Jan. 16, 2011 - 2 Epiphany

Isaiah 49:1-7
I Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

Last week, we heard the fairly simple account of Jesus’ baptism recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. This week, we are given some of John the Baptist’s reaction to the baptism and its miraculous aftermath. When you come to think of it, it’s a fairly strange and cryptic thing for John to say of Jesus: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Christian symbolism has embraced the imagery of the Lamb of God; we see it in stained glass windows, on vestments, in paintings and icons. It speaks of the sacrificial nature of Christ’s love for us. But I wonder whether John’s audience would have understood the comment in the same way. Of course they were familiar with the sacrificial lamb; a lamb — or other animal — was used as a sacrifice for ritual purification, as a sin offering; and it was the sacrifice of a lamb — and its blood on the lintel of each house — that spared the firstborn of the children of Israel from the plague God unleashed upon the Egyptians in the Passover story. So a sacrificial lamb would make sense, but… the Lamb of God? Why would God need to make a sin offering, or a Passover offering? So to say, “Here is the Lamb of God…” might have been the sort of strange, cryptic utterance one expected from a prophet. But John didn’t stop there. He went on to say: “…who takes away the sin of the world.” Taking away sin is what sacrificial lambs were for, but John says: the sin of the world. He doesn’t say: the sin of Israel, or even the sin of God’s chosen people; John says the sin of the world. This offering, this sacrifice, this Lamb of God is to be offered for everyone, the world, Jews and gentiles, all people. This would have been a new idea — and a radical one — for most of John’s audience. They had come out from all the surrounding area in order to receive a baptism of repentance from John — and here was John pointing to Jesus and saying that here was the sacrificial Lamb of God who would wash away the sins of the whole world. With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that Andrew would go to his brother, Simon Peter, and say “We have found the Messiah.”

One of the things that struck me, this week, about this passage from Scripture was the power of hope in John’s identification of Jesus as the Lamb of God. The people of ancient Palestine were living in difficult times; their lands were occupied and their people oppressed by the Romans. For a few well-to-do and influential folks, ones who largely collaborated with the Roman authorities, things were pretty good — but even for them, there were strong undercurrents of fear, and the threat of violence. The vast majority of the people were struggling to subsist; there were hotheaded radicals advocating armed rebellion; and there were the Roman legions, which, history tells us, suppressed any uprising among subjugated peoples with efficient and uncompromising brutality. Hope, in ancient Palestine, was in short supply.

But John the Baptist calls the people to a baptism of repentance. In the past, such public acts of repentance, such corporate demonstrations of a willingness to turn away from sin and back to God, had been followed by a restoration of God’s favor: the drought would end; the famine would ease; the people would be allowed to return from exile to their homeland. Just the fact that John was standing by the Jordan, calling people to repent would be recognized as a hopeful sign. But John doesn’t stop there. He sees Jesus, and recognizes in him something blessed and powerful: See, here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. And he points him out; and others see it, too: Andrew, Simon Peter, the other disciples.

Today, I think that many of us labor under a burden of hopelessness, and helplessness; there are so many things wrong in the world, and there seems to be so little we can do about it. Multiple crises, any one of which would be terrifying, loom: global warming and environmental degradation; over population; oil and energy shortages; pandemic disease; the growing shortage of potable water; the so called war on terror and continuing hostilities and casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan; outsourcing of jobs; economic uncertainties; the list goes on and on. Added to that are the personal stresses and anxieties: a family member who is ill; aging friends and relatives who need our attention and help; job pressures; financial anxieties; and on and on. We feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and largely helpless; and because of that, we retreat into whatever comfort-zones we can create, leading us to avoid anything that looks like it might be one more commitment. Our mindset may have been more like that of John and Jesus’ contemporaries than we think. It made sense, in the face of Roman occupation, to keep one’s head down. Just doing the work required to keep (almost) enough food on the table may have seemed like more than most people could take on. But when John called for a baptism of repentance, somehow, some of the people found something in his message that enabled them to respond. And when John recognized and identified Jesus, there were those who found hope enough to follow him.

The question for us, and it’s a big one, that comes out of this passage of Scripture is this: Where can we find the kind of energizing hope that John expressed in his ministry, and recognized and identified in Jesus? It may be important for us to note that the Jesus didn’t take on the powers that be directly; and also, he didn’t try to bring his message to the people by himself. The disciples and Jesus formed a community, a group with a shared purpose, who supported, strengthened and inspired one another. Being human, they probably frustrated, irritated and annoyed one another, from time to time as well. But the positives — the strength, energy, shared purpose, hope, and inspiration — they gave one another outweighed the effort it took to be, become and remain a community.

Our modern culture idealizes the individual; it stresses — in ways overt and unstated — individual power, individual control, and individual responsibility. In some ways, it lays the burden of our own fate squarely on our own shoulders, and teaches us that we ought to be able to take care of ourselves, and to meet our own needs. Our culture provides us with many, many solitary, individual activities and methods for distracting ourselves, for escaping from the burden of our responsibilities and worries; but it does not really encourage us to find relief with and among other people. Activities and events that might build our sense of community become, when viewed through the peculiar lens of our cultural biases, simply one more draining responsibility, one more obligation which keeps us away from whatever private solace — whether it be television re-runs, the latest bestselling page-turner, or the daily Sudoku or crossword puzzle — the culture promises will soothe us. But that promised soothing doesn’t really work. It can distract us from the troubling realities that oppress us, but it neither solves them, nor helps us to come to terms with them as a part of this new reality. We become ever more isolated, ever more helpless-feeling, ever more disempowered, ever more despairing.

So back to the question: Where can we find the kind of energizing hope John expressed in his ministry, and recognized and identified in Jesus? It’s easy for us to think, “Well, they were different. Of course people would be hopeful if Jesus were right there among them.” But I think we delude ourselves with that. Our faith teaches that Jesus is Resurrected, that the Risen Christ is present to us — present in the Eucharist, present in one another, present in the gathered community. We may not have a single person to point to and exclaim: “See, here is the Lamb of God,” but Christ’s power is present in each of us, and present in all of us. Perhaps, what we need most to do is to seek hope with and among one another. From its earliest beginnings, Christianity has taught community, inclusion, mutual love and support. It seems to me that those lessons need still to be learned, even (and perhaps especially) in this technological, rampantly individualistic age we inhabit.

When Andrew and the other disciple begin to perceive the hope John the Baptist saw, they ask, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” And Jesus responds with an invitation, which the disciples accept: “Come and see.” So, brothers and sisters, let’s do more than just think about where we might find energizing hope: let’s go looking for it! During the coming week, ponder the things you are most worried about, and ask yourself if they are also the things you are most passionately determined to address. Spend some time in prayer; ask for guidance, and for help imagining what sorts of encounters and what kinds of activities would energize you and give you hope. And then, begin to seek them out; if they don’t exist, start thinking about what it would require to get them going. Personally, I’ve found some energizing hope in conversations with others concerned about caring for Creation and “earth-stewardship.” I’ve begun to seek out some with ideas and passion; and I find that I come away from those conversations feeling fired up, not drained dry; hopeful, not despairing. We haven’t fixed any of the issues, but somehow, just finding people with whom to brainstorm, and getting exposed to new insights and ideas is helping me to overcome the sense of isolation and hopelessness that can be so paralyzing. And in it all, I sense the movement of the Spirit, as God seeks to awaken us to the new possibilities for ministry and mission.

During Epiphany-tide, we are reminded that we are called, and challenged, to follow Jesus, and to make the light and love of Christ present to the world. May we always be strengthened to respond, with joy and energy, to the invitations — subtle or overt — to come and see where God is at work; and may we find in ourselves the power to join Christ in the ministry to which we are called. In Jesus’ name: Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, VT

Jan. 9, 2011 - The Disappearing Epiphanic World

Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17

As Jesus came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened
And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved,
With whom I am well pleased.”

I read just the other day a book review that began this way: “Forty years ago, in a world that has long since disappeared …”. The reviewer was referring to the time of publication of the first book written by the now aging author, and he went on to talk about that book, but I got all hung up on that initial phrase, “Forty years ago, in a world that has long since disappeared.” I know well that world of forty years ago and, yes, I see the point of saying that world has long since disappeared, but if the world of forty years ago has disappeared what are we to say of a world that was not forty years ago, not even four hundred years ago but was five times four hundred years ago? I am speaking of course of the world of the biblical writers.

The baptism story that we heard this morning, from the gospel of Matthew —- of heavens bursting open, of the Spirit of God descending, of a voice from heaven speaking —- has followed upon the story of the magi, the three wise men, the three kings, if you like, who have followed a star from its rising in the East to its stopping point in Bethlehem where they find the Christ child, and pay homage to him. We call this story of the magi, The Epiphany, the manifestation of God’s presence on earth, or to put it in more philosophic terms, the presence of the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the temporal, here, in the little town of Bethlehem, in Judea, two thousand years ago, in this baby born of Mary, wife of Joseph. But the baptism story is as much an epiphany story as the magi story, and once we think about it we can see that the gospels are full of epiphanies, from the healings to the miracle stories, to the resurrection appearances, in fact the Bible can be understood as essentially a witness to epiphanies, from its very beginning in the book of Genesis when the sound of God could be heard “walking in the garden of Eden at the time of the evening breeze,” to the sound of God thfundering on Mt. Sinai, to the sound of God through the voice of the prophets who like Isaiah in this morning’s lection only open their mouths when they feel impelled to say, “Thus says God, (not me, Isaiah, but thus says God) the Lord, who created the heavens and spread out the earth and gives breath to the people upon it.” There’s an old rabbinic (Hasidic) story about a theological student who could never complete his studies because every time in class when someone would read the biblical text, “Thus says God the Lord,” he would start banging his head against his desk, shouting in crazed wonder, “God speaks, God speaks, God speaks,” til he was told that he must leave the classroom. But to the people of the Biblical world, the world that existed two to three thousand years ago, it is a wondrous but not a strange event that God speaks, that the eternal should make its presence known in the temporal. And the reason is this: that ancient people saw their world with epiphanic eyes and heard their world with epiphanic ears. Or, to put it more philosophically, the language, the categories, which were at hand to them, the ones through which they understood the events of their world, were metaphysical categories, transcendental categories. A reality transcendent to this world was as real to them as this world itself; in fact, it was more real, if the words, “more real,” make any sense to us. It is this world, this two thousand year old world, this epiphanic, metaphysical, transcendental world, that has “long since disappeared.” For the language, the categories, which dominate today’s understanding of the world, are the materialistic categories of biology and physics and sociology, and the rational categories of logic and mathematics —- none of which have any need for the God hypothesis or for the idea of an eternal order of things. Only a fool, says the psalmist, thinks God does not exist. Today it is different. Today’s cultured despisers of religion think that only a fool believes that God does exist. And some of us believers, because we are, after all, people of this age, (some of us) sometimes, hear those words of the cultured despiser coming not only from the outsider but from within ourselves: “only a fool would believe that God exists.” It’s a terrible, terrible, inner voice to hear. And yet we go on in faith, we do go on in faith, and with good reason, I might add. I’ll talk about some of those reasons in just a little bit.
Years ago, no, decades ago, in my long-lost youth, when I was a graduate student in seminary, a group of us graduate students, along with some of our laity friends from the churches we worshipped at, would meet weekly to discuss matters of biblical faith. We were discussing one evening the Jesus birth stories, and we graduate students, flush with our newly gained knowledge of biblical criticism, pointed out the contradictory character of those stories, their problematic sources, and the unlikely factuality of any of those narratives. One of the lay members of our group, a lawyer, who came from a family of cradle to grave Episcopalians, then said, “Well, if those stories aren’t true, I don’t see any point in believing in the Christian faith.” A terrific silence fell on the group. All of us were too young to respond to that statement in any adequate way. I have no memory at all of what reply we wise guy graduate students eventually stammered out to our lawyer friend, but his statement, like so many of my other failures in life, has lodged itself permanently in the back of my head —- and in a certain sense I have been working on a faith response to that statement all my adult life. For that statement demands an answer to how we, lacking epiphanic eyes and epiphanic ears, (how) can (we) remain firm in our faith in God and in Christ and in the Holy Spirit, and in the presence of the eternal in our temporal and finite and relativistic lives.

In the opening lines of today’s Old Testament lesson, Isaiah says, speaking in God’s voice, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” Now we know, I mean we post-enlightenment, twenty-first century people, with our psychological and scientific understanding of things, (we know) that this is Isaiah speaking, not God speaking, granted an inspired Isaiah, an Isaiah reaching deeply for the meaning of existence, but, still, Isaiah speaking, using his words, his language, his thoughts; and, further, we know with our historical knowledge that it is a questionable point whether the servant to whom Isaiah points is the one who “brings (or will bring) forth justice to the nations.” And yet there is something else we know, which we must not forget that we know, which I think I forgot all those years ago when my lawyer friend made his statement —- which is this: Isaiah’s statement, like the birth stories, indeed like this morning’s baptismal statement, “this is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” that these statements, these stories, speak to something very deep in us, and that they harbor profound truths which our failure to affirm is to our spiritual or existential detriment. So how can statements and stories that are factually problematic and logically contradictory harbor great truths? One answer, certainly not the only one, (one answer) is to think of such statements as fingers pointing to the moon. If we are walking with a child in the dark of night, when the moon is low in the sky or just a sliver of itself, so that the child does not see the moon, and asks us, “Daddy, mommy, where is the moon,” then we are very likely to point with our index finger at the moon, and say, “there it is.” If the child simply looks at our finger, lovely as our finger may be, he or she will see only the finger and not the moon, and perhaps will lose faith in us as a helpful authority and consult us no longer on matters of importance. But if the child looks at where the finger points, then she or he will see the moon, and be filled with a sense of its beauty.

So let us consider this: let us consider that Isaiah’s servant passages and Matthew’s baptismal story are like fingers pointing to the moon, a moon of great beauty whose sighting, if only we would see it, can fill us with a sense of the beauty and goodness of life. For this moon can tell us many things that are important to us, the greatest of which, perhaps, is this: that the inmost nature of reality cares for us and is congenial to the aspirations of love and justice that we long for. But this moon is not a physical moon, it is a spiritual moon or, speaking philosophically, it is a metaphysical moon, which means that it is beyond the reach of physics, and our age questions the reality of anything said to be beyond physics —- as if physics were the end all and be all of all knowledge —- and so for us, in our world, the moon to which the finger points is a highly controversial moon, a reality-challenged moon. Though it is beautiful, and though with all our heart we yearn for it to be, we hardly dare believe it exists —- for we fear that it is an illusion, and we dread illusions. I do not wish to deny that there are good reasons for our dread of illusions. We religious people have been burned by enough of them in our past: from the early church’s hopes —- voiced in the gospels and the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters —- that the Kingdom of God will come on earth in the lifetime of the earliest believers, to the illusions of medieval European Christendom’s crusades to restore the Holy Land to Christian hegemony, to the Puritans’ belief that they could establish a new and, this time, true Israel in America, to today’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs that the reestablishment of the state of Israel to its biblical boundaries will signal the second coming of the Christ. Even so, it is a mistake, and a mistake of logic at that, to believe that because some religious beliefs have turned out to be illusions, that all religious beliefs are illusions.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, when we find ourselves gripped by the fear that our faith is an illusion, let us remember that our biblically based faith is like a finger pointing at the moon, that our faith is not the finger but what the finger is pointing at, the moon, and that the moon is not the moon up in the sky that circles planet earth, but it is the moon which lies in the innermost depths of reality, which is the source of all reality, and which we affirm is for us, our friend, not our enemy, not a reality indifferent to us but one who cares for us and for all creatures and for what we do with our lives. To believe this is to believe that at the base of things lies not an inexplicable presence of super-concentrated dark matter, a mindless explosion of energy and a fortuitous acceleration of particles driven by a purposeless survival mechanism whose ultimate end can only be a return to darkness but it is instead to believe in the mystery of human origins and human destiny, its goodness and moral purpose, it is to believe in the triumph of light over darkness, beauty over ugliness, order over chaos, life over death.

I know only too well that there is no certainty in this belief, and that when we do so believe we are committing ourselves to a life of inner tension, the tension of accepting the truths about nature that science, seemingly endlessly, unfolds before us and, simultaneously, accepting the truths, the intimations, that come from deep within us, from our innermost spiritual yearnings and hopes. There is risk in deciding to live in this tension, and to take this risk is an act of faith. No one ever said that faith is not a risk. But, also, no one ever said that we can have life without risk. Even more, John Keats, the English poet, long ago told us that one of the sources of human creativity lies in our ability to live with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, conflicting ideas. So the tension we people of faith live in is a creative tension. Let us celebrate it. And perhaps we can, then, in faith, boldly say that that is exactly how God intended it to be. For one of our firmest faith affirmations is that God, the creator, has created us in the image of God —- so that we are most ourselves and most imaging God when we, like God, are creative. Let us, then, not back away or be embarrassed by living in the tensions of faith. For there are great rewards in doing so, great joys, and, dare I say it, great epiphanies await us: for we will see the heavens open, and the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and we will hear a voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Praise God for this great sight.
Praise Christ.
Amen.

Delivered by Burton Cooper
St. Barnabas’, Norwich, VT

Jan. 2, 2011 - 2nd Sunday after Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6; 15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15; 19-23

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

As I was preparing my sermon this week, I found myself reflecting that this strikes me as a somewhat odd collection of lessons for the second Sunday after Christmas. The passage from the prophet Jeremiah seems almost properly celebratory — except that the Lord is promising these joyful things in the future: “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth… I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow…” The passage is filled with promises for the future, rather than with declarations of the good things God has already done in the Incarnation. This gives the passage an Advent-like flavor: as we listen, we are still waiting for these promises to be fulfilled, instead of celebrating their fulfillment in the birth of Jesus. Then there’s the Apostle Paul, who in his letter to the Christians at Ephesus, celebrates the way that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ … to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” Paul’s triumphal writing contrasts sharply with the not-yet feeling of the passage from Jeremiah. Paul makes our redemption sound self-evident, and though he talks about “the hope to which [God] has called you,” and the “riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,” for Paul it is clearly a realized hope, with all its glory and power manifested already.

And then, there’s the Gospel passage. In the larger cycle of the Church year, we’re still waiting for the wise men to arrive in Bethlehem — on the Feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6th — and yet, in this morning’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel, they have already been and gone. Further, there’s a big piece left out of this story — well, three verses; but such three verses! Apparently, the compilers of the lectionary wanted us to consider the Holy Family’s travels — into Egypt, out of Egypt, and then to Nazareth — and the way these peregrinations fulfilled various prophecies having to do with the Messiah. But the part of the story that got left out is the part where Herod realizes the wise men aren’t going to return and lead him to the Christ, so he sends his soldiers off to kill all the children two years old or younger, in hopes of destroying the king whose birth the wise men said the star foretold. This also fulfills a prophecy, Matthew is quick to point out — but it begs the larger question of why God would take steps to save his own Son, while letting all those other children die.

So, all in all, these are not terribly comfortable readings for Christmastide. But I think it’s important for us not to gloss over the unpleasant — even tragic — elements of the birth narratives, if for no other reason than that it gives us a glimpse into the enormity of God’s risk and God’s gift in choosing to be born human. It is a terrible paradox, then and now, that human life is both precious and cheap. God chose to be born at a time and in a place where a ruler could command mass executions on surmise alone; for those who were not Roman citizens, there was no due process, no recourse to the law; and there was no one to hold Herod to account, either. The Roman overlords didn’t care about the infant offspring of a subject people, although each of those children was precious and beloved by his family. It was a terrible time to be Jewish, and poor. Clearly, God didn’t select the historical epoch in which to become incarnate with the same criteria or priorities we might expect. Instead, God chose to be born in poverty, the son of a subject people, a member of an oppressed religious minority; by all measures of the society of that time, the infant Jesus was outcast and worthless.

It wasn’t an accident; a point is being made. In Christ, in the Incarnate Lord, human worth is being redefined. No matter how little Herod and the Roman authorities valued the lives of the murdered children, God was with them; God was one of them. This serves to remind us that in God’s eyes, all human beings are precious; we cannot judge by a person’s circumstances whether or not she or he is favored by God. Jesus of Nazareth was poor; he had none of the advantages of birth, wealth and power. And yet, he was God’s own beloved child.

The lesson I take from all this is that in Christ, God has shown us the depth of the divine love for all people. For us, this means that if we want to be faithful Christians, we must recognize that there are no people whom we may disregard. Every child, every person, is loved and valued by God; and it is our duty to love and value them for Christ’s sake. How we fulfill this goal in our lives is the biggest challenge of our faith journey, and each person’s attempt to be faithful in this way will look different.

Let me share with you a creedal statement, which comes from one of the Protestant churches in Indonesia. Some of you may have heard this before, but I think it bears repeating. While this creedal statement does not carry the same historical and theological weight as the Nicene Creed we will recite later in this service, and while I do not propose this as a substitute, I do believe that it expresses something valuable and powerful about our human interconnected-ness and God’s unconditional love for all of us — more clearly than I’ve said it.

“I believe in God, who is love and who has given the earth to all people. I believe in Jesus Christ, who came to heal us and free us from all forms of oppression. I believe in the Spirit of God, who works in and through all who are turned toward truth. I believe in the community of faith, which is called to be at the service of all people. I believe in God’s promise to destroy the power of sin in all people and establish the reign of justice and peace for all humankind.

I do not believe in the right of the strongest, nor the force of arms, nor the power of oppression.

I believe in human rights, in the solidarity of all people, in the power of non-violence.

I do not believe in racism, in the power that comes from wealth and privilege, or in any established order that enslaves.

I believe that all men and women are equally human and that order based on violence and injustice is not order.

I do not believe that we can ignore things which happen far away.

I believe that the whole world is my home and that the field I plough and the harvest I reap belong to every person.

I do not believe that I can fight oppression far away if I tolerate injustice here.

I believe that there is but one right everywhere and that I am not free if one person remains enslaved.

I do not believe that war and hunger are inevitable and peace unattainable.

I believe in the beauty of simplicity, in love with open hands, in peace on earth.

I do not believe that suffering need be in vain, that death is the end, that disfigurement of our world is what God intended. But I dare to believe always and in spite of everything, in God’s power to transform and transfigure, fulfilling the promise of a new heaven and a new earth where justice and peace will flourish.”

In the Name of God.
Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas, Norwich, Vt.

Dec. 24, 2010 - Christmas Eve, Year A-RCL

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

Christmas is a mystery and a wonder. At its deepest level, it is our celebration of a love so deep and fathomless that it led God to choose to become human, mortal, one of us, in order to call us into a deeper relationship. The same God who, out of nothingness and the Divine imagination, called into being the stars and galaxies and every living thing, chose to subject the Divine self to the risks, pain, heartbreak, and indignities of a human life, so that we might learn to love God more deeply in response. Each year, we celebrate this festival in many beloved and familiar ways: with Christmas carols, the scents of pine and balsam, candlelight, the decorated tree; with the wonderful, familiar story of the star, the angels and shepherds, and the baby in the manger; with cards and presents, with family, with feasting; with acts of generosity and kindness, with what we call “the spirit of the season” — the spirit which reminds us that Christmas touches us all on a more fundamental level than that of familial and cultural traditions. Each year, our Christmas celebration reminds us that we are in relationship with a God who loves and values us, and calls us to love and value others — and each year, it seems, that reminder is very, very necessary.

We are surrounded by evidence of the ways we have strayed from the ways God wishes us to take: there is violence and war, famine and homelessness, poverty and unemployment; the strong oppress the weak, the rich exploit the poor, and all of us (except the poorest of the poor) degrade and pollute the planet. We remain so far, yet, from the angel’s joyful message: “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!’”

In some ways, I think we are still looking for that child in the manger, still waiting for the promises of peace and justice to be fulfilled. Christ is born, we proclaim; the Savior has come — and yet, our world is still broken; our human experience encompasses, all too often, pain and grief, betrayal and injustice, loss and despair. The tension between the joyful message and the sometimes harsh reality can give us pause, and maybe help us to reflect on what the coming of Christ really meant, and means.

On some level, I think we all want someone — a leader — to arise and make things better; we want someone to mend what is broken, to recover what is lost, to restore what has been devalued, and to deliver on promises of peace and prosperity, comfort and joy. Much of the language and metaphor of Scripture would lead us to believe that person is Jesus the Messiah. As Isaiah says: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” But… WHEN?? This was the dilemma of the early church: that after his Resurrection, Jesus did not return immediately at the head of an army of the host of heaven to cast out the hated Roman overlords and establish the reign of God fixed in human history. Instead, as the church came to understand, the followers of Christ formed faith communities, which taught people to grow spiritually, and to transform their hearts, their relationships, and their lives. We can hear this understanding articulated in the portion of Paul’s letter to Titus that we read tonight: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.” As Christians, we are still the community that waits for some remarkable, mystical manifestation of the glory of God, through our Savior Jesus Christ. We are — all of us, the whole of humanity — saved; and by our understanding of that new relationship, we are trained — encouraged, urged — to live lives that reflect that understanding. If we wait for Christ’s return, we do so actively, continually pursuing our agenda of spiritual transformation by being (in Paul’s words) “zealous for good deeds.”

It seems, sometimes, a peculiar, backward way to save the world. Surely it would have been simpler for God to manifest directly, whip everyone into shape, set everything to rights and disappear back into the clouds leaving peace, harmony, and prosperity behind. Why send a baby — and not even a prince or aristocrat, laid out on silks and velvets, and surrounded by all the trappings of wealth and power, but instead, a fragile child of poverty born to homeless parents in a barn? It’s not the way any of us would have done it.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? God always seems to act in unexpected ways — because Love is a mystery, a wonder, and something that can never be coerced or forced, but must be allowed to flower and grow. If God had come in power, humans (being what we are) might have responded to that power, but the response wouldn’t have been — couldn’t have been — love. So instead, for Love, God made the Divine self vulnerable — utterly vulnerable — becoming human, mortal, fragile enough for us to love in return. It’s such an unthinkable, outrageous, risky, ridiculous course to pursue that only God could imagine it. None of us would have thought of it; none of the powerful leaders and charismatic visionaries we long for would have dared to take such a risk. But God did, because God loves us and longs for our love in return.

What I’m struggling to articulate is put into words in the texts of two Christmas hymns — not necessarily familiar ones, but ones with powerful, thought provoking texts. The first is a 17th century poem, written by Thomas Pestel, which relates the mystery of the incarnation; and the second is a modern poem by John L. Bell and Graham Maule of the Iona Community, which ponders some of the same theological questions I’ve reflected upon in my sermon. Allow me, in closing, to quote them for you.

From Thomas Pestel:

Behold the great Creator makes himself a house of clay,
A robe of human flesh he takes which he will wear for aye.
Hark, hark, the wise, eternal Word like a weak infant cries!
In form of servant is the Lord, and God in cradle lies.
This wonder struck the world amazed, it shook the starry frame;
Squadrons of spirits stood and gazed, then down in troops they came.
Glad shepherds ran to view this sight; a choir of angels sings;
And eastern sages with delight adore this King of kings.
Join then, all hearts that are not stone, and all our voices prove,
To celebrate this holy one, the God of peace and love.

And from Bell and Maule:

Who would think that what was needed to transform and save the earth
might not be a plan or army, proud in purpose, proved in worth?
Who would think, despite derision, that a child should lead the way?
God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas day.

Shepherds watch and wise men wonder, monarchs scorn and angels sing;
such a place as none would reckon hosts a holy helpless thing;
stable beasts and by-passed strangers watch a baby laid in hay:
God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas day.

Centuries of skill and science span the past from which we move,
yet experience questions whether, with such progress, we improve.
While the human lot we ponder, lest our hopes and humor fray,
God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas day.

In the Name of Christ, Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, VT

Nov. 28, 2010 - Advent 1, Year A-RCL

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

The three lessons appointed for today, the first Sunday in Advent, seem to me to capture much of the tension of the Advent season. The passage from the Hebrew Scriptures articulates a vision of hope and expectation. The selection from the Christian letters emphasizes the immanence of momentous events: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.” And the Gospel passage offers the warning that what is coming may not be what is expected. These themes of hope, expectation, immanence, and warning weave their way through our liturgical expressions of the Advent season, and serve to remind us that, as Christians, we await and prepare for more than just the annual commemoration of Christ’s birth; what we, as Christians await and prepare for is the fulfillment of God’s transformative power in our lives and our world.

Now, much of the imagery and popular understanding surrounding the coming of the Son of Man (often referred to as the Second Coming) is theologically dubious. Even though the passage from Matthew’s Gospel includes Jesus’ predictions that: “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left,” I’m not sold on the idea that the faithful will be magically “Raptured” away from this mortal coil, and the sinners will be left behind to deal with the dark and hostile reality of a world abandoned by God. For one thing, in this passage, Jesus doesn’t actually indicate whether or not there’s any connection at all between one’s faithfulness (or lack thereof) and whether one is taken or left; and there’s no indication of the relative merits of being taken or being left. Instead, it’s laid out as an example of an unexpected and unanticipated event. “For as the days of Noah…before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage…and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Life will go on as usual — until it changes. “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” God’s power is unpredictable; you cannot know ahead of time when or how it will be exercised. Obviously, no one can be awake all the time; but one can be prepared — or susceptible — to the in-breaking power of God the same way one can be attuned to particular sounds at night — a child’s cry, the sound of the door when a member of the household comes in late — even in one’s sleep.

God is constantly engaging us; the Second Coming may not be one event, at the end of time, but may instead be something that happens constantly, repeatedly; whenever one of God’s beloved children opens him- or herself up to God’s transforming power. In that case, we aren’t waiting for some cataclysmic event that may or may not occur in our lifetimes; we are instead, as individuals and as a community, called to be attuned and responsive to God’s movement in our lives and times. We are not the audience, waiting for the dramatic events to unfold upon the stage; we are more like the actors, awaiting in expectation the cue for us to go on and do our part.

It’s that kind of waiting — expectant, listening, alert, hope-filled waiting, rather than waiting in idleness, distraction, or despair — that the season of Advent celebrates. There are undeniable themes of warning, intimations of judgment, but I experience them as reminders that there are consequences, rather than as threats of retribution. All of our actions have consequences; we know this. If you bump the hot woodstove, your hand will be burned. Even our inaction has consequences; and there’s nothing particularly dire in that fact. There is a difference between even a strongly worded warning: “Be careful, it’s slippery; are you trying to break your neck?” and a threat: “If you aren’t careful, I’ll break your neck.” Advent is full of warnings, and yet, it is also filled with hope. Inviting God to break into our lives, permitting God to guide and shape our community, and offering our selves, our lives, and our energies to God’s unknowable will are huge, daunting risks. It’s so much easier to define a set of rules and follow them (or not), than it is to hold oneself open to the transforming, compassionate power of God in Christ. And yet, that is precisely what the season of Advent challenges us to do.

It struck me, this week, that in the Gospel account from Matthew, the warnings Jesus expresses are given to his disciples, privately, and not to the gathered multitude. In our modern, individualistically-focused culture, it’s all too easy to assume that the warnings about watchfulness and staying awake are for individuals, and that each person is responsible for her- or himself, alone. But if Jesus gave the warnings to the disciples privately, and not to the crowds, then perhaps he was entrusting them with the task of being watchful on the wider community’s behalf. If the Christian community is charged with being alert and watchful, responsive to God on the behalf of others, then what are the warnings we are called to convey? What are the signs and symptoms we are called to be watching for? If we, as the Christian community, are called to be open to the on-going in-breaking of God’s power in our community and our world, then what do we point toward? To what tasks and challenges should we direct our individual energies? How do we deepen our own connection to God, so that we can share, more effectively, God’s love with others?

There are many, many answers to those questions. There are a myriad of tasks and challenges to confront, a plethora of warning signs and symptoms; and we cannot possibly address them all. But we aren’t called to do everything; rather, we are challenged to discern what we are called to do. During this season of Advent, I invite (encourage, urge) all of us to begin to engage in this discernment. Read the book, Changing the Conversation, selected for our Advent study, and participate in the session. Think and pray about where your energies are directed, already, and envision ways that our parish can participate in the causes and projects that involve you. Imagine ministries our community can offer that would strengthen you and might also connect with your neighbors and friends. Help me to dream up themes or programs we can incorporate into our Fifth Sunday Community Breakfasts, that might resonate with and attract those beyond our parish family. Pray for guidance, and for the confidence to share what you discern with others. Advent is a season of waiting, but it can also be a season of hope, of inspiration, and even of action.

We live in a time of change. Our environment, our economy, our culture, our church — all the elements of our way of life and the systems that have supported it — are changing. We don’t know how things will be, once the changes are complete; and we can’t even predict how long this period of change will last, or how quickly it will commence. We may have the sense that the night is far gone, but I’m not sure we can say with certainty that the day is near. And yet, we have some very clear choices. We can wait, in a kind of passive, patient idleness, for things to resolve. We can use our energies to resist change, and cling to our familiar, unsustainable ways. Or we can offer ourselves as conduits to God’s transforming power, and with God’s help, put our energies to work, shaping the new things that are coming.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul exhorts the Christians at Rome to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light….put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” The ‘works of darkness’ to which Paul refers may be the inward, selfish voice that allows us to justify the status quo, and encourages us to embrace the Spirit-defeating idea that there’s nothing one person can do; and the ‘armor of light’ may be an image connected to the watchful, prepared, alert, active waiting to which Advent calls us. So, borrowing from Paul’s example, I exhort all of us to relinquish our familiar, too-comfortable, unsustainable ways, and, after strengthening ourselves with Christ’s compassion and the light of God’s imagination and vision, to offer ourselves, wholeheartedly, to the work of discernment and to whatever new actions, projects, or ministries our deliberations reveal.

In the name of Christ. AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, VT

Nov. 14, 2010 - Yearnings: a cry in the streets

Isaiah 65:17-25
Luke 21:5-19

“I am about to create new heavens and a new earth … says the Lord.”

These prophetic words, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” are old words, two thousand five hundred years old, to be exact. The prophet speaks them to a very unhappy people just returned to Jerusalem from their fifty-year exile in the land of Babylon, and finding their fields grown wild, their holy places desolated, their temple in ruins, their homes in rubble. This proud people, believing themselves God’s special children, the ones to whom God gave the land, the ones to whom alone God gave the holy law, the ones who once were conquerors themselves, from Joshua to the mighty David, have been in their turn conquered, first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians, and now, their former boundaries greatly reduced, they find themselves nothing more than a small, obscure province ruled over by the Persian empire. This politically and economically weak people, many of them in despair at the thought of the rebuilding job that lay ahead of them, now hear these wondrous words of the prophet, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth … says the Lord.” Is it any wonder that this people remembered these words, prayed for their fulfillment, wrote them down, preserved them for themselves, and ultimately, though unintentionally, (preserved them) for us? For is this not what we all yearn for? When we think of all our destructive conflicts and passions, all the blood that we spill, all the violence we unleash, all the intractable, irresolvable problems of our life together, do we not yearn for a fresh start, for a new heavens and a new earth where, as this morning’s scripture goes on to say, (where) we “shall not hurt or destroy.” These ancient Judeans will indeed rebuild their homes and their temple and their fields. Of course what they do not know is that two hundred years or so later their land will be overrun once again by foreign armies, this time by the Greeks; and in another two hundred years their land will be overrun yet again and their painstakingly rebuilt temple will be, yet again, destroyed, this time by Roman armies; and, worst of all, in less than another two hundred years, Rome will expel all Jews from the land that Rome calls Palestine, and spread those Jews across the middle east and Europe, to be, in good time, of course, persecuted and driven out. Can we not take a moment to weep for this ancient people who two thousand five hundred years ago heard their prophet say to them, “I am about to create a new heaven and a new earth, says the Lord.” How they must have yearned for God to fulfill these words.

This yearning for a new beginning —- which is really a yearning for the ending of all human pain and suffering, all injustices and evils, for an ending to all the moral ambiguities in life —- (this yearning) came to a head in the first century of what we call the Christian era amongst a small community of Jewish Christians. For this community experienced, in the life and words of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s messianic messenger, the very presence of whom signified for them the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, a new heaven coming to earth, a transformed earth, a heavenly earth. The death of Jesus meant, at least initially, only a small delay in this transformation. They believed that “the time is near,” to use the words from today’s gospel lesson. Until then, there is the task of mission, the spreading of the gospel word, the good news of redemption; and, as a token of the fruits to come, there is life now in the new community, life in the church, where the living Christ, who died for us, is present in spirit, a spirit of love and forgiveness, a spirit of compassion and understanding. But, ironically, can I say, “ironically,” there is another spirit in the early church; true, it is a subordinate spirit, and mainly it lies in the shadows, but nevertheless it is a spirit that lives alongside the spirit of compassion and understanding, and that is the spirit of wrathful violence. We are all too familiar with the appearance of this spirit in the book of Revelation where vast armies of darkness, assumedly God’s fallen creatures, clash and are destroyed without a tear being shed, but it is a spirit that is hinted at here and there even in the letters of Paul, and here we find it in today’s gospel reading where Luke has Jesus saying, “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place … Nations will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and .. famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents … from heaven.” How is it that these images of violence, of un-regrettable, eagerly anticipated violence, (how is it that they) have worked their way into, of all places, the gospel, the gospel, the good news that God is loving and merciful and understanding, and has suffered for us, and asks us, in turn, to be loving and merciful and understanding towards our neighbor, forgiving our neighbor not seven times but seventy times seven.

Perhaps, for an answer, we need look no further than into ourselves, deep into ourselves. For which one of us has not experienced feelings of violent rage rising up within us as we witness or even hear about some particularly outrageous brutal act such as the rape of an innocent child or when we learn that in East Europe alone, during the time of Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin, in the lands sandwiched in between Germany and Russia —- the three Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine —- (in those lands) fourteen million unarmed men, women and children were, as a matter of deliberate policy, killed by the Soviet or German armed forces. When we hear about, read about, see a film about such inhumanities —- we call them inhumanities although humans are the only ones that perpetrate such outrages —- do we not find ourselves like Luke and other biblical writers not only yearning for the time to be near when such horrors will come to an end but yearning also for the perpetrators of these dark deeds to be themselves tossed into outer darkness, to suffer for the evils they have done, and to be annihilated. And can we not sympathize with those early followers of Christ who, finding themselves weak and powerless before the forces of injustice in their own time, call upon the God of the gospel, the God who has created us and shown mercy to us, the God who is love, call upon this God to do the deed of destruction —- so that the God of Love becomes God the Destroyer.

Well, we can sympathize with those early Christians, just as we can sympathize with those writers of the Psalms who here and there call on God to exact vengeance on their enemies, just as we can sympathize with Christians throughout the ages, including our own age, who look with eager anticipation towards God’s coming with destructive, annihilating power, salvaging only the remnant, the true believers. We can sympathize but as we do so we should also be clear, at least to ourselves, that there is a crucial difference between thinking of God’s power as transformative and thinking of God’s power as destructive, between thinking of God’s power as inwardly healing, if only we open ourselves to it, and between thinking of God’s power as coercive, capable and willing to physically annihilate the enemy. We sometimes think that the question of faith is a question of whether we believe in God or not. That is certainly how the current crop of atheistic writers —- Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins —- (that is certainly how they) see it. They have endless fun mocking a god who time and again sends devastating punishment upon his own people as a correction to their unjust ways or as a means to fulfill some mysteriously unknown end, and they mercilessly mock a god who has to have his son crucified before he can forgive people their sins. But the real question is not whether we believe in God or not, but which God we believe in, that is, which God is God, and which God is a false god. Do we believe that at the base of things lies a creative power that works to heal and transform the darkness that appears in the world; or do we believe that at the base of things lies a creative power that ultimately will destroy all who have given themselves to violence and darkness; or do we believe, as perhaps the above mentioned trio of atheists believe, that at the base of things lies a power that simply spews out life, a power that is morally indifferent to whether that life is light or darkness, good or evil. Certainly there is power at the base of life, otherwise there would be nothing, and as we see, just by looking around us, just by looking out the window, we can see that there is something out there. We may ask why is there something and not nothing, that’s an age-old philosophical question, but there’s no denying that there is something. So what do we believe about the ground of that something, the power, the God, that lies at the base of that something, that life-filled something. What we believe on this score is a matter of decision, a decision only we can make. No one can make it for us. So which side do we decide to be on?

The church, despite all the confusion in the history of its thought, all its theological bickering and quarreling, all its inquisitions and divisions, has never succeeded in completely drowning out that biblical high-soaring note that the God who creates us, the God who is at the base of life, is a God of love, and that it is out of love that Christ, the expression of God’s spirit in our midst, dies for us, for us humans, not some of us but all of us. As for Christ’s death: we can more profoundly understand it as pointing to God’s suffering love for us than to some divine need to punish—- for how could a God who loves us not suffer from the hurt and murderous destruction we heap upon each other over and over again. Does not love at its deepest, most steadfast level become suffering love? To take the most ordinary and common of examples: do not loving parents suffer at the suffering of their children, do not they suffer when their children do evil to themselves, let alone to others? Is the cross not telling us, the cross that we process with, the cross that we hang over the altar, is that cross not telling us that God’s love is as a parent: deep, steadfast, suffering … and all for us.

Let us go back now to those images of violence, images that have gotten so mixed in with our apocalyptic hopes for God’s coming kingdom of peace and harmony. This morning’s opening prayer in our bulletin insert, which we call the collect, tells us that “all holy Scriptures (are) written for our learning,” and asks us to pray that we may hear them “in such wise,” that is, hear them in such a way as to strengthen our faith and our “hope of everlasting life.” So what is the way that we can hear these images of violence that strengthen our faith, and not hurt it or make us sound ridiculous in the eyes of non-believers and perhaps even to ourselves. Well, for starters, those images of violence help us understand something about ourselves, our all too willingness, though granted it is sometimes a necessity, (our all too willingness) to resort to violence when our well-being, let alone our survival is threatened, and then to project upon God whose well-being and survival can never be threatened, (to project upon God) our willingness, our necessity, to use violence. The Bible helps us proudly declare that we are created in the image of God. But we are all too inclined, as these wildly destructive images of the end time reveal, to turn that saying on its head and create God in our image. The philosopher Whitehead noted, almost a century ago, that our deepest idolatry is to fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler, to give to God attributes and inclinations that belong exclusively to Caesar. In God the Destroyer we have made God into the image of a Caesar. That is what we can learn negatively from this morning’s apocalyptic lesson, but there is much that we can learn positively.

In James Joyce’s great book, Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is asked, “What is God?” He answers, “(God is) a cry in the streets.” And that gives us the clue to how we should look at all these images of violence and evil armies destructively clashing in the night. They are “a cry in the streets,” a cry first of all from us, a cry against all our inhumanities, all the injustices of life; but also a cry for a more unambiguous state of being, a cry for a new heaven and a new earth —- where there is sheer harmony, universal peace, complete justice —- a cry rooted in a yearning for an ultimate good, a good that clearly transcends all the limitations and conditions of history, which is why we call it an ultimate good. This cry for the ultimate, is also the sense of the ultimate, is also the religious dimension of human existence. It is the dimension where we find God, so that finally we come to know that the cry for justice that issues from our mouth has its origins in the cry for justice that issues from the mouth of God.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, the biblical image of an end time can be destructive and even a source of evil when we take it literally or when we too closely identify its ultimate good with our particular culture’s historical norms and values. But such an image is creative and redemptive when seen as an ultimate norm judging all our historically relative achievements and leading us on to a greater and greater sense of justice, ever raising the norms of our life in community. This is the paradox of our faith in God and in our vision of the coming kingdom. For it is a faith that, contrary to expectations, returns us to the world, even when we feel hopeless about the state of the world or perhaps especially when we feel hopeless, it is a faith that returns us to the world with hope, with purpose, and with life so that we may live forward.
Praise God for this great mercy.
Praise Christ.
Amen.

Sermon preached by Burton Cooper
at St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church, Norwich, Vt.

Nov. 7, 2010 - Proper 27, Year C - RCL

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
2 Thessalonians 2:1- 5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

When, in the wake of the mid-term elections on Tuesday, I sat down to write my sermon, I found myself wondering what on earth I would find to say that wasn’t unutterably depressing. Regardless of one’s political opinions, this election season seemed more vituperative and negative than any I can remember. As a nation, we are beset with a multitude of problems — with very few (if any!) clear, unambiguous solutions. The economy is a mess — a complicated, intricate, arcane, and interconnected mess — and there is no consensus about how to fix it; about the only thing everyone can agree on is that the system doesn’t work — but the question of how to fix it generates diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive answers: cut taxes; raise taxes; cut programs like Social Security and Medicare; expand the social safety net; provide government incentives for growth and job creation; stop governmental spending and let the market regulate itself. I could go on, but you’ve all heard it before. And this is just one of the problems our nation faces — and none of the others have simple solutions, either.

For me, one of the most disheartening aspects of this election cycle has been the tone of the public discourse. To me, it seems as though many candidates ran on side issues, negative advertisements, and fear-mongering, instead of articulating carefully reasoned and compelling arguments for their positions, and, with their opponents, entering into rational, substantive, and courteous debates on the crucial issues of our time. I know that voting is important; I know that in order for a democratically elected government to be effective, the electorate needs to be attentive and involved. But when the campaign ads are negative and deceptive, when the media is more interested in sleaze than the issues, when sound-bytes replace substance, and the quantity of money spent seems to translate directly into the number of votes, it’s very hard for me to maintain any sense that the process is worth the effort. It’s hard not to be despairing; it’s also hard not to throw up my hands and say: “What’s the point? Why bother?” and retreat into some form of escapism.

With all of this weighing my heart down, this week, I picked up the Scripture insert and read the passage from the prophet Haggai. Now, the book of the prophet Haggai dates from what is called the post-exilic period (late in the 6th century BCE). Earlier in the century, the Jewish people had been defeated by the Babylonian Empire and driven into exile. But when Cyrus became king of Persia, he permitted and encouraged the Hebrew people to return to Jerusalem from their exile, and rebuild the Temple. Haggai, along with Zechariah, was instrumental in accomplishing this; he had a “pivotal role in inspiring the Jewish leadership and populace to complete reconstruction of the Temple,” which was — ritually, economically, administratively, and symbolically — the heart of the community. His exhortation to Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest — the chief political and religious leaders of the community — is powerful. They were surrounded by the ruined remnants of the Temple, which had to be painful reminders of defeat and subjugation; and yet, Haggai (speaking for God) tells them all to take courage, that God is with them, that new things are not only possible, but immanent.

That was a message I needed to hear, this week. Like Zerubbabel and Joshua, I may feel as though the former glory of our democratic process is in ruins and disarray — or as Haggai put it: “Is it not in your sight as nothing?” — and yet, this passage reminds me that hope is not lost, that God is still among us, that there are still things that can and must be done. “Yet now take courage…says the Lord; take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made… My spirit abides among you; do not fear. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts. … The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former…and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.”

The passage doesn’t say when these wonderful, earth-shaking events will take place; but it does promise transformation. And it offers a prescription: work, and do not fear. It also contains the promise — and the reminder — that we are not alone in our working. And somehow, I found this comforting. It isn’t the facile assurance that everything will work out for the best; but rather, it reminds me that things are still in flux, that the transformation is not complete; God is still shaking the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, and the nations. The situation may not be comfortable, but events are still unfolding, and there is still hope that new things and remarkable transformations are yet possible.

We are, I think, living in a time in history when a great deal is changing. The old familiar patterns are disappearing; the things we’ve “always done” don’t quite work the same way any more — in the church and in the culture. What will be isn’t yet clear to us, but the forms, patterns, and habits we thought were established and normal are rapidly turning into archaic has-beens. Transitional periods are difficult; in hindsight, the changes may seem obvious, even inevitable; but until the paradigm has actually completed its shift, it’s very difficult for people within the transition to see the endpoints clearly. I think it must have been like that for the Israelites who decided to rebuild the Temple. Haggai (and Zechariah, et al) had no idea (really) whether rebuilding the Temple would yield the results they wanted; but they stepped forward in faith, nonetheless, with the promise that God’s spirit was with them. I think this may be a good example for us — for our parish, as we continue to discern the ministry to which we are called; for our families, as we seek to order our households in a new, tougher economic reality; for our nation, as we try to contend with the myriad issues that confront us. None of us has all the answers; none of us is exempt from doing the work of reexamining our assumptions and reordering our priorities; and none of us is alone, or unsupported, in the process.

The passage from the prophet Haggai exhorts and reminds us to do the work; stay open to the spirit; have the faith (trust, hope — whatever it takes) to live through the paradigm shift on whose edge we’re poised. We can’t hope to answer every question or to come up with a perfect, logical explanation for everything that perplexes us. Unlike the Sadducees in the Gospel lesson, we need to eschew the temptation of reducing the big, mysterious questions that face us to ridiculous, contorted logical conundrums. There’s a lot of uncertainty — and there has to be. As much as we’d like to have a certain roadmap into the future, we need to be chary of anyone who offers us answers that are too pat, and too comfortable. As Haggai warns us, God will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land…and all the nations — none of which sounds like a comfortable, easy or smooth segue into whatever is coming next. I don’t believe that we can stop the coming changes; but I do believe that we can ride them out — and even help to shape the new things that are emerging, if we remain open to the Spirit’s leading. I doubt very much that we’ll be able to tell, beforehand, which strategies will succeed and which will fail; but we can be pretty sure that pretending that everything will continue in its old, familiar patterns, and resisting every conceivable innovation will turn out to be counterproductive.

Do the work, as Haggai advises, for the Lord is with us. God’s spirit abides among us; do not fear. And we mustn’t wait for answers, predictions, programs, and prescriptions, either from political leaders or from the institutional church; we must simply step forward in faith and start trying things, as the Spirit moves us — even if we aren’t sure they will work.

It is my prayer that we will all find comfort in the knowledge that God is with us; and that in that surety we will find the courage and confidence to open ourselves up to the Spirit’s leading, so that we may offer our energies to whatever work God calls us to do. In the name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Oct. 17, 2010 - Proper 24, Year C - RCL

Jeremiah 31:27-34
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8a

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about prayer, this week; in part because of this week’s Gospel lesson, but also because — in advance of our Blessing of the Animals service this week — I’ve been attempting to put into words a theological connection between the intuitive communication we can learn from our companion animals, and the kind of openness we need in order to cultivate a rich and sustaining life of prayer. At the later service, I’ll talk more about intuitive communication and our animals, but for the sermon at this service, I decided to concentrate on the lessons appointed for the day.

The parable of the unjust judge, a story found only in Luke’s gospel, is introduced as “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” Now, as a parable about prayer, the story causes some difficulties. First of all, since there’s no discussion of whether or not the widow’s case had any merit, the story can convey the impression that all one needs to do is to be persistent, and God (like the unjust judge) will give us what we ask for in order to stop our pestering. To counteract that impression (which I believe is a distraction and quite beside the point), it’s important to notice that both the unjust judge and Jesus use the word ‘justice’ when they talk about granting the petition. The unjust judge says: “…because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” Granting someone justice is not the same as giving someone whatever she asks for. It’s possible that in the case of the widow, ‘justice’ does indeed mean righting a wrong against her; but it could also refer to the act of making a decision, of coming to a determination in the case — even if the judgment turns out not to be exactly what the widow wants. When Jesus picks up on this theme, by saying: “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them,” which brings us to another of the difficulties this parable presents: the implication that, before we decide to pray unceasingly and not to lose heart, we had better be confident that we are the chosen ones, and our cause is just. I don’t know about you, but I frequently need to pray, not from a sense of confidence, but from a place of uncertainty, of questions and doubts; I bristle at the implication that certainty and confidence are prerequisites to valid prayer. Furthermore, I’ve found that when I’m extremely sure and confident, my prayer is more likely to fall into the category of explaining exactly what I want God to do for me, which tends to make it much more difficult to recognize God’s action and answer, when it doesn’t accord with the plan I’ve laid out, beforehand. This parable does tend to make it sound like prayer is a formula: ask persistently and — assuming one’s cause is just and one is among the chosen ones — God grants. But our experience is usually quite different. At those times when we pray for something we believe we want or need, and don’t get it, are we able to perceive God at work in that — or does it just feel like God isn’t listening? I remember once, many years ago, applying for a position as Rector’s Assistant in a prosperous parish. I prayed for that job; I thought it would be perfect for me. But I wasn’t hired. I was very disappointed, and I tried hard not to feel that God had abandoned me in my discernment process. Later, after I was called to a different position, and after I had a chance to talk with a colleague who had formerly been an assistant in that very parish, I was able to recognize that — far from abandoning me — the Holy Spirit had been quite actively rescuing me from a situation for which I was not ready.

It is important for us to remember that when we pray, we are intentionally inviting God to act in our lives; and, if we are honest with ourselves, we must recognize that in response to that invitation, God may urge us in directions we didn’t anticipate, or set before us challenges we didn’t expect (or desire) to confront. Prayer is part of a conversation — our part — and we can never control the Other’s response. What we can do — maybe even should do — is to say what we need to say, to ask for what we need or want (on our own behalf, or another’s) and then listen and wait, opening ourselves up to be able to perceive whatever response God makes.

Some prayer is simply a voicing of our hopes; when we pray for the healing of another, or for the vibrant life of our own parish family and its ministry, we are often expressing more hope than expectation. Paul’s exhortation to Timothy and his community is something we might do well to consider in this light. It’s a prayer, expressing the hope of what a Christian community — awakened by the power of God, strengthened by Christ’s compassion, and energized by the Spirit’s inspiration — can do in the world. While Paul writes: “I solemnly urge you,” he could just as well say, I pray that you will “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.” We are told: “Proclaim the message.” By word and example, make our faith visible to all those who surround us. “Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.” We are not to try to tailor our message to what we imagine will be acceptable in any current context; rather, we are to hold to our faith, to pray and listen for answers, to teach love and nonviolence even as the world seems to accept greater and greater degrees of violence against others. “Convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching,” because the wider culture doesn’t know the sacred story, they haven’t heard the Good News, and their perceptions of Christianity — and indeed of Islam and Judaism, as well — are shaped by the prominence of fundamentalist extremism. “For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.” Indeed, Paul could be speaking of our modern times, where spin and innuendo are more influential than content, context and fact; so we need to be persistent and patient, and committed to the message and ministry of our church — or as Paul puts it: “ Be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.” We cannot be intimidated by a hostile culture; we cannot let the Good News of God in Christ be silenced in us by fear. We are disciples, and we are called to do the work of evangelists — of those entrusted to bear good tidings to a troubled and war-torn world.

It is my prayer, this day and always, that the love of God will strengthen us, the compassion of Christ will move us, and the power of the Holy Spirit will inspire us to action.

In the Name of God, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Oct. 3, 2010 - Proper 22, Year C-RCL

Lamentations 1:1-6
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

As I wrestled with the three lessons appointed for this Sunday, I found myself struggling to find connections among them. In the passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, we have a very bleak passage from Lamentations, in which the prophet Jeremiah describes the terrible things that have happened to Jerusalem because “the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions…” It’s not until the Canticle appointed for this morning (which also comes from the book of Lamentations) that we have a word of hope: “…by God’s kindness, we are not destroyed; for God’s mercies are never-ending and are new every morning.” What we get from the two Lamentations passages is the sense that in times of suffering (even suffering that is understood to be a judgment), there is still hope if one maintains one’s faith. “[God is] good to those who wait with patience, to every soul that seeks you. It is good to wait, even in silence, for the salvation of the Lord.” This is, fundamentally, a message of hope — for us, today, as well as for the people Jeremiah addressed — but it isn’t quite what we want to hear. It seems to me that there is a good deal of despair, hopelessness, fear, and uncertainty in expressed in our lives and culture at this juncture in history; and while it may be true that “it is good to wait, even in silence, for the salvation of the Lord,” and that our faith in God calls us away from despair and toward hope, it also seems to be clear that the fact that simply having faith doesn’t give us quick or easy answers for the many, many troubling situations with which we find ourselves confronted. It may be good to wait, even in silence, for the Lord; but I’m pretty sure that there’s more we should be doing to respond to the love God showers upon us. In fact, the passage from Paul’s letter to Timothy may have something to offer for our contemplation.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul sends some much-needed encouragement to Timothy and his community. Things are not going the way the early Christian community expected. The early Christians expected Jesus to return in glory momentarily; and as he didn’t, and as the established order began to marshal its resources against what it saw as the Christian heresy, there was fertile ground for doubt. Paul writes: “…I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. Do not be ashamed, then of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God…” Do away with the notion that by embracing Christ you have secured worldly comfort and success for yourselves; banish the notion that faith in Christ will save you from suffering in this life. Do more than simply wait for Christ’s return, Paul advises, as he bids the early Christians to “join him in suffering for the gospel,” and urges them to place their trust in the promise of salvation, not in the lures of worldly comfort and ease. Despite worldly trials, despite persecution, suffering, and contempt, Christians should rely “…on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purposes and grace … [which has] now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

Paul is trying to help Timothy — and his community — understand something very important about life in Christ. Paul is trying to make a distinction between the worldly circumstances (often unpleasant) which surround Christians, and the spiritual and eternal gifts that belief in Christ convey. When we are baptized into Christ, we are not guaranteed a life of comfortable circumstances; we are not assured that everything we want will be provided and that no pain or loss will ever afflict us. Rather, when we are Baptized, we are promised that we will never have to face anything — not pain, not loss, not even overwhelming success — without God’s presence and support. Just as God is with Timothy’s community while they wait for Christ’s return in the midst of alarming circumstances like Paul’s imprisonment by the Roman authorities, God is also with us as we contend with global climate change, a struggling economy, seemingly endless war and violence, isolation and alienation. Our faith in Christ can never assure that we receive the “prize” of a comfortable and successful life; but it will sustain us through whatever circumstances with which we are required to contend.

With this as background, we come to the Gospel story appointed for this morning. For all that we cling rather tenaciously to the image of Jesus as gentle, kind, and loving there are certainly a lot of places in the Gospel accounts where he isn’t very pastoral. This morning’s Gospel is a case in point. The disciples come to Jesus and ask him to increase their faith. Surely it’s not such an unreasonable thing to ask. There are plenty of times when I’ve wished someone (like Jesus) would make it easier for me to understand and act on whatever God is calling me toward, when I’ve thought it would be nice to have a really healthy dose of the sort of faith that breeds certainty and conviction. Anyway, it’s the disciples — the disciples, and not just random extras from one of the crowd scenes — who ask Jesus to “Increase our faith.” And he responds with a put down. You can almost picture him rolling his eyes and saying, “Increase your faith? If you had even this much faith, as much as a mustard seed’s worth of faith, you could do spectacular, irrelevant miracles and everyone would be amazed. You could order this mulberry tree to uproot itself and plant itself in the sea, and it would obey you.” And then he goes off on a tangent and talks about servants and preparing meals and being unworthy because one only does one’s duty.

What, the disciples might ask themselves, does any of that have to do with increasing our faith? How does one get faith like a grain of mustard seed? And why does a servant doing his or her duty come into this at all?

It’s very easy — tempting, even — for us to think of faith as something, like a vitamin pill, that you could take more of to supplement some deficiency. Then, when we fail to take some risk, or accept some challenge God seems to be holding out to us, we can excuse ourselves by thinking: “If I had more faith, I could take that risk, or accept that challenge.” But that’s just an excuse; we have no reason to imagine that the people (like Jesus, or Paul, or Martin Luther King) who face difficult situations, or who hold to their principles despite danger and even death, actually have faith on a different order from our own. Faith isn’t something in our makeup — like a genetic predisposition toward longevity — that lets us respond to God, or not. Faith is the response. In the same way that no one can truly have courage unless they use it to overcome fear, we can only develop our faith by using it to overcome the doubts, the self-involvement, the apathy, or anything else that seeks to inhibit our response to God’s challenges.

When the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, they were thinking about faith as a kind of power, a very special sort of magic: the secret ingredient that lets one cast out demons, or command the lame to walk. They wanted more of this special power because it would increase their status; the greater the wonders they could work with their faith, the more respect and attention they would command, the more people they would impress — and convert. But for Jesus, that kind of wonder-working faith isn’t what’s important. What’s important is that one be faithful, that one performs the tasks one’s Master sets. This is radically different from the miracle-worker model of faith; and Jesus is also careful to make the point that faithfulness is not something that will be rewarded. “Does [the Master] thank the servant because he did what was commanded?” No, of course not. One isn’t rewarded for doing one’s duty: it is expected.

So in the model of faith Jesus presents, we don’t get to have faith — the miracle working kind — and do cool stuff with it; we’re expected to be faithful, to do what the Master commands in a very matter-of-fact way, because it is our duty, because the Master asks it of us — and we’d better not even to expect to be thanked for it, let alone rewarded with success or riches or power or any of the things miracle workers might reasonably be given.

I can certainly imagine the disciples having some difficulty with this. Remember, these are the same guys who had arguments about who was going to get to sit at Jesus’ right hand when he came into his glory. Jesus was so clearly remarkable, powerful: he healed the sick, made the lame walk, fed a multitude with five loaves and two fish. And the disciples wanted to be just like him; or at least, they wanted to be just like him before things got really rough. But instead, here Jesus turns around and says that faithfulness is servanthood, that working wonders is irrelevant, and that sort of power is illusory and useless. So what if you can command a tree to uproot itself and be planted in the sea? What difference does that make? What matters, Jesus says, is doing the work the Master commands, without expecting special treatment and favors, or even a thank you.

So for us, today, I think this parable challenges us to examine what, exactly, we’re expecting our faith to do for us. Are we thinking of faith as some kind of spiritual insurance, or a fast track to success and comfort? Are we hoping to work miracles — even little ones, like being able to find a parking space whenever we need one, or to elude speed traps? Is it a quid pro quo arrangement for us: “I’ll do the faith thing and God will look after me?” Servanthood — Jesus’ model — may not seem terribly attractive to us. Nonetheless, I think this Gospel passage does challenge us to approach faith — and faithfulness — as servanthood, as tasks to be done, instead of as something to attain, or an attitude to achieve.

I don’t think we’re ever done with faith. I don’t think we ever arrive at faith and then stay there; we have to keep working at it or it atrophies; we lose it and don’t even remember when we last had it. If we approach faith and faithfulness as tasks to be done, why then, we don’t fall into the trap of neglecting our faith: there’s always more to do; God’s work is never done.

This morning, my prayer for all of us is that Christ will indeed increase our faith — not as the disciples meant, but rather by helping us to become ever more aware of the love that flows to us from God, and by strengthening us to respond to the Divine love with hope, courage, compassion, and service.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner on at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Sept. 5, 2010 - Proper 18, Year C, RCL

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

The hard sayings of Jesus always pose a particular problem for us. A case in point is the passage from the fourteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, appointed for today. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” That’s bad enough, of course; we none of us want to be told that unless we hate — hate! — our nearest and dearest. And taking up one’s cross, while more metaphorical and hence easier to embrace, is nonetheless freighted with certain negative connotations. But the last verse of this passage is so difficult for us that usually we blip right over it. “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Think about that, for a minute. “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” That’s pretty uncompromising, and also, quite clear. Numerous commentators find ways around it by pointing out that Jesus often used hyperbole in his preaching and teaching, but many of those arguments leave me suspecting that the commentator is simply weaseling. A few Christians, through history, have taken this seriously, notably some of the Desert Fathers, anchorites, and St. Francis, but for the most part, Christianity has ignored this particular directive. But should we? If this isn’t simply a hyperbolic statement intended to make us recognize the importance of putting God first in our lives and priorities, then what does it mean?

As I grappled with this, I thought about Jesus. He never envisioned his mission as one of starting an institutional church. He was trying to teach — and model — a new way to live, a new kind of relationship to God, one not dependent upon rules, nor upon institutions and hierarchies to enforce them. He and his disciples were nomadic — travelling among the people to teach and heal, without visible means of support, dependent upon the generosity of strangers; he wasn’t establishing an institution, he was working to transform communities. Jesus’ radical Gospel message — the Good News — was that God loves us, with no exceptions; and that the only requisite part of a relationship with God is one’s willingness to engage with God. For many (especially the poor), the Temple, with its appointed sacrifices and Holiness Code, got in the way of people’s relationship with God. It was extraneous and unnecessary. The inspired insight Jesus taught was that God already loved us. The family of God stretches to include everyone: beyond the limiting boundaries of family and ethnicity, apart from the insulating qualities of possessions and power, we are all, unconditionally and equally, loved and included in the family of God.

So what happens if we look at the “hard” directives as speaking, not to a literal, individual interpretation, but to a metaphoric, collective one? It’s not that each of us is being called (literally) to hate our families and relatives, but rather that, collectively, we are being challenged to place the priorities of the community as a whole ahead of the more narrowly defined interests of family and kin. It’s not that each of us is being asked (individually) to sell our possessions before we become disciples, but rather that we are being challenged to relinquish individual ownership (possessions) in favor of holding assets in common within the community.

The seventeenth-century philosopher, John Locke, defined the rights of people as “life, health, liberty, and property.” This phrase was adapted, somewhat, by the American founding fathers to read: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with the accumulation of property (possessions) being understood as one of the primary ways to pursue happiness. While it may not sound terribly patriotic to say so, in the context of this passage from Luke, the phrase “life, liberty, and property” doesn’t express a terribly Christian perspective. I think that if Jesus were defining these rights, he would talk about life, liberty, and community — with the understanding that ‘liberty’ refers to an individual’s freedom to make choices for him or herself (as long as those choices don’t exploit others), and that ‘community’ is so broadly defined as to include everyone.

Our culture places enormous emphasis on the individual; but more and more I am coming to believe that the Gospel calls us to place our emphasis instead upon the collective. Perhaps the message Jesus’ statement about discipleship and possessions holds for us is a challenge to begin to think about ways we can redefine our relationship with our possessions so that they become assets for the welfare of the community as a whole. We’re so used to thinking within the structures of the system we inhabit that it is hard for us to imagine and envision a truly new way of ordering our common life; but we need to do that work — urgently and desperately — if we are to have any kind of sustainable future. I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about consensus-driven communities — small ones, like neighborhoods, perhaps, at first, where people cooperate to share resources, set collective priorities, and look after one another. It seems, perhaps, unrealistically idealistic — but I wonder: along with individualism, our culture places enormous emphasis on pragmatism, which may actually serve to curb the scope of our ability to respond to God’s limitless imagination. If we’re constantly critiquing the Spirit’s inspirations with questions like: “Is it possible? Is it practical?” then we run the risk of stifling the very innovations toward which God is urging us.

In today’s Epistle, Paul is essentially urging Philemon to respond differently to the situation regarding his slave, Onesimus. “Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love…” He is asking Philemon to set aside whatever punishment or harsh response the law and culture would support, and instead to “welcome him as you would welcome me.” And he ends by saying, “Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.” Within the context of the insight about community from the Gospel lesson, this letter seems to be about transforming the relationship and response, which would otherwise be dictated (or at least heavily influenced) by cultural expectations, into a uniquely Christian one. “You will do even more than I say,” Paul concludes, leaving room for the Spirit to move in Philemon, and allowing for whatever comes of Onesimus’ return to surpass Paul’s own limited imagination.

It wasn’t easy to find much to connect the rather foreboding passage from the prophet Jeremiah with anything in either the Epistle or the Gospel; but actually, the central image of Jeremiah’s prophecy — “[The potter] was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him…” — called my own experiences with clay and potter’s wheels to mind. The lump of clay has nearly unlimited potential; it can be shaped on the wheel into such a variety of vessels: cups, chalices, mugs, bowls, plates, pitchers, flagons, ewers, and so on. Also, when one is working the clay, it sometimes feels like it has a mind of its own, a shape it wants to become; sometimes, it gets out of hand, or out of balance, and there’s nothing to do but reshape and start over. But that’s no tragedy, because the clay is fluid; until the resulting vessel has been removed from the wheel, and dried and fired, it can be reshaped over and over. And there is no single, perfect shape, no definitive final product. So as a metaphor of the new community, the new sustainable world order, toward which God is urging and calling us, clay on a potter’s wheel is a good one. We are — collectively — clay; the size of the lump can stretch to include more; what we’ll become, under the Spirit’s influence and through our own ability to cooperate with God’s efforts to shape us, is unclear. But the wheel is turning, and if we open ourselves to entirely to God’s transforming forces, then there is no limit pragmatism can impose upon what we become.

This morning, I pray that we will allow God to shape us, teach us, guide and transform us, by the Divine Love and through the Spirit’s inspiration, into the community Christ’s compassion envisions. In the Name of God; AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.