Facebook Collaboration on a Sermon

Last week I was having a tough time trying to put my thoughts together for a sermon, and I put up a facebook status that said I was needing the "Sermonator" to ghost write for me. I got several responses from friends, some delightfully facetious, including one from my dear friend, Paige, who is a writer by trade, that said, simply, "You rang?" There were a couple of posts that, together, got me thinking in a productive direction. The sermon below is the result. It's not exactly what I preached, but it's the manuscript I took to the ambo, with a couple of revisions that attempt to get closer to what I actually said.

And, by the way, our parish was able to send some desperately needed assistance to the LAMB Institute this week thanks to the generosity of some folks who heard this sermon, and to the generosity of many parishioners and community members who have supported other fundraising efforts at church.

Texts: Ephesians 2:1-11; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.

Do you ever engage in the thought experiment that produced the term “Six Degrees of Separation?” The idea is that the human family truly is more tightly connected than we usually imagine it is. For example: Many of you know my daughter Anna, who has shaken the hand of the President of the United States. The President has met the Queen of England, who is the grandmother of Prince William, who is the son of Princess Diana, who had met and shaken the gloved hand of Michael Jackson. Usually we play this game with famous people. But we can just as easily play it this way:

Leamarie True (choir member, indefatigable supporter of the Trio Coffee House, our parishioner who has been to Honduras twice on mission trips) went to Honduras with a St. David’s parishioner named Amanda Scott. Amanda keeps in close touch with a woman named Suzy McCall, who is Field Director of the LAMB Institute, and who cares for children who somehow find themselves homeless on the streets of Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital. Suzy knows an unnamed member of Tegucigalpa’s equivalent of DFACS, who was contacted by another unnamed individual, who discovered a pair of twin girls, who appear to be about fifteen months old, literally abandoned in a pigpen, trying to compete with the pigs for food. How many degrees of separation is there between you and these two precious children? Of course, Suzy will find a way to make sure the children don’t fall through the cracks.

The email that told us about them also gives us an idea of how Suzy somehow manages, on faith and prayer, to provide a loving home to her own seven adopted children, ages 2 to 24, while at the same time operating a school, a day care center, and a children’s home; and providing leadership and educational training to a staff of wonderful young adults who work in the school with her. Just put the words “LAMB Institute Honduras” into a search engine when you get home, and you can see the amazing things that Suzy is up to.

We can look at the enormous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that Suzy and the staff face; and we wonder how she finds the strength to go on. She’s recently had to cancel plans to return to the USA for a time of retreat and respite, because the money just isn’t there.

Suzy’s ministry is truly Christ-like. She longs, with all her heart, to model what she does in Honduras on the ministry of Jesus. And as soon as you decide to live this way, as soon as you realize that Jesus calls you to be his eyes and ears and hands and feet in the place where you find yourself, your heart begins to burst as you see the needs. Our reading today from the Gospel of Mark tells us that people flocked to Jesus, and if they just touched the hem of his garment, they were healed. I hear this reading and think about these twins, and about being the Body of Christ and I feel like the chain of the degrees of separation begins with us, having grabbed onto the hem of Jesus’ robe, reaching out to bring that healing to the ones we are called to serve.

They are here as well as in Honduras. You know this if you volunteer through Good Samaritan or CARES or ACES or Angels on Horseback or the Thrift Store, or mentor children, or serve as CASA volunteers, or tutor at the Joy House: you find your heart strings constantly tugged. In doing this work, we hear stories that touch our hearts because there soon develops a flesh and blood connection between ourselves and the people we serve. We see glimmers of hope that maybe things can change with wise and loving intervention.

And there are also days when Holy Family folks wonder why they don’t just pack it in, and spend all day on the golf course instead. People who care can fall victim to compassion fatigue. The problems just don’t seem to quit. One can begin to feel, like Dr. Laura used to say, that no good deed goes unpunished. As Good Sam develops a reputation for being an effective deliverer of medical care, for example, more and more people come. And the work expands.

There’s a lot of joking in this parish, especially as we have seen so many folks facing surgeries to repair hearts, knees, backs, and hips, that growing old is not for wimps. Neither is being a Christian. Following Jesus is not easy. Following Jesus is not a hobby that we take up like raising Dalmations or Chinese cooking or wood-working. It is a way of life, a way of seeing and being in the world that will wear you out and that will break your heart.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark shows Jesus and the disciples with every intention of taking a break to catch their breath. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while,” Jesus says.

The disciples needed a rest. They had just heard tell of the horrifically violent death of their friend and fellow servant of God, John the Baptist. The story reached Jesus and his disciples just after they had been engaged in a period of intense ministry: traveling through Palestine, teaching and healing. They were tired and emotionally vulnerable. It was time for them to be getting some rest and a restored perspective on their mission.

Jesus said: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” So they headed across the lake by boat. As it turned out, they didn’t get much time to relax this day. By the time they were at their destination, crowds were waiting for them.

Jesus saw the crowds with compassionate eyes. He saw them as sheep without a shepherd. Mark’s analogy here is apt: the Hebrew Bible has a long tradition of referring to the rulers of Israel as shepherds; and some were faithful, but others were more like Herod. The kind of man who could commit the horrible violence of beheading John on a whim, and subjecting a young girl most likely to nightmares for the rest of her life, was not, in Jesus’ eyes, a faithful shepherd. This was the entree, perhaps, for his teaching that day. It ran long into the afternoon.

It was a huge crowd that gathered. You’ll notice that today’s reading has a gap in it. We move from the 35th to the 50th verse of this 6th chapter of Mark. What we miss is the feeding of the 5000 and the story of Jesus walking on water. We will spend the next five weeks taking a little break from the Gospel of Mark and hearing these events narrated from the point of view of the Gospel of John. So we’ll have more time to consider these events and their meaning later this summer. But what we have before us today is a very important picture of the way Jesus conducted his ministry. We need to see the pattern and apply it to our own lives if we are to be faithful followers of Jesus. It is a pattern that helps us to steer between two common but destructive ways of living: overestimating the importance of our own contributions to the Kingdom of God, on the one hand; and, on the other, seeing our Christian faith as little more than a stress-reduction program.

Jesus, as a faithful Jew, knew the weekly pattern of six days of work and a day of Sabbath rest. He also had a day-to-day pattern of alternately seeking solitude for prayer, and compassionate engagement with the people who needed him. When the disciples and Jesus got to the other side of the Lake, they discovered that they had to postpone the rest. But the pattern of Jesus that we see in the Gospel of Mark shows us that, although this was one time when he did not manage to get away, Jesus did regularly make time in his day for solitude and prayer and rest.

Most of us can look at our own lives and say, truthfully, that our work is so demanding and so satisfying that there’s not enough time in the day to get it done. The in-box is never empty. There is always more we should be doing. We can exhaust ourselves doing important work, work we know we are called to do. We can look at what our competitors do, and we can say, if we are to stay in the game ourselves, that there IS no time for rest. We can do that for a while. But then one day the fun goes out of the work, we find we are no longer making progress. We stop caring. We lose our creative edge. We need to take time out, to come away and rest awhile. When we rest, when we make a quiet place in our lives to listen to God, to become again aware of his love and his care, then we can go back refreshed and ready to serve again. So this is the first mistake, perhaps the most classically American mistake: to think we don’t have time for rest or solitude.

But there’s an equally tempting alternate point of view that is also a mistake. And that is to think it is the purpose or function of our Christian faith to make us feel better, to offer us a kind of stress-reduction program. Our time with God does give us a refuge from the storms out in the world. We can seek the quiet and the peace of a Sunday morning in worship, or a Saturday afternoon out in the woods on the Pavilion, with our sisters and brothers about whom we care so deeply. But the time away, so nourishing, so wonderful, is not the end in itself; the time away is to charge us up to jump back into the fray, to jump back into compassionate engagement with the people that God puts in our path.

We follow Jesus because he calls us. We follow Jesus because it is the right thing to do. We rest in order to be better equipped to serve. We rest in order to be able to work. We do not engage in religious practices primarily in order to find peace of mind, as a kind of religious hobby, or even a kind of mental health aid.

But if we seek to follow this pattern of work and rest, where, to be honest, work has the primary focus… lo and behold! we discover, as the writer of Ephesians did, in the thick of all this overwhelming need and exhausting work, that we also have peace, and membership in a family that is eternal and all-embracing. We discover that, metaphorically speaking, we are being built into a temple where joyous union with God occurs. And from this safe and beautiful place we are launched out again on journeys in a world that is hungry and thirsty and hurting, where twins just a couple of months younger than my own beloved grandchild Lillian, are abandoned in a pigpen in Honduras. The work never ends. There are always more people to love in Christ’s name.
Following Jesus is not for wimps. The work is hard. It will demand more than all we have to give. But we are promised times of rest and refreshment. We come away and rest, not as an end, but as a means: a means to continue to be effective servants of Jesus. We are just the latest link in the chain that runs back to the hem of the garment of Jesus—back to the power of God to bring hope and light and justice and love to those who need it most.

Wired Family Vacation--Weird Family Vacation?

Yesterday after church my husband and my middle daughter and I got in the car and drove about 500 miles to O'Fallon, Illinois. The drive was pleasant and easy. We shared delicious, home-made bread and wonderful chicken salad at a picnic at a rest stop--also some very tasty white cheddar.

We arrived at a motel about 9 pm and tried out three rooms before we got the rooms right. (One was not what had been advertised. We'd hoped for a two room suite so our 21 year old daughter could have some privacy from us and, okay, we from her. The second had two rooms and a brokensofa bed with no sheets or blankets for it in evidence. The third was a basic two-king room for about $40 less than we'd have paid for a suite. So chalk one up for family togetherness and saving money!) There is no agenda today. We are all enjoying some important unwind time. And we're letting time pass until this evening when we plan to go to a jazz and blues club for supper and some live music.

But we are doing it in a characteristically 21st century way. At the moment we are all sitting in a Starbucks with our laptops. Two of us have earphones in. I took a picture of the three of us with my iphone, just because I could.

So this is iconic of our wired, weird way of being a family, I guess....

Moral Outrage in a "Flat" World

Two mornings ago at Morning Prayer, one of us read the "wrong" reading, according to the Lectionary, moving us back a couple of chapters in 2 Corinthians, back into the place where Paul speaks so eloquently about the need for reconciliation, about God making his appeal through us, God's ambasadors. The Spirit clearly had a different agenda than the creators of the Lectionary, for this reading opened up among us a discussion of the solidarity and helplessness we feel with the women in the Sudan and in refugee camps in Chad, whose lives are in peril. These women fear rape and murder even in the camps that are supposed to offer them refuge.

We discussed their plight, agreed that they are our sisters and when they are hurting, WE are hurting. But we also felt like there was so little we could do from where we sit. We remember them, we tell their stories, we pray for them. What if we wrote letters to the US Ambassador to Chad? Where could we send money and be sure that it would make a positive difference? How do we support women and children here in our county and support women and children half a world away? What has happened to those men that they think they can treat women this way? How do we not just feel ourselves to be "fat cows of Bashan" here?

Returning Home

I came home from Israel Friday night. My journals and a long letter to my husband contain my thoughts while "on the ground" there, and I hope to edit them into a blog entry soon. My camera's pictures are about half unloaded and edited. My heart is full. It was a journey that was beyond my expectations. I'd heard about the industrial-strength tourism that governs many of the holy sites in the Holy Land. I'd heard correctly. Yet the pilgrims themselves, over the centuries, from every continent in our own day, hallow these places. I'm reminded of lines from T.S. Eliot's poem, "Little Gidding:" "You have come to the place where prayer has been valid."

Yesterday was my first day back at the office. I drove in on the first sunny day after 4 days of nearly constant rain or drizzle. Trees sparkled. The late versions of daffodils bent over in the rain and you could almost see them slowly straightening up. Buds on the maple trees are about to burst into teeny crinkled leaves.
Four of us gathered for the daily office of Morning Prayer.
Afterwards I visited with two ladies who are creative with paint brushes were at church to bring some calm whimsy to the ladies' bathroom. They admitted that the robins'-egg color they'd rolled on last week was greener than they'd expected, but it didn't stop them from painting trees about the size of the dogwoods that are all over the understory of our woods, and birds of many colors in their branches.
Meanwhile a college professor who had been at morning prayer stopped before he left for work to set up 7 tables and 56 chairs for this evening's Lenten supper and lecture series.
I stopped on the way to the office to visit with our most active volunteer gardener and groundskeeper, who was consulting with our landscape architect (husband of a parishioner) about where to plant some juniper trees around the amphitheater in front of our outdoor stone altar. This is where we celebrate Easter at a sunrise service.
Right next to the worship area is the Memorial Garden. There is a new grave where the ashes of my beloved parishioner Jim are laid to rest. He did, indeed, make it to (the new) Jerusalem before I left for Israel. The day after my previous entry, he died suddenly. His last words, in the exhausting struggle of simply putting on fresh pajamas, were: "I just need a little rest." Spring is in the air. May Jim rest in peace and rise in glory. May his faithfulness inspire us who remain behind to follow Jesus faithfully.
I finally got to my office. There my secretary had a lovely card and a big new mug waiting for me to welcome me home. I gave her one of the mother-of-pearl crosses that the Palestinian Christians from the West Bank carve in Bethlehem, and that I bought in Jerusalem. We updated the parish calendar and caught up on all sorts of details.
I wrote personal letters to all the children of the parish between the ages of 3 and 8, inviting them to the Communion class a week from Saturday. I signed "welcome letters" for the newcomers who visited while I was gone.
I ran out for a late lunch and to return the rented carpet cleaner that had been necessary to clean up a BIG mess at home. The dogs had been very quiet Monday, it turns out, because they had managed to sneak into our youngest son's bedroom and coat the entire place with mud. I bet our son will remember to really check that the door to the back yard is latched. He worked several hours to bring things back to some kind of order.
Later in the day I met with a relatively new parishioner who has all sorts of gifts and talents in the areas of education and organization. She will be spearheading the gathering of a group to develop an after school arts program for children in the community.
I had an hour conference call with the executive team of our Community Service Board on which I serve.
It was 6:30--a full and good day with lots of creative energy, good fellowship, and plenty of moments to smell and see and hear spring unfolding.

Lent as pilgrimage, Lent as gardening

I am about to leave (in two days) on pilgrimage to Israel as part of a group of twenty Protestant clergy from all over the country and of all different denominations. We are all between 35 and 55, and all have been ordained at least ten years. The pilgrimage consists of about a week in Galilee, in Tiberias, and about a week in Jerusalem. I have been very busy trying to get all the parish ducks in a row before I leave.

Today is Ash Wednesday, and at both of our services we will process back out into the world singing a hymn that marks the beginning of Lent and restates its purposes. This year, the words of the hymn are particularly meaningful:

Eternal Lord of love, behold your Church
walking once more the pilgrim way of Lent,
led by your cloud by day, by night your fire,
moved by your love and towards your presence bent:
far off yet here--the goal of all desire.

So daily dying to the way of self,
so daily living to your way of love,
we walk the road, Lord Jesus, that you trod,
knowing ourselves baptized into your death,
so we are dead and live with you in God.

If dead in you, so in you we arise,
you the firstborn of all the faithful dead;
and as through stony ground the green shoots break
glorious in springtime dress of leaf and flower,
so in the Father's glory shall we wake.

I will literally walk the road that Jesus trod in Jerusalem. I expect that the experience will be very moving. But there is the journey of the feet and there is the journey of the heart. I am blessed to take the journey of the feet. But it will be useless if I do not also make the journey with my heart.

Two parishioners of mine are elderly and the husband is struggling with his health. He has some sort of auto immune disease that is attacking the nerves in his legs and feet. For him, the pilgrimage to the bathroom or the kitchen can be a via crucis. He has been known to crawl the distance, like a medieval penitent. This man is brilliantly intelligent and well educated. He has never been to Israel. I am taking him "in my back pocket" on this trip. I hope to see and hear and smell and taste and touch on his behalf. I hope to write about the experience and take pictures that I can share with him when I return.

My parishioner may have a heart pilgrimage that takes him greater distances than my journey to Israel takes me. May we both walk the road that Jesus trod, knowing ourselves baptized into his death.

But there is another very important Lenten metaphor, and that is the metaphor of gardening. In Lent the days lengthen (two words etymologically related in English thanks to the Norman conquest). The sun warms the late winter soil. God the Farmer comes and digs things up and turns them over, a process that may be painful, if refreshing. Then we are ready to be fruitful gardens that offer nourishment and refreshment to others.

Clergy and their parishes and --God (!!?!!)

As a "professional" religious person, I sometimes succumb to the temptation to put form before content, to put the daily workings of my parish before their purpose: all of us being in ever-deepening relationship with the God of the Universe and in "love and charity with our neighbors" for Christ's sake.

I was talking last night with a wise priest who said that if he could say just a couple of things to parishes about relating to their clergy this is what he'd say:
1) Come to church expecting to have a powerful encounter with God, ready to be blessed and to be a blessing.
2) Give your priest the benefit of the doubt. Every one comes with his or her own personality but each has a call from God to serve God's people in the church. Give them the benefit of the doubt that they are sincere in the desire to carry out this call.

I think my friend could take these two points on the road, and do a world of good in parishes that sometimes get at odds with their priests; and with priests that sometimes get frustrated with their parishes. He talked some sense into me last night, when I was frustrated enough to feel like packing it in with my congregation. I love these people. I love the place where we serve. I can't imagine another place being better. Not really. But I was beginning to lose hope that I would see changes and growth in my lifetime.

Today things don't look quite so bleak. I would like to know that I could stay here until I retire, that I could have an effective ministry here. But I seem, in my prayers, to be getting the message: "This is where I want you TODAY. You don't have a need to know further ahead." I suppose God, who created me with the personality I have, and who has been with me through all the "changes and chances" of my life, should be trustworthy in the promise that we may "rest in God's eternal changelessness" as the collect from our prayer book puts it.

I continue to be intrigued by the Benedictine vow of stability. I may need the spiritual discipline and companionship of becoming an oblate of a Benedictine order, and the attendant guidance in understanding that concept as a married female Episcopal priest in the southern USA in the 21st century .