mary-the-virgin-aug-15

Church

Homily – August 15:

Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ

History

Assumption of Our Lady
This feast originated in Jerusalem before the fifth century as the “Falling-Asleep of the Mother of God.” It was adopted in Rome in the mid-seventh century and was renamed the “Assumption” in the next century. It celebrates Mary’s passing over, body and soul, from this world into the glory of her risen Son.[1]

Mostly a Catholic feast, although not exclusively so.

Like the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption was not always an official dogma of the Roman Catholic Church – not until Pope Pius XII ruled it so in 1950. It is, however, a pious belief held by some Orthodox Christians and some Anglicans. It is regarded as the principal feast day of the Virgin Mother. link

Catholics response:

are currently sensitive to the long tradition of devotion to Mary that looked and felt a whole lot like worship. I suspect there will be many homilies preached today that will be a little defensive about that past and will be quick to maintain that it’s really about Jesus, not Mary.

Creighton sermon: “It’s not about worshiping Mary” … [2]

He evokes a commonly found argument that the devotion to Mary increased as the exaltation of Jesus increased. In other words as the primary focus of our faith – Jesus – became more and more transcendent, distant from us, humans sought sacred figures that were closer to us.

I imagine that it was easy for believers down through the centuries to be certain that Mary, of all people on this earth, the one “full of grace,” would be the first to be carried home to the loving embrace of God. Andy Alexander, S.J

Others have also argued that Mary has provided a gender balance in the sacred figures of our faith. For many years, as I tried to focus my own devotion on loving Jesus (a man), I wondered what it was like for women. Women loving a man is a different dynamic that men loving a man. Clearly, it seems to me, the church has a long history of patriarchy that needs correcting.

Catholics and Anglicans each have their own axes to grind

Catholics have their prominent themes – on this day it is that we don’t worship Mary, it’s really … something else. Of course it’s all about Jesus – we’re Christians afterall, not Marianists but at times I think, “Thou protesteth over much.”

Anglicans have their prominent sermons. We don’t idolize the Pope. In fact we may despise everything the Pope stands for. In some sense the Anglican Way emerged out of a conflict over authority. But when it comes time to articulating our own theology of authority we are usually stumped. NB. in the Episcopal Church we just leaned back on the secular vision of the founding fathers of the United States of America.

Consider the drop off in Marian devotion after Vatican II by Catholics and the revival of contemplative Marianist devotion among protestants in the same years. Devotion to Mary is experiencing, I think, something of a revival in our lifetime. Not only Methodists teaching about the value of the Rosary in developing a spiritual prayer practice but also the Catholics recovering a balance of devotion to Mary because of our foundational trust in the saving work of Jesus the Messiah.

When St. Paul’s in Monroe said goodbye to Mary Pat and me, the church gave her a gift of prayer beads, together with a guide to their use. Just an illustration of a widespread recovery of Marian style devotion in the Anglican tradition.

I have followed a path wandering somewhere between the Catholic and the Protestant

My saying “Hail Mary” with my children at night –

I think I may have known early that loving children was a hopeless cause. As much as I try to protect them, one day they will have to cross the street on their own.

saying it when I approached a pastoral setting that I didn’t know what to do with

for 30 years I have found the strength to go into the unknown, the lost situation. Someday perhaps I could just privately catalog the amazing situations that a priest gets called to. It’s what the vocation is.

Let me share with you 2 stories that illustrate something of the way I have experienced Mary in the devotional life of the church.

Homily by Andrew Greeley 2005

*Background:
…Story*:
Once upon a time the Lord God went out on patrol of heaven just to make sure that it was still a city that worked. Everything was fine, the hedges trimmed, the grass cut, the fountains clean, the gold and silver and ivory polished, the mall neat (Of course they have a mall in heaven. Where else would they put the teenagers!). He stopped by to listen to the angel choirs sing and they were in great form. Then on one of the side streets he encountered people who had no business being in heaven, at all, at all. Some of them should have been serving a long sentence in purgatory, others would not get out until the day before the Last Judgement, still others would make it into heaven only on very special appeal. So he went out to complain to St. Peter. You’ve let me down again, he said and yourself with the keys of the kingdom of heaven. I have not said St. Peter. Well, how did they get in? I didn’t let them in. Well, who did? You won’t like it. I have a right to know how they got in. Well, I turned them down and didn’t they go around to the back door and didn’t your mother let them in!

(Theologically this story of course is nonsense. But as a story it reflects Mary’s role as reflecting the maternal love of God).[3]

Mary’s presence and devotion to her helps the church to keep in mind our calling to radical compassion, to love seemingly as only a mother can love.

For me personally, Mary has been particularly present in times when I felt lost, unable to find my way forward, situations where “What would Jesus do?” doesn’t help me know what to do. Mary functions to remind me that I can go forward not knowing, but trusting, the way a babe in arms trusts the mother.

Barbara Brown Taylor

talks about how failure, like being lost, can

You will think of ways to get lost, or to accept that you really have gotten lost through no choice of your own. It can happen anywhere, in all kinds of ways. You can get lost on your way home. You can get lost looking for love. You can get lost between jobs. You can get lost looking for God. However it happens, take heart. Others before you have found a way in the wilderness, where there are as many angels as there are wild beasts, and plenty of other lost people too. All it takes is one of them to find you. All it takes is you to find one of them. However it happens, you could do worse than to kneel down and ask a blessing, remembering how many knees have kissed this altar before you. – Barbara Brown Taylor

For me, Mary has been the saint who has been most faithful in accompanying me in those times, the lost times, the hopeless times. We are beyond help. But she is there.

How does Mary fit in your devotion and faith?

Share?

Appendix

lectionary

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

Magnificat

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1. catholic ireland  ↩

2. http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/081518.html  ↩

3. Creighton Center links: http://liturgy.slu.edu/AssumptionC081510/main.html  ↩

proper13-august-5.md

August 5:Ordinary Time, Proper 13: Supply St. Paul’s, Ft. Mill

Introduction

Sometimes the Episcopal Church makes the craziest decisions. I’ve been serving in it long enough I feel like I have been serving in it long enough I can poke fun.

Like you know how there are introductory words to various parts of the liturgy that kind of rattle off the lips without thinking? Who was it who thought it would be a good idea to have two different sets? One for Rite 1 and one for Rite 2.

When I say, “The Lord be with you.” Do you say “And with thy spirit” or do you say “And also with you.” And if we’re in a mixed audience and I hear someone next to me responding – the other way – I think to myself, “Oh, you’re one of those!”

I know the liturgical reformers in the 60’s and 70’s had good intentions. But …

The opening of the Eucharist is almost the same – except for the Lenten response. Some of us are supposed to remember that it is “Bless the Lord who forgiveth all our sins” rather than “Bless the Lord who forgives …” One group of us has a lisp and the other doesn’t – I’m not sure which is which.

Then there’s the Gospel acclamations for Rite 1 and Rite 2. They are totally different. And for those of us who go to 8 o’clock and 10:30 service – well, I hardly ever get it right 2 times in a row.

Here’s an interesting thing, though. All the new liturgies only have contemporary language. We can’t get them confused. Things like “Holy Baptism”.

Baptism

You would be justified in saying to me, “But wait, Dale. Baptism isn’t a new service. It’s an ancient one. The church has for a long time called it one of the 2 original sacraments!”

And you would be right. But here’s the thing. The main thing that changed between a prayer book from 1928 – or even 1662 – and the one that came out in the 1970’s, is precisely the understanding of baptism. Many have argued that the most important change in the church for centuries is in a new understanding of baptism.

It drove our understanding of:

• prayer
• ministry
• church administration

So the opening of that part of the Prayer Book is new. And it only comes in contemporary language.

after the introductory words of the Eucharist, because Baptism is assumed to be part of a Eucharist, – and that’s important, we get

	There is one Body and one Spirit;
People	There is one hope in God’s call to us;
Celebrant	One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
People	One God and Father of all.
Celebrant	The Lord be with you.
People	And also with you.
Celebrant	Let us pray.

These words, you may recognize come from today’s second reading from the letter to the Ephesians. So I’m getting to the sermon part of the sermon.

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Paul says he’s a prisoner … how? Literally prisoner? Traditionally taken that way. Prisoner because of the Lord I would have anticipated, but here he is prisoner in Christ.

To be caught so you can’t escape. To be so caught up in the calling that it is perfectly natural that you would live in humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another, maintaining the unity of the Spirit, the bond of peace

That’s a heck of a prison! But that’s what Paul’s talking about. And he understands that to be a description of what Christians are called to do and be. He understands that as a description of what it means to be baptized.

Gifts

“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

It turns out that this reading today from Ephesians is an absolutely central text for understanding the new understanding of baptism. It has to do with gifts, spiritual gifts, being given by God to the Body of Christ for the purpose of building up the body.

Some of you are called to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers. Altar guild, warden, sexton, choir member, – all the things we think of the church doing – Paul wants us to understand in terms of spiritual gifts not practical abilities.

And it is all to be measured against a single over-riding purpose: Building up the body.

I heard a story on NPR this week that is the perfect illustration for what Paul has in mind here.

The interviewer was talking with 2 of the 3 women graduates of Annapolis who are running for Congress this year. Listen closely. That’s really remarkable. These are women graduates of the naval academy. They are veterans, having at least served the minimum years required of graduates of the academies. And they have then gone on with serving their country – our country – in various ways. And now they want to serve as representatives in Congress.

The two women who spoke both identified as part of the reason they want to run is that the current leadership in Washington is obsessed with victory of party rather than service to country. They both observed the deep-seated impulse to divide between this that and the other. Democrats/Republicans, liberal/conservative, white/ black, english/hispanic, men/women – all the ways we have to divide ourselves against one another.

One of the women gave this illustration from her experience as a Navy pilot. She said, "When our crew went up in the helicopter assigned a mission, it never occurred to us to only take a particular set of folks. We didn’t say, ‘We’re going to do this mission only with … fill in the blank …’ No, all of us together worked to fulfill the mission we had been sent on.

She went on to say that she had helped the Navy discover – as a woman in a man’s world – that with diversity the mission was accomplished more efficiently and more completely than if it had been done with a homogeneous group. Diversity is better than the opposite!

It is in that spirit that Paul talks to his communities. He is saying it takes all of us to accomplish the mission of the Body of Christ. It takes all of us working together. We don’t ask if we agree with everybody or if we like everybody – we are all assigned the mission of the church.

And the mission as he puts it here is:

equip the saints for the building up of the church.

Equipping the saints as a meme

I realized in preparation for today’s message that the phrase “equipping the saints” had become a meme in today’s church. Now partly I’m trying to self-consciously show off. I don’t really know what the word meme means. Mary Pat and I have asked one another a number of times. It’s a term that is contemporary and connecting with the digital world we live in.

“an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.”

It’s become a watchword, catchword, catch-all, hot-button. I can think back 20-30 years of reading and hearing teachers and speakers plead for the church to begin equipping for ministry. For too many centuries ministry was conceived as something one person did to or for another person. If you were a minister you ministered. If you weren’t you had it done unto you. The church was conceived as a building full of folks who hired a clergy person to do ministry for them. But that model is dying and in many places is gone.

There is broad consensus, as I read it, throughout the church, that what we are to be about is working together, as the Body of Christ, to equip all the people of God to build up Christ’s Body. We are all ministers of one kind or another. And we are all to be about the work of building up the body of saints.

It is not for 20% to do the work and 80% to support the workers. When we were baptized, we were commissioned to work for the mission of the church. All of us. For that work, each of us needs to be equipped with the resources we need.

Closing

One of the resources (listed below) summarizes much of what has become commonplace in the contemporary church. That we are failing to work together to further the mission of the church. We may not be clear what the mission is. We may have failed to see that we have to do it together. Eric McKiddie ¹ summarizes this way:

3 reasons pastors fail to equip the saints

1. The Pastor doesn’t equip the saints to do the work, because he/she is doing it …
2. The Pastor isn’t teaching the people how to join the work of the ministry. …
3. The Pastor is patronizing the people, rather than shepherding them. …

3 reasons the saints fail to be equipped

2. They expect the pastors to do all the work instead of joining in. …
3. They don’t see their pastors as gifts from Jesus for their equipping, but rather as nags always asking for volunteers. …
4. They don’t realize they are signing up for work. …

…

“Get to work” Eric says. “Now it’s time to do Ephesians 4, for the sake of Christ’s glory in the church as his body matures into him, her head.”

We must all of us say together and mean it when we say it (please turn to p. 833 in the Prayer Book):

Lord make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
And where there is sadness, joy
O divine master grant that I 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’s in dying that we are born to eternal life
Amen

Appendix

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• August 6:The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

lectionary

• Nathan speaking to David in parable
• contrast doing in secret vs. doing it in the light
• Paul opening para. is summary of baptism, including opening versicles
• presentation re. gifts, some should be …
• … equipping the body …
• Jesus: Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves …
• “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Additional resources

• Equipping the saints: practical stuff
  practical outline
• A 16 page reflection, bible study on the passage:
  bible study
• Episcopal training for ordination
  episcopal church
• sample sermon
  sermon
• Vestry papers: many of these resources are from a conservative, traditional persepctive
  2007 Vestry Paper
• Overview from Dioc. NC
  NC
• Equipping the saints has entered the lexicon of the contemporary church as a description of what the church is supposed to be. What ministry is supposed to be. What we are all supposed to be about because we are the baptized faithful – the saints of God.

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1. (these are from the blog of The Rev. Eric McKiddie, Chapel Hill, NC) ↩︎

proper12-july-29.md

Homily: St. Paul’s July 29

Welcome & Thank you

It’s certainly been a while since I was last here and it’s good to be back. Thank you to your rector for inviting me to be with you during her vacation time this summer.

Mary Pat is unable to be here today because of surgery she had on her foot at the beginning of the summer. The surgery was relatively straightforward but the recovery is a slow-going process.

Telling the story (Narrative)

Have you been following the magnificent story we’ve been hearing in the first reading this summer? It’s the Great David, introduced by the steady hand of – well sometimes the not so stay or accurate hand of – Samuel. And, of course, God who provides the winning hand.

I’m so grateful to the adjusted readings we get because of the Common Lectionary. We get to listen to continuous readings from the Old Testament in a way we weren’t before the last 15 years or so. We’re in the midst of the narrative about David.

It turns out David is really important as you read throught the rest of the Old Testament and then open up the New Testament. Tradition has attributed the book of Psalms to David – and they quote from, or are quoted in, much of the rest of the Old Testament. And then we open the New Testament and right off the bat we are introduced to Jesus’ as the “Son of David” and we hear his heritage traced back to Abraham. At least in part the New Covenant which is presented by the New Testament (they are the same words) as “David’s Covenant”. We heard that articulated at the end of the reading last week:

“I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me”

We get a pretty significant twist to this narrative today. It wasn’t until I began to teach the Bible that I began to understand the real significance of this narrative about David & Bathsheba.

It is something like this:

Until now, David has been presented as something of a founding father of the people of Israel. A little like George Washington I think you could say. We’ve heard an account of his mythical-like origins, heroic in stature, going up against the likes of Goliath. We have heard God make a profound covenant with him.

Then this week we begin his encounter with a great beauty, one of the great loves of his life, Bathsheba. The story seems to be preparing is to anticipate that he is going to pair up with a great feminine figure to match his masculine stature. The narrative prepares us for such an encounter, which, of course, we don’t get. It doesn’t work out the way we think it should.

It’s like a best friend is sharing with his friend the adventure he is having but he doesn’t know how it’s going to turn out. The best friend says, "Oh, yeah, I have heard a story like that! It goes … [fill in the blanks] … By the time the best friend is finished with the story he realizes that it actually ends in catastrophe. He realizes the mistake and says, “Oops I guess maybe I shouldn’t have told that story.”

We get the ending next week, but you know, well, it doesn’t turn out so well. It is actually one among quite a number of stories and legends about women that are horrifying to our ears. A real challenge to know what to do with.

In this case at least in part what we need to do with the story is to conclude that the great hero of our faith and of the nation of Israel – King David – in addition to being a hero was also a profound schmuck. That gives hope to the rest of us who are maybe more parts schmuck than we are heroes.

It is a powerful story and one that can take our breath away, particularly when we take it to present the way in which God loves even one such as myself. Personal and transformative.

Paul’s excerpt has a breathless sentence.

We hear a continuation of a reading from Paul also today. From his letter to the Ephesians. In this NT letter, which we read from through the end of the summer, we have a scope of concerns that is, for me, breathless. Paul takes a cosmic view of what it means to be a human being. God, the God of the Universe mind you, is concerned with the likes of you and me. For that reason he has provided – in his immense scheme of things – a path for redemption, through adoption as heirs of his inheritance.

Paul has a very different way of telling a story than does the writer of the book of Samuel. He has a different story to tell also. I hear breathlessness in Paul’s words as he goes on and on, compiling one magnificent vision upon another and upon another. In the English translation of the Greek that we have heard today, after a brief introduction, there is just a single sentence!

Paul’s is so filled with enthusiasm and passion for his vision of redemption that he wants to get it all out at once. He wants to tell it with such power and conviction that others will be brought under the same power of redemption that he has known.

Powerful stories are contagious with the power to save.

John’s account of feeding: attention to detail

With the Gospel passage from John that we hear today we get another powerful narrative, intended to convey the same sense of effectiveness that can change lives. During the year of reading from Mark’s Gospel (Year B) we hear also throughout from the gospel of John. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest and our lectionary is 3 years long but there are 4 gospels. So the intention is that we will hear from John sporadically and intermittently through the 3 years.

The passage today combines what are often 2 separate stories in the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The feeding of the multitude and Jesus’s walking on the water. It turns out that the story of the feeding of the multitude is a distinctive narrative in the gospels. There are surprisingly few narratives that occur in all four gospels. That’s a story unto itself and needs another time. But not only does it occur in all 4 gospels, – in effect – , it is repeated 2 more times for good measure. There are 4 accounts of the feeding of 5,000 and 2 accounts of the feeding of 4,000.

Clearly among the first generation of Christians, Jesus’s miraculous feeding was experienced as one of the most powerful, the most contagious, the most effective at bringing about the experience of salvation about which Paul had written. Ranking right up there with the Crucifixion itself – which is only repeated 4 times.

John’s version of this narrative has been for me distinctive and powerful in its own special way. He pays attention to details that the other gospel writers gloss over. He allows me to enter into his story.

John presents the boy as if he was just like the boy I passed on the street the other day. I feel like I know him. He observes that there was a grassy place. Why mention that? It makes me feel the grassy sod underneath bare feet.

John pays attention to the distance that the disciples rowed the boat in the stormy waters, up to the point that Jesus miraculously comes walking upon the water.

I once heard someone interpret the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (Rambam) as saying about miracles that:

Miracles are not a super-natural manifestation of the impossible. They are a sign of what is possible.

John is writing his powerful Gospel (“Good news”) in order to show what God is doing in our world – not some other world. And one of the things he intends to bring about through this powerful story he puts into the words of Jesus: “Do not be afraid.” And then in the blink of an eye the boat comes home to harbor.

What story do we tell?

If we were in a position to share a breathless story, what would it be. What is your breathless story?

On our refrigerator is posted the following message – it was a gift to me from my wonderful spouse – “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away.”

My conviction is that each of us, no matter how young or old, rich or poor, male or female, brown yellow or green, – each of us has a story that can take one’s breath away. Each of us in need of a story so powerful that it can change and redeem our lives. Each of us is a part of a web that is entirely in God’s hands and in no other. Each of us is both in need of redemption and in touch with the Grace that saves.

Thanks be to God.

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Appendix

lectionary

• David, Bathsheba, Joab, Uriah (unfinished story)
• next week the story finished, adding Nathan and David’s repentance
• “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

1. Passover was near … feeding of 5,000. Matt (5 & 4) Mark (5 & 4) Luke & John
2. Jesus hid from their view
3. Jesus walking on the water … where there had been storm Matthew Mark and John