the sacred Scripture and learning how to use what it teaches to comment on their daily lives. That was in large measure the struggle of the Reformation.

And we stand in the long line of that reformed tradition. We also stand in the long line of the mystical tradition. We appreciate the mystery of God in the sacraments—how water and wine and bread in the power of God can make changes in us, can draw us closer to God. But just as much as we love the unknowable mystery, we love to learn about God and try to know God.

And that is why every service of Holy Eucharist also has a sermon. We take seriously a dual responsibility: we are to know God, and we are to fall into the mystery of God. And on any given Sunday, one thing is easier than the other.

So, here we are on a day like today, when each of our lessons seems harder than the one before it. The Old Testament lesson seems to say that we can do whatever we want, but if we choose wrong, God will get us. And Paul’s letter to the Corinthians seems intent on letting those poor people know how immature they are, and how unlikely it seems to Paul that they will ever understand. And the Gospel? Well, the word means Good News and it seems to me that this teaching is about Jesus delivering the bad news.

So let’s work on this together. And because, as Paul observes, we are sometimes like children, let’s think in pictures. How do you picture God? Last week, we talked about the Holy Trinity, how we believe in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Do those three descriptors help you draw a picture of God? One joker famously said that calling God Father, Son, and Spirit makes him think of an old man, a boy, and a bird. Others recognize that since they cannot know how God looks, they can only imagine God in what is created. So they see God in a sunset, or a majestic mountain peak—or yes, a bird, soaring through the air.

In this room, we depict God in many ways: the young man suffering on the Cross towering above our heads; the baby in the manger in one of the windows; the bread and the wine that we share at the Altar; the light that is always burning.

How do you picture God? As I thought about it this week, I remembered a sermon I heard years ago. I don’t remember which lessons the preacher was struggling with, but he shared with us that for most of his childhood, he had pictured God as a cop on the beat with a great big billy club in His hand. For this man, God was all-knowing and all-powerful and fully intent on punishing anyone who stepped out of line. And there is some comfort in a God like that. Because if you are well-behaved, the God with the billy club will protect you from the bad guys.

Moses stood before the children of Israel and told them about the Law of God: See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, . . . then you shall live and become numerous. . .if your heart turns away and you do not hear. . . . I declare to you today that you shall perish. It is easy to see the God with a billy club in his hand in those words of Moses: do this, or I’m going to get you.

And it leaves us with a great big problem: what will happen if we step out of line? Worse than that, what will happen if we are shoved out of line? Because the law of God that Moses set before the people was not just demanding, it was sometimes contradictory. No matter how hard the people tried, perfection at the law was beyond their grasp.

Moses recognized this when he urged to people to choose God’s law—that choice would bring them life and prosperity, and they should attempt it even when it seemed hard.

The God with the billy club can be a comforting image when you are young, when the rules are uncomplicated, when the need for protection is the most important need. But we grow up.

And that is what Paul is addressing with the Corinthians. As they came to know Christ, to be drawn into the mystery that is God, most of them were adults. They were wise in the ways of the world, but young in the ways of God. Paul wanted them to know that—but he did not want them to be stuck in it. They could grow up spiritually. They could learn to take lightly some things—their quarrels and disagreements over administration—and take more seriously the abundance of God. Paul was trying to draw a picture of God for them—and there was no billy club in sight. Paul wants the Corinthians to see God as the source—that place from which all good things come. We all have to work hard, says Paul—but not to save ourselves. That great work has already been done. We work hard to show off the salvation we have already been given.

How does Paul picture God? Well, for sure he sees the glory of God in the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. But Paul also seems to see God in the community, in the groups of people who come together, quarreling and questioning and seeming to be stuck in the flesh, but yearning to learn the life of the Spirit.

I remember the story of another preacher, this time a bishop. For the life of me, I cannot remember the man’s name—20 years ago or so he gave a presentation to a workshop for parish leadership—and there I was, a young woman, not all that mature in the ways of the world and just about bursting with pride to have been considered enough of a leader to receive an invitation to this workshop.

I don’t remember his name, but I remember this bishop relating the time that someone had come up to him at a cocktail party. “Ah, it’s good to meet you bishop,” he said. “I want you to know that every night I say my prayers just like my mother taught me.” The bishop looked at the room full of parish leadership for a long moment. I cannot speak for others, but I was thinking pretty complacently of the prayers that my mother had taught me, and of the ones I was teaching my babies. And the bishop said, “Well, then, shame on you! Don’t you think that God would like to know the grown-up you have become?”

How do we take seriously all of Holy Scripture—even the bits that seem too hard, or contradictory, or even just wrong? Well, first of all, we read God’s word together. And we struggle to understand it together. And finally, we realize that our God who showers us with abundance has given us a magnificent gift in our ability to learn, and grow, and change. Holy Scripture allows us to discover who God is in our complicated, tangled, grown up lives.

Jesus sat down on the mount and he spoke to the crowds of people before him. And they were of all sorts and conditions. And he gathered them in, those who were poor of spirit, and those who were pure, and those who struggled with injustice, and those who were sad. And Jesus declared that God’s blessing fell on all of us. And he begged us to realize how powerful we are—how our good works can care for God’s creation. And then, in the lesson we read today, he reminded us of the law that Moses brought to the people, and he helped us to see beyond the God of the billy club.

It is not that God will get you if you call people names, or steal, or get divorced—it is that your actions have consequences not just for your body, and not just for your spirit, but for the whole community. God created us to live and work together, for the good of one another.

If you were to draw a picture of God, what would it look like? Is God an old man, a young man and a bird? A mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing? A policeman walking his beat in the dark, slapping his night-stick in his hand? More and more, as I struggle with you to receive the solid food of Holy Scripture, I see the face of God in your faces, in the lives and work of all the ones whom God loves so much.

How do you see God?

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Manipulation can be fun

2011-02-09T19:53:00.001-05:00

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

February 5, 2011; Year A

1 Corinthians 2:1-16; Matthew 5:13-20

There is a website called Wordle.net. When you go to it, it allows you to download any written material that you wish. Then you click a button on the screen. Out comes a kind of picture—your words written in an artistic arrangement. The words you use the most are the biggest ones; the words you use the least are the smallest. They leave out the little common words—and you can set a limit on how many words they will use.

I went to the website, and I found that I could enter all of my sermons, just by putting in the address of the blog were I post them online. So I did that. And I told the program to consider 100 words I used most often. And after a couple of seconds, this cool collage showed up on the screen.

Then I could play with it—moving things around, and changing colors, and changing the font style. In the end, I came up with something like this.

Even if you are sitting way in the back of the church,
you can see that the word I use the most is God, followed closely by Jesus. And I guess that is what you would expect from sermons given in a Christian church. But something that is not here caught my attention, too. There are lots of names on this page, not just God and Jesus, but Isaiah and Paul and Jezebel and Ahab. There’s even Ricky Bobby from the movie Talledega Nights. But nowhere in the top 100 words of my preaching do I find Holy Spirit.

And yet the church teaches, and we affirm several times in every worship service, that we believe in God, whom we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But although the church teaches it and we affirm it, how often to we talk about the Holy Spirit? How often do we use examples of the Holy Spirit to help us understand Holy Scripture, to help us illuminate the teachings of Jesus? Much more often, I at least, turn to Jesus’ teaching to try to understand the mind of God. Certainly on this Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, when Jesus teaches that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, it is good to examine those images.

The strength and power of salt are well known—perhaps too well known on this icy Sunday morning! In the ancient world, salt was an important commodity—as important as precious metal. In some places it was even used as currency. Salt draws moisture, preserving the flesh of meat and vegetables, and helping the cells of our body stay hydrated. We cannot live without an adequate amount of it. Jesus speculates that if salt were to lose its flavor we would throw it out. But the truth is salt does not lose its flavor—it shares its flavor wherever it goes. It has often been on our fingers this week—not only as we cook, but as we try to keep from slipping on icy walkways. If we are the salt of the earth—that means that Jesus sees us as strong and valuable—an important ingredient in the life of the world.

And light—well, Jesus gives us another preposterous image, the lamp covered by the bushel basket. Remember that the lamp that Jesus is talking about was a burning flame. If you covered it with a basket, you might drown out the light—or you might set fire to the house. Whichever, the result is catastrophic. Either there is no light at all, or the conflagration leads to destruction.

Let your light shine before others, says Jesus, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. Notice that we do not let our lights shine so that others may be seen in our reflection. As a matter of fact, Jesus doesn’t say a word about us being seen in the light. It is good work that needs to be seen—good works that will let the light shine on God.

Strength and power, good works and the revelation of God’s glory—Jesus gives us homely and accessible images so that somehow we may understand the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

My little exercise with word art got me thinking what it would look like if someone were to enter all of my conversation for a day. What would the top 100 words be then? I am guessing that any name for God might not be in the top three—the ones that become the center of the Wordle design. If I followed that exercise for a day last week, the top words might have been SNOW and BUDGET and maybe SAFE (as in “stay home; stay safe in this weather”). In a week with fewer snowstorms they might have been CHURCH, CHILDREN and BILL. I just hope that any word that names God might have been in the top 100.

What do you think are the words you use most in a day? Take a moment with that. Leave off the little expletives—and the common words that we all say—what would a list of your most used words look like? Snow and budget and safe—or children and dinner and home—or work, and salary, and car? Take ten seconds, and pick your three.

______________

Got them? Well hold on to them for a moment; we will get back to them.

I took today’s second lesson, the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, and I entered it the Wordle.net program. And here is what Saint Paul was most concerned about, the day that he sat down to write a letter to new Christians.

He wrote his letter to encourage people who were trying to live by faith in a materialistic and sometimes crude culture. He wrote to share with them his experience of Jesus—an experience that went far beyond the usual senses. A lot of the teaching in Paul’s letters is given over to helping the new Christians see the giftedness in their lives, and to explore how that giftedness might be used for good.

For Paul, knowing Jesus was not about taste, sight, hearing, smell, or touch. For Paul, to know Jesus is to be drawn into the mystery that is God. To know Jesus is to have the power of the Holy Spirit living within you, giving you power and strength, to allow you to do good works and to reveal the glory of God in this hurting world.

As fun as it is, the computer program at Wordle.net is a manipulation. The program decides which words are common and may be left out. It decides which words are the most important based on number of uses. It decides how to arrange things, based on preferences that the user may enter, but also on the programmer’s taste. There is no wisdom in this program and there is no mystery. But it is entertaining insofar as it tickles our imaginations and makes us think.

Jesus said that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. That is, we have the strength and the power to work for good. And our good works can reveal God’s glory. We are salt and light, says Jesus. Our lives are valuable to God.

A few moments ago, I gave you ten seconds to think of the three words you use the most in a day. Can you remember them? The mystery of God is far beyond any silly manipulation that you will encounter in a computer program or hear in a sermon. But think of those three words—the three things, or names, or actions that stuck with you when you engaged in this little exercise.

Those three words may be a measure of what you value. They may be a measure of what you find to be strong and powerful. Those three words may reflect your good works.

Last Sunday we had the Annual Meeting of our parish, and we spent some time reflecting on our giftedness. We thought of the things that bring us joy. And we wondered together how to connect those gifts with the needs of the world. Today, I invite you to think of your giftedness in terms of salt and light, and in terms of your words and works: where are you strong and powerful? Where do your words and actions throw light on the goodness of God?

It takes more than ten seconds and three words, of course. Paul knew, when he wrote his First Letter to the Corinthians—and when he wrote and preached and brought the Good News of Christ to the whole known world—Paul knew that living in the power of the Holy Spirit is a mystery that will take all of our lives to uncover and understand. And he knew that our understanding would seem foolish to anyone who did not live a life attuned to the Holy Spirit. And he knew that finally, our understanding of God will only be fully revealed when Jesus comes and gathers us to himself.

Because Paul knew that our spiritual wisdom seems like foolishness to the world, and because he knew that living in the Holy Spirit is a mystery that draws us closer to God, but cannot be found by our own work, he constantly wrote of our giftedness. Paul begged us to be the salt and light of the world, to use what we are given for the good of the ones God loves, to reveal God’s glory to the world.

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

What does the Lord require of you?

2011-02-09T19:50:00.001-05:00

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Annual Meeting of the Parish

January 30, 2011

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

If you are one of the millions of Americans who love to watch TV, your heart is probably troubled today. If you are one of the millions who still reads newspapers, you probably have a better understanding than the TV watchers of why your heart is troubled. If you get your news from the Internet, well, you have the very most up-to-the minute information—enough to trouble your heart for sure.

I am referring, of course, to the unrest in Egypt. Well, that and the murder of a gay rights activist in Uganda. And, of course, I could have started my sermon exactly that way a couple of weeks ago and been referring to the shooting in Arizona. And before that? We could make a list, I suppose: children without enough to eat; cancer patients denied procedures for lack of insurance; students afraid to go to school because they are bullied.

There is so much that is wrong in the world—whatever are we to do about it? Is there anything to say, any way to be, that will make a change?

Last week, we heard the story of Jesus walking along the shore and calling disciples to follow him. And they did, they dropped everything to follow him. And it was encouraging—empowering even—to think that those men who had so much less than we do, those men whose fishing meant the difference between full stomachs and hunger for a whole town of people, those men dropped everything to follow Jesus. What would the world be like, we wondered together, if we did something like what they did?

I hope that the feeling lasted a little while. Maybe you took your encouragement with you and attended an Outreach Team meeting and began to make plans for how money from our pockets could help needy people in Westfield and beyond. Or maybe your empowerment led you to join the new Pastoral Care Committee. They met last Sunday morning, too—and drew up a list of all the ways we at Atonement can help each other.

Maybe you were nourished last week by the power of Jesus’ call, and by the Bread of Life offered at the Holy Table, and you took that strength with you to feed people at the Community Table. Maybe the feeling lasted even a little longer and on Monday, or Tuesday—or even later in the week, you were able to stretch yourself to offer love or care or concern to someone whose way in life is harder than your own.

But the TV and the newspapers and the Internet did not stop reporting the news of the world this week just because a few of us, or a few churches full of us, or maybe even millions of us heard the Gospel for the Third Sunday after Epiphany and were encouraged by the call of Jesus and the excitement of a few fishermen a couple of millennia ago who rushed to follow him.

The truth is that the poverty and violence and sorrow in the world are too much to bear, too much to get our arms around. We try to be encouraged, and the feeling lasts a little while, but bit by little bit, we get bogged down by the inevitability of it all. And then we remember our own sorrows, our own poverty—of possessions or spirit, our own powerlessness. And because of the gifts that God gives us in our fine minds and elegant imaginations, we fall to thinking about how we can make ourselves feel better. Then for a while, at least, our own self-interest comes forward, and the call of Jesus to care for the world is muffled.

But at some point, most of us look up again—perhaps we turn on the TV, or read the paper, or spy something on the computer screen on our way to our e-mail and our hearts are troubled all over again.

This is a problem way older that we are, of course. It is a problem way older than the Internet, or TV or even newspapers. Way back in the year 725 B.C.E., Micah tried to find a way to rouse the people—to encourage them, to empower them, and to remind them that we created ones are never far from the imagination of God.

Micah knows that the people are dispirited. They keep making the ritual sacrifices, but it seems to them that God is not paying attention. What are they to do? And God speaks to them through the prophet. It is almost as if he is playing a role with them. “I’ll give you the words of the prosecuting attorney,” the Lord says to Micah. “And the people can be the jury.” All those thousands of years ago, it is as if God knew that one day, someone would create TV shows like Perry Mason and Law and Order. For the people’s entertainment, God presented creation as though it were a case in court.

What would be fair? What would the judge demand in payment for these people who are prone to violence, warfare, and rampant self-interest? Would the judge like some oil poured out on his behalf? Perhaps a beautiful calf, killed on the altar and the blood sprinkled around the temple? Perhaps something precious could be burned, and the sweet smoke would rise up to heaven and catch the interest of a negligent God.

And then, just like Perry Mason leaning in toward the real perpetrator, with the thunk-thunk of the background music from Law and Order—just like that—the words out of the prophet’s mouth remind us that God is thoroughly and intimately interested in us.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; 

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice,

and to love kindness, 

and to walk humbly with your God?

Really, that’s it? Do justice? That is, be fair to everyone? Don’t use others to my advantage? Give out of my abundance to meet the needs of others?

And, love kindness? Really? Just speak nicely to one another? Hold the door open for someone? Make dinner for someone who is sick?

And walk humbly with your God? That’s it? Remember that God is God and I am not?

The remarkable thing about this little scene from is that God sets it up like an adversarial situation—like a courtroom. Maybe we are the jury, but somewhere along the way, we have begun to feel like the defendant. Or at least, we have begun to feel defensive. God sets it up that way, and when we are thoroughly caught up in the scenario, we are called to walk humbly with God.

What is our punishment for being a human being? What is the consequence of getting caught up in our own self-interest? Just this—God begs us to come closer and to allow a place where we might walk together, side by side.

Hundreds of years later, Jesus addressed a crowd of people much like the congregation of Micah. They are dispirited: sorrowful about the state of their nation, stressed by material poverty, and worried that God has abandoned them. And Jesus reminds them that they are blessed.

That is, they live in relationship with God. God does not abandon those who are meek, or sorrowful, or powerless. Instead, God promises to be right with them in whatever condition they find themselves. More than that, Jesus promises that they can return to God’s blessing. The blessing is right there for everyone. If you cannot find yourself on the list—you can put yourself there. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God—and you will find yourself blessed in one, or two, or maybe more of those wonderfully inclusive categories we call the Beatitudes.

Today is the day of our Annual Meeting. Even if we never heard a word of the news outside of these walls—even if we knew nothing of Egypt or Arizona or global poverty—even then, our kind and just little community can easily find a list of things that worry us.

We do not have quite enough income to pay for all the things we want to do. Our wonderful building is showing her age, and sometimes when it rains outside, it rains inside as well. We have lots of jobs to get done, and it would be so nice if we had more hands to do them.

And, of course, we are engaged in the world beyond us, and so we bring those worries with us, too. What are we to do? Well, Jesus promises us that we are blessed. Jesus promises that we are constantly in the presence of God. God’s constant, faithful love is God’s gift to us.

And so that we can do justice, and love kindness and walk humbly with our God, let us work together, every day, to uncover that gift. We will begin again today. We will gather around the Table and receive the Bread of Life broken for us and the Cup of Mercy poured out for us.

And then in our meeting today we will take a little time to identify those individual gifts and talents and interests that allow us to claim the promises of God’s blessings. And we will pledge to assemble together again soon, so that when we forget, or wander, or get turned around, we can return to walk humbly with our God.

Amen.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Drop Everything!

2011-02-09T19:42:00.001-05:00

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

January 23, 2011 Year A

Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23

In our Gospel this morning, Matthew tells us about the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. As he tells it, Jesus has left the family home in Nazareth and moved in with his friends in Capernaum. Capernaum is a nearby town, a little less provincial than Nazareth, close by the Sea of Galilee. There is more to do in Capernaum—fishing as well as farming and masonry and tending the sheep. There are people to see, fishermen who live and work down by the docks, and travelers from the towns on the opposite shores. This geography is very important to the Good News about Jesus that Matthew wants to tell. You see, Matthew first told his Gospel to Jewish Christians. These were people who understood the Law of the Hebrew Bible. They understood the importance of the Messiah to the people. They understood the importance of the ancient prophecies.

But even though Matthew was writing to people who had been formed in Judaism, raised to know and live the Law of Moses, he wants his readers to know right away that Jesus came for everyone, not just for the people of Israel. There are good Jews living in Capernaum, to be sure. But the tiny region is bordered on the north and west by Syro-Phoenicia and on the south by Samaria. The people are not all of one mind or understanding. They don’t all follow the 613 commandments so central to Jewish life. And one day, in the midst of this region, Jesus is walking by the edge of the sea, and he sees some fishermen. And he calls to them. And they drop their nets and follow him.

Immediately,
Matthew tells us. Andrew and Simon hear Jesus’ call and immediately they drop their nets. And then he calls to James and John and again, immediately, they leave their father’s boat and follow him.

I think it is important to note that none of these men are boys. It is tempting to think that they are very young, because their behavior seems so impetuous, and because Matthew makes a point of telling us that Jesus has just left home. But this is not a coming of age story. Scholars think that Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. In those days, that was the old side of middle age. And his first friends in ministry are also men who are obviously needed at home. Peter and Andrew own boats together. And Jesus finds James and John helping with their father’s boat. And when they heard Jesus, immediately they dropped their nets.

Follow me, calls Jesus—and they drop everything and follow him. Immediately.

When was the last time you dropped everything? When was the last time you stopped what you were doing—left it unfinished and went on to something else? I have been asking people that question all week. The answers were all the same: they cannot remember.

The last time I dropped everything was to meet someone in the emergency room. Come to think of it, the last three times I dropped everything was to meet someone in the emergency room. There are moments in life when everything changes—and they almost always have something to do with someone’s physical health. A broken limb changes the way someone gets around. A heart attack leads someone to change his diet and exercise habits. Someone dies and the loved ones who survive never will be the same.

Two thousand years after Jesus took that walk along the shore, we live in a world where almost everything is immediate. We carry telephones in our pockets and send e-mails that arrive with the push of a button. Our cars go from 0 to 60 in seconds; we can fly to Europe in a few hours. We try to exhibit patience by saying that we will sleep on something, but then we set an alarm clock to wake us up before our bodies are ready. Everything is immediate, but have you noticed that we never drop anything?

Along with all of our immediacy has come the habit of multi-tasking. To be perfectly honest—this week when I got a call that someone was being taken to the emergency room, and I didn’t drop everything. I said, “Nobel Hospital? That’s pretty close, I’ll give it half an hour and then I’ll drive up there.” And I finished the two different conversations that I was attempting to have at the same time while doing some paperwork.

We don’t drop things to do something else—we try to do two or three or four things at once. And so it takes a real emergency to make us drop everything and do something else. Everything is immediate, but we only change when it is forced upon us—illness and death make us drop everything but the rest of the time we just keep picking things up until are our hands are over-full.

Matthew tells us that Jesus left his family home, and moved to Capernaum to preach a message of repentance. The word that Matthew uses is metanoia, which means change. The word for repentance in the Gospel is change. Change: as in change your mind. Change: as in change your hearts. Change: as in drop everything.

Change, for the kingdom of heaven has come near, says Jesus. Follow me, and immediately they drop their nets and their lives change forever. It is tempting to hear these words and shake our heads and say, “Well, I just cannot do that. I am too connected. I have a job and a family and responsibilities. I cannot just drop everything, not even for Jesus.”

St. Paul understood our dilemma. He wrote to the Christians in the sea-side town of Corinth, and he begged them not to fight amongst themselves. They had already changed their lives forever by pledging to follow Jesus. He wanted them to remain steadfast in their new lives.

This is a little bit of Holy Scripture that we might not have if Paul had lived in our day of immediate fulfillment. I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) It’s almost comical to read. Paul wants to make a little aside, naming those he did baptize, and then forgetting, and amending the list. Remember that Paul was probably dictating his letters to a scribe, who was writing on expensive and hard-to-obtain papyrus. These days, when we want to amend something we have written, we just hit the delete key—and the word processor obligingly backs up to the place where we want to begin again. But when Paul changed his mind about what he wanted to say, he couldn’t do that. And likely it was too expensive to find a new sheet of papyrus and wasteful of the ink to cross it out. He just added a confusing little bit naming some others that he baptized—but really after all, that is not the point!

You see, even way back in the first century, it was difficult to do anything immediately. It was difficult to change completely. It was too easy to get tangled up in who you are and what you do and how connected you are to those who love you and those whom you love. I am so grateful for Paul’s little mental hiccup. He may have been a saint, but he was just as human as any of us.

Paul knew how difficult it was for the Corinthians to change everything to follow Jesus. And that is why he wrote letter after letter explaining the importance of sticking with the change. Two thousand years later, Paul’s letters are a comfort to us—because although we are not new at following Jesus, we have just as much trouble embracing the change that Jesus calls us to.

Change your hearts, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. And Jesus called friends to follow him. And immediately, they dropped what they were doing, and entered into a new life. Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. Jesus called those fishermen all those years ago. He called them to change their minds and to follow him. He didn’t call them with a funny story. He didn’t call them on an exotic journey. He didn’t entice them with fast transportation and luxurious living. He called them into his new life of care and concern for the people.

All these years later, we have literally hundreds of things a day calling for our attention. The radio wakes us from a deep sleep. Phones ring, and e-mails ping. Text messages arrive with a beep. Paper mail is dropped in the box. The television announcer calls us to look up. Change your hearts, calls Jesus. Follow me, to a life of loving and caring for God’s people. Drop everything, and live.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

What we are raised to be

2011-02-09T19:38:00.001-05:00

The First Sunday after the Epiphany

The Baptism of Our Lord

January 9, 2011

Isaiah 42:1-9; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:3-17

This week we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord. For the past 16 days we have been remembering the baby Jesus—well, in church it has been 16 days, but in our popular culture, we have been celebrating Christmas for about 6 weeks. But most of us have packed away the ornaments, and thrown away the dried out greens. Beautiful pointsettias are beginning to look a little leggy about now. Even collectors of Nativity scenes have let the kings get to the manger and are now ready to reclaim the space on the top of the piano, and to dust the mantle piece over the fireplace. And so today we turn to a story of the adult Jesus.

Next week, our Sunday service will be a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, as it always is, but we will have the added privilege of a visit from our Bishop, and the celebration of the rite of Confirmation. Since September, nine members of the congregation have been preparing to affirm their faith in a public and adult way. They have met with mentors, attended Christian formation classes and participated in ministry experiences. One of the requirements was to read and reflect on the Gospel of Luke. Another is to have a meeting with me to talk about the process toward confirmation of faith.

This past week I asked one the confirmands if anything he had learned surprised him. He told me that he had never realized the John the Baptist and Jesus were cousins. It is a small detail—and it is only found in the Gospel of Luke. But it makes today’s Gospel story even more interesting. Jesus and John knew each other; they were family.

Who knows if they were anything like your family, or my family?
Let’s just say that the Webb cousins all knew about each other and what our parents thought of us. My grandmother’s love was often expressed by her pride in one or another of us, although rarely was it offered directly—and so I am sure my cousins in Maryland grew just as tired of hearing about my report card as I was hearing about theirs. We don’t know exactly how it was for John and Jesus, whose mothers were such close friends and cousins—but likely they each had heard about the expectations that had been placed on the other.

Christmas is over in the church, and so in our Gospel this morning, we have a story about the adult Jesus and his cousin, John the Baptist. Now John has taken on the role that was described by his father when he was a tiny infant:

You my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,

To give to his people knowledge of their salvation

by the forgiveness of their sins (Luke 1:76-77)

John is out in the River Jordan, begging people to turn from their sins—to be washed in the water of the river, and to be ready for a new time to dawn. The Messiah is coming! John begs, and yells, and does everything he can to draw the people out of their selfishness, out of their fear, and to turn their attention to the source of power that can save.

Zechariah looked into John’s infant eyes and told him that he would prepare the way for God’s salvation. But John wasn’t the only one whose father was thinking about salvation. Before Jesus was born, an angel appeared in Joseph’s dream and told him about the baby that Mary was carrying: you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21b).

And so we can imagine John’s shock when the source of salvation walks right up to him and asks for Baptism. John knew what Jesus had been born for. After all, he had been hearing about it since he was a week old! And John was doing exactly what was expected of him—he was preparing the way for Jesus’ ministry to increase and grow, so that his could decrease.

I have to wonder what it was like for these two grown men, raised with very specific expectations—requiring strength from each of them—but humility, too. In order for Jesus to bring the salvation that He was destined to bring, John would have to step out of the way. And in order for Jesus to bring God’s salvation to us, his humanity would be shattered and killed.

It makes me crave the stories of these two men growing up. How did they do it? How did their parents do it? How did they grow to be strong, loving, wise—and humble, too?

I spoke with another confirmand this week, and asked why she wants to be confirmed. “It seems like a good ending to my childhood in the church,” she said. And so we talked about that other side of endings—new beginnings.

I am especially touched to be able to share conversations with our confirmands this week in light of the devastating news yesterday from Arizona. As I watched the news report last night of the shooting of a Congresswoman, a judge, a child, and all those others gathered in a parking lot outside a supermarket, I thought of the shooter—a young man, about the age of my own sons. I don’t know how he was raised. I don’t know what dreams and hopes and expectations were laid on him. But here is what I do know: he wasn’t raised to do this.

What were the hopes and dreams of that young man as he grew up? What were the hopes and dreams of the ones he killed? And, lest we sink into despair: we can we do, in our safe, comfortable church, to stop this kind of fearful, senseless violence?

Every week, we distribute The Sunday Paper and The Sunday Paper Junior to our children as they come into church. Perhaps today, someone is coloring one while he sits next to you. A couple of weeks ago, one of our adults came to me and confessed that she had colored one in during the sermon. And that’s okay—we distribute them because they are illustrated versions of today’s lessons, created by a Christian formation teacher in the Diocese of Connecticut and distributed throughout the country.

Here is what she said about today’s Gospel, “When John baptized other people, he helped them get ready for the Messiah to come. But when he baptized Jesus, he helped Jesus get ready to do the Messiah’s work.”[1]

The people could not save themselves. All they could do was to get ready for the salvation to begin. But then Jesus came. And with his Baptism, he was empowered to take up all those expectations that had been told about him since before he was born—and the saving work could begin.

“When John baptized other people, he helped them get ready for the Messiah to come. But when he baptized Jesus, he helped Jesus get ready to do the Messiah’s work.” It makes me think about the next sentence: When we baptize people we help them ________________. How do we fill in that blank?

Well, the saving work of Jesus has begun. And the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus showed the power of God’s salvation at work in the world. And it is our Christian affirmation that the power of Jesus’ salvation is all we need—we do not need to look any further for a Messiah; He has already come.

And yet, the horrific events in Arizona yesterday tell us that the work of the Messiah still needs to be done.

Next week, nine of members of our parish will stand before the bishop and confirm the vows that were made for them at their Baptisms. They will, in the words of one of them, confirm that their childhood in the church is over. New lives will begin.

It seems like a good time, then, to remind them, and to remind ourselves, of the hopes and dreams and expectations that were given us at our baptisms. It seems like a good time to renew our baptismal vows.

As we do it, let us pray for the all the saving power of God to refresh us anew, that we may cast away the works of darkness, banish anger and fear, and become the people that God is raising us to be.

Amen.

The next part of the service is the Baptismal Covenant, (Book of Common Prayer, p. 304)

The Baptismal Covenant

Celebrant Do you believe in God the Father?

People I believe in God, the Father almighty creator of heaven and earth.

Celebrant Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

People I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit

and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Celebrant Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?

People I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Celebrant Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and

fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the

prayers?

People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever

you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you proclaim by word and example the Good

News of God in Christ?

People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving

your neighbor as yourself?

People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you strive for justice and peace among all

people, and respect the dignity of every human

being?

People I will, with God’s help.

[1] Gretchen Wolff Pritchard, The Sunday Paper, Year A, First Sunday after Epiphany, 2011.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Christmas Presents

2011-02-07T21:00:00.001-05:00

The Second Sunday after Christmas Day

January 2, 2011

Ephesians 1: 3-19; Matthew 2:1-12

For lots of people, Christmas is over. We have turned the page on the calendar—the reds and greens of December have made way for the frosty blues of January. As usual, the Church has other ideas about time. For most of December we waited and anticipated. We wore blue and purple and even pink instead of red and green. We sang in mournful minor keys. We decorated slowly, greening and lighting the church bit by bit until, by December 24 in the evening, every candle was lit, every bright red bow was hung, and banks of red and white flowers filled the sanctuary.

Because, the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and the angels knew it. And the angels told the shepherds. And the shepherds went to see the baby—and like Mary and Joseph and the angels, they knew that what they were seeing was a miracle sent from God, and so they knelt down and worshipped. And that was Christmas.
And more than two thousand years later, we are still celebrating that miraculous night.

And so finally, every year on December 24, we let the baby Jesus take His place in the stable—well, we put the little china figure in the scene over there in the Baptistery—and a favorite baby doll in the wooden manger we use for our pageant—but either way we make ourselves wait to celebrate the birth of the baby in Bethlehem until it is His birthday.

So, the world may think it is over but we are still celebrating! Here in the church, our red and green and gold still gleams. Our hymns are Christmas carols and the date on the front of the leaflet reminds us this is the Second Sunday of Christmas.

In the church, the tradition is that Christmas is twelve days long. We celebrate from the time the baby is born until the time the wise men come to bring him gifts. Why twelve days? We don’t really know. Maybe the wise visitors from the east lived only twelve days away. One tradition says they travelled a year and twelve days. But however long it took the actual visitors to get to see the baby Jesus, the church celebrates the visit on January 6^th. And alas, that day is this Thursday, when most of us will be at work or at school, because for most of the world, Christmas is over.

So instead of waiting until Thursday, today we read the Gospel story of the first Christmas presents and we let the china magi travel all the way from the side altar where they have been waiting to get to the stable.

Of course, the Church doesn’t call the Twelfth Day of Christmas the Feast of the First Christmas Presents. January 6^th is called the Feast of the Epiphany. But we are not in the season of Epiphany just yet—it’s still Christmas. And one of the best parts of Christmas is the presents!

I love presents—both the getting and the giving. Oh, it can be stressful, and too expensive—but there is nothing quite so sweet as the look on a child’s face when he is opening a gift that he longed for but never dared hope he would get. And there is nothing as beautiful as the look on the face of someone who loves you when you open the gift they picked out just for you. Many a daddy has worn a Santa Claus tie long into January, and many a mommy has kept a Christmas angel on her bureau through the long, hot summer because of the look on the faces of the ones who presented those treasures.

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. This is a story that was told and retold—and lots of details have certainly dropped away. For one thing, Jesus and Mary seem to have left the stable. They are still in Bethlehem, but now they are in a house, and Joseph is not even mentioned! Here’s another thing—we don’t know how many wise men there were. (Although, as the old joke goes, we can suppose that there were no women with them, or the gifts would have included baby clothes and nourishing food and maybe a diaper service.) All the story tells us is that they were wise men from the East.

So, however many of them there were—they weren’t from Judah or Galilee, or from the places where the people knew the one, true God. They were from the East, and they knew how to follow stars—so they were astrologers or magicians—and because they carried treasure chests, we know they were rich.

It has been two thousand years since these wise men made their trip of 12 days or two years or however long it was and over the years, the story has developed: there were three of them. One was African, and one was Asian, and one was European. That is, they represented all of the people of the known world. One was old, and one was middle-aged, and one was young. That is, they represented all the ages of human life. They were not only astrologers and magicians; they were kings. That is, they were the rich and powerful coming to visit the poor and lowly. Tradition has even given them names. But whoever Gaspar and Melchior and Balthazar really were, here is what Matthew wants us to know:

They knelt down and worshipped Jesus. They did not know the one true God of the Jewish people. They did not understand the customs or laws that Mary and Joseph understood and in which they had promised to raise the miraculous newborn. The wise men knew stars, and they knew power. You will notice that they did not bow down and worship King Herod. It was not until they found the baby that they knelt. They were the first people outside of Israel to worship Jesus.

And then they offered the first Christmas presents. Isn’t it interesting that after all the telling and retelling, this is the detail that has not been lost? We know exactly what the gifts were. Gold and frankincense and myrrh—they are so much a part of the story that we rarely stop to think that only one of those gifts would seem like much of a present today.

Most of us here would be very happy to accept a bag of gold, but what about the other two gifts? Frankincense and myrrh are not familiar these days, but in those days, they were indeed treasures: more costly than gold, and fit for use only by select persons on the most special occasions. They were not gifts for the poor and lowly. Why were these gifts so important that Matthew specified exactly what they were?

Frankincense and myrrh are each products of tree sap. The sap is harvested from trees and it hardens into little golden crumbles. Like the sap from our native maple trees that we harvest in late winter, frankincense and myrrh have their own distinctive smells. In fact, frankincense smells lovely when it is burned—the fragrant smoke was said to have medicinal properties—breathing it in was prescribed for clearing the lungs. But the most important use for frankincense was an aid to worship. Priests used it to purify the temple. The rising smoke from a censor was a visible sign of the rising prayers of the people. That is why, to this day, on special occasions, we use incense in worship.

Myrrh, on the other hand, is not burned. Most often, it is ground up and mixed with something—with wine to make a powerful medicine or in oil to make a fragrant perfume. In those days it was often used at burial. The dead body would be anointed with myrrh and wrapped in linen before it was sealed in the tomb.

Curious gifts for a new baby born in such poverty that his bassinet was a cow’s manger, don’t you think? And yet in all the telling and retelling, that is what Matthew wants us to know. Jesus, that poor little baby, received gifts—gifts fit for a king, and for a priest, and for one who is about to die.

On this day, we celebrate the first Christmas gifts—but of course, they are not the only gifts we remember. Here in the church at least, we are still celebrating Christmas, we are still remembering this year’s gifts—the gifts we received and the gifts we gave and the ones we love who were on the other side of those exchanges. But of course, those aren’t the only gifts we remember today, either.

Two generations after Jesus was born in the stable in Bethlehem and received the mystical gifts of wise men from the East, Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, he wrote, so that. . . you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance. . . and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power. . . .

In a few moments, I will lift up the bread and the wine, the mystical signs of the life of Jesus among us: The gifts of God for the people of God, I will say. And two thousand years after those first Christmas gifts were given, we will celebrate the one, true gift. We will know that Jesus is with us, and we will be filled with the hope to which he has called us,

the glorious inheritance,

the greatness of his power,

the peace of God.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Happy Holiday!

2011-02-07T20:52:00.001-05:00

First Sunday after Christmas Day

December 26, 2010

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

John 1:1-18

Happy Holidays! It seems that there is a bit of a culture war going on about that little phrase: Happy Holidays. If I can make assumptions based on the e-mail forwards that clog my inbox, and the cranky editorials of mid-December, there are some people who are refusing to say Merry Christmas, preferring the more inclusive Happy Holidays. After all, their reasoning goes, different people are celebrating different special days this month. Won’t people find it offensive if I wish them a special greeting for my holiday and not theirs? There are others who think that this shift in festive greeting is a grim reminder of how low our country has stooped or is a sign of the moral decline of the post-modern world, or at the very least, is something that is disrespectful to Jesus, who after all is celebrating a birthday this week.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, . . . full of grace and truth. The wonderful prologue of the Gospel of John is our Gospel reading today, as it is every Christmas morning and every First Sunday after Christmas. Toward the end of his gospel, John writes of Jesus on the Cross:

26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son." 27 Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother." And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home (John 19:26-27).

Tradition tells us that John, the writer of this Gospel was, himself, the beloved disciple to whom Jesus “gave” his mother. If that is so,

then in the years following the Crucifixion and Resurrection, John had plenty of opportunity to ask Mary what it was like when Jesus was a child. He had plenty of time to hear all of the stories. He no doubt asked her to tell him what it was like when Jesus was born. At the end of his life, long after Mark and Luke and Matthew had written down the their accounts of the Good News of Jesus, John sat down to tell the story one more time. And even though he certainly had heard all of the stories, he did not start his account of the good news with the angel, or the young unmarried woman, or the long journey to pay the tax, or the shepherds or the kings.

But he does start the story in the beginning. In the beginning, John tells us, was the Word.

Happy Holidays! That word, “holiday,” may be giving some people upset at this time of year—but this season, the darkest season of the year in the Northern hemisphere, is full of holidays. Here is a quick list—and these are only the ones I know the best—I apologize in advance for leaving some out.

We start with a national day, Thanksgiving Day—when we go over the river and through the woods to celebrate a plentiful harvest and thank God for our many blessings. And then there is St. Nicholas Day—when the 4^th century Bishop of Myra, a town in ancient Turkey, gets all confused with a roly-poly elf in a red velvet suit who brings gifts to good children—but only in some places, because in other places he doesn’t come until Christmas Eve. And then there is Lucia Fest—when we celebrate the life of a Roman girl who refused to marry a non-Christian and was murdered for her trouble—and how that became a celebration with wreaths of candles on the heads of girls in white dresses and warm cinnamon rolls on the darkest morning of the year I am not quite sure. Tucked in somewhere around there is Hanukkah, when for eight nights we remember how a group of Jews were besieged and somehow God made a miracle so that their ritual lamps would remain lit, even though the oil had run out. And if we don’t know what that has to do with potato pancakes and little spinning tops, eight days to give and receive presents seems like a good thing.

And then there is the feast of Thomas the doubter on December 21^st and finally we get to Christmas Eve and the pageant and midnight service and Christmas Day and the presents under the tree. Stephen, the first deacon, who was martyred for his faith, is usually celebrated on December 26^th, and St. John, the beloved disciple, on December the 27^th. December 28^th is a special feast—the feast of the Holy Innocents—those babies who were slaughtered by Herod as he was trying to root out the holy Baby king who was rumored to have been born somewhere in Bethlehem.

And that takes us to the end of December—but the holidays don’t stop—because there are a couple of big cultural celebrations. Kwanzaa was developed by African-Americans to celebrate African culture in American life. It is a seven-day festival that begins today. And of course, there is New Year’s Eve—the celebration of old and new and the chance to resolve again to be good at a time of year when we often feel we have over-indulged. And on New Year’s Day, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus—because eight days after he was born, Mary and Joseph, following the law, had the Baby circumcised and gave him the name that the angel had told them. And then comes Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, and we celebrate the coming of the Three Kings to the stable in Bethlehem, and the Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas, and those children can finally open their presents and the Twelve Days of Christmas are over!

Happy Holidays! In the beginning was the Word. The long, long list of holidays that we celebrate in the darkness is simply exhausting, but there is not one of them cannot be a cause for celebration—for lightening our moods and lifting our spirits. There is not one of those holidays—or of the many others that I simply don’t know enough about—that are not special to someone. It is their special-ness that makes them holidays—that is holy days—days that are set apart for a sacred purpose.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was . . . . Well the word was not ‘holiday,’ but it was not ‘Christmas,’ either. The word was not Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. The word was not tree or candle or even present.

I mentioned in the long list of dark-time holidays that today, December 26^th, is usually the Feast of St. Stephen—only this year, we celebrate that feast tomorrow, on December 27^h. So tomorrow is the day to sing of Good King Wenceslaus, who looked out when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.

The reason for this transfer of dates is because this year, December 26^th is a Sunday. And of all the holidays of the year—of all the holy days—of all the days that are set apart for a sacred purpose, Sunday is the most important one. It is on Sunday that we gather together as the people of God. It is on Sunday that we hear the sacred story that forms us as a people. It is on Sunday that we put out our hands and are fed with the holy food that makes us a holy people.

The Word was God. And all of our holidays—even the ones that seem to be silly cultural festivals, are days that are set apart to help us find what is good and holy. All holidays, all holy days, are days to remind us that in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us. . . . No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

The holy baby born in Bethlehem, Jesus, God’s son, somehow escaped the murderous soldiers of Herod. Under the careful parenting of Mary and Joseph, he grew in grace and truth. As a man, he taught and healed and pointed out the way of God to a people who lived in a very dark time. And on the darkest day in the world, Jesus was killed—because some people were too scared to allow him to live and let us see God, face-to-face. And on a Sunday, a holy day, on our holiest day, Jesus broke the bonds of death, and rose again.

The world was changed forever on that holy Sunday—and so here we are today, all of us together, to remember, and to rejoice, and to go out into the world and spread the Good News. Happy Holiday!

See this thing!

2011-02-07T20:49:00.001-05:00

Christmas Eve

December 24, 2010

Luke 2

I collect Nativity scenes. A lot of them are set around the church this year—there’s one in the Narthex, and three in the niches by the front door, and one on the desk in the parish library. My house is full of them, too. I used to think that I had a lot, but this week I read an article in the New York Times about collectors who have several hundred of them, so I guess I am still a beginner.

A Christmas pageant is a kind of Nativity scene, of course. It came to me last Sunday as we rehearsed that I collect Christmas pageants, too—they live in my memory from year to year. There was the year that I was the archangel, and the year my little brother was King Herod (with a huge smile on his face). There was the year that my baby girl was the baby Jesus, the year that my middle child offered his drum to the infant in the manger, and the year that my youngest son and my mother held hands and were angels. Tonight I can say that
I have begun a collection of Atonement pageants: the year that a brother and sister were the archangel and the shepherd, and the year that the littlest shepherd and the littlest angel shared God’s glory by tossing hay from the manger like Christmas tinsel.

And so my scenes are made of many different materials—plastic and plaster, papier-mâché and real live people. And this year I have found myself reflecting especially on all the different personalities represented in the various scenes.

In every scene, there are three pieces that you absolutely have to have. They are, of course, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. You can’t have a Nativity scene without those three—but almost every scene that I have has at least one other figure. And I began to wonder, if I were going to create a Nativity scene, which character would be the fourth one? Who is the next most important one in this story?

You might think that it would be the donkey—the little donkey that Mary rode all the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem. But if you look back into the story—the donkey is never mentioned. That doesn’t keep him out of lots of Nativity scenes, but strictly speaking, he doesn’t have to be there.

As far as that goes, other barnyard animals don’t have to be there, either. I have one scene that has a goat and a dog and a cow and a cat, and some chickens and even a turkey! But all of those figures are just from our imaginations. We put them there, because there was no room in the inn, and so we try to populate the stable to make it a little less lonely for the very young mother and the tired man who had brought her such a long way.

I particularly love a scene with a rooster. A rooster heralds the morning: wake up! Jesus is born—God has come to earth to live as one of us! Cock-a-doodle-do! Wake up! But the rooster reminds me of another scene in Jesus’ life as well. On the last night of his life, Jesus looked at his best friend and said, “This very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times” (Matthew 26:34). Like Jesus’ friend Peter, I sometimes have a problem standing up for what I believe in. And so the rooster reminds me that when the night is long and dark—the morning is coming. And in the night time or in the day time, Jesus is always with me. It is good to remember and let that knowledge guide my days and nights.

So Joseph and Mary and Jesus are there in the Nativity scene, and sometimes some animals. And in the fields outside of Bethlehem, we are told, there were shepherds. The shepherds are sculpted in many ways—scruffy old men with dirty clothes and beards holding little lambs—or young girls in tattered dresses—I have a set from Russia where the shepherds are carrying rabbits instead of sheep—but then all of the figures are wearing rabbit fur coats, so I guess that’s right.

Of course, the angels were there on that miraculous night. There in the fields, and shining in the sky, were God’s messengers. Angels are beautiful of course. Well, really, we are not sure if they are beautiful or not. They all have men’s names, but we tend to depict them as if they were girls. Try as I might, it is hard to get a boy to be an angel here at Atonement, or a girl to be shepherd. But we always make the angels have beautiful clothes: bright, shining white, with golden haloes and wings that allow them to get from place to place as quickly as the light.

We don’t know what they look like. What Holy Scripture tells us is that angels are surrounded by glory. I am not exactly sure what glory looks like, except that I think it must be gold and shining, and full of light. Now if you read the story closely, you will notice that the angels never really get to the stable. They don’t have to see Jesus there. They already know Jesus, because, remember, they live in God’s glory, and Jesus has always been in God. The angels are out in the fields, glorifying God and sharing the message of Jesus’ birth with the shepherds.

The angels knew all about Jesus and they couldn’t help from singing about it. And so some Nativity scenes have angels—as our pageant did this evening. Some of the angels are large and scary (I even have one with a great big sword) and some are little and sweet; some fly on golden cords or fishing line from thumbtacks in the ceiling and some stand behind the manger as ours did this evening. I’m not going to name names, but I would say that Atonement’s angels lean toward the sweet side of the scale. Not too many scary angels in our pageant, and let’s not even entertain the discussion of suspending our children from our beautiful wooden beams.

Now the Gospel that we just read tells us that the shepherds went to visit the baby Jesus, because they just had to go see for themselves: Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing, they say—and off they go, with lambs and maybe even a goat or dog following along. The nativity scene is getting pretty crowded, now. It is hard to arrange it so that each figure might be able to look at the baby Jesus and still be enjoyed by someone who is looking at the scene for inspiration. As a Christmas pageant director, I will say that I often have the image of a soccer game played by young children—all the figures surround Jesus like players surrounding the ball. “Back away!” I want to shout. “Let the forward move toward the goal!”

Of course, some Nativity scenes have kings. Those fancy foreign visitors who came bearing gifts often have crowns on their heads. Sometimes they are fashioned with different racial features—a symbol that Jesus came to all the world, not just to the little town of Bethlehem. Sometimes their odd gifts are quite distinct: gold and frankincense and myrrh—each gift has a mystical meaning. And many Nativity scenes have other visitors as well—the camels or elephants or horses that the kings rode, and others in their entourage. I have a rug merchant in one and some Guatemalan peasants with laden donkeys in another. But we know that it took the kings awhile to get to the stable—twelve days or two years—or some length of time in between. This year, our kings will finally get to the stable in the Baptistery on January 2. So tonight, we will leave them off to the side.

Every year, we pull out our Nativity scenes, and we straighten out the pageant costumes. Every year we arrange and re-arrange the figures and we practice the pageant, amid the laughter of young angels and shepherds who might rather be playing hockey with their crooks or tossing Christmas tinsel on the tree instead of picking up dusty old hay strewn about by pre-school actors. And by the time we get to this night, most of us are on visual overload! Shepherds carrying rabbits and kings in Guatemalan peasant garb; angels with swords and trumpets; Santa kneeling before the infant in the manger; a scene full of figures; gifts and visitors carrying mystical meaning and no practicality at all. Didn’t anyone bring that poor young couple a casserole and some diapers?

By the time we get to this evening, it is very hard to pay attention to all of the details that are swirling around. So just in case you forgot the question that I asked way back at the beginning of the sermon, I will ask it again: After the Holy Family, who is the next most important figure in any Nativity scene?

Every pageant in my memory and every Nativity scene in my collection is different. Even Joseph and Mary and Jesus look different in each and every one. They are made of different materials—carved of wood or needlepoint worked on canvas or acted out by over-achieving teenagers and crying infants who will not fall asleep in the hay. And in every pageant or Nativity scene, once the Baby Jesus is there—who is the one character that we cannot do without? Who is the one who is even more important than Joseph or Mary—or donkey, angel, shepherd or king?

The answer came to me in our rehearsal last week, as I read the last line in our Gospel for tonight: The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. I told the children that after a moment for pictures they could leave the manger and return to their families in the pews. And we practiced the leaving—shepherds first, then angels, then stars and finally Mary and Joseph. And I saw who was the most important figure in the scene. It is the one who is the most important to Jesus.

That one is you. And you. And you. And you. And each one of us, all of us—because all those nights ago, all those years, and decades and centuries and millennia ago, heaven touched the earth, and God came to live with you, to bring you peace, to save your life.

And we call him Emmanuel,

that is, God with us,

the infant Lord,

Jesus Christ.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Happy Holiday!

2010-12-26T22:47:00.000-05:00

First Sunday after Christmas Day

December 26, 2010

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

John 1:1-18

Tradition tells us that John, the writer of this Gospel was, himself, the beloved disciple to whom Jesus “gave” his mother. If that is so,

But he does start the story in the beginning. In the beginning, John tells us, was the Word.

The world was changed forever on that holy Sunday—and so here we are today, all of us together, to remember, and to rejoice, and to go out into the world and spread the Good News. Happy Holiday!

Dear Baby Jesus

2010-12-18T22:43:00.004-05:00

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

A couple of years ago, my brother and his family spent the holiday with us. Between us, we have six kids in their teens and early twenties—so we pretty well had adolescence wrapped up that week in our happy home. It seems to me that it was that Christmas that there were at least three copies of the movie Talladega Nights floating around our family room, what with the copies given from parents to kid, and cousin to cousin and uncle to nephew. Between December 25 and January 2, this stunning example of early 21^st century comedy seemed to be playing on a continuous loop on the family room TV. And of course, because the adults wanted to be with the kids—especially the college students we didn’t get to see very often—we were stuck watching and re-watching that movie until it burned itself in my memory.

The story centers around Ricky Bobby,
a NASCAR driver with an extended family and the hilarity that ensues following his non-injury in a car crash. Ahh, but the sermon today is not really about the death of American culture, so hang in there a minute.

At one point in the film, Ricky Bobby is presiding over the family dinner of take out from a variety of fast food establishments. His wife and two sons, his father-in-law, and his best friend are all ready to dig in when Ricky Bobby says grace.

“Dear Lord Baby Jesus,” he begins, “. . .we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest.” He goes on for a while, offering thanks for family and friends, beginning each sentence with, “Dear infant baby Jesus.” Finally, his wife interrupts, “You know sweetie, Jesus did grow up.” “He was a man! He had a beard!” adds the grandfather. “I like to picture Jesus as a Ninja fighting off evil Samurai,” says one of the sons. “I like the baby Jesus the best!” says Ricky Bobby. And he starts in again. And again the others offer how they like to think about Jesus. The best friend likes to think of him with giant eagle’s wings and singing lead vocals for a band. “Dear infant baby Jesus,” Ricky Bobby goes on, “doesn’t even know a word, but is still omnipotent. . . .”

It’s thoroughly disrespectful—but it’s hard to watch without laughing out loud. And in its disrespectful, ridiculous way, it points out a truth about the human longing for God. Ricky Bobby and his family understand some things about Jesus. Jesus was born. He began as a baby, just like each one of us. And Ricky Bobby likes that about Jesus. He likes that he never says a word. Then there is the power thing. Ricky Bobby’s son likes that Jesus is powerful—powerful enough to fight off the fictional Samurai who threaten his dreams. The grandfather, who in this scene seems to be the only sensible one at the table, likes that Jesus grew up, and grew a beard. Jesus was a man. But, as the best friend points out, Jesus can do whatever he wants—he can even grow wings and sing in a band.

Ricky Bobby’s family is not that different that many through the centuries who have wanted to know God. Only in trying to know and understand God, they have picked out the aspects of God that are easy, or attractive, or fun and ignored what is hard to understand, or might have a tendency to go out of control.

Some eight centuries before the baby Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah tried to represent the LORD God to the King. Isaiah spoke for the Lord—and King Ahaz wanted nothing to do with it. “Ask for a sign so that you will know who I am.” That was God’s message spoken through the prophet. And Ahaz said he wouldn’t do it because he didn’t want to put God to the test.

There is a problem with asking God for a sign. If you ask God for a sign—you just might get one. Ahaz wasn’t very trusting, but he wasn’t stupid either. He wasn’t about to ask God for a sign. If he did, he might just get it—and it might not be something that Ahaz wanted to see.

“I like the baby Jesus best!” says Ricky Bobby, “little baby Jesus, never says a word. . . .” It is easier to understand a God who does not show you what you do not want to see and say what you do not want to hear.

Nine centuries or so later, the apostle Paul wrote his general letter to the Christians in Rome. Now, Paul was going to begin his letter as was customary, by offering his blessing on those who would read it. Typically, he begins, “Grace to you and peace from God our father and our Lord, Jesus Christ.” But in this letter, it occurs to Paul that he ought to first explain who he understands this Jesus Christ to be. And Paul did not make the mistake of Ricky Bobby or Ahaz. He did not just describe the aspect of Jesus he understood.

Paul wrote his letter a generation or so before the first Gospel was written, and two or three centuries before the church would hammer out the theological understanding of who Jesus is, and how God operates as Father, Son, and Spirit—that is hundreds of years before more than a churchful of Christians could find themselves in agreement about the nature of God. Paul writes of the gospel of God . . .the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

For Paul, Jesus was descended from David through the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God through the resurrection. The next three centuries would see the acrimonious struggle to understand how Jesus could be both in the flesh and Son of God—but that is not Paul’s concern, because Paul is writing to all of those who are in Rome, who are called to be saints. Paul is calling on everyone to recognize that God has done this new thing in the person of Jesus. Jesus was born in the flesh, and has the power of God, the spirit of holiness. And everyone to whom Paul writes is called to be a saint—that is to enter into the life and ministry of Jesus.

A generation after Paul wrote his letter, the one we call Matthew wrote out the oral tradition of the story of the life death and resurrection of Jesus. He begins by defining Jesus in human terms. He describes 42 generations between Abraham and Jesus—father to son to father to son—with a couple of the mother’s names thrown in for good measure. But the time he gets to Mary, the mother of Jesus, we get the point. Jesus is a human baby.

Like Paul, Matthew wanted to describe all of Jesus—not just the parts of his life that are easy to understand and fun to think about. And so, after the 42-generation genealogy, Matthew has to explain how it is that this human baby has the power of God.

And so we hear the familiar story: Mary, who is engaged to Joseph, but is not yet his wife, is pregnant. Joseph, knowing that he is not the father, has every reason to feel betrayed, but he decides not to expose her shameful secret. He will just use this proof of Mary’s immoral behavior to get out of the engagement. And then he hears the word of God.

In our Gospel story today, the angel comes to Joseph in a dream. God is going to do a new thing in the life of the tiny baby who is coming. And Joseph has an opportunity. He can listen to the word of God, and care for Mary and the child. He can understand that a God who is greater than he is may do an unexpected thing. Or he can roll over and fall into a deeper sleep, and let God be God without any help from him.

We barely hear about Joseph again in Holy Scripture. Most of what we know about him is in this story, where he hears the call of God in a dream, and he does his best to live into the call. And because of the courage of Joseph, because of the risks that he was willing to take—to marry a woman pregnant with a child that was not his—to care for them and to love them, because of that, Jesus grew up to be a man.

Jesus grew up to be a man who spent his life caring for the least and the lost, who poured out his life loving all the ones whom God created, who was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.

In the coming week, we will have many opportunities to worship the tiny baby Jesus, asleep in the hay. Because God gives us the wisdom of Paul and the courage of Joseph, we, too, live in the love Jesus, who was born of the flesh and is the Son of God.

Watch the clip from Talladega Nights by clicking here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A0-u85aAYg

December 19, 2010; Year A

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Rejoice!

2010-12-11T23:07:00.001-05:00

The Third Sunday of Advent

December 12, 2010

Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-11

On Friday evening about twenty of us gathered in the Narthex, grabbed some hymnals and walked out into the cold night to go Christmas Caroling. We learned some things along the way: it’s hard to sing and walk at the same time, for one thing. For another, even if we remembered the words to the first verses of the carols, we really needed light to read the second and the third verses. And because it is hard to turn the pages with gloves on, many of us were still trying to find the right page when we got to the second or third verse.

We learned something else, as well. We learned that Christmas Carols make people smile. As we stood under the Christmas tree near the center of town, cars drove past—and little faces smiled at us, noses pressed against back-seat windows. The residents of Governor’s House and The Arbors sang along with us, and their smiles made us smile.

A couple of hours after we set off, we gathered in the Narthex again, and Barbara and Gene Giacometti treated us to hot chocolate and brownies—and our cheeks were red, our throats were a little raspy, and our faces were a little sore from all the smiling. And someone said, “This is the start of a brand-new tradition!”

And I hope a parish group does go caroling next year, and I trust
that that outing will be informed by the nuggets of wisdom we collected on Friday night. And so we will set off with flashlights and throat lozenges along with our hymnals.

This holy season of Advent is brim full with traditions—we might even say hindered by traditions—but many are so beautiful that we hate to give them up, even when our accumulated wisdom makes it hard to see the point. Sometimes we just stack the new ones on top of the old ones until our traditions seem to overbalance our sense.

Last week, a Facebook friend of mine, who is serving a parish in Virginia, asked if anyone thought that Advent is a season of penitence. Is it our tradition to ponder our sins more in this season than we usually do? And most of us quickly responded—no, no! This is a season of preparation and expectation, not penitence! Save the penitence for Lent, if you please. And then I thought again of the collect that we prayed last week—and I looked ahead to the collect that we pray today.

“Stir up your power, O Lord,” it begins. And I remembered that the tradition is that on this Sunday, “Stir up Sunday” I must remember to stir my plum pudding so that it will be ready for Christmas dinner!

But then, I don’t usually eat plum pudding for Christmas dinner. Come to that, I don’t usually eat dinner at all on Christmas, unless someone is making it for me. A bowl of cereal is about all I can handle by that time on December 25^th—so “Stir up Sunday” is a tradition that is not very useful for me.

But, most of you are ahead of me—our collect this morning goes on: because we are sorely hindered by our sins. And even if the emphasis in this season of Advent is expectation and preparation—even so, we remember that it is our sin that hinders us. It is sin that keeps us separated from God. Perhaps our Advent preparation ought to be doing whatever we can to remove those sinful stumbling blocks from our path toward unity with God.

The prophet Isaiah said it this way:

Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

"Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you."

Isaiah gives us another one of those lovely bits of Scripture, where the advice is do not fear just prior to the warning that our God is both righteous and judgmental toward those whom he loves.

Still, the prophet goes on to tell us how it will be when

. . .the ransomed of the LORD shall return,

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Joy shall be upon their heads. . . . By long tradition, this third Sunday in Advent is “Rejoicing Sunday”—or in the Latin, Gaudete Sunday. The tradition is that in addition to the lessons from the prophets reminding us to turn from our wickedness, the service would begin with the singing of a couple of verses from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, ‘Rejoice!’ (Phil. 4:4). We have long since taken up a new tradition, we sing a hymn as we enter the church—but even though we no longer enter on chanted lines of Scripture, we remember the joy.

It is the joy that turns the third candle of our Advent wreath from purple to pink. We acknowledge that we are hindered by our sins—but we rejoice in the Good News of Jesus, and so the heavy penitential purple fades to rose.

Of course, Isaiah wasn’t the only prophet in the Hebrew tradition. Some eight centuries after Isaiah encouraged the people to strengthen their hands and knees, John the Baptist was baptizing in the River Jordan, calling the people to repentance. That God is great and the people are sinful is a steady tradition of prophetic preaching!

John gathered crowds whenever he preached—he was quite a sight after all, clothed as he was in camel’s hair, and feasting on bugs and honey. He began to gather disciples who followed his teaching, and tried to get others to repent and return to the straight path to God.

John’s ministry continued after he baptized Jesus. The Biblical witness is a little unclear as to the timing, but we do know that sometime after Jesus began to gather disciples of his own, John got into trouble. It was all well and good for him to stand out in the wilderness and tell the people that they were sinful, but John made the strategic error of speaking the truth to power. He proclaimed that the King of Galilee was a sinner, living as he was with his brother’s wife. The king, who knew perfectly well that he was breaking God’s law, found it necessary to shut John up. And so he did, literally. John was shut in prison. And with all that time on his hands, he wondered: was his prophecy about to come true?

Prophets are rarely granted the privilege of seeing their prophecies come true, of course. Isaiah—or the three or four prophets whose words are recorded in the Biblical book we read from today—were speaking of their present times, and what they thought would happen in the immediate future.

We who know the Good News of God in Jesus look back and read the prophetic witness and marvel at how close it comes to who Jesus is. And we wonder, does the ancient prophecy still hold the power of God?

But it was a little different for John the Baptist. His disciples tended to him in prison, and wondered how they could best serve him now that his voice was shut up. So they went to see what Jesus was up to.

And Jesus said,

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

And when John heard, he knew that his prophecy was fulfilled in his own lifetime. It is astonishing, really, the speed with which God worked through his prophet John. But even though John’s prophecy came true almost immediately, what has followed in the two millennia since has been even more astonishing.

Last week, folks confined to beds and wheelchairs found smiles on a random Friday evening when the news was full of traffic accidents and filibusters. And Christmas Caroling is just a little tradition—and a new one for us. Today we are starting another new tradition with the Alternative Gift Fair. Next week, agencies near and far will begin to receive checks from the people of the church of the Atonement—checks that will purchase food, clean water, and health services for people who need them. And we have long-standing traditions, too. Every week here in this place, groups meet for service and help—Twelve Step Groups and scouting organizations—they meet here in warmth and safety because you are able to provide this place for the good of all.

We may not be cleansing any lepers, but for sure, more than two thousand years after John prophesied it and Jesus proclaimed it, we are bringing Good News to a hurting world. Thanks be to God, we are only following in a long and unbroken tradition of service to those who are the least in the kingdom of heaven. And thanks be to God, we are not the only ones doing it, of course. But thanks be to God, here we are, some 325 of us, doing all we can to point to new life, to bring light, and beauty, and reason for joy to all of those whom God loves.

That, of course, is what all of the traditions are for—to guide us on the path to unity with God. And on this Third Sunday in Advent we can proclaim in the words of Isaiah: everlasting joy shall be upon [our] heads!

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement
The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Fullness

2010-12-04T22:14:00.002-05:00

The Second Sunday of Advent

December 5, 2010

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

I wonder if your kitchen table is anything like mine? There is the pile of mail, half opened and half not—with the important bills mixed in with advertisements and catalogs and newsmagazines. There is always a newspaper or two, with a few coupons torn out perhaps, and the crossword puzzle neatly folded outside in. The pencil used by the puzzler is lying around, dangling off the edge of the lazy Susan that holds the salt and pepper, vitamins, Splenda and ibuprofen. Somewhere are a couple of placemats—not quite dirty enough for the wash.

It’s a merry jumble, and every single day both my husband and I devote several minutes, morning and evening, to clearing a space so that we may sit down and eat a meal—sometimes together and sometimes not—but either way, we make a space in the middle of the important little details of our lives for the important task of nourishing ourselves.

It is all very normal and usual. If you made a list of the things on my table, it would describe us: we read a lot, and take a lot of vitamins, we try not to put sugar in our coffee, we often take our meals together. Our kitchen table is a sign of who we are and what we think is important—and so the things on it are exactly what you would expect to find on any kitchen table.

Except at this time of year, in the midst of all of the important, expected things, I find that every day I am clearing not just enough space to lay out my meal, but also
space for an Advent or Christmas decoration. It started last week with the Advent wreath—and then came a book of Advent prayers, and then a box of Christmas cards. Next to the pencil tucked in the Splenda container for my cryptogram, there is a red pen, useful for a little note of holiday cheer.

There in the midst of what is completely expected—our work, our play, our food—evidence of how we live our lives—right in the middle of it all, is evidence of what we hope for. For that is what the Advent wreath symbolizes—the four colored candles surrounding the white one—signs of the fire of God that is coming to burn in the circle of my life. It is not here yet—the tall white candle has not yet been lit. Indeed, as of this morning, only two of the candles in the circle are lit—I am not yet on fire with expectation—my hope is only beginning to burn.

Oh, I suppose if you came over to my house this afternoon and looked at my kitchen table, all you would see is a mess—and that’s all right, because this morning we have a wonderful scrap of poetic scripture to tell this story of hope with other images.

The prophet Isaiah was writing about the failure of the kings of Israel. It had started well enough with David, but generations later, the welfare of the people has become more and more precarious and the protection of the king has become less and less likely. Isaiah is convinced that Jerusalem will be destroyed.

And in that mess of a prophecy, Isaiah proclaims hope. A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The image is wonderful and most of us have seen it: a living green shoot growing out of a decayed stump, or little saplings growing up around the trunk of venerable old tree. It is very common to see new growth poking through where the old has been destroyed or laid dormant, like the pale green haze on a field of corn at the beginning of spring.

Isaiah offers this expected image even though he is so weary with the house of King David that he won’t even say David’s name. That whole family has been such a disappointment to the people—David is just a stump—the goodness and prosperity that Jesse’s son brought to the people is gone. Everything is in ruins—except there is that small shoot—that branch that might grow into a new and mighty tree.

And the tree will be mighty, the prophet proclaims—as long as the king behaves as a king should—judging not by appearances or convenience, but by championing the meek, upholding the poor and casting out the wicked. That tiny shoot of hope will become a strong advocate for the people, by being a discerning and compassionate judge.

So far, so good, like the common things on my table—coffee cups and newspapers and placemats, signs of nourishment for a new day. And the nourishment will sustain us, as long as we remember our vitamins and don’t use too much sugar! A new tree shall grow where an old one toppled and fell. Isaiah proclaims that God will work out newness from the midst of failure.

But then, out of the commonplace and expected comes a new set of images. Wild and odd, they offer a vision of the future that is improbable to say the least.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

It’s quite one thing to say that a new day is coming: the sapling will become a tree—but what is this about the wolf and the lamb living together? The calf and the lion—and a child will be safe with them—more than safe—a child will lead them? All of that animal power and size—and a human child will have an effect on them? Impossible!

And even if it could be—even if there were a child so possessed of charm and confidence that she could lead that unlikely menagerie—well, she would be dead after sticking her hand in the nest of snakes.

There in the midst of a rather commonplace natural image— stumps and trees and saplings—yes, yes, spring does indeed follow winter—in the midst of it all comes the craziest fantasy, more fit for Dr. Suess than for Holy Scripture.

But it is an entrancing bit of fantasy, isn’t it?—through all the centuries and translated from Hebrew to Latin to Elizabethan English to Modern English, it hasn’t lost its beauty or its power to move us. We see the possibility in it:

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

If the king is able to accomplish the commonplace—to rule with wisdom and discernment, to care for the poor, to uphold the meek—if the shoot of Jesse becomes a mighty tree, well then! Who knows what wonders God has in store for us? If righteousness can come from the wicked mess that has befallen the people, how wonderful might be the reign of God?

All of this is to say that what we do here today in this place is important. We come here week by week—and sometimes, I am guessing it would be easier to stay in bed—or at least in your pajamas, and sit around the kitchen table—drinking coffee and eating cheerios. Pay a bill perhaps, or read TIME magazine.

What we do here is just as improbable as any vision of Isaiah—we gather from our individual realities, and just for a time, we give up our individual needs. We sing melodies that few of us would play on our iPods or record players. We read fanciful bits of ancient writings. And then we gather around a Table—or is it kneeling at an Altar? Somehow, it is both at the same time. And we pray over a tiny scrap of bread and a little sip of wine: and we are convinced that God is with us.

And for that moment, the earth is as full of the knowledge of God as the waters that cover the sea.

My brothers and sisters—in this holy season of Advent, I bid you take the time, and make the space, to dream the dreams of Isaiah. How wonderful might it be—if we remember the poor, uphold the meek, care for the ones that God loves? The reign of God is at hand. Indeed in this place, at this time: God is with us, and we are full.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

Some women and men

2010-06-13T19:56:00.001-04:00

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

June 13, 2010

Proper 6C: 1 Kings 21:1-21a;  Psalm 5:1-8; Galatians 2:15-21;  Luke 7:36-8:3

We have heard these stories before, of course, and not just in the Bible. You don’t have to look very hard to find a story about a controlling woman whose contempt for the men in her life leads her to despicable actions. There’s the wicked stepmother in Cinderella, for one. She is not unlike Jezebel, whose story we heard in the first lesson. Both believe that their husbands are weak fools, and both use their husbands’ names and wealth to get what they want. And there are the innumerable ladies of daytime television: Erica and Dorian and Carly and their sisters. Dig a little bit into any of these narratives and to hundred of others written in the centuries between them and you will find a frustrated woman.

What gives Jezebel her place in holy literature
is that her story revolves around right worship. Of course, that is a little hard to tell from the portion of 1 Kings we have today, so let’s fill in the back-story. Ahab is the king of Samaria, and now he has control over Israel. We are well acquainted with the God of Israel, the same God whom we worship here today—but Ahab was living in a time when the understanding of God as One, and God as Holy, and especially of God who is active in history—well let’s just say, that not everyone understood a powerful, relational God.

The prophet Elijah understood, though, because God kept speaking to him. And accordingly, Elijah kept exhorting the people to believe in God. Elijah had a hard row to hoe however. For one thing, the God of Israel didn’t really have a name. There was a series of written letters that comprised part of the Holy One’s name, but truly faithful people never pronounced them, or even wrote the whole thing out. And for another thing, this God could get angry if you did not pay enough attention. It was not just that you had to follow certain rules and make certain sacrifices. It seemed that the God of Israel knew and cared about everything you did.

Jezebel loved Ahab, and she was delighted to marry a king—but really, Ahab’s God was just a little too much to take. And so she suggested to her dear husband that they try her religion for a while.

Baal and Astarte, now these were gods that made sense. They were in charge of some specifics: Baal was the storm god and Astarte was the fertility goddess. And, they followed the rules: the people sacrificed to them, and they kept out of the people’s business. They tended not to get jealous of one another. Of course, they rarely gave you what you wanted, but it wasn’t like they were picking on you either. These were gods that let you exert the power of your own intelligence.

And so, in today’s story from the Old Testament, Ahab takes to his bed over a property dispute, and Jezebel takes on the power and authority of his office to kill his opponent. But remember that Ahab is the king of Israel. The power and authority of his office are gifts of God. In and of himself, Ahab is just a man. In fact, he is a man who takes to his bed over losing a plot of land.

Jezebel, on the other hand, is a strong woman. She has gifts and talents. She knows how to get that field that Ahab wants. Jezebel does not believe in the God of Israel, and she certainly doesn’t believe in the cautions of the prophet Elijah. What does a property dispute have to do with the gods? Baal and Astarte don’t care; why should the God who has no name? And so she perpetrates her deceit: Naboth is killed, Ahab gets his patch of vegetables, and all is well.

But. The God of Israel is the One, True God. The God of Israel cares about the life of Naboth, and the life of Ahab. The God of Israel even cares about the life of Jezebel. After our lesson for today, Elijah foretells Jezebel’s death—that she will be killed by wild dogs—and in God’s good time, Jezebel is torn apart.

The wild dogs are a nice gory touch, one of the reasons that little kids like Old Testament stories more than their parents do: the Old Testament is at least as bloody as a good video game. But we hardly need Jezebel to be attacked by dogs to get the point: that life without a relationship with the One, true God is not life at all.

There is a way into life, of course. Even if we stubbornly take a while to recognize the One, true God, God will always recognize us. We call it forgiveness. We have the opportunity to change our minds, to remember, over and over again, just who God is. And God’s promise to us is that we will be forgiven.

Jezebel could have given up on Baal and Astarte and realized that the activity of the God of Israel was always about God’s relationship with the people. She could have listened to the prophet Elijah. She could have supported her husband in the work that God had given him to do. But for Jezebel, there was really no one else but Jezebel.

Of course, not every good story in the world is about manipulative women! Sometimes it is the men who are the power-hungry ones. Today’s Gospel story is a familiar one. It is repeated in each of the Gospels, albeit with slightly different details, so it must be important.

In today’s version, Jesus is dining at the home of a wealthy man. Our story begins in the middle of dinner, and we don’t realize how shabbily Simon has treated Jesus until a nameless woman, known only to us as a sinner, takes care of the hospitality that the rich man did not bother to offer. It seems strange to us that Jesus would complain that no one offered to wash his feet—but imagine if you were invited to someone’s home for dinner and they did not allow you to use their powder room, or offer you a place to lay your coat. It was just basic everyday hospitality that Simon neglected, and this poor sinner offered.

And yet, her offering was far greater than simple hospitality. The woman took a huge risk in order to care for Jesus. First of all, she touched a man to whom she was not related. At the very least, her failure to observe propriety could get her thrown out of the house. And then, she used expensive ointment for Jesus’ foot-bath. What would she have to go without because of the generosity of her gift?

Jesus makes the connection between the opposite actions of the rich Pharisee and the sinning woman. At first, his little parable about forgiveness seems to be off the point. Isn’t the issue hospitality? Why is he going on about forgiveness? Forgiveness is God’s business. Then he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."

This woman knew what Ahab and Jezebel and Simon the Pharisee did not. The nameless woman with the costly ointment knew that she was separated from God. And she knew that when she was in the Presence of Jesus, that separation disappeared.

There is another way to say this. The woman knew that life, properly lived, was not all about her—her health, her feelings, her needs. She knew that life was about her relationships. And she knew that the first relationship, the one from which all the others came, was her relationship with God. She needed to be forgiven. And so, whatever the cost to her reputation, whatever the cost to her resources, she did what she could to get close to God. She poured all of her propriety and all of her resources on to the hot and dusty feet of Jesus.

Then he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." . . . . Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women.

There are a lot of stories of women and men in the Bible: strong women and dumb men; evil women and loving men; wise women and evil men—men and women of “all sorts and conditions” as the old prayer says. Some of them knew what Jezebel could never quite admit, that all of their gifts came from God. Some of them, like the woman who washed the feet of Jesus, were deeply aware that without the grace of God, they were nothing. And so, they followed Jesus.

What do these stories say to us, all these years later, when Elijah no longer reminds us how to worship and Jesus no longer attends our dinner parties? Right here in this church, we are men and women of all sorts and conditions. What do we think about our lives? Does each one of us say, “I am strong and I am smart, so I can have what I want. Life is all about me?” Or do we look into the face of the other and say, “What may I do for you?”

Jesus says to us, “Your sins are forgiven.” And he invites us to go out into the world and proclaim the Good News of God’s favor. There are men with him, and women: shall we join them?

The Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud

The same or different?

2010-06-12T18:13:00.002-04:00

The Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 6, 2010

Proper 5C: 1 Kings 17:8-24;  Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24 ; Luke 7:11-17

When my children were little, we often watched Sesame Street together. There was a little ditty that used to run through my head in those days, and it came back to me this week:

One of these things is not like the other; one of these things just doesn’t belong.

Can you tell me which thing is not like the other, before I finish my song?

Four pictures would appear on the screen while the song was playing: three blue circles and a yellow triangle, for instance. Or, a dog, a cat, a mouse, and a muffin. Easy stuff, and the irritating little song wore quite a groove in my brain. Of course, sometimes there were tricky ones: a saddled horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, and a passenger ship. Which is the different one: the live horse, or the ship that you sit in rather than on? Early on, we teach our children to learn
by making connections. And even children as young as those who watch Sesame Street learn that our own context guides our understanding.

Sitting on a saddle to ride a horse, and a bicycle, and a motorcycle would make a lot of sense to a child who had seen those methods of transportation—but what if you had never seen a horse? What if the only sense you could make of the pictures was that three were machines, and one was an animal? Or perhaps you would choose using an entirely different perspective: three of the things belong on land, and one stays in the water.

You have heard me say often enough that the lessons we read on Sundays are chosen with a theme in mind. Finding the theme of the lessons is sometimes very easy: last week we had the actions of the Creator, Savior, and Spirit, and we knew for sure that it was Trinity Sunday.

But this week, what are we to make of the theme? Two of the lessons seem to be about the difficulties of widowhood, and the importance of sons. The widow of Zarephath is in the first lesson and the widow of Nain is in the Gospel lesson. And while it is not a picnic being a widow at any time, in any culture, we can remember that in the time of Elijah and in the time of Jesus, a widow probably was the poorest person in town. And a widow whose son was dead was just a step away from being dead herself, because without her son, she would have no way to provide for herself.

So, the lessons today are about the poor and the dispossessed. Ah, but “one of these things is not like the other.” Paul writes to the Galatians in our second lesson:

You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.

Far from being poor and dispossessed, Paul was an “advanced” member of his religion. He had worked hard to get ahead. He was more zealous than others of his age; he was looked on with respect. He had gotten so far, of course, by persecuting Christians. And then, the Lord had come to him on the road to Damascus and turned him around. And now, well, Paul doesn’t really like to boast, but wherever Paul went, he says, they glorified God because of me. So these lessons are about the good things that happen when you love the Lord.

But wait, the widow in our first story was from Phoenicia, a place dedicated to Baal, the god of Canaan, not to Yahweh, the God of Israel. She didn’t love the Lord. In fact, the drought that was causing the great famine had been caused by God, in order to prove to the people that Baal had nothing to do with bringing rain. God wanted the people to know that all good things came from him, and so for the time, he was withholding the rain. Elijah was the mouthpiece of the God of Israel. That is, the same Lord that Elijah loved, that Elijah spoke for—that was the God who was causing a drought. And the drought was not just killing the widow and her son, it was slowly starving Elijah, as well. So the theme of the lessons is that God controls the weather.

But wait, the suffering of the widow and her son in our Gospel lesson has nothing to do with the weather. When Jesus raises the widow’s son, when life is restored to the young man, and renewed to his mother, Luke tells us: Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" Everyone who saw Jesus raise the widow’s son knew the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son. That story was as recognizable a part of their culture as the ditties from Sesame Street are to two or three generations of our children. And when Jesus raised the widow’s son, it told the people a little bit about who Jesus was: he was a prophet, like Elijah. So our lessons today are stories of the prophets.

But, wait! Prophets speak for God, and that certainly works for Jesus and Elijah, but can we say that about Paul, as well? Does Paul really speak for God? He declares that he “proclaims” God—that he is sent by God to the people to tell the story of Jesus. It is a new calling for him—he who was once steeped in the tradition has radically changed his life. Actually, Paul would say that his life was changed through no action of his own. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. It was through his encounter with the Risen Christ that Paul’s life was entirely changed—as changed as the lives of the widows in Zarephath and Nain—as changed as the lives of the dead sons of those poor women.

In the past couple of weeks there have been some disturbing articles in the national news about the Episcopal Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has written that there should be sanctions against our church because of the recent consecration a new bishop whose lifestyle is, in the opinion of some, sinful. Of course, in the opinion of others, her lifestyle is an expression of the gifts of our good God. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has written,

We do not seek to impose our understanding on others. We do earnestly hope for continued dialogue with those who disagree, for we believe that the Spirit is always calling us to greater understanding.

Both Archbishop Williams and Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori are good people, writing from their own perspectives and struggling to minister to the churches in their charges. Both are concerned that what holds us together—that hard to define thing we call the Anglican Communion—may become splintered and torn. A breach in relationship is like a death. Like death, it is frightening, because we do not know what will come next.

The widow of Zarephath did not know what would come next. She only knew that she had just enough food for one small meal for herself and her son, and then they would die. Her son did not know what would come next: first he was terribly sick—and now this crazy prophet was pressing him down on his bed. Paul did not know what would come next. He had made quite a good thing for himself, being a persecutor of Christians, and now he was struck blind, and the voice of Jesus rang in his ears. The widow of Nain did not know what would come next. Her only support, the only one left to her was dead. Her son did not know what would come next, but he felt himself being lifted off the bier and he felt the winding cloths being stripped from his body.

The trick to playing Sesame Street’s little game, of course, is not in finding out how one thing is not like the other. Oh, that is what the song says, and it is tempting to do, too, because differences tend to stick out, to show themselves in dramatic ways. The problem with that method is that it is easy to fix on something that is easy to see, and miss all the wonderful giftedness that lies beneath the surface. The trick to the game is in seeking out the similarities, in making the connections for how things work together.

Our lessons today teach about a lot of good and important things but above all of the things we have been considering for the last few minutes—above them, and beneath them as well, is an inter-connected web of new life. The theme of these three lessons is resurrection.

Elijah eats, and is restored. The widow and her son will live in the knowledge and protection of the God of Israel. Paul’s sight was restored, and the gift he had been given before he was born—the gift of being chosen for God’s purpose was used to bring good news to the known world. The son of the widow of Nain allowed himself to be unwrapped and brought back to life, and while he rejoiced in the arms of his mother, the people recognized that they were in the presence of God.

I do not know how to solve the problems of the Anglican Communion, but I do know this: Sunday by Sunday we gather together in this place, and it is easy enough to see our differences. We are men and women, old and young, gay and straight, rich and poor, Republican, Democrat, Independent—some of us like chocolate and some of us like vanilla, and I am guessing that there are even a few of us who don’t like strawberries! (Although admit to that in the next couple of weeks and see what happens!) The differences are easy to see, but thanks be to God, through the resurrection of Jesus, the presence of God is all around us in our splendid diversity. And we, too, are called to live in the resurrected life of Jesus.

Death is scary, because we do not know what is next. But this week our Presiding Bishop challenged us to heed the call Jesus to new life as she reminded us of what comes after death:

the vision of the Gospel – a healed world, loving God and neighbor, in the love and friendship shown us in God Incarnate.

Sesame Street is a production of The Children's Television Workshop

and I hope they don't mind my singing their song.

Pastoral Letter to the Episcopal Church, Pentecost 2010,

from the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, may be found at: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79425_122615_ENG_HTM.htm

Or follow the link at the left of the page.

The Church of the Atonement

The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud