Tenth Wednesday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Reading to Remember

Lessons: Psalm 72; 2 Samuel 3:22-39; Acts 16:16-24; Mark 6:47-56

Many of us read scripture every day.  We do so on some significant level to begin the day or end the day or divide the day with the memory that God acts.  As years go by we find that our expectations of that action gentle, or at least I do. 

I do not expect this day that I will find the slave girl Paul finds locked in a life of divination for other’s profit. Her whole existence is summed up this way.  Her usefulness, her value, her heart and mind are only of any use as long as she can articulate what she sees by some spiritual force that controls her.  

She is an annoyance to Paul and Timothy as she continually announces, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” (Acts 16:17). Why this is an annoyance I am not sure.  Was it the constancy? Was it the way it affected their credibility because it seemed a circus act? What we know is that once she was relieved, healed of this habit, this way of being owned and possessed, both she and her owners had to deal with the clarity of her humanity or not.  

I suppose it is like being too anything, too beautiful, too intelligent in one vein, too witty in an obsessive way.  You can get lost and your complex goodness not noticed.  You are expected mostly to be that.  Your emotions, your struggles, your coming to be in other ways can go unseen.  It is only when the fullness of who you are is noticed that you feel seen, known, genuinely appreciated.  Your faults are as much a part of you as your gifts.  This complexity is God’s creation meant to be noticed and valued. Your growing edges are often in these under noticed faults or over noticed for that matter. Once she is healed or begins to heal she and her owners have to deal with the real person inside and Paul can do the real work of helping folk grasp the change that comes in Jesus.  That change is knowing one’s self as faulty but loved, errant but forgiven, gifted and loved, able to act and care. 

This so often defines the realm of God’s work with us. We are loved and complex creatures coming more and more into being and usefulness.  God acts in these places.  When we remind ourselves of this we may notice our usefulness. Scripture helps us trip that memory.

I just spent some days with a lovely friend who is a harpist for the joy of being a harpist I think.  Along the way she has developed a commitment to play for several senior living facilities often in the areas of the lesser noticed folk.  Sometimes this is in the dining moments, sometimes with Alzheimer patients or the very elderly too often left to mull over the days now past. Some special friendships have developed and she is very attentive to a couple.  You might say she is useful to God.  Memories are often found by music.  One can journey back to a happy place or an emotionally rewarding place.  One can remember one’s essential value; taste again what it is to have been in love, dance, and feel significant. Does God act here?  I think so and for a moment there is healing and sweet hope is tasted.

Perhaps God’s core miracle in our lives is that when we learn to see and help others see our core, essential worth reflected in the touch, speech, actions of another’s care, we awake again to our value, our self as gift and not because we a profitable.  Rather because we simply are part of the flow of care God in Christ names and sets free in the world.

I read scripture to remind myself, God acts. Does that seem so to you?

Tenth Tuesday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Miracle Out of Silence Waiting

Lessons: Psalm 61, 62; 2 Samuel 3:6-21; Acts 16:6-15; Mark 6:30-46

For God alone my soul in silence waits; *
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation, *
my stronghold, so that I shall not be greatly shaken.  Psalm 62:1-2

Today the twelve return from their mission to invite others to notice the reign of God come.  They are delighted it seems with their progress. The first thing Jesus does is take them away. "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." Mark 6:31 They will not sustain the quiet long, but they do enter it together.  It strikes me that we do not know what Jesus was up to while the 12 were on their teaching mission.  I assume he dealt with the John the Baptist question of yesterday’s reading.  Perhaps he had his own quiet spaces.  What we do know is that after so active and vibrant a time as the disciples report, Jesus is clear they need a quiet break, a reflective break.  Psalm 62 is our invitation.

For God alone my soul in silence waits; *
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation, *
my stronghold, so that I shall not be greatly shaken.  Psalm 62:1-2

It is in such spaces that we find the silent energy to hear our lives, see our paths, note our growth, taste our hopes, release our regrets, notice the tug of others on our hearts, find the still small voice of God which troubles, enlightens and soothes, restore, see the road of reentry.

The crowds press then in upon them and Jesus’ teaching begins again.  The next challenge of compassion sets in naturally.

When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat." Mark 6:35-36

This is a double moment of care.  There is the care for Jesus. “Take a break.”  There is the care for the crowd.  They need a meal and rest and relief from the coming dark.

But he answered them, "You give them something to eat." Mark 6:37

The disciples do not see the option here.  It is drawn from them an awareness of but one picnic here of five loaves and two fish.  Then the miracle that puzzles occurs.  Offered to the God who waits in silence, shared with the crowd, all are not only fed but abundance occurs.  The Five thousand leave behind twelve baskets full.  Is this manna in the wilderness found again at God’s hand?  Is it generosity materialized by the crowd?  Is it an instruction that when we take seriously that we are well resourced people we find a generous response either in us or in God? Whatever lies in this miraculous moment of care, there remains a message of compassionate generosity.

Our potential to care, to see abundance, to bring it to heart and mind is never achieved by sending each other away.  We may need moments to withdraw and find God’s lurking generosity in our silent core and to open to its creativity. Yet we find it only to be turned back to one another, to notice we are ever a hungry crowd seeking that which may seem surface but can open our depth.

What miracle are we to be part of this day?  Is it to go into our place of work or leisure and listen to another life?  Is it to hear our own life next to another’s?  Is it to create a listening meal of food, emotion, laughter?  Is there a task we can do that will add quality to our work or play or another’s hope?  It can be folding laundry with care, putting focus on an insurance policy, an architectural plan, selecting correct or caring language as we write, placing an appropriate gentle hand on a forearm. It can be looking at our local or larger politic and shifting our awareness from my need to some larger caring way.  Miracle is often a small noticing of the too few loaves and bread of our lives, offering what we have, being open to its rootedness in the Creator, Redeemer, Lover of humankind, and then acting from this generous center.

It helps though to begin this way.

For God alone my soul in silence waits; *
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation, *
my stronghold, so that I shall not be greatly shaken.  Psalm 62:1-2

Now let us be miracle…and then return and listen anew.

Tenth Monday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Nightmares Become Better

Lessons: Psalm 56, 57, 58; 2 Samuel 2:1-11; Acts 15:36-16:5; Mark 6:14-29

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had become known. Some were saying, "John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him."  But others said, "It is Elijah." And others said, "It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old." But when Herod heard of it, he said, "John, whom I beheaded, has been raised." Mark 6:14-16

Being at the top can be pretty nervous making.  So it seems was the case with Herod.  There were in fact a number of Herods like there were a number of Henrys and Georges on the British throne.  Only this Herod was pretty unsure he could maintain the top so he had a habit of offing people he thought might stand in his way.  Even his sons he killed to protect his place.  That is the definition of paranoid (perhaps with cause) and ethically challenged all at once.  It seems he married his match in Herodias and she is schooling her daughter in the same lost set of ethics.  The top is the top, enjoy it at all costs.  You may not always enjoy it but you can manufacture your own nightmares.  Herodias’ were a marriage that violated Jewish law, a prophet who spoke his mind and the disapproval of “a higher authority”, God, a beheading that was to get even, and people who just kept talking. 

Herod who married her was none the more comfortable.  Was Jesus now John come back to haunt him?  Was this the nightmare of judgment he so dreaded?  Yes, thought Herod.  But no, he was a source of Godly thought and presence that felt like John come back to pick his conscience.   You cannot off a prophet to please your lust-raising daughter and later off your sons and expect to feel that life is fine all the time.  Someone will always arise with a deep ethic and not necessarily speak to you, but trouble you with the choice of good living in them that you keep missing.  On your best days you can have all sorts of entertainments that make you feel pleasure and that life is good but there are always the opposite days…or nights…or nightmares.

I guess every Bernie Madoff has his day.  I digress but could you have a better name as a thief?

And if John the Baptist raised isn’t the answer and instead it is Elijah the prophet who precedes the coming of the Messiah and the full judgment of God, well that is no better.  You are soon going to be out of a job and meeting your maker with some eternal review before you…or just empty nothingness for eternity.  Which would be better?

And the surreal piece is yet to come when Herod will join in the judging of Jesus and will help hang him on the very day he becomes friends with Pilate, another man striving for a top place.  And Herod will find that this one does rise from the dead and good people will follow Jesus and thus keep troubling the world of getting to the top at all costs just because good will not die away.

Good is meant to trouble us into better choices.  Often those better choices may trim in our striving for “the top” or easy answers to tough choices.  And even when we look back and find that this good measures the wrong choices we have made, Jesus stands resurrected to say, “start again.” Look over your shoulder; acknowledge what has gone wrong and your role in it. Ask forgiveness. Make amends, restitution if you can.  Go forward with the desire and intention to “sin no more.”  Do your best and stay willing to review.  Dream a kinder life into being by doing what is good or better.

You may still have some nightmares.  This is the psyche cleaning house. But these are seldom nightmares that walk about in the day like your past rising to accuse you.  Yet if they are, make amends.  Replace them with daydreams of what is better.  You are worthy of forgiveness and you will be surprised how often it is waiting for your genuine good taken up.

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Defining moments

Lessons: Psalm 24, 29; 2 Samuel 1:17-27; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 25:31-46

When I was a young priest in my first parish as Rector there was a moment just before my daughter was born that I made a gentle decision.  Knowing we would become a one income family I decided to buy two herringbone jackets and several trousers to get me through the next number of winters.  I spent those winters yet to come in a wealthy suburban parish.  They were good years of significant work.  These were also the years our household was one of the struggling finances compared to most of my congregants. Yet we were also quite good at living in our income and developing thrift. By such habits we had what we needed, were able to tithe which was important to us and our daughter did not go without.  Yet we were always on the low end of the town’s economics.  This was just an awareness one carries in one’s gentle awareness.  I suppose we were just blessed in that it did not bother us much.  It was just there in the contrast of what we could take advantage of and what we had to manage.

Over a decade later I assumed a position in one of our poorest cities in a downtown parish.  I loved the place and the people and the work.  That was pretty usual for me.  There were however far many more occasions when the church doorbell rang and a person of poverty was there seeking aid.   Sometimes the person was one whom I/we could help and sometimes not.  I would walk the city streets and often be asked to help out financially or just be asked to pray.  I learned the essential nature of looking directly at a person and either help or often acknowledge that I could not help as they asked.  I learned this eye to eye contact kept us both human and in a momentary relationship of some peculiar equality, human to human.  It slowly set in on me that I had gone from being one of the least affluent to one of the most affluent without much change in my income or in the need to mange my finances.  Daily seeing poverty can deeply affect your sense of reality.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus puts forth one reality.  All live in a world where there is hunger, thirst, nakedness, real or false justice and penalty, sickness, loneliness and a sense of being not known, a stranger.  There is a time when we too will be judged by the compassion at the core of God by how well and willingly we have responded.  Jesus sees this as a sorting out of the sheep from the goats.  It is clear one wants to be a sheep and rest in God rather than a goat about to be roasted.

When the question is raised about our response everyone answers.

'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?  And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' Matthew 25:37-39, (44).

We are told that when we aid any we are aiding Christ.  He dwells in all who suffer, rightly or wrongly, he makes no distinction.  There is in Jesus vocabulary no such thing as the deserving poor and non-deserving poor.  We are all needful of care.  We all choose how we express this care.  Something in God will judge us and hold us accountable.  Did we share in the flow of God’s care or did we fail to notice its resource in us?

Years ago I was given a portrait of heaven and hell.  Both look the same.  There is a banquet table laden with food. Seated by the table are a mass of folk.  All have no use of their elbows, their arms are stiff.  In hell the people are all struggling to feed themselves unsuccessfully.  In heaven they each are feeding the persons across the table.  The difference is awareness of the other and acting on that awareness.

So it is with our souls.  The other is always in some way our tutor.  In our listening, steady or slow responding, in our caring we become deeper people.  When we aid and offer healing awareness of the other something in us grows. Perhaps we will offer a buck or two, perhaps something more precious, our awareness, a piece of our compassion, our time, our creative mind.  It is odd how God chooses to grow us.  Sad how we sometimes miss our own becoming.  And yet always there is grace to begin again.

Ninth Saturday after Pentecost, Proper 11; Inclusion and Majority Adjustment

Lessons: Psalm 55; 2 Samuel 1:1-16; Acts 15:22-35; Mark 6:1-13

Inclusion is a word often used in mainline churches these days.  We use it largely in reference to new membership and an openness to those we once viewed as ‘other’, not us.  Often it is used with a certain pride that we are an inclusive congregation.  Yet when I hear it I often wonder are we aware that in all of us there is the possible lurking backlash of old exclusion? 

For instance, once I moved on decades ago to inclusion of women in ordained leadership, there was an impatience in me with those who excluded this possibility.  I had to watch that and still do.  I had to learn to maintain patience with those who differed with me.  I can, as long as the energy in the “conservative” person is also patient and open to speak and listen.  Two things grew clear for me.  This works as long as I am not expected to lose my insight and women are not expected to lose their new found place and authority.  This then is more than inclusion.  It undoes exclusion and our history of using “otherness” as a weapon.

That I believe is what is happening in our reading of Acts.  For generations there were gentiles who saw the depth of God in Judaism.  They could however not become full members of the worshipping Jewish community for they were by definition gentile, non-Jew by race, other.  This same view was held by many Jews who saw in Jesus the Messiah, the Christ.  As gentiles began to not only see the same but receive the empowerment of the Holy Spirit to arrive at deepening faith, confession of Jesus as Lord, Son of the living God, this old tension remained.  In Acts 15 it is resolved by the council in Jerusalem.  It seems to be resolved largely by the authority invested in Peter and James, their leaders. Peter has earlier had a dream of full inclusion of all God made in an earlier chapter.  Full inclusion can be found in prophetic writings as well. There remains however the tension from the conserving camp that these gentile men be circumcised and adhere to the Old Testament Law. 

In yesterday’s reading this was resolved.  No such requirement will be made.  Rather only three things are asked. They are: to abstain from food offered to idols (this disturbs the conscience of Jews who see it as proof of idol worship); from fornication, unchastity (also a gentile practice associated with pagan worship and offensive to Jewish law and sensibility); and to refrain from eating meat strangled with the life blood still in it (once again offensive to Jewish sensibility and law).  It is worth noting that the concern was that this inclusion should be viewed by Jews as not violating their own sensibilities and conscience in only a few ways.  Beyond this it was the task of the Jewish Christian to see God’s grace in gentile lives who prior to this were outside and other.

Whenever we who are already at home in the church approach a new understanding of inclusion, be that new understandings of racial inclusion, class inclusion, gender inclusion, or today, sexual orientation, we do well to remember that these conditions were placed on gentiles only in part for their own clarity of what it meant to worship the One True God through the revelation of Jesus Christ, Son and Lord.  It was placed on them in large measure for the sake of the conserving but opening Jewish Christian. 

All these generations later we, the Church, do not much care how meat is killed and prepared.  We do not keep kosher. We do care about the ethics of sexual fidelity but do not worry that pagan worship is involved in sexuality.  We have grown past a preoccupation with this concern.  You might say the gentiles have won the day. 

Yet we do well to notice that we still have an energy within us to ask those newly included not to offend our sensitivities.  When I served a congregation in Newark, NJ, with a formal tradition, what proved most difficult was how to balance the needs of the African immigrant population for spontaneous praise with the Anglo and Caribbean preference for formality. Yet we found a compromise, in time.  

That, it seems to me, is what we struggle with in the arena of Gay and Lesbian inclusion.   Truth is all people come to the Church with a desire for spirituality, for the signs of God’s care, to be helped to sort out life ethics that reflect this care inward and back into the world.  Yet for so many generations this group dare not speak its name, so our ways of care are foreign to many, touch can be troubling, the image of family likewise.  When we ask anyone not to offend our sensibilities, we need to be aware this is for our adjustment not their moral and spiritual good.  In time we need to realize this is not God’s requirement.  It is the road to majority adjustment and must pass away.

Ponder what your sensibilities are and how they reflect the core of God’s care for yourself and others. What might be necessary for your own transformation as a deeper practitioner of faith?  What might need to pass away and what might need to be maintained?

Ninth Friday after Pentecost, Proper 11; Not Quite Yet...

Lessons: Psalm 40, 54; 1 Samuel 31:1-13; Acts 15:12-21; Mark 5:21-43.

Being ready to die is seldom our goal, yet in time it is an important goal.  Saul is not ready to die and yet here he is in his final battle when he and his sons will lose their lives.  Being Israel’s first king has not be an easy learning curve.  Saul is not settled or right with God but his time is up.  To spare himself humiliation and sport in an enemy’s hand he falls on his own sword.

In the Gospel today a young girl, Jairus’s daughter is dying as is a more mature woman, though she slowly.  Both reach out to Jesus for healing and time.  The girl through her father, the woman on the street through her own desperate hand reaches out to Jesus.  The father asks for Jesus’ aid and Jesus heads in the direction of the child.  The woman made poor by doctors who can offer her no final healing, seems to steal her health.  "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." We can but admire her faith and hope.  What is odd is how important it is to Jesus to find her in the crowd.  He has somehow felt not the tug but the draining of healing power.  What seems essential is to say to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."   Here is the physician of Mark’s Gospel who will always point back to faith and thus God.  It is never about Jesus the person.  It is always about hope met, about faith in a Higher Power.   It seems that the leader of the Synagogue already has made the faith connection, the God connection.  So when a deeper miracle happens, the child restored from death, all that needs to be said is, “Feed her and keep silent about what is done here.”  Is that because people will confuse Jesus the man as disassociated from God the healer?  Who will get the glory?

I was raised with two grandmothers.  One I could be close with, my Grandmother Lewis, the other not quite so much, my Grandmother Holland.  Both were at separate times diagnosed with cancer.  Grandmother Holland at a younger age and I remember the Sunday we were told and that she would live maybe six months.  I remember later being told the cancer had disappeared and it inexplicable according to her doctors. Was this a God miracle? It seemed so and was received as such.

My Grandmother Lewis would years later be diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer.  She sought a miracle, believed God would spare her.  I was often there as we cared for her until her death.  I loved her much and deeply regretted her death. Yet I admired her faith and hope and somehow held to the idea she was now safe with God.  Perhaps it was because in her house I had to read the Bible daily and go to Sunday school whenever I stayed there, and thus knew her faith.

Few people of faith want to die.  Yet some are ready to die when the time comes.  It has mostly with having made your peace with the reality that we are time limited, that we have gifts of love to give and have given them.  It has to do with being right with the Source of life and having made your amends with any you have hurt.  It has to do for most Christians with having known times when you reached out to God and found your way, been healed sometimes by a faith that is satisfied with just the hem of Christ’s garment, the fringe of his care that comes to us in sacrament, or quiet, or scripture, or unmerited love like a Grandmother Lewis.  It is knowing these that have helped me know that if I die tomorrow I am right with life and God.

I hope tomorrow is however a long way off.  I like living.  I like knowing God on this plane and growing.  Perhaps just this knowing is a continual reaching for Christ’s hem, so I guess I am a bit like the woman in the crowd desiring life. That works too.

Ninth Thursday after Pentecost, Proper 11, Feast of St James; Just As We Are

Lessons: Psalm 34; Jeremiah 16:14-21; Mark 1:14-20

Today is the Feast of St. James and I must admit that before reading the correct lessons I read the propers for the ordinary Thursday, proper 9.  So I have a mixture going.  In the ordinary propers we find Acts 15:1-11.  The image here is Peter dealing with the early tension between the original Jewish believers in the Resurrection and Messiahship of Jesus and the gentile population now coming to faith.  The issue was whether the gentiles needed to keep all the practices the Law required of Jews including circumcision.  This later was repugnant to gentiles not to mention painful. Speaking of the faith conversion of the gentiles, Peter states:

And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe we shall be saved through the Lord Jesus, just as they will."   Acts 15: 8-11

The application of Peter’s argument is relevant for any cultural advancement of the Gospel.  Each time a different culture is opened to the love of God we know in Jesus Christ, there is a weighing out of what is central and core to the Gospel and what is not.  Peter resolved that neither circumcision nor dietary laws incumbent on Jews were required to enter into relationship with Christ and the free flow of God’s life giving love. A certain adherence to the moral code of care between believers, of truthfulness, of sexual fidelity, of uprightness of life was expected.  But even this must not blur the reality that each of us comes to God in Christ as we are seeking to know and be moved by Grace; the free unearned love of God offered to ground and guide us.  His deeper concern was that both Jews and gentiles must remember the law was a guide that was an aid but failed to create in us the perfect pattern of God’s love followed.

In my last parish I had a number of Africans that held customs strange to Westerners. Some of these the missionaries had told them were to be gotten rid of to be Christian.  One was they were to cease ancestor worship.  Another was they were allowed only one wife.  I noticed early on that “honoring the ancestors” was not the same as worshiping them.  At an after baptism party, before the time of prayer and hymn singing, a libation was poured on the carpet and words spoken as a symbol of honoring all who had gone before.  I was far more sensitive to the ruining of a rug or a hardwood floor beneath in that moment then I was to a distortion of faith.  It struck me this was not much different than our customs of naming our children after a generation past.  I am a ‘third’ out of this custom.  The primary difference was that the understanding that we build one generation on the strong shoulders of the one before was what was being honored. Our connection to Christ generation to generation was honored.  This would similarly show up at any life passage.  Each time I was reminded how much we are effected by our long past to good or ill.

I learned that as much as the outside message bearers thought they knew what was essential to conversion, the message receivers would do their own work to sort out what was right and wrong by the Gospel.  Sometimes both would agree.  Sometimes the recipient of the Gospel would find a different understanding knowing what was in their own hearts. In some places God was already tutoring them in deep values outsiders missed. I was also enriched by what they retained of their culture, what it taught me to newly value as a human.

So I am reminded that on this feast of St. James as we read the Gospel call of the twelve disciples, it was not following the rigors of law that caught the first disciples and made them “fishers of men.”  The bait was a strange sense of embodied love, the announcement that we are of such value to God that our errors in action and thinking could be both forgiven and tutored out of us, or wooed out of us by grace or enriched by grace.  The bait was that God comes among us in our flesh.  This bait was found in Jesus, yes, but also in themselves in renewed loving attitudes and actions.  “Follow me,” was not so much a physical movement but movement by compassion into outlooks and actions daily assumed.

Mostly I have come to believe, when we look at another experience of being human that may differ from “my experience,” we are to ask the “other” what customs do you perceive need to be altered to be consummate with the Gospel?  What ones need to be blessed?  What ones will help you grow into God? What ones stand in your way?

Perhaps at least this verse is true of the hymn, “Just As I Am.”

Just as I am - Thou wilt receive,
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
-O Lamb of God, I come!

Ninth Wednesday after Pentecost, Proper11: Sleeping Jesus

Lessons: Psalm 119:49-72; 1 Samuel 25:23-42; Acts 14:19-28; Mark 4:35-41

The water is lapping hard on the shore of Lake Champlain below the cliff and one of the small boats has lost its mooring and taken on water.  The wind is blowing straight at us. We will have to bail it out later.  The wind has picked up strongly and I am reminded how hard it is in a sailboat to make headway against such wind.  One must tack to and fro and if the wind is as strong as it is now even that may not work well for you if your aim is the other side of the lake.  Thus I understand the Disciples' frustration with the confidently sleeping Jesus.

“And they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’  He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.  He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’” Mark 4:38-40

I think I would be annoyed having labored hard to stay steady only to have calm so easily brought.  But perhaps this is just one more simple lesson of faith.

All of us go through stormy times, times when the wind seems against us and headway is hard won.  One sees this all the time in parish ministry.  The person of high principles will find the one of low principles in a superior position and is called to navigate their own principles in a barren land.  How many people in business share this story?  It can get you down. 

The teenager who is kind is so often the recipient of the bully’s attention or the popular girl’s unkind commentary.   Parents struggle to help their young stay steady and it eats at us. 

A pastor confronts a system stuck in isolation that cannot see its way to inclusion of the new and the different and thus to new growth and depth.  Here the pastor must hold the higher vision and slowly work for deeper awakening.  Here is the season of patience and colleague building.

All of these places require the patience of faith and deeper hope.  And at some point you wonder is Jesus or God asleep in the boat, resting comfortable in the bow or not there at all? 

So often these are the places we are to remember in faith that storms are a normal course of life.  In their presence we learn new arts of navigation.  This is where we are to remember, the boat will not sink, and the storm will not last forever. That is having faith--to remember those facts as we navigate. 

Looking back over my shoulder, I have seen business people of ethics win for the company or move on and find different, deeper vocations.  I know in myself the kind teenager can find a deeper way to be an effective presence in life.  The parent finds deep reward in being the steady place as our young become their better selves.  The patient, listening pastor of vision can help the system move to its better, more faithful self.  It is not always this sweet and clear, but it is often enough.

The sleeping Jesus always eventually awakens and we find the storm has cleared or is clearing.  Often we rest a bit before the wind comes yet again.  And we have learned how to navigate it the better.

Ninth Tuesday after Pentecost, Proper 11: Birds, Weed, Seeds, Me and God's Reign

Lessons: Psalm 45; 1 Samuel 25:1-22; Acts 14:1-18; Mark 4:21-34

Beyond my kitchen window is a garden patch.  A previous owner created slightly raised beds which I have only partially recovered as a vegetable garden this season.  The other portion has some bulbs and then is just weed.  When you are cutting four acres of ground, a weed patch is at least one area you can ignore. Over the last two winters I have noticed the weeds contain much seed and the birds feed there. Something of God’s balance is here.  Last spring I did not clear the weeds until the birds had other feeding ground.  Today’s Gospel allows me to feel generous.

"With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?  It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."  Mark 4:30-32

I think about this tiny seed of faith in my early life.  I did not plant it.  God did in my creation.  Most children express a natural wonder about God.  Adults either water it or pull at its roots to remove it.  Mine was watered and nurtured by some essential adults in my life.  If you are so blessed as to have a child wonder about God with you, mind how you respond, listen to her curiosity.  You may find this place of little seeds stir within your own lost wonder.

By the time I was making it through the difficult season of adolescence I had a goodly bush within me.  When life seemed uncertain, even mean, I had both friends and this bush of faith.  Sometimes I plucked its seeds to feed me.  Sometimes I tucked under its cooling shade to find comfort when the world was rough, peers unkind, the first blush of sexuality too strong and disorienting, moral decisions demanding, self worth perplexing.  Prayer was the shade.  Faithful adults and worship was the seed place.  God’s reign within grew largely unnoticed, yet progressive.

Over the decades, dark times have played with me as have times of light and insight.  That is the rhythm of life and faith.  I often do not see how this reign of God has shaped me.  I take it for granted as I do the rising of the sun, the dependability of the trees shade, the purr of the cat on my belly. I have learned to like kindness more than anger, even if both have a place and right balance.  I find it better to forgive than to hold on to the negative, to move on in life. Sharing my wealth and managing my poverty has grown me wiser.  I notice that most folk have a deep good to be sought out patiently.  Some access it more easily than others.  What is hopeful wins most of the time.  What is broken is repaired by love when we give into it. What will not give into love and kindness should not possess my soul even if it does someone else’s.  These seeds grow the Kingdom within and without.

Jesus died between two men considered weeds by some.  One mocked at Love, the other noticed Love and asked mercy and remembrance.  Both requests were granted from the unlikely place of suffering. The second thief still had enough wonder left to see God’s reign in a most unlikely place, coming death.  That tiny seed was still alive in an overlooked life.

I think this summer I will let those weeds continue to grow and feed next winter’s birds and remind me I too both feed on God’s reign and thus feed others.  We all can do this even if we are far better than weeds.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 11: Martha and Mary and me

Lessons: Genesis 18:1-10a; Psalm 15; Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42

I mostly like to cook.  I like what can be creatively achieved in the kitchen and the care it involves.  When I lived in the rectory I spent a lot of time in the kitchen.  Yes, I made meals but I also read the mail there, leafed through magazines, prayed there and watched the news. While I cleaned up, I thought a lot as well.

I like to entertain. I do it well in point of fact. I depend on my ability to get things out of the kitchen in one given moment, hot and on the table.  I don’t mind refilling bowls and platters.  I remember to get the coffee on and the dessert out, if it has been planned. The plates are removed and the leftovers put in the fridge.

Often I overhear the leisure of those at table, the conversation, while I manage the details.  I do not resent my role, except when I am tired. Then I realize I am missing the stories, the people at ease. Then sometimes there comes that resentment.  Couldn’t one of you help a little? Talk kindly to me while I am in the kitchen managing the details.  Why is it that I am here … being hospitable?  What are you all thinking?  It is not a good moment when this sets in.

So it is from this place that I understand Martha.  She knows the ministry of hospitality.  In her world there were no easy helps.  She feels alone and burdened by what is expected of her and what she expects of herself.

You don’t have to be planning a supper party to get her.  Anyone who ever takes on a task at church knows her feeling at some point, say a parish supper or coffee hour.  You take it on, usually with willingness.  You plan the meal, do the shopping, execute it, serve it…often with some help.  You know the rhythm: we eat, we laugh, we tell stories, we do our business, say our prayer.

You get to the end and it is amazing the people who do not notice the clean up.  Too often it is assumed that the usual people will clean up.  Others pack up the leftovers, or don’t, and drift away home.  If you are in that faithful crew who in good conscience cannot just walk out…well sometimes you resent it.  You wish others would wake up, pick up a towel, bump you out of the way, and go to work.  You hear Martha stir within, “Lord, do you not care that I am left to do all the work by myself?”  Sometimes your Martha sticks her head out of the emotional kitchen and says, “Does anybody notice me?”  “You are so engaged in meaningful stuff and I am feeling pretty alone, taken for granted!  Will someone, you Mary, get off your behind, help!”

And it’s not just from the kitchen that we feel this, ask this.  The call comes from the Sunday school floor, the stewardship group, the counters and bookkeepers, the rector trying to create education, those who care for the altars and the flowers and the hungry at your church door. So many times we feel Martha rising up within the areas of ministry that we assume for the whole church.

From this place we can understand how Martha felt as Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are distracted by many things…”  Can you get a grip here?

It is important to catch the context of this encounter.  We are in the portion of Luke’s Gospel about discipleship.  Last week we heard from the lawyer who desires eternal life, and knows the law -- love God overall and neighbor as self.  When he wants to limit who qualifies as neighbor, he is introduced to the nameless Samaritan.  The Samaritan had every reason to walk away from a wounded Jew -- with their history of hate -- but he does not limit his sense of neighbor.  He labors to restore the man’s wholeness. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

If only George Zimmerman had noticed this lesson over against his notion of limiting.  He and Treyvon would be nameless, neighborly Floridians perhaps.  Or their encounter might have reconciled a neighborhood by example. We cannot undo this moment in history.  But we can choose to grant the title, neighbor, when we might previously have chosen differently. 

So last week Jesus named an outsider as our leader, a Samaritan.

This week, he names a woman who sets herself down in the place of a disciple to listen.  She has chosen a non-doing role, a being role for just now.  She sits at Jesus’ feet for now to grow her sense of wellbeing, her Christ center, her God core.  She, in her silence, calls us to attention, to the place of listening.  She, in her silence, claims women have as much right as men, and Jesus invites Martha to take note of this.

Martha, too often, gets a bad rap here, as if her busyness is so wrong.  It is not.  Rather she is being offered insight.  Resting into Jesus' teaching, being, presence is not optional but essential.

Martha is the modern busy person.  Trying to accomplish much, dutiful, balancing much, faithful to the ordinary in life, but also losing self and center. 

When Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”   He names her reality.  We hear it as judgment but what if we hear it simply as reality pointed to. What if all that is meant here is; “Martha notice the toll you are paying?  Notice you can sometimes choose a discipleship of listening, being.”  Might you have more depth?

The key is here: "...there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

What was it that Mary grasped and Martha missed?  Not that daily duties are to be ignored. Rather Jesus wants her full attention at a strategic point. Has she noticed she too is offered a role as disciple, a close follower?  Mary has. This is what will not be taken away.

Jesus comes to offer her…us...deeper life.  He wants her to listen, us as well.  Be attentive, find depth, accept a fuller life, live it.  Perhaps this is the day she is to hang up her oven mitts, forget all who want to be fed, let go of hospitality's function…rest in Jesus.  May be she did just this.  Scripture falls silent as to her response.

And here, I guess, is the rub.  We do need to function and be functional. Sometimes we do that best when we stop, pay attention to our need to rest in Jesus.  Pray…study…listen…check our rhythm.  We need to plan a pause, check our pace, breathe. 

We are at our best both Martha and Mary, engaged in a balance of doing and being.

Eighth Friday after Pentecost, Proper 10: Dark Night

Lessons: Psalms 31; 1 Samuel 21:1-15; Acts 13:13-25; Mark 3:7-19a. 

We do not arrive at our true vocation, to reflect something true and lasting back into life, without some darkness that awakens us more deeply.  Something of the ego or false self must go for true self, the self that reflects God’s love back into life, to begin its next phase of arrival.  The dark night does not come only once but will in some way repeat as we grow in awareness and depth.

Not a lot is said about the dark night in casual writings about spiritual growth and awakening.  There is a tendency to instruct us to stay attached to the light, to work at happiness; to forgive and seek forgiveness as if we are in this realm where all is sure. Yet the dark night is real and essential to our growth.  It is that time when the false props fall away and we are in some way naked to self and God who eludes us for a time.

In the dark night one feels totally alone, stuck in the dark.  The hope of seeing the light again is gone.  This time often follows real spiritual growth or some early sighting of our potential for growth.  Yet it feels as if we must have done something terribly wrong to be here, in this land where we cannot see our way or God as our guide.  What waits for us here?

One writer has noted that this is a time of spiritual detox.  The pain we feel may be the pain we have tried to suppress for years or decades.  Now it is coming to the surface. 

I experienced it as overwhelming first by its dullness.  I called it my world of cotton where I could feel nothing.  Then it became a world of anger and pain.  Where did all this come from?  It came from that deep place I felt God could not go with me.  It was a place of denial of life for me.  In time, by honest journey, with some companioning, the darkness and pain become the way of enlightenment and new growth.  Yet in the beginning it is frightening nothingness.  It is as if one is either falling deep into aloneness or stuck on the surface of nothingness.  For me it was accompanied by such shame.  How did I get here after seeking to be so attentive to God and good?

Perhaps David is in an early chapter of his dark night of the soul or one of his early encounters with this experience of aloneness.  So much has gone well for him and so much of it based on his ego, his sense of self as his own.  He has been entrusted with family responsibility.  He has slain a giant of a man with a stone.  He has been a healing source for Saul’s mind with his music.  He felt he had been a faithful servant even as he was more praised than his superior.  Jonathan, the next in line to reign has chosen David as most dear friend or more.  He is deeply loyal to David’s soul.  One can see that so much must feel a blessing from God who has already set him apart by Samuel’s anointing to be the future king.  Can’t you just see the growth of ego, of false self in the midst of true self?  It happens to us all.

And then it is over, progressively.  Now he must beg or lie for bread.  Perhaps God seems his only companion or none at all.  He today lies to a holy man and then to his intimate enemy he passes as mad.  Does he feel sly or does he feel alone or does he feel both?  While he clings to survival, where is he with God?  In the quiet stretches of aloneness, when the scheming is at rest does he let the dark night speak?  Does he watch his false self give way as he hungers for the Holy Other to support and guide and receive his wasted efforts of building the self only to find it hollow and of no deep guide?  If so he has entered the dark night. 

Here we awake from time to time.  If we wait, even hopelessly wait, yet stay alert, we will awake to a truer self.  From this place we will learn the strange art of love that comes from our depth.  We awaken to God who is deeper than our notion of God before.  When next we are found by the Dark Night we will trust perhaps that it is a place of deep birth even as it feels a place of our depression and dying.

Eighth Wednesday after Pentecost, Proper 10: Gratitude

Lessons: Psalms 38; 1 Samuel 20:1-23; Acts 12:18-25; Mark 2:13-22

Yesterday I visited the memorial garden of St. Peter’s by the Sea to visit the place where my longest term friend was interred four years ago.  Al was one of the few people outside of family who knew me deeply and well.  We met in a dorm in college, became friends, went to church together, served the communities we gave ourselves to together. Geographically and professionally we moved off in different directions.  We lost each other for a brief time and then found one another.  We never lost each other again.

He could call me up short in a way no one else could.  He could also listen to the present or next chapter of my life knowing what questions would prompt my growth or unbury my sins.  I could answer him and know he would push me often sharply, usually kindly, to my better self.  In later years our conversations were too often over the phone but always remained essential to me and I think to him.  Still to this day I miss him, our long history, and the truth he held out to me.  

One of the most powerful friendships in the Old Testament is that of Jonathan and David.  They come to know each other in the field of bravery.  They bind to each other as blood brothers we suppose.  They become of one heart.  We are told in the 18^th chapter of 1 Samuel, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the souls of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”  Elsewhere we are told that Jonathan delighted in David.  We are not told what exactly this means but at minimum they were soul friends, caring and admiring of each other. 

In today’s reading they hatch a plan to save David’s life even if it involves tricking Jonathan’s father, King Saul.  We are reminded that there are loyalties that outweigh family in importance and meaning.  Some call this our family of choice.  Sometimes these are the places where we encounter a kind of love that is very close to the love God holds out to us.  It can be wise.  It can be forgiving of much.  It is not done by blood obligation but is chosen.

Think with me today.  Where has this friendship come into your life?  What is the closeness you have offered? Touch your gratitude.