last-epiphany-2020-monroe.md

February 23:

The Last Sunday After the Epiphany – Monroe

Opening

We come to the last Sunday in Epiphany. It’s a season in the church year that begins with, of course the feast of epiphany, which is the 12th day after Christmas. So a season in the church year that lasts for a variable number of weeks is devoted to the manifestation of Christ. For that’s what the word epiphany means, manifestation. To reveal. To unveil. To see what couldn’t be seen before.

We are so confident that we’ve seen it all. It’s tough to surprise us. We’ve been to church over and over again, perhaps all our lives.

Is it possible for this season of epiphany to surprise us? To catch us looking in one direction while the prince approaches us from our blindspot?

The trip up the mountain for what we call the transfiguration was such a place for John and James and Peter. Glory was manifest to them and they had not expected it.

This then is the text that the church gives us to hear as we turn our attention from looking back at Christmas to looking towards Easter. Dare we expect to see the glory? What would glory look like anyway?

Glory

What was my earliest awareness of something like glory?

I was taken aback when the first thought that came to mind was a song. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

It seemed strange at first and I thought I shouldn’t say that out loud in North Carolina. It was, after all, a Union army song. But I felt encouraged to go ahead and share it with you when I learned that the tune and part of the chorus, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah …” was originally a folk song developed in the oral hymn tradition of camp meetings in the southern U.S., dating from the early 1800’s. link

I can remember at some early age singing that song, or hearing it sung, and having goosebumps travel across my body. In Hawaii that’s called having chicken skin. Something of glory crept into me through that song.

Is glory something you hear? Is it something you see? Is it something you feel?

I don’t know the answer to that. Perhaps it’s any or all of the above. But I’m quite convinced that it creeps up on you, that it is something you don’t expect, and that that is what those three disciples experienced that day on the mountaintop.

In Morning Prayer this past week, I read this from someone reflecting on the readings:

I have a friend who is in the habit of saying, when he’s considering a baffling situation, “I wonder what God is up to here.” He’s cultivated the habit of expecting God to show himself precisely in odd, unsettling moments. He makes a practice of readiness for God to reveal himself. “I wonder what the Lord is up to here” means “I assume the Lord is present and at work—I just have to watch and wait, and I’ll see him.” ¹

What is God up to? Here in the account of the Transfiguration? Today in my life? In your life? Glory, I am convinced, is waiting to burst in and be manifest.

“Glory” as it used in the Hebrew Scriptures is both something that we offer to God and also a description of something that is saturated with God’s presence – as praise and as substance. link

Words made cheap

Glory is one of those words that at one time meant something weighty, something you didn’t say lightly. But that now is cheap from our use or over familiarity.

There are a number of things like that in the life of the church. Christmas becomes family tradition when at one time it referred to the incarnation, the manifestation of God himself in human form. Easter becomes a time of children’s activities and new clothes. Hallelujah. Praise God. Bless you. We so easily say the words; do we have any idea of what it is we speak?

Annie Dillard wrote in an essay many years ago of the contrast between what she called high Church and low church. In the high churches she said we go through the motions, say the words, follow the ritual, and we have “long forgotten the danger,” she says. “If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”

I don’t think it’s exclusive to one kind of church and not another. I think that we can all become like those disciples, sauntering up the mountain, confusing the glory of God’s presence with a familiar religious ceremony, and only late in the experience falling on our faces as the chicken skin engulfs us.

Glory is our all too human perception of the Divine Presence – something we are simply not accustomed to.

This week I thought to myself that at the very beginning of my career in the Episcopal Church I listened to Archbishop Michael Ramsey give a week long lecture series on Glory in the gospel of John. I was certain that he was able to see something I couldn’t – and I wanted in. He carried himself with a modesty that belied his importance in the international church. He spoke directly to us gathered in St. Mary’s Chapel, even as we felt that he was a channel speaking with the very voice of God. Glory is about bringing the presence of God into the humble existence in which we live. I can’t tell you the joy and peace I felt as a year later I was privileged to have him and his wife Lady Jane Ramsey for dinner in our humble student housing.

Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He is important in all kinds of ways in the history of the Renaissance and of painting in general. But I was captivated to learn this past week that one of the things he was known for – as he painted religious scenes from the life of Christ – was to place contemporary figures into the scene. People would recognize contemporary church leaders, cultural figures, in the scenes of the life of Christ. ²

It may not seem so original a thought to us, but in the 1400’s it had an impact. People could feel it. Perhaps it produced chicken skin.

So I wonder where we place ourselves in this scene of the transfiguration, where the glory of Jesus is revealed? Where do we place ourselves?

Who is God doing this for? For Jesus? For the disciples’ benefit?

I remember for the longest time it seemed to me the disciples were just kind of not very bright. Building the booths was a foolish kind of mistake.

I now think it is about Jesus knowing he’s on his way to death.

This is one of those watershed moments in Jesus’ life.

Conclusion

Whether we place ourselves as distant disciples, or as close friends and companions of Jesus, in that scene we are experiencing the glory of God and it is a watershed moment in our life.

The voice tells us, just as it told Jesus, “You are chosen. You are loved.”

It is a time to bow down to glory; to expect glory.

Don’t let this moment be cheapened. Recognize the watershed moment for what it is. God is with us. Emmanuel. And he is risen, Alleluia.

Then you will come down from the mountain. You will adjust your eyes and ears to hear the mundane. But like Jesus then, like his disciples then, you will be changed now.

Notes

lectionary

• O God, who before the passion of your only begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain
• Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai
• We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven
• Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain

February 23:Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr of Smyrna, 156

February 24:Saint Matthias the Apostle

Notes

---

1. Marilyn McEntyre, What’s in a Phrase? (MP for 2/20) She is the author of numerous books on language and faith, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts. ↩︎

2. from “Blessed Among Us” 2/18 ↩︎

epiphany-6-monroe-feb-16-2020.md

February 16:The Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany – Monroe

Setting

The lessons this week are not easy and comfortable words. The preacher might well be justified in looking at one of the other lessons.
Afterall we’re given the choice of preaching on: 1) murder, 2) forgiving your enemy, 3) adultery, 4) cutting off one of your hands to prevent sin, 5) divorce, 6) swearing in court – known as perjury in our legal system.
Let me read from another version – loose translation by Eugene Peterson. I use it sometimes because several bishops through the years have confessed to me that they use it when they celebrate Eucharist.

Matthew 5:21-37 The Message (MSG)

Reconcile

Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.
23-24 “This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.
25-26 “Or say you’re out on the street and an old enemy accosts you. Don’t lose a minute. Make the first move; make things right with him. After all, if you leave the first move to him, knowing his track record, you’re likely to end up in court, maybe even jail. If that happens, you won’t get out without a stiff fine.

Adultery and Divorce

27-28 “You know the next commandment pretty well, too: ‘Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices—they also corrupt.
29-30 “Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.
31-32 “Remember the Scripture that says, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him do it legally, giving her divorce papers and her legal rights’? Too many of you are using that as a cover for selfishness and whim, pretending to be righteous just because you are ‘legal.’ Please, no more pretending. If you divorce your wife, you’re responsible for making her an adulteress (unless she has already made herself that by sexual promiscuity). And if you marry such a divorced adulteress, you’re automatically an adulterer yourself. You can’t use legal cover to mask a moral failure.

Empty Promises

33-37 “And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

The Sermon on the Mount

We hear from the first chapter of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – Matthew’s version of it. We would have heard from the beginning of the chapter 2 weeks ago, but the readings were changed for Candlemas. Last week’s excerpt was “You are the salt of the earth …” “You are the light of the world …” We will finish hearing from it this year in 10 days on Ash Wednesday.
As I tried to think about the pattern in the readings – it’s punctuated by that repeated phrase “You have heard what was said to the people …” “You have heard that it was said…” “You have heard how it was said to our ancestors …”
In each phrase Jesus expresses a received value and guide to action and then looks to his audience and says, “But I say to you you have to do better than that …” “You have to go deeper than that …” “You have to get serious about that …”
The values that I can identify are:

• Peace / Reconciliation / Shalom
• Honesty
• Faithfulness / Fidelity
• Keeping one’s word / Promises

The rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount is built on a shared and inherited value system. Jesus audience is made up of Jews. The occupying forces of the Romans were not his immediate concern. His Sermon on the Mount would eventually be easily expanded to include all people. But Jesus wasn’t polemicizing against the state, he was speaking against the interpretation of morals and religious values by other religious Jews. He was speaking to his fellow country men and women. Men and women with a shared value system.

Jesus’ point:

In this “sermon” – that lasts for 3 chapters in Matthew’s gospel – Jesus takes the inherited “traditional values” of his society and tells his listeners, “Your inherited values don’t go deep enough!” You have to be radical in living those values."
We might say in today’s world, it’s not enough to separate cans and plastics for your recycleables. You must change your lifestyle.
But then can we take a concern for the environment as a shared value? Probably not.

Political?

This is not a political sermon. But it seems to me that we cannot talk about Jesus’ word to us today without considering that the culture we live in has sought to extinguish the inherited values upon which the lesson is made.
My words aren’t necessarily political. It is about values that we live by. It is about what Jesus has to say about our cultural values. Let me think of an illustration.

Defending Russian traditional values

• Vladimir Putin has put himself forth as the standard-bearer and defender of Russian values, morals, tradition.
• He has sought to impose that message for years, as the foundation of his regime. ¹

Or as an Irish editorial put it: “Putin depicts Russia as a bastion of conservative Christian values standing firm against a dissolute, multicultural West…” ²

• wikipedia
  “The political system under Putin has been described as incorporating some elements of economic liberalism, a lack of transparency in governance, cronyism, nepotism and pervasive corruption.”

Putin claims to be a defender of Russian values. But he’s not. He is no Dostoevsky, He is no Solzhenitsyn, He is no Maria Skobtsova (Mother Maria).
He has built up the values of power, authoritarianism, plundering, and greed.
Clearly the pattern is being repeated around the world. How close to home is it?
The danger of our time is that the received, traditional values that we had formerly received, are now perceived as optional or a sign of weakness or treachery.
The sign of our times is that before we can go beyond the values we have received, those values must themselves be revived.

Received values

I asked myself who passed on to me the values that have guided my life? A key figure was – ironically, because he wasn’t very much a part of my life after I reached adolescence – my father.
“Gentleman” and handkerchief … one of the things I have remembered through all the years are the 2 things he said any gentleman would do.
First a gentleman would always have a handkerchief in his pocket. This was so that he could deliver it when needed to the lady who accompanied him.
The 2nd thing I very much associate with him. It is that a gentleman would be as comfortable eating with the poorest of the poor as he was while eating with the rich and powerful.
But there was much more in that “gentleman” designation. It had to do with much of what is in today’s gospel: honesty, keeping one’s word, faithfulness.
The other value at the beginning of today’s reading – love, Shalom, Peace – I got from other places.
But the main idea I can’t escape about today’s excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus’ teaching to us has to do with the need to go deeper than the values we have received. It is not enough that you be honest you must have integrity.
Jesus’ admonition to take the received values and make them deeper and more significant – that “command” if you will, is problematic if we have not received the basic values he presumes:

• honesty
• genuine desire for peace and reconciliation
• faithfulness
• desire to keep one’s word

then Jesus’ command to us is without weight.
If we have lost “what is passed down to us” – if the foundational values are watered down and finally reduced to empty phrases – then we have nothing left to build our gospel life upon.
Another illustration:
For a long time I pointed to a turning point in American society. It occurred during the turbulent years of President Richard Nixon. At a certain point, after he had been accused of having lied to the American Public, he said in his own defense that he had mis-spoken. The media accepted that as a defense and there was no public outcry that it was an empty excuse.
The problem was not a leader lying to the public. That has always gone on. The problem was the silence of the people. When the media and the people accepted mis-spoken as a defense for lying, … at that point it became ok for our leaders to lie – provided that they explain it away.
The gospel demands that not remain silent.

Loss of received values

Here is the reason I raise the political figures. They help us to determine how far we have lost the very foundation that makes the Sermon on the Mount real. We -flive in a time when our political leaders claim to be defending “traditional values.” But they really are acting so as to undermine and destroy the very foundation upon which the gospel depends in order to make sense.

• honesty
• genuine desire for peace and reconciliation
• faithfulness
• desire to keep one’s word

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus saw through the defenders of “traditional values”. We must do likewise. The gospel depends upon it.

Closing

It is insufficient to go beyond the received values when the received values have been lost or not passed on.
The demands of the gospel today require that we not remain silent. Each of us in whatever way is available to us must demonstrate that these values:

• honesty
• genuine desire for peace and reconciliation
• faithfulness
• desire to keep one’s word

… that these values still rule in our world and that to violate them is unacceptable.
The gospel today demands that we not remain silent.

Notes

lectionary
Coming week:

• February 17:Janani Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda, and Martyr, 1977
• February 18:Martin Luther, 1546

---

1. Why Putin’s Defense of “Traditional Values” Is Really a War on Freedom
   The sensible way to fight back against Russia’s anti-gay campaign
   foreign policy ↩︎
   
2. Irish Times editorial ↩︎
   

presentation-2020-monroe.md

February 2:

The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany – Monroe (Presentation)

This day

Superbowl

Superbowl Sunday in past years represented a competition with church attendance. It doesn’t any longer – except for those few places where a Sunday evening service is important.
I had a dear friend in the first congregation I served in after ordination who was frequently not in church on Sunday because he was an avid golfer. He ended up convincing me that there was an arguable case to be made that golf could be a deeply spiritual activity.
I have not yet been persuaded that either playing football or watching football was an equally spiritual activity. Did the NFL win by moving the game to evening? Or did the church?
I think probably NFL did, but …

This day is also the feast of the presentation.

Wikipedia “and to perform the redemption of the firstborn son, in obedience to the Torah (Leviticus 12, Exodus 13:12–15, etc.)”
With this day we leave behind the Christmas cycle and turn our eyes toward Easter. The account we hear in the gospel takes place 40 days after the birth of Jesus. Feb. 2 counts as 40 days from Christmas. Ash Wednesday is around the corner. That day is a kind of countdown to Easter.

Luke:

In the gospel readings for the Presentation we hear from 2 prophets – Simeon & Anna – who speak in the temple to proclaim Jesus to be the real deal – the expected one to come, the one to “redeem Jerusalem”.
Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,

Lord you know that I have waited my whole life for just one thing. I’ve wanted to see the anointed one who is to come. And now he’s come. He’s right before me. And you can take me away. What you made me for I have accomplished.

Simeon’s life had been dedicated to the Messiah who was to come. It didn’t look like Messianic times around him, it looked like apocalyptic times. It seemed impossible, but he waited with expectation. And then he got to see the Messiah.
I thought of a similar story that a hero of mine told about his grandfather. Harry Chapin is my hero’s name. He died young, but his short life was dedicated to serving the hungry. He said this about his grandfather:

My grandfather was a painter. He died at age eighty-eight, he illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry, and he was looking at me and he said, “Harry, there’s two kinds of tired. There’s good tired and there’s bad tired.” He said, “Ironically enough, bad tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people’s battles; you lived other people’s days, other people’s agendas, other people’s dreams. And when it’s all over, there was very little you in there. And when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn; you don’t settle easy.

It’s that good tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost, but you don’t even have to tell yourself because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days and when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy, you sleep the sleep of the just and you say ‘take me away’”. He said, “Harry, all my life I wanted to be a painter and I painted; God, I would have loved to have been more successful, but I painted and I painted and I’m good tired and they can take me away.” Harry Chapin’s grandfather

The gospel text includes also a woman, Anna, also a prophet, and she too recognized who Jesus was and announced it to the world in her prophetic voice.

"There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem."

These two prophets speak in effect of Jesus’ vocation, the one he was meant to be – as the gospel of John put it “from the beginning of time.”

Vocation

The gospel I hear today seems focused on the concept of vocation. One’s calling. Some years ago F. Buechner developed a powerful – and now well-known – algorithm or formula for identifying one’s vocation. He said:

IT COMES FROM the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Originally published in Wishful Thinking

The world has a great need for redemption. Just look around and the need is very great. Jesus – as if to match that need – was made by God to have a heart for meeting that need. The place it met for Jesus was at the cross and the empty tomb. Easter.
One of the ways, it seems, that we can reflect Jesus’ light in the world is by living in our own intersection of the work that the world around us needs to have done and our own heart’s desire?
For me that place has for a long time been about what God has made us for. It’s the kind of question we ought all of us to be asking – asking every day.
How well am I living into that place? That intersection?

Concept of presenting, offering in Temple

Candlemas as the feast today is known leads me to wonder how we have been encouraged or discouraged from living into our heart’s desire?
Simeon and Anna had their part to play in putting a prophetic stamp on Jesus’ vocation or calling. Who has played that role in your life?

Confirmation of Vocation?

If I ask that of myself … Who confirmed for me the whatever it was that I was supposed to do with my life?
Who gave me the stamp of approval, the imprimatur to go forward with the task of becoming who I am today?
Who encouraged me, mentored me, yes? But more to the point, who gave that solemn sign, like Simeon & Anna gave to Jesus?
Interestingly two important people who played that role asked me similar questions. The questions were put to me about 35 years apart. In both cases the person had a simple question for me, “Why not?”
Those were the words that somehow set me free to find that intersection of my heart’s desire and the world’s great need.
I thought of a counter example of what I’m talking about. It came in the form of a trusted older person sitting down with my daughters and asking them what their dream was for their life. What did they want to do “when they grew up?” They were both in their early teens. And they poured their heart out to him – they trusted him.
And you know what he did? He proceeded to tell both of them what was wrong with their dreams.
He was the opposite of Simeon and Anna. How can we be Simeon and Anna for the world around us?

Vestry retreat

Does this have anything to do with St. Paul’s
This is a worthy question for the community to be asking. What is the need in the community of Monroe, NC? What is the heart’s desire of this place? And where is the intersection?
Are you doing what you were intended to do?
What lies ahead? God knows. God has made each of us for this time and this place. The need is very great. But your hearts are very big.

Notes:

lectionary

Praising the Temple (psalm genre)

Psalm 84
Quam dilecta!
1 How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! *
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.
2 The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; *
by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
3 Happy are they who dwell in your house! *
they will always be praising you.
4 Happy are the people whose strength is in you! *
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.
Malachi: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”