proper20-st-peters.md

Sermon: Sept. 24: St. Peter’s

The Gospel today sounds like an offense to the best of our human instincts regarding fairness and justice.

Jesus: King. of Heaven is like laborers went out into the field … working various lengths. … so the last shall be first and the first last. …

None of us can hear the parable about the Kingdom of Heaven without first reacting – wait? what? … that’s a sign that we may be on to something.

On Easter this past Spring I preached at the church in Rock Hill. In it I tried to evoke the wonder and depth and significance of what we proclaimed on that night. In the course of it I recalled a commencement speech that had been given a year earlier by the dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was filmed and shared on YouTube where it came to be viewed by millions of people – going viral I guess it’s called.

The key words of the commencement message that I wanted to focus on was a pair of words that are sometimes spoken by children and young adults when they are surprised by the depth and significance of something the parents have raised.

Imagine that someone you respect has told you something vitally significant about your life and what’s going to happen in it. Your first instinct might be to try to react as if was a normal conversation. And you would say, What! But then quickly you realize that the person has told you who you are, what is important in your life, and where your future life is going. Then you would say, Wait!

Jesus speaks to us that way – when we have ears to hear. Wait! What!

The parables we encounter in the New Testament – particularly when we do hear them as he intended – lead us to say Wait! What!

Because the parables – when we can hear them – are intended to wake us up, to shake our expectations, and to lead us into a new way of living.

Today’s gospel is one of those kind of parables.

If we can hear it, it offends our sense of justice and fairness.

Jesus says to his hearers, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out and hired workers throughout the day, promising each of them a fair wage.”

Now as you would expect the workers who worked longer hours were angry at the unfairness of it all.

It is not inappropriate that we would think about the first reading where the Israelites complain to God – after he had successfully delivered them from centuries of slavery in Egypt.

In contrast to Rabbinic parables with a similar theme, this parable stresses God’s unmerited grace, rather than any sense of “earning” God’s favour. In this way it resembles the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Yes, what we hear in the story is not fair. It is not just. We are not to be faulted for hearing it that way, for justice and fairness are one of God’s abiding characteristics.

Fair? Just?

What is fair? What is just? Literally it involves a kind of equation, a statement with an equal sign in the middle of it. E.g. “This 25¢ is = to this glass of lemonade.” It’s a fair price to pay at the children’s lemonade stand. The penalty one has to pay for speeding on the streets of Great Falls – well we could say that it is just, it is an appropriate payment for the infraction. There is a correspondence on either side of an equal sign.

• If you are willing to go a little ways with me on this lesson, perhaps you’ll go further when I affirm what Galileo Galilei said many centuries ago, “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe”. The equal sign at the heart of so much of mathematics is in fact God’s language. God knows about justice and fairness.
• God has given us the gift of recognizing fairness and justice and charged us with bringing about more and more fairness and justice into the world.
• But here is Jesus’ point in the parable. God didn’t give us His eyes and heart. He only gave us the means to grow into his eyes and heart.
• God’s justice and fairness, in the language of the parable, is: it is all gift, it is all grace

Paradox as a part of “religious language”

What looks and feels like unfairness and imbalance is in God’s eyes a greater justice. It’s why the writer of Matthew’s gospel “explains” the parable by saying that the first will be last and the last will be first. Jesus, it turns out was fond of saying that.

Living/Dying; first/last; strong/weak; hungry/well-fed; (beatitudes generally) … Jesus continually talked in paradox.

It’s the kind of thing the prophets had said before him.

Canticle 10 The Second Song of Isaiah Quaerite Dominum
Isaiah 55:6-11

Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; *
call upon him when he draws near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways *
and the evil ones their thoughts;
And let them turn to the Lord, and he will have compassion, *
and to our God, for he will richly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, *
nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, *
so are my ways higher than your ways,
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Jesus spoke this parable to his hearers to provoke their sense of surprise and shock. Wait! What! So that they might recognize they weren’t yet able to see that God’s justice is in fact delivered in the form of a gift – in the form of Grace.

Jesus spoke the parable so that his hearers would be moved to change their thoughts, their ways, so that they might more easily recognize God’s thoughts.

A prayer attributed to St. Francis puts it this way:

• Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
  hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
  there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
  there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
  there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
  be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
  to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
  in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
  are born to eternal life. Amen.

Or as Jesus puts it in today’s reading: The Kingdom of heaven is like this: the first shall be last, the last shall be first.

15th sun after pentecost

Sermon: Proper 19 – Sept. 17

St. Paul’s, Monroe

Forgiveness as the source of life

I’m thinking of the philosophers and scientists pursuing the question of how life began, how human beings were created, where it all started. We were reminded of some of this in the past few days and weeks as the Cassini space craft was completing its 13 year mission to Saturn. I read about how some of the things discovered during this remarkable ended up giving us new information about life could have beegun.
But in spite of all the new information we have about the origin of life, I am led to a curious conclusion. The beginning of everything we need to know about human life is really to be found somewhere else. Today I want to put before you the proposition that life really comes from a process of forgivenness.
Consider the central role forgiveness plays in the foundational story of the patriarchs – in particular Joseph and his brothers. We get a little flavor of that in the episode we hear today, coming as it does toward the end of the saga.
Poignance of Joseph receiving and forgiving his brothers after they had perpetrated such violence against him. (Gen)

Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good (Gen)

Or Paul, writing towards the end of his magnum opus, his letter to the Romans.

Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions (Paul)

Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? (Paul)

Finally, of course, in the gospel, we hear Jesus’ response to Peter who asks him, “How many times do we need to forgive someone?” Jesus’ words are probably not what he was looking for. They were:
“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times."
Jesus goes on to illustrate his answer with a parable using one of his most common similes. It is the continuation of Jesus’ opening, “The kingdom of heaven is like …”

And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Lemons

Somehow the story emerging from these selections from the Bible is about God taking the terrible things that we have made and making something good out of it.
It’s something like taking lemons and making lemonade.
I remember a professor at seminary who bought an Oldsmobile. Within the first year I think he had to replace the transmission twice – or maybe it was having to replace the transmission a month after it went out of warranty. I’m not sure exactly. But he was left with the feeling that the car company was telling, “Sorry for your loss, pal. See ya around.”
His solution was to get a custom license plate – in Wisconsin at the time, license plates were a bright yellow. On his plate, boldly pinned to his nearly new Oldsmobile were the letters: A (space) LEMON.
I’m not sure if he was completely satisfied. But at the time it seemed like an innocent way of expressing one’s frustration at being powerless and being exploited by a corporation – all without hurting anyone.
In a much more serious example, my wife and I have been watching a tv show this season that some of you may have seen. It’s called “This is us”.
We first began watching because a colleague had said that it was a great show but that you had to have a box of kleenex handy because every episode would make you cry.
We found that to be roughly correct as far as the crying goes.
We also found it an enormously attractive story for a number of reasons: great acting, great writing, I like it because it has good things to say about being a father, and more.
It is also trying to tell a story that is as deep and significant as the words we hear in scripture today.
We have a whole season under our belts now and the next one is about to begin, but I don’t want to give too much away for any of you who might try to watch it.
(I don’t suppose I should worry about that because we have recently been re-watching the episodes and they still make me cry.)
Much of the premise of the series is built on an event in a hospital 30+ years ago. There a physician sits with a stunned and shocked father. They are in a hospital waiting area. It becomes clear that it is the waiting area outside the Delivery Room of the hospital. Dr. K. says

Dr. Katowsky: I like to think that one day you’ll be an old man like me talkin’ a young man’s ear off explainin’ to him how you took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade. If you can do that, then maybe you will still be taking three babies home from this hospital, just maybe not the way you planned.

Making lemonade out of sour lemons. It may be that the business God himself is in is making lemonade. Because he is in the business of taking the terrible things that we make and making lemonade from them – that is what we in turn need to be about.

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Forgiveness is like lemonade

I don’t mean this to be trivial at all. Perhaps a little playful. But playful so that we can hear that it is about the transformation from the brokenness of sin and betrayal to something beautiful to God; from hate and violence to something beautiful to God; from abuse and exploitation – into something that God can smile about. Forgiveness provides us with a path forward when every step in front of us seems barred from us.
I once got a call late at night from a physician in the small congregation I served. The doctor worked with hospice and he had a patient that he was seeing who was dying. My friend observed that from a physical standpoint the man should already have died, but that there seemed to be something holding him back. He called me, thinking that the work of a priest might be more appropriate.
Indeed when I got there I found a man who was essentially unconscious, clinging to life with each breath. I asked a few general questions of the family at his bedside, but then began to pray. Basically I followed the outline of repentance and forgiveness as found in the BCP. It was a powerful experience for me. I got a phone call a few hours later – still in the middle of the night – that the man had died peacefully. Not that it mattered, but the man was a Baptist not an Episcopalian.
It is as if God was in the lemonade business, like two 8 year olds out on the street in front of their house. There is a card table there, a pitcher and some paper cups, and a sign that says, “Lemonade. 5¢ a cup.” God is those 2 young children.

God sings a song of forgiveness

I Know why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

I’m sure some of you have read it. It is a standard book in many of our schools’ curricula.
The book’s title comes from a poem by African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The caged bird, a symbol for the chained slave, is an image Angelou uses throughout all her writings. Wikipedia
In that autobiographical book she covers powerful and poignant subjects, from rape to racism. What was most important to me as I read and reread that book through the late 1980’s – we used it as one of our standards texts at St. Joseph’s College – was its account of how one particular girl took the greatest lemon one can imagine – and from the lemonade she made, she herself began to sing as a bird, as an author.
Angelou took the title of her book from a poem by an early 20th c. African-American poet by the name of Robert Dunbar. He used the image as a symbol of a chained slave and she borrowed and continued to use it. Wikipedia
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Sympathy
“Take the sourest lemon life has to offer and turn it into something resembling lemonade”
The caged was 1st caged – it had been served a lemon like no other – its life of freedom was robbed from it – but the bird was able to bring forth song.

Forgiveness gives life

I was given a book some years ago that provided something of a roadmap or method for making forgiveness a part of your life. Though to forgive might seem like an insurmountable obstacle, the author would claim along with Jesus that to walk the path of forgiveness is to walk into life, lived to the fullest.

How to forgive and get your life back together again.

Dennis R. Maynard
(Maynard) outlines 7 steps to forgiving. They are not necessarily easy in as much as they seem insurmountable. But they are as near to us as is the Kingdom of God. They are:

• Choose to forgive
• Don’t cry alone
• Go get angry
• Forgiving and forgetting
• Choose to reconcile
• Sometimes reconciliation is not a choice
• When restoration is a choice
• Nurture a forgiving heart

These 7 steps are in effect a recipe for making lemonade from the lemons served us in life. There are perhaps variations, but when we consider the central place that forgiveness has in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we might conclude that it is the central recipe of the gospel.
Jesus forgives our sins through the power of God’s Grace. We forgive because we are first forgiven.
The Way of the world is “Arbeit machst frei”
The Way of God is "Versöhnlichkeith machst frei
Conclusion
We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. (Paul)
Forgiving and Forgiven

14th-sun-after-pentecost.md

14th Sun. after Pentecost St. Paul’s, Monroe, NC September 10, 2017

Greetings and introduction

Greetings from my wife and me. Greetings from Rock HIll where we have
lived since 2014, having moved there from Hawai’i where we had lived
for over a dozen years. We are there because WU’s invitation to Mary
Pat to teach in the Math Dept. seemed like a call.

Even before I left Hawai’i I had discussed with my bishop there about
the various opportunities for serving the church from where were about
to move to. Clearly in Rock Hill we are close to NC while still living
in SC and really we are pretty close to a number of Episcopal
dioceses.

When I moved here I called fairly soon and found that it would be 9
months or more before I could meet with the bishop of North Carolina.
I decided to put that off for a while. Of course you then proceeded to
get rid of your bishop by sending him to New York. After meeting with
Bp. Anne, I finally received my license to supply in North Carolina
almost a year ago. As it turns out this is the first time I have been
able to agree to supply in NC.

Hurricanes : we don’t know the time or day

It seems as if we have ended up on the eastern side of Hurricane
Irma’s trajectory. Surely we are going to feel something here. We
experienced remnants of Harvey last weekend when we drove to Ohio to
be at a HS reunion. But the worst is going somewhere else.

But surely we can agree we “dodged a bullet.”

• It could have been so much worse.
• I am at least a little ambivalent about the phrase. It could just mean, whew, I’m sure glad (so and so) got hit rather than us. Sort of
  like – “Well, better them than us.”
• None of us would really take that position if we put it in those terms.
• I hear something about all of this in the words we hear from St. Paul in today’s reading?

now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone,
the day is near. Romans 13

Seize the Day

I remember looking at the novel by Saul Bellow lying around the house.
I was really intrigued at first reading the book, but I was not quite
sure whether I should be embarrassed or not. It was a grown up book
and I was still pretty young. I knew that as far as my mother was
concerned there was no censorship in our household. If we were
interested in it we were allowed to pursue it. From her perspective,
openness and honesty were especially prized. It was quite a few years later that I really began to recognize what was going on with
the novel and in particular the title.

Seize the day is the translation of the Latin saying Carpe diem. It is one of the oldest philosophical mottos in western history. First
uttered by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago, the
actress Judi Dench had carpe diem tattooed on her wrist for her 81st
birthday.

Carpe Diem is an antidote to the reality that we are, as Dead Poets’ Mr Keating (played by Robin Williams) (and by the way also
Shakespeare) put it, “food for worms”.** Life is short and our time is running out.** … Basically its about taking the ones you
love and living every day without ever getting into fights about
stupid shit. We don’t live forever, you gotta make the days you have
with them last. Keep those you love close, and seize the day. Urban
Dictionary

The day is near (at hand): Seize the day for God.
blog

Along with most of my classmates in seminary, many years ago, I did a
summer of CPE at a hospital in Boulder, CO. What happens in CPE is
that 20 hours a week we worked as chaplains in a clinical setting. The
other 20 hours we participated in a seminar in which we read,
discussed, and processed our experiences. It was a time for learning
about practical ministry and about ourselves and how we approached
ministry and how we might change in order to be better ministers of
the gospel. I had a profound learning experience, about ministry
and about myself when I ended up being the chaplain on call in the
emergency room when a young man arrived who had been electrocuted –
by an Xerox machine of all things. The doctors and nurses tried to
revive him but it was in vain. Finally his parents arrived at the
hospital and there I was – a young man about their son’s age trying
to listen carefully to their questions and to reflect back to them
what I thought was appropriate under the circumstances. It was strong
on intellectual concepts. And overly weak in heart-felt empathy.

When they repeated over and over again, “How can this be? How could
God have allowed this to happen?” I responded as honestly and openly
as I knew how at the time. But when we processed this event later with
the group of chaplains and my supervisor – I was convinced – I was
convicted – for having failed to hear those parents in their deepest
agony, in their devastation, asking for some kind of blessing some
kind of proclamation and embodiment of God’s victory over death and
destruction. I missed the moment.

I became convinced that I had failed to seize the day for God and
God’s blessing in that moment.
Almost 20 years later under different circumstances I became further convinced that seizing the day is the responsibility not
just of ordained ministers but was an obligation for all who wish to
wear the name Christian. All of us must seize the day to
proclaim blessings on those nearest to us. Each day, throughout the
day, we all are given the opportunity to respond with a word, a
gesture, a decision, that conveys God’s blessing.

Closing

It has to do with setting priorities. It has to do with knowing
what’s important and what is small stuff. Knowing what needs our
attention now because now is the time.

The things that divide us – and we are faced in this time and in this
country by enormous canyons and walls that divide us – what divides
us is mostly – I’m tempted to say always – small stuff.

What binds us is:

• We want to know that Jesus is indeed in the midst of us
• We want to believe and put into action the conviction that our salvation is near at hand
• For all of us, the night is far gone, the day is near
• All of us are regularly with 2 or 3 gathered in Christ’s name. Knowing that Christ himself is in our midst, wouldn’t we be deeply
  motivated to extend a word of reconciliation.
• What binds us together is our common desire to claim God’s blessing – and to claim it now, not tomorrow, or some future time.

Shared from my wife: 4 things you can’t get back:

1. The stone after it’s thrown
2. the word after it’s said
3. The occasion after it’s missed
4. The time after it’s gone

We do know the urgency about which Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus tell us in
today’s readings. We all too often pay attention to the lesser things
– that seem so big or tall at the moment. Somewhere, someone, today, at this very moment, is open and hoping for a blessing from you. Give
it to them. For the day is near and our salvation is nearer than when
we became believers.