Epiphany III B A Change of Work

I have changed my work at least three different times.  My first two professional jobs after my masters degree were at non-profit health services organizations, where I was a kind of data cruncher and writer of program grants.  The second job was particularly fulfilling work, as I was helping to move health policy toward more home and community-based services for older people needing long-term care.  I was the assistant director in a very small organization however, and I knew I didn’t want my boss’s job which required lots of political wrangling and negotiation with local, state and national Medicaid staffers and even congressional representatives.  I knew I was more suited to teaching, which required me to go to school again.  After more graduate study, I began teaching and doing research in this same area of health services for older people, moving down from Michigan to the University of Kentucky.  I found a niche there for my skills and talents, but after 9 years, began to be a little restless and took up writing.  I even quit my tenured position, which made many people gasp with horror. But to me, it was a new freedom to do many things I had wanted to explore.

As my money began to run out, doing local consulting work, I found another position at UK as a research professor.  All this time, I was very involved in my church, having become Episcopalian some years before.  At my church I was not quite like a Henry Johnson, but I was active in pastoral care work and in small group studies and spiritual growth groups, in which I made many very close spiritual friends. The pastoral work was very fulfilling and the small groups wonderful.  I began to serve at the altar and found I liked that more that I could have predicted.  All these church activities fed me, and I was comfortable in them.    But then I began to hear questions from God about who I was and what I was doing.  One particular challenge came that made me see that my life was merely going along without a lot of investment from me.  At work I applied and was accepted into a leadership training program.  And after a few months, I was sitting in church confused about why I would do such a thing, since I had already done academic leadership as a department chairperson and knew it didn’t interest me. It came to in church that day that I was being called to leadership in the church, and slow as I was to discern what was going on, I could only think that I didn’t want to serve on another vestry.

Well God finally got my attention and I got into the discernment process for taking holy orders as a priest.  As soon as that process started, I began to lose that feeling of comfort.  I began to be challenged in ways I had always avoided before—to be asked personal and probing questions about who I was and how I had lived my life, and especially who God was for me.  The process of going into the priesthood leaves no stone unturned, no wrong turn from the past unexplored.  This process of intense scrutiny only sped up in seminary, as I was challenged in other ways by pastoral care, preaching, and leadership roles that were so different from the kinds of pastoral care, study and writing and leadership I had been used to.

You may think that the process of becoming a priest ended in seminary, but it continues for the rest of your life after ordination.  The priesthood is a vocation that never goes away, even if you don’t spend all your hours doing priestly tasks.  Of all the professional roles I have taken on over my career, it has been the least comfortable, the least warm and fuzzy.  While I was a professor I had many days when I could say I was successful and felt on top of my field.  In the priesthood, I seem to have more days of questions and appeals for God’s help than days when I can say everything fits into neat categories and falls into place spiritually.

When I read this gospel today I see it was always thus.  The calling of the brothers doing their fishing at the Sea of Gallilee begins not with warm and fuzzy proclamations about how following Jesus will make them elite apostles of a famous rabbi, it starts with the statement—“after the arrest of John the Baptist”.  If a story ever had a warning, this one does.  People who are in the business of spreading the good news of God’s kingdom are stepping into dangerous territory.  They make people upset, they bring a message that doesn’t sit well with some people. The apostles themselves may never have a permanent home again, as they travel around to give their message.  It’s a portent of dangerous activity and serious consequences.

When we understand that this is what being a follower of Jesus is, perhaps we can understand that this message is also becoming even more subversive than it was perhaps in times past when everyone went to church.  Like Jesus’s time, people are seeking but what are they expecting? Are they like me and my seminary classmates who came from comfortable small groups in our churches and wanted more warm and fuzzy times?  Did they expect to have respect for hanging out with this man of God?

The calling Jesus offers is one of giving up your past life, just like the fishermen were giving up fish and taking up fishing for people.  How different can that be from their former life of toil in the sun, with a catch to count at the end of the day? How could they possibly know whether they had brought people into the fold of God’s love?  How do we know today whether someone’s life has been transformed by our bringing the good news to them?

In short, brothers Simon and Andrew and two other brothers James and John left their comfortable life, where they knew their business, to enter something they could not have known would change them forever. They were asked to change their entire identity, their profession, to leave their nets and to enter into the challenge of trying to bring spiritual awareness to people who were seeking for perhaps something altogether different.

All Christians are called from their comfort zone into something that will challenge them for the sake of God’s kingdom.  May God be with us all as we drop our nets and take that step toward into the unknown with Jesus to do our new work.

A drop of water or pouring out of the spirit?

In Jesus’s time, the act of baptism was not what we think of today as a rite that is performed by the priest.  In those times, the person immersed themselves in water, performing their own baptism as an act signifying their repentence.  The Greek word is metanoia, which means changing one’s mind, in the sense of a change of perspective, a fundamental shift in perspective.

When I think of a shift of perspective, I think of suddenly getting a concept in mathematics as a young student, such as the first time I understood long division or plane geometry.  Such a shift comes with an “aha” moment of clearer perception, incite and relaxation of powers of hard work to grasp something that seemed beyond our reach.

Because I was a pre-pharmacy student at Illinois Wesleyan, I had to study a lot of chemistry, which was okay until I got to physical chemistry. Think of quantum physics applied to chemical compounds, with lots of calculus to describe the movement of molecules--that’s physical chemistry.  Many days I left the classroom shaking my head as if I understood but whenever the test came around, I found I had been fooling myself.  Needless to say, my worst grades were in this subject.

But take Shakespeare, my best class. It was taught by a really exciting professor who loved words, who made the strange cadence and language of Elizabethan English come alive, so that I finally got what the characters were really saying.  It was an epiphany, an opening up of Shakespeare to me that gave me a new perspective on the language, helped me learn how to read Shakespeare to really get what the play was all about.

Most of have had experiences of the thing that eludes us entirely, like my physical chemistry, and the thing that we grasp and learn to love because we now understand what it means to us, like my experience with the class in Shakespeare.  The first experience may make us feel lost, out of the loop, or even dumb, because we just don’t get it, can’t see the connections or grasp the importance of major pieces of the puzzle.  Not only do our minds remain closed or unable to be opened, but our hearts can’t engage because we don’t understand the meaning of what we are experiencing.

The second experience of understanding lightens us up.  It is not only our minds that are changed, but our very hearts.  What was once a blank, dark space becomes enlightened, bright with meaning and connected to us in a new way.  This opening up happens not only in our mind but in our hearts as well, and we may even come to love the thing we now understand.

The same can also be true of people. A person we didn’t know or understand, who we spend a little time getting to know can suddenly come closer to us, be opened to us and then we open to them.  Our hearts were not engaged but now they are.

These are all experiences of metanoia, of changing not only our minds but our very hearts, as we engage more deeply with things we now understand.  You can’t embrace what you don’t know, and the metanoia that we experience with Christ is just that.  Understanding Christ does not mean studying him, but entering into his life in order to make meaning of his coming among us in the manger, his ministry and his death and resurrection. What does this mean to you that Christ came into a body like ours, lived a life like ours, and suffered a death like ours so that we can enter a resurrection like his?  Christ is not meant to be studied but to be loved, in a turning around of our life from focus on things that pass away to things that last.

Baptism is the basic symbol we Christians have chosen to mark this new understanding, this change in our hearts and minds to the things eternal.  That Christ himself baptizes himself at the invitation of John the baptizer shows us that baptism means entering into the world of God and God’s will for us.  Baptism means rinsing off all our former selves to take on a new self.  In Christ’s baptism, God descends in the spirit and declares Jesus to be the beloved Son.  God acknowledges the new life in Christ, and in a sense anoints Christ at his baptism for ministry, and ultimately for resurrection.

It is said that some of us are sprinkled with water and that’s all that happens, but others are baptized into new life.   It depends on what we take from our baptism that makes the difference. For those of us baptized as children, our parents helped to make the difference for us in whether we merely got wet or got transformed into new life.  Whether it was some water poured on us or the Holy Spirit poured out for us.

Like Jesus in his time participating in his own baptism, we too participate in our own baptism.  Are you merely getting wet or are you being transformed?

Advent IV B Mary Points to Christ

        

In nearly every Episcopal church where I have served or been a member there has been a Mary altar in part of the nave.  At my sponsoring parish in Lexington, the priest had brought back from Central America a wonderful statue of Mary holding the Christ child.  Here at Holy Trinity, our Mary altar includes a three-part picture, called a triptych, and we also have an icon showing the same scene—Mary holding the baby. In each case Mary is dressed in traditional blue and flanked by angels on either side.

At evening prayer, the traditional canticle is the song of Mary, which we said and sang last week.  The monks of Gethsemane in Kentucky every day sing the Canticle of Mary, and say a rosary after their final prayers of the evening.  Anglo-Catholic groups of Anglicans practice Marian devotions than more protestant groups.  But most of us Episcopalians see Mary as worthy of attention, whether we light a candle here at our Mary altar or think about her as the bearer of God.

Roman Catholics and Anglicans all agree that Mary is not divine, but is a servant of the divine, bringing God into the world.  We do not worship her but put her in a category with the saints, a little above those we remember, as a figure who is central to our faith.  She is at once filled with grace and favored by God, but also the specific person God chose to announce the coming of God’s son into the world.

Mary heard the words of the angel Gabriel with mixed emotions, which makes her a figure we can relate to—she is first perplexed, an understandable reaction, wondering what is going on with a greeting from an angel of God.  She must also have been afraid for the angel tells her not to fear. When the angel tells her she is going to bear a son, she is very surprised for she is a virgin, and asks how can this be.  Nothing is impossible with God, the angel answers her.  At that message, Mary seems to realize that God is truly with her, and she acquiesces to this amazing and frightful news by replying “here am I” to all that has transpired.

So, a peasant girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, the age of betrothal at this time, becomes the bearer of God.  How are we to react? What does this mean to you?

In a book he wrote about praying with the icons of Mary, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: "It is not only that we cannot understand Mary without seeing her as pointing to Christ; we cannot understand Christ without seeing his attention to Mary". 

The peasant girl who will be the mother of Christ points to a baby, born among the animals of the manger, visited by peasant sheepherders.  She points to Christ who will serve the humble, the captives, the least of those among us, showing that in their lowliness God is with them. Christ tasted their wine, ate their bread, and knew their homelessness.

Mary makes real the entrance of God into the world at a very particular point in time, to a very specific young woman, bethrothed to a specific man of Nazareth.  This is not a message about God forcing God’s will upon a human being, but God announcing God’s favor to a lowly girl, who in turn feels many things, and finally sees that God is about to do something new in her.  Mary becomes the willing servant of God, offering her very self.  This offering of her body points to the offering that Christ will make of his body. They both, mother and son, serve God specifically by embodying the love of God for all humanity.  So Mary points to servanthood and self-giving in the great dream of God to bring all humans to God’s heart in love.

Mary points to the miracle of this love—that it came as through a lowly girl in first century Palestine, and lived in a humble traveling prophet who worked miracles with the sick, ate with outcasts and sinners, and ultimately was reunited with us through resurrection.  Mary points to these miracles, that with God nothing is impossible.

Fear not, the angel says, for God with you.  Emmanuel, in Hebrew.  Mary points to the opening of her heart by overcoming her fear and perplexedness, overcoming her doubts about the bearing of a son though God’s spirit.  She does not deny her fear and confusion, but keeps listening to the message God has for her, stays with the feelings and then becomes a partner with God in this miracle of love.

What does Mary point to for you? Do you find your own feelings in this message from Gabriel?  Advent has many seeking a miracle and here we find it.  Advent has us waiting with Mary for this son, whose birth we will celebrate in a week.  The message of this last few days before the Christ Mass is that God favored a peasant girl, and she stepped through her swirl of emotions to accept God’s favor, in a willing giving of herself to bring God’s incarnate love into the world.  In these last days of Advent, be ready for this love.

Advent III B Blessing is still happening

I don’t know if filling out gratitude cards these past few weeks has made a difference to you.  If paying attention to what is good in your life makes you even more grateful, gives you a sense of being lifted up, freer from worry about the small stuff.  But the goal has been merely to bring to your mind the good things in your life, to take a minute to ponder those things and be grateful.

I had a sad phone call the other day from someone who is not a parishioner but who calls me sometimes for support.  He tells me of his unemployment running out, of depression, of being paralyzed with the fear of meeting people, and the inability to get out of the house.  There were tears in this phone call and I sensed him giving up. He said he felt that God was mad at him because there were so many bad things happening in his life.

First, I listened to what this person had to say, not judging where he was coming from.  But I asked why he thought God was mad at him?  Bad things happen all the time to all kinds of people. Even Ghandi was arrested, Martin Luther King put in jail.  The Virgin Mary is pregnant without a husband.  All of us undergo difficult times that have nothing to do with how God feels about us.

No one is immune to things going wrong—illness, job issues, economic downturn, losses of all kinds.  We all must face difficulties and challenges, but it is how we respond to these events that make us strong, that give us faith even in the face of them.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to the Israelites who have been returned to their homeland.  There is not continuing sullenness about the years of exile in Babylon, but joy: “God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners,” Isaiah says, bringing a garland instead of ashes. These images are of a God who has a preference for those who have gone through the fire, who have seen hard times and grief. God sends Isaiah to proclaim God’s favor.

God sends John the Baptist to witness to the light, we hear in our gospel.  If people were not walking in darkness there would be no need for light.  If the world was not in need of the love of God, Christ would not have come to us.  So the Virgin Mary, instead of lamenting her condition, proclaims the greatness of a God who brings his spirit within her womb, who casts the mighty from their thrones, fills the hungry with good things, lifts up the lowly.

These images tell of the God who is with us: Immanuel.  They tell not of a God who makes all the bad choices surrounding us go away but who loves us through them, and because of them. 

While we know these writings are old, from the 6^th century BC and from the first two centuries AD, we also know they are still true. God is still being born among us, being planted in spirit in a womb and coming to us.  God is still blessing us and Mary is still giving birth to the messiah who comes to save.

We are not left without God’s love. “Those who sowed in tears will reap with songs of joy”, we still believe. We believe that God is with us, giving us the most important things we need—the love of family and friends, and especially the love of this faith community where you are accepted for exactly who you are. 

The joy of God coming to us is the message of this third Sunday of Advent. Can you experience this joy when you focus on the good things God is doing for you, when you take time to think about what you are and what you have that are gifts from God?

Can you feel the wonder and joy of Mary, as God fills the hungry with good things, show the strength of his arm, to scatter the proud and bring down the mighty from their thrones, God coming to the help of his servant?

For not only do we undergo the hard times, at the same time we are showered with God’s gifts.  It depends where we focus our lives—on the hard things we are undergoing or on the many gifts surrounding us.  Mary chose to remember the gift of God’s spirit coming into the world, John the Baptist witnessed to the light, and the prophet Isaiah told of how God released those in captivity. 

Not all of us can be focused on God’s presence and gifts all the time, but during Advent we are all called to remember the spirit of God being birthed among us. We are called to focus on the light coming to us, being filled with good things, being set free from whatever captures us.  Pray to be attentive to God’s good things in your midst during this Advent.

Advent II B A call from the wilderness

Have you ever had a bad phone connection, where the call keeps getting dropped, or when you can’t get any cell service?  This often happened to me when I served the church in Morehead Kentucky which on the edge of the Appalachian range. I not only could not get cell coverage, I could not get my air card for my computer internet service to work.  I finally found out that the local coffee shop had wifi service and I could take my laptop there to get email.  The coffee shop offered good coffee and a welcoming spot to work, and I was surrounded by many Morehead State students and faculty doing the same thing.

And have you ever tried to communicate with another person, only to find that they don’t get what you’re saying?  Maybe you have a particular point you’re trying to convey, or you need to vent about something important that’s bugging you, but the other person is not hearing you.  There is a type of couples counseling that I have found very useful to help you learn how to really listen, called Imago Therapy.  In that counseling technique, I learned to curb my need to reply when someone was telling me about their feelings.  I learned that they are telling about their experience and that this was what most of us yearn for—to be heard, to be listened to.  The Imago technique teaches you how to listen without being defensive, without breaking into the other person’s speech to contradict them, without feeling the need to respond even.  The word for this is validation—the person speaking feels that their experience means something by being listened to.  It does not mean that you necessarily have the same feelings or that you agree with their viewpoint, but that you have allowed them to speak their own truth about their situation.  To be able to speak about deep feelings to another person in this way is truly freeing.  When I practiced this way of listening and being heard, it opened me up, and created a place of trust in my relationship with the other person.  This kind of listening is not easy, and takes a lot of practice, and I cannot say I do it very well, but I know the power of being heard and the freedom of giving another person a chance to speak their truth.

When you can’t speak your truth, when you can’t be understood or heard by another person who you care about, you may feel frustrated, hurt, angry, and even uncared for.  You are a voice crying in the wilderness.  You may feel on the outside, all alone.

The voice of John the Baptist was crying out for repentence to all who were seeking God.  John’s wild look and habits made him an outsider, signified that God was coming from a new place, a place of wilderness, where those who are not heard may be heard and comforted.

What comfort does God have for us who feel unheard, for those who are on the outside or in the wilderness?  When there are places inside us that are crying out, needing to speak our truth?  Where is God in our dark places?

This time of Advent, this time of preparation allows us the space to look at the darkness both in ourselves and in the world around us.  Even the darkness of the nights of December may have us seeking some light.  Where do you find the light of God, find the God that comforts, from the place of wilderness?

Each of us have our own way of finding God, but first we must decide that God is there for the finding and that it is important to go looking for the light of God in the darkness we may be feeling.

For the message of John the Baptist is that God is there for those who are seeking. That repentence is the key to finding God.

If you feel you are out there in the wilderness needing to speak your truth, the comfort of God beckons you.

If you feel you need to have your experience validated, then God hears your cries.

If you feel you need some light in the darkness, then call on the God of Israel who heard the cries of the people who had sent into exile in Babylon to rescue you from the exile you may feel in your own heart.

Whatever you seek, God waits for you.  God patiently waits to hear our cries, waits for us to make our paths straight to prepare for God’s coming near to us.

The message of Advent is that we are listened to, that God hears our pleas, God waits patiently in God’s time, and if we seek we will find this God.

A voice cries out in the wilderness. What does your voice cry out today?  How will God answer it?