Sermon of 25 February 2007, First Sunday of Lent
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Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13


The temptation of Christ immediately following his Baptism is one of the earliest stories I remember from the Bible. I’m not sure when I first heard it as a child, but for some reason it stuck with me as a pretty amazing and extended interaction between Jesus as a wise but very vulnerable and human person and Satan as the great tempter and tester of each of us in our own weakness. I remember understanding, even as a child, how important it was that even though Jesus could have done the things Satan tempted him to do, that he didn’t do it. To this day when I hear the often quoted phrase “man cannot live by bread alone,” it reminds me of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

There are three key pieces to our readings this morning, each tying into the spirit of contemplation, penitence, and self reflection we’re drawn into as we enter this season of Lent.

We are reminded in our reading from Deuteronomy to reflect on our spiritual journeys – on our own personal history as people of God. Within this same reminder is the reminder to offer up to God the first fruits of our labors, in which God has blessed us. Lent, as an introspective time of personal examination and growth, draws us into that conversation with God that takes a look at where we’ve been, where we’ve come, and asks the big questions of “how has God been active in my life and in the process of becoming that has brought me to this day?,” and “how have I been active in bringing God’s kingdom to those around me through offering up some of the fruits of the abundance God has lavished on me?”

The second Lenten call comes to us from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which we are reminded this Lent to focus on the salvation offered to us through faith in Christ. Coming out of our own salvation history with God, we are called by Paul to examine what our faith means to us as members of Christ’s body in the world. By having and acting out of our faith, we continue to cultivate and nurture our relationship with God through our response to God’s many calls in our lives to be Christ to those around us in the world. By our prayer life, we interact with God in a very personal and meaningful way, and it is especially appropriate during this time of Lent to give special attention to our faith, our prayer life, and our spiritual grounding and well being. Paul encourages us, especially today, to contemplate the deeper significance of what faith in Christ truly means to us not only as Christ’s body in the world, but as an individual who is deeply and profoundly loved by God.

The third call to us comes through Christ as we are called to a remembrance not only of Christ’s divinity as proclaimed at his baptism, but of his humanity, which is tested under the most dire of circumstances as he, alone in the wilderness, hungry and thirsty, is tempted by all of Satan’s cleverness to claim the divine power at his command rather than suffer in human flesh. Christ’s response is faithfulness to God, courage, and strength. In this encounter, we are reminded that Christ has experienced the dire roots of human temptation. Though he succeeded in mastering his wants and desires in the face of temptation, it wouldn’t be called “temptation” if he hadn’t struggled with each decision. From Christ, in this encounter, we are reminded that God will give us the strength to face every temptation, every need, every suffering moment of our sometimes tortured existence. All we have to do is allow God’s love and compassion for us to lift us up and carry us when our own burden gets to be too much… Sometimes this comes through the help of friends, other times through prayer, other times simply through the plea for help that cries out from deep within our own hearts. In whatever form it does come, we are encouraged to have faith that it WILL come and that we will not be left alone in the wilderness of our most desperate moments. And so we are called, finally, this Lent to be mindful of God’s sustaining presence in our lives – to contemplate on those moments when we have felt particularly sustained or protected by God’s presence.

Earlier this weekend, youth from St. Martin’s, from Lutheran Church of the Incarnation, from Davis Lutheran Church, and from Davis Community Church gathered at Davis Community Church to voluntarily experience hunger together. This is an event called the Thirty-Hour Famine, and is an annual event that is designed to help raise awareness for hunger, disease, and poverty around the world. The teens sign-up for the event as much as two-months before hand, and begin raising funds, all of which are donated to World Vision, the agency that designed and provides resources for the event. They provide services in some ways similar to those provided by Episcopal Relief and Development, helping to provide food, education, sanitation, and safety to some of the most poverty stricken areas of the world.

Basically how the weekend works is that the kids who attend agree to stop eating after lunch on Friday at 12:30. They finish their school day without snacking, they go home from school without an after school snack, they do their homework without the promise of dinner, and then they come together at the sponsoring parish (Davis Community Church this year) to talk together, engage in hunger simulations about allocation of resources in different countries, and just to be in solidarity through their fast. The agreement is that they won’t eat a single thing for thirty hours. During that time they drink water and have the option of drinking juice – though some refused anything other than water.

Yesterday morning, after going without food for about eleven hours, our teens made upwards from forty sandwiches for the homeless and poor of Davis, which they distributed for about two hours during the Farmers’ Market, and the remainder of which they donated to the cold-weather shelter last evening. Our later afternoon activity was a door to door food drive. Designed as a scavenger hunt, three separate groups went out into the downtown neighborhoods of Davis with a specific list of supplies to gather. Proteins, vegetables, fruits, starches, grains, even some desserts and jam. We were surprised and delighted by the generosity of our neighbors around Davis, each group returning within an hour having filled their list of twelve to fifteen items.

We broke our fast at 6:30 pm, having gone without food for a full thirty-hours. We had a simple meal of soup, bread, and salad, garnished with a few sandwiches that were left over, and a bit of kettle corn (thanks to the forethought and generosity of Dori from DCC, who picked up a bag during the Farmers’ Market and saved for dinner).

The experience of the retreat was, for many, the first time they had experienced true hunger. Yet it was amazing how little these hungry teens complained about their rumbling stomachs, and it was both rewarding and very promising to be with them as they, out of their own hunger, fed the poor together with real compassion for how they must feel on a daily basis. God’s presence was a constant companion this weekend, as evidenced by some of the teens’ own comments and prayers, in their compassion for one another and for those who live every day of their lives in the same desperate need that many of them began to feel as the hours mounted without relief of their hunger. While they could see the end of their own hunger, many of them voiced and felt a solidarity for the first time with those in our community and our wider world who have no end in sight for their own famines.

This has been an amazing start to my Lent this year, and it is a striking experience to have juxtaposed against today’s readings where Jesus goes straight from his Baptism into the wilderness of deprivation and personal testing. I can’t think of a better way to have prepared for this first Sunday of Lent, and for this particular reading than the experience of this fast, and it leaves me with the hope that I have come to associate with the heart of Lent. That though we may be preparing for Christ’s passion and death, it is in the hope of the resurrection. That though we may be contemplating the depths of our own spiritual life and questioning our responses to God in our lives, it is in the hope of a refreshed and reinvigorated relationship with God. And that though we may be taking on new spiritual disciplines or giving up something to keep us mindful of the deeply spiritual nature of Lent, it is the hope of coming into greater awareness of the Spirit’s work in our lives and hearts.

As part of our work this Lent, Bishop Beisner has challenged us to be intentional about our Lenten practice of contemplation and personal and collective inquiry. In light of today’s readings, we are asked to remember and tell the story of a time of trouble in our lives when God was indeed our refuge. And so in closing today I invite you into a few moments of quiet reflection. Take a few moments to think of a time in your life in which you experienced God in a uniquely profound way. As refuge, as protector, as comforter, as provider.

What was happening?
Who else was involved?
How did you perceive God’s presence either in that moment or looking back on that moment?
How did it effect your understanding of God’s presence in your life?
What have you done with that experience to keep your relationship with God growing and fresh?

As you continue to contemplate this experience or these experiences this week, I invite you into a Lent filled with the hope and anticipation of exploring God in ways that will deepen your relationship and your understanding of the profound mystery of God’s love for each of you as individuals.

Amen.

Sermon of 18 February 2007, Transfiguration Sunday
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Readings: Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-36


What veils us from God?

We hear this morning in our readings two amazing mountaintop experiences, and two very human reactions to the divine. Moses, himself both fascinated and yet afraid at his first encounter of the divine in the burning bush, is now more comfortable with his ongoing encounters with God, but we see in the Israelites the same human experience of apprehension and fear that the disciples experienced on the mountaintop with Jesus in today’s gospel reading. While Moses’ encounters had already trained him to take his mountaintop experiences back to the valleys of normal human community where they can best serve God’s purpose, his followers experienced the brilliance of an encounter with God through Moses’ own shining face.

Similarly, Peter, James, and John experienced, first hand, the brilliance of Jesus as he, in the presence of God, spoke with Moses and Elijah in what could only be described as the ultimate mountaintop experience described in the gospels. Peter, always the first to speak up with his honest, human, and frequently inappropriate response, speaks our own hearts’ desire to stay in the moment, to remain on the mountaintop and set up shop.

As much as we might prefer the exhilaration and spiritual ecstasy of our close personal encounters with God, the truth is that the rest of the world goes on as though nothing had happened. It is our responsibility to bring those experiences back to the valley of our every day life and thereby allow it to shape and change us in profound ways that can be experienced by more than just ourselves.

The example in Exodus, however, gives us a very telling example of the response of the masses in the valley. Having not realized that his face was shining brilliantly from his encounter with God, Moses brings the good news back from his mountaintop to find the people terrified of his very presence – unable to comprehend the experience he’s just had and afraid to even approach him.

His choice to veil his face as a means to ease the anxieties and fears of the people is an important lesson to us. Having not been in the presence of the holy themselves, they only had Moses’ descriptions of his encounter to inform them, but similarly, they were not able to withstand the full results of that encounter, having no frame of personal reference. Moses gives them God’s commandments and tells them of the encounter, but veils his face, which could only show the awesome and profound effects of the human coming into direct experience of the divine. If a picture is worth a thousand words all at once, the thousand words offered by the image of Moses’ face were each too deep, too fundamental, too mysterious to be comprehended.

Luke’s telling of the Transfiguration of Christ is similar in many ways to Moses’ experience on Mt. Sinai, except that this encounter was witnessed first hand by Jesus’ three closest disciples.

Yet even in the presence, themselves, of the holy, the disciples are still at a lack for words to respond to their experience. All they know is that it was profound beyond words, that it was indescribably awesome, and that their deepest heartfelt desire was to stay there in that divine, ecstatic moment. The disciples themselves were then taken inside the veil when the cloud enshrouded them. Terrified, they received their own personal divine encounter, hearing God’s words in affirmation of Christ.

Coming back out of the veil, they told no one of their experience “in those days.”

The physical veil of Moses, and the veil of silence by the disciples draw us into the mystery of an experience that apparently cannot be aptly described in words, but it also seems to point to an almost unwillingness within each of us as humans to fully embrace and explore the depths of a soul shaking encounter with the divine.

For me in my life, I look back on two specific encounters that I would certainly describe as mountaintop experiences. One was purely on a spiritual level, the other was holistically experiential.

I’m sure many of you can guess that the first of these experiences was my late teenage spiritual retreat experience at Happening in the diocese of California. As the defining mountaintop experience of my life up to that point, this was an event that quite simply changed me forever. I came home from that weekend with a deep and abiding sense of God’s love for me, Garnabus, an eighteen year-old teenager who struggled with self-worth and self-confidence, and sought desperately for approval from all the wrong places… I no longer needed to prove my worth, to question and second guess myself and my abilities, to win the approval of everyone around me. I was free to be myself, secure in knowing that I was all I would ever need to be – that I was all that I could ever be. Whatever I would become beyond what I already was would be for me and for God.

Of course I couldn’t have put that into words at the time. I wandered in a half ecstatic haze for about two weeks, veiling my full experience as too deep and too personal to share fully with anyone other than my friends from the retreat who had been there and experienced the same thing I had. But as I mentioned a couple of months ago, I felt as though my face must have been shining from the reactions I got from people I encountered in the weeks following. The difficulty was that the rest of the world didn’t even pause to appreciate the soul-shaking experience I’d had. The rest of the world down below that mountaintop didn’t care that I would never be the same again, or that I had no words to describe the primal depths of the encounter. But for me, the world had stopped – for that weekend and for the next couple of weeks as I adjusted to being back in the valley of normal life, I set up my dwelling on that mountaintop and didn’t want to come down.

The other experience I want to share with you came out of a personal crisis stemming from doing what I knew in my heart to be the right thing to do even though it would mean embracing another profoundly life-changing reality, and would hurt someone close to me.

My best friend for many years was a woman named Equis. We had known each other for about twelve years, had attempted to date each other – rather disastrously – for two and a half of those years, had been college roommates, and had continued to be roommates for the last two years we knew each other after college. When I told her about meeting and falling in love with Fuego, she surprised me with reactions of anger and resentment rather than the congratulations and joy I had expected from my best friend, and told me that she could not be my friend anymore if I decided to date Fuego (which I quickly came to realize meant anyone when she confessed that she had secretly hoped we would get married some day). This came at the end of the weekend between two summer camps I was working, so the next morning I drove back up to camp, thinking about what she had said and praying for an easier way out than choosing between my then best friend and someone I really thought I might have a future with. I knew what was right in my heart, but up to that point in my life it was the most difficult decision I had ever had to make. A wise and good friend of mine, The Rev. Mommy Chaplain, was the chaplain for camp. When I told her of my dilemma, she used the example of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – praying for an easier way out than breaking the hearts of his twelve best friends by doing what he knew was right to do. I phoned Equis to let her know that I had to do what was right in my heart, and that as much as her decision not to be my friend anymore saddened me, I had to do what I knew was right. She had moved out and headed back to San Diego before I got home from camp that week. Where this becomes a mountaintop experience is through Fuego. This was the first time in my life I had to face an unappeasable situation, and having done what was right instead of what was easy, I suddenly found myself more alive in the coming weeks than I had been in about seven years. I was in love with the woman of my dreams (I literally realized that she had been the recurring mysterious woman in my dreams for the previous several years), I had friends again, one of my best friends from high school (who had been instrumental in getting me to Happening) moved in as my new roommate, I felt spiritually and emotionally energized and free. This time, I brought the mountaintop experience with me instead of staying on the mountain top. My world didn’t stand still as the rest of the world continued spinning around me, rather I felt like I was living life in fast-forward for the next several months. Looking back on my life previous to that summer, it looked like an endless holding pattern of emotional and spiritual stagnancy. It’s amazing what strength and courage comes with taking off the veil.

What both of these experiences have in common is the profound change that they made in my life. In the capacity of these encounters to permanently change something deep and fundamental about myself, my relationship with others, and my experience and understanding of God, there is something at once captivating and yet terrifying. Some aspects have taken years to fully understand and describe, much as I’m sure the disciples’ encounter at the Transfiguration took them some time to fully embrace and understand.

This perhaps is one of the single biggest reasons for the veil we put up between ourselves and God. It is simply a terrifying thought that we could be fundamentally and permanently changed by removing it. We hear countless examples in the Bible of people whose lives were completely uprooted, swirled around, and replanted as something other than what they were before. The blind made to see, the deaf made to hear, the lame made to walk, the leper made clean. And today – a teacher going up a mountain and bursting into brilliant white light as he converses with long-dead prophets and has his divinity confirmed by God’s own voice…

It’s no small wonder that we want to remain in those moments when we finally drop the veil and experience something so awesome and powerful that we can’t imagine our lives any other way than that which they’ve become through the experience. But until we’re willing to drop the veil and start climbing, the mountaintop will always be just a beautiful mystery on the horizon.

Lord, grant us the courage to start climbing, the grace to experience your unfathomable and life changing love for us, and the wisdom to come back down the mountain.

Amen.

Sermon from Tuesday 13 February 2007, Absalom Jones (LFF)
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Readings: Isaiah 61:1-4, Psalm 126, John 15:12-15


For those of you who haven’t heard the story of the first African American Priest in the Episcopal Church, it is an amazing story of courage, perseverance, and faith.

His story comes from Lesser Feasts and Fasts:

Absalom Jones was born a house slave in 1746 in Delaware. He taught himself to read out of the New Testament, among other books. When sixteen, he was sold to a store owner in Philadelphia. There he attended a night school for Blacks, operated by Quakers. At twenty, he married another slave, and purchased her freedom with his earnings.

Eighteen years later, Jones bought his own freedom in 1784. At St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, he served as lay minister for its Black membership. The active evangelism of Jones and that of his friend, Richard Allen, greatly increased Black membership at St. George’s. The alarmed vestry decided to segregate Blacks into an upstairs gallery, without notifying them. During a Sunday service when ushers attempted to remove them, the Blacks indignantly walked out as a body.

Three years later, Black Christians organized the Free African Society, the first organized Afro-American society, and Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were elected overseers. Members of the Society paid monthly dues for the benefit of those in need. The Society established communication with similar Black groups in other cities. In 1792, the Society began to build a church, which was dedicated on July 17, 1794.

The African Church applied for membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania on the conditions that they be received as an organized body; that they have control over their local affairs; and that Absalom Jones be licensed as layreader, and, if qualified, be ordained as their minister. Four months later, it was admitted as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. Bishop White ordained Jones as deacon in 1795 and as priest on September 21, 1802.

Jones was an earnest preacher. He denounced slavery, and warned the oppressors to “clean their hands of slaves.” To him, God was the Father, who always acted on “behalf of the oppressed and distressed.” But it was his constant visiting and mild manner that made him beloved by his own flock and by the community. St. Thomas Church grew to over 500 members during its first year. Known as “the Black Bishop of the Episcopal Church,” Jones was an example of persistent faith in God and in the Church as God’s instrument.

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It is with good reason that today’s readings were chosen for Absalom Jones.

Isaiah’s testament to the Spirit being upon him in his being sent out to bring the kingdom of God near to those in need, so very reminiscent of Jones’ own life, is also a call to each of us to similarly be filled with God’s Spirit in our own lives.

I realize I preach a lot about the kingdom of God, but to me it’s the most important message of hope and the strongest call to continue Jesus’ ministry that we have. It’s the whole root and purpose of Christ’s ministry in the world, and it’s something that Christians as a broad religion just simply can’t seem to remember. It’s in the “Saints” like Absalom Jones that we see ordinary people living out a life empowered by God and driven by the Spirit acting within them. Through these examples, we see the continuing ministry of Christ brought to the world by people who are just like us. We seem to have tacked a super-human label on the saints in the modern church that never existed in the early Church. The Saints are all those who are baptized into the Christian family both past and present. We remember particular saints for the example they give us of a holy or particularly spectacular life, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that as members of the Body of Christ, WE are saints.

Jesus takes this idea of the kingdom a step further in the reading from John’s gospel today. With the disciples, we who continue to do Christ’s will in the world are called his Friends. With the disciples, we are called to love one another as Christ loved us – a selfless and compassionate love that expects nothing in return but the chance to reveal God’s amazing love for every part of creation.

Many of us take pause at the appended statement that follows this commandment to love one another, but the laying down of one’s life for one’s friends is simply the willingness to put another’s needs before our own. This is Absalom Jones buying the freedom of the woman he loved before slowly rebuilding his savings to buy his own freedom eighteen years later. This is Jones setting aside his former life to become a lay leader in the Church. It is Jones helping to found a revolutionary organization of African Americans, taking charge of their own faith and founding their own parish. It is Jones setting aside everything he previously knew and stepping out in faith to help bring God’s kingdom near to the slaves and former slaves of Pennsylvania. It is Jones, an African American, former slave, being ordained as a priest over half a century before the Civil War.

Laying down our lives out of love for another is simply acting out of the profound love of God to better the life of another instead of simply walking past them on the street. It is as simple as buying an extra hamburger at McDonalds for the homeless and hungry woman outside, or pausing for two minutes to recognize the humanity of the Vietnam Vet, panhandling on the corner, by talking to him, or even just visiting our friends and community members who are ill, hospitalized, or unable to make it to the church for services. It is not a complicated or even a life-long or life-ending practice for most of us, but it does hold the life-changing potential for God’s spirit to take hold of us and anoint us as it did Isaiah, Absalom Jones, and Christ himself into a lifetime of loving service of others.

May each of us, as the Saints of today, learn to love more fully, strive to be Christ’s hands and heart in the world, and pray to become the kind of saints that will be remembered in centuries to come for our willingness to lay down our lives in service of God’s kingdom.

Amen.