Sermon for Lent 4

We have solved the problem of limited time for YouTube videos, so here is the link for today's sermon, and the text.

Sermon

March 18, 2012, Lent 4

Grace Episcopal Church

Norwalk Connecticut

The Reverend Lois Keen

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

From the Gospel of Luke: “Jesus…was led by the Spirit in the wilderness…He ate nothing at all…and he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone” ‘ “ (Luke 4:1-4)

It’s July 16, 1054 A.D. We are in Constantinople. The people are gathered in Hagia Sophia Cathedral for worship. Suddenly, the floor rings with the boots of intruders. They are westerners from Rome. They stand before the altar and babble something in Latin, then they throw a document on the altar and, as they leave, they shout, in Latin,

“Videat Deus et judicet and walk out.

“Videat Deus et judicet”; “God sees and judges”. These are the words of excommunication. Pope Leo IX of Rome has sent his envoys to deliver his excommunication of Cerularius, the new patriarch of Constantinople, and with him all his followers. Leo has excommunicated the entire Eastern half of Christendom.

Four days later Cerularius, returns the favor. He excommunicates Pope Leo IX and all his followers, the entire Western half of Christendom.

Thus begins the Great Schism between the Christians of the West and the Christians of the East, Rome and Constantinople and, it seems, never the twain shall meet.

There were lots of things in contention between eastern and western Christians – married clergy yes or no, reverence for the saints, days of fasting and whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – the belief in the West - or only from the Father – the belief in the East (please note which side we are on, east or west, when we say the Creed today). These were just a few of the disagreements, but we had been one church for 1,000 years and we managed, even with our quarrels, to stay together.

Then came the straw that broke the camels back: bread.

The Eastern Christians used leavened bread – wheat bread made with yeast or other leavening. The Western Christians used unleavened bread. The East said we’d been using leavened bread from the beginning so leavened is the right kind of bread for the Eucharist. The West pronounced that the right bread for the Eucharist was one that was different from the bread we eat every day, and besides, an unleavened, round wafer is purer than real bread. Neither East nor West was willing to let go on this matter. And so they excommunicated one another and the schism continues to this day.

Clearly, Satan has been hard at work since he tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread.

It is interesting to note that, from the time of the 1552 BCP, which marked the Reformation in England, the Anglican church used real, leavened bread, but not as a sign of unity with the Eastern churches, rather to discourage people from worshipping Jesus in the bread. This changed in the 19^th c, when some of the anti-catholic strictness was loosened. Today we Anglicans can use either kind of bread.

However, the war of bread is not over yet. Satan is still at it. Today it’s over whether or not to provide non-wheat, gluten-free bread for those with celiac disease. I am glad to say this congregation provides gluten-free bread for those who need it. However, the argument is that because the bread in Jesus’s day, the bread of the last supper, and the bread for the whole history of Christianity has been made from wheat, no other kind of bread can be used for the Eucharist.

The irony is that, in the feeding of the 5,000 according to St. John, the bread was barley loaves, the food of the poor! And in the Hebrew scriptures, the bread that came down from heaven to feed the people as they wandered in the wilderness after escaping Egypt was called “manna”, which means, “What is it?” for it certainly was not bread from any kind of grain at all.

And so, our wars about what kind of bread, leavened or unleavened, wheat or not, become a nonsense, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. I vote for barley bread, the food of the poor, but what do I know, except that Satan is always there in the niggling details. But, remember, “One does not live by bread alone.”

“Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread…”

Give us THIS bread. The bread we have been given is Jesus himself. He is the true bread. This bread is not leavened or unleavened, not wheat, barley, manna, or gluten-free. This bread is the Love of God.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” This is the bread from heaven, the love of God in his Son Jesus, the Christ. It is immaterial what kind of bread we put in our mouths at the Eucharist. We eat that bread to actually put in our bodies a bit of the love of God for us and all people, and as a sign that we are all, living, dead, and yet to be born, one in Christ’s love, whether we love one another or not.

“As grain, once scattered on the hillsides, is in this broken bread made one…” (hymn 302, Hymnal 1972) Jesus, this true bread makes us one.

Yet, the Body of Christ continues to fracture along lines of what kind of bread to use, who is saved and who is damned, who is in and who is out, which beliefs are correct and which are heresy. Jesus, at his last supper, according to John, commanded that we love one another as he loves us. “By this,” he says, “everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”. But we can’t seem to love one another.

And this is a problem, because Christianity now has a credibility issue. The Church is created and sustained out of God’s reconciling, restorative love for all creation. But we can’t even reconcile with one another. And the world really needs that reconciling, self-giving love right now.

At the risk of being thought to be preaching politics, I think it’s safe to say we all know that something is wrong with us in this country. Incivility, partisanship, self-centeredness, greed, isolationism, and demonizing those with whom we disagree are being raised to art forms. There is a place for Christian communities in the midst of this, not for the sake of saving dying churches but for the sake of the Gospel, for the sake of the Lord of love, who commanded us to love all people, not just one another, even to love our enemies. Can we do it?

With the help of God, we can, but bread is useless until it is broken so it can be eaten, and we have to be willing to be broken, to open our minds and hearts and see and hear how God is drawing us to a new way of being community, a community that heals, reconciles, gives itself away, and opens itself to be shaped by others not like us.

This church hosted a magnificent sign of the kingdom of the love of God made real and visible on the Monday before Thanksgiving when we hosted the community Thanksgiving service. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians who disagree on doctrine, all worshipped together in English, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Punjabi. This is what we Christian communities can be ALL the time – visible signs of the love of God for all people, broken open and used as the food of love.

Whether or not we can keep buildings or clergy or even our way of being church, we Christians of all beliefs and persuasions must examine ourselves as individuals. Hold before God those things within ourselves that contribute to separation from one another as people in the world – all our phobias, all our isms – and ask God to take them away. Then we need to find a way to form communities like that Thanksgiving service, communities of unconditional, radical love, signs of God’s love, signs of the reign of God. People cannot live by bread alone. We, the people, need to love God by loving one another, and we need to be loved by God, through people we least expect to love us.

“As grain, once scattered on the hillsides, was in this broken bread made one.” Jesus is the true bread that gives life to the world. Evermore give us this bread, Holy God, and make us your love.

"Why do we need it?" of the week

Daylight savings time.

Invented so farmers could have an extra hour of daylight, or so my mother taught me.

Why do we need it now?

For one brief, shining moment, it was light when I got up.

Now it's pitch dark.

I hate daylight savings time.

The deeper, theological question is, what's with us humans that we just can't stop ourselves from manipulating our environment? I get making shelters and growing food and needing clothing. And yet, since we can't influence the sun, moon, stars and planets in their courses, we still find a way to manipulate them: Daylight savings time.

Now I have to get to work on tomorrow's sermon. My dull, waking in darkness mood, will most likely affect what I write. Will there be sun?

Sermon for Lent 3

Here, in two pieces, is the sermon for the Sunday past, the 3rd Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2012.

Technology is not always our friend — a little out of focus at the start and You Tube is giving conflicting info on permitted video length:

Part One is here:

Part Two is here:

Comments are welcome and are moderated.

Written text is here:

Sermon, March 11, 2012

Lent 3

Grace Episcopal Church

The Reverend Lois Keen

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ “

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ “ Luke 4:9-12

It’s been a busy two weeks for Jesus, according to John’s gospel. John the Baptizer tells people that Jesus is the one for whom all Israel has been waiting. The next day John declares Jesus to be the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. The day after that – notice that John is very specific about time here – John points out Jesus, saying, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” and two of John’s disciples immediately turn from John and begin to follow Jesus. One of these is Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He goes and gets his brother and brings him to Jesus.

The next day they go with Jesus to Galilee. Jesus tells Philip to follow him. Philip finds Nathanael and brings him along to follow Jesus. “On the third day,” John the Evangelist writes, “there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.”

You may know the rest of that story. The wine is running out. Mary, Jesus’s mother, tells him to do something about it and Jesus says it’s not his time to show himself yet. Mary knows better, and tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells him to do. So Jesus changes water into wine, and John writes, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

After this they go to Capernaum with Mary, Jesus’s brothers, and the disciples, and “they remain there a few days.”

Now it is the Passover. All Jews who can will go to Jerusalem to the temple to celebrate, to offer their sacrifices. The temple makes it easy for them: the outer courts are a marketplace for buying suitable sacrificial animals and such. And since worldly Roman money is too unholy, it will pollute the sacrificial animals that are bought with it, so the temple has arranged for money changers, who will launder your filthy, pagan Roman money for pure, holy temple coins, at a price, of course.

Here Jesus performs the second of what John the Evangelist calls “signs” rather than miracles – signs that point to Jesus being the Messiah. Jesus sees the market atmosphere in the temple, the buying and selling, the exchanging of coins for a price the poor can hardly afford, but have to pay in order to make even their poor sacrifices of a dove, and Jesus is angry. He makes a whip of cords and drives out the money changers, the merchants, and even the animals meant for sacrifice. He overturns the money tables and scatters the coins – which, of course, I imagine, anyone, even the poor, might just now be scrabbling to gather up for the next time they have to buy a sacrificial animal – and the disciples remember a line from Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

This is not the anger of a temper tantrum. Jesus knows that the next day it will be business as usual in the temple. He does this sign, which we call the cleansing of the temple, as if to say, “I know what you have done with the religion that was supposed to bring people closer to God, my Father. You have turned it into a business. Don’t think for a moment God doesn’t see what you are doing!”

In the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Satan taunts Jesus to prove he is the Messiah by jumping from a pinnacle of the temple. “Surely the angels will come and catch you, if you really are the Messiah!.”

Today, in the temple, the ones with the greatest stake in the temple as marketplace play the role of Satan as they demand Jesus’s warrant, his credentials for doing this thing. “What sign can you show us for doing this?”, they say.

And Jesus says there will be no other sign. They have already seen the sign. Do not put the Lord God to the test.

John is using a little irony here. He wrote his gospel after the Temple of stone and mortar was actually destroyed by the Romans. The temple was leveled. Nothing is left but part of the wall that supports the temple mount. The temple itself has never been rebuilt.

The temple has become a marketplace because it has to be one. People can’t be carrying sacrificial animals around so the temple sells them. But there’s a bonus for the temple. They refuse to accept the common coinage and insist only temple coins be used for the people’s purchases, and these come at an additional cost, a profit that goes to the temple.

For John the Evangelist, then, Jesus becomes the temple. Access to God costs the worshiper nothing. It only costs one life. That of Jesus himself. The stone temple will be destroyed and no one will be able to raise it again. But the temple that is Jesus’s body is another matter.

Jesus says, “Destroy this temple,” meaning his body, “and in three days I will raise it up.” His death will be the only sign they shall receive, and the angels will not save him from dying. Instead, God will raise him from the dead. When the stone temple is destroyed, it will be for good. When the temple of Jesus’s body is destroyed, it will be resurrected, to live and continue forever.

“Do not tempt the Lord your God.”

“Mortal pride and earthly glory, sword and crown betray our trust; though with care and toil we build them, tower and temple fall to dust. But God’s power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower.”

(Hymn 665, The Hymnal 1982, The Episcopal Church. Words: A Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms, 1698, alt.; para. of Psalm 130.)

Where is God? Where to you expect to meet God? In a temple? A Church?

The Jews expected that God lived in the temple, and that they could meet and even commune with God through the sacrifices they bought to be offered in the temple in Jerusalem. Where do you expect to meet God?

Where do you expect to participate with God in Jesus’s ongoing work?

In John’s gospel Jesus finds his vocation, the work he is to do with God, from his cousin John the Baptizer, from the people who attach themselves to him as disciples, through his mother who pushes him to show himself, to demonstrate with the sign of water turned to wine that he works with the power of God. And today Jesus demonstrates his vocation as the temple of God, a vocation that will lead to trial, execution, death and resurrection.

Where do you expect to participate with God in Jesus’s ongoing work? What is your vocation? Where do you find and exercise your vocation?

These are the questions today’s gospel is pressing us to answer. In John’s gospel Jesus knows who he is in God. Do you know who you are in God?

If you are having trouble answering these questions, that’s not surprising. Over the centuries the Church has been confused as the place to meet God, the place to participate with God’s work, the place for vocations that come from God.

Meanwhile, the church has forgotten to equip you, the saints, to recognize that it is in your common life outside these walls that you meet God. It is in your common life outside Church that you find your vocation. It is out there that you participate with God in Jesus’s ongoing work, in the ordinariness of everyday existence – doing the laundry, eating a meal, grading school papers, drawing blood samples, making appointments for people at the doctor’s office, selling hardware, teaching music, managing a city office – all, all ordinary activities of the lives of people everywhere, Christian or not, and yet these are the arena of Jesus’s work for God, through you.

So, does that mean that at work, in the home, at play, at the grocery store, at the movies you are supposed to become a soapbox preacher, telling people about the Good News of Jesus Christ? No. Unless that is truly your vocation. Your vocation, is that which you love doing, which stretches you and challenges you, in which you find delight and frustration, probably in equal amounts, and in which you occasionally catch glimpses of the beauty that is God.

Your vocation may not be your work or your profession. But your vocation is certainly there, in your every day, ordinary life, not in the church. If vocation were only in church, you would be here gladly every minute of every day. Few are called to do that. For good reason.

The reason is that God is out there in the whole world. The work of maintaining the place where the people of God can be refreshed for the coming week, and taught and supported in their vocations in the world often keeps those with the vocation to the temple, the institutional church, out of the world for most of the time.

But not you. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. Out there. Living. Working. Retired. Active. Real. And every bit as dedicated by God to do Jesus’s work in the world, which is, simply, to know who you are as God’s possession and to live your life in that knowledge.

When I was a little girl there was a man who lived with his wife in the house behind ours. He was a music therapist in the Veteran’s Hospital. But to me he was Uncle Teddy. He taught me how to play the piano. He encouraged me to sing. He wrote down the little songs I made up. But mostly he taught me love of something outside myself – the love of and passion for music. This was his vocation – love and passion for and in and with music. He also made his living at it, which was fortunate for him. But his profession was not his vocation, which was love.

What is your vocation? How are you already participating with God in Jesus’s ongoing multifaceted work in the world? How can the church help you to answer these questions?

"The heavens declare the glory of God, *
and the firmament shows his handiwork.

One day tells its tale to another, *
and one night imparts knowledge to another.

Although they have no words or language, *
and their voices are not heard,

Their sound has gone out into all lands, *
and their message to the ends of the world.

Let the words of [our] mouth[s] and the meditation of [our]
heart[s] be acceptable in your sight, *
O LORD, [our] strength and [our] redeemer."

(Psalm 19:1-4, 14)

New Car news

We saw a new Fisker in Westport last weekend. We were mesmerized, and I confess, we followed it until it turned off. It is absolutely beautiful. Now this happens - see link here.

I don't know how to explain the fascination with high performance cars which also happen to have beautiful lines (not all high performance cars are beautiful!), and which BP and I can never even hope to drive, much less own. I blame my Dad. I think one of the first words I learned to say was Jaguar! And Dad said his dream car was the Lotus Elan. He did get to race speed boats on the Hudson River. What more can I say? I wish grooming young people to be race car drivers had been available to me when I was a child.

Oh well, at least I've had my day on the track, and in my tres sportif Astra, no less!

A week from Sunday, opening day for the Formula 1 Grand Prix series - the Australian Grand Prix. Cheers!

Five Years Later

I'm watching television.

"Dying Young" with Julia Roberts.

I'm enjoying the story.

The young man has leukemia. He has to undergo chemo therapy when his blood test numbers are bad.

The chemo scene comes on. I see the pump. And suddenly it dawns on me.

It's been five years. Actually, five years February since my diagnosis.

And I forgot. February went by and I missed it. I never even thought about it.

I'm feeling pretty good about myself for that.

I just made my annual mammogram appointment and without the usual sense of impending fear. Good girl!

Then I realize, you know how in movies there's that scene where the heroine stares off in space, not directly towards the camera but a bit to the side, just staring, shutting everything out, the sound continuing but getting dimmer and farther away.

That's what I'm doing.

I'm staring out the window, to the left of the television, and I'm thinking, "She's staring off into space, like they do in movies."

Then I'm back. The movie continues. Then, suddenly, without warning, he's in the infusion unit again, and this time I can see him sitting in the chair, far off, and all the other people in the unit sitting in those chairs, the same chairs that are in every chemo unit in the world.

And I'm crying, crying for all those people who have to sit in those chairs while poison is pumped into their veins wondering if it will kill the cancer, or them.

And I'm thinking over and over again,

God damn you, God. God damn you, damn you, damn you. Go to hell.

"He descended to the dead." (Apostles' Creed)

"When thou didst descend to death, O Life Immortal, thou didst slay hell..." (from the Great Saturday Matins troparion)

"He descended into Hell and took Hell captive!" (John Chrysostom, Easter Homily, 4th century)

Almost good enough.

Almost.

Will it ever be totally good enough?

Connected

Along with many of the parishioners where I serve as priest, I am reading the Bible from beginning to end over the course of this year 2012.

This morning I was reading some chapters in the book of Judges. Two of the chapters (Judges 4 and 5) were about the one woman judge, Deborah. I've loved this story for a long time, for Deborah's sake and for the sake of Jael (yah-ALE), another woman in the story. I got to the end of chapter 4 and I began chapter 5, which is the song of Deborah, and Barak, her commander. I glanced briefly at the note at the bottom of the page regarding the song and I read there that this may very well be the oldest part of the Hebrew scriptures. I thought that was nice.

As I read the song, though, I realized something was different in me. I sat with that as I read and it grew on me that I was feeling this song as more genuine than a lot of what I had read so far this year, more immediate, like I was reading something written, or composed, on the spot.

It is nearly impossible to describe this feeling. I was deeply moved.

I then went on to read the psalm I was going to read for today, Psalm 89. When I reached verse 20 that same feeling began to come over me - that immediateness. And I realized a deeper awareness - that I was praying with and for people thousands of years before me. I was praying into the past.

As I finished the psalm and went on the say the Lord's Prayer, with which I end my readings each day, I was overcome by awareness that I was praying with the disciples, the first, so far as we know, who prayed some version of that prayer. And the name of the feeling came to me: connected.

Today I was connected.

Sermon for second Sunday in Lent

Many thanks to the CREDO Lenten Reflections, 2012.

Here's the sermon.