Saint David's Blog

Yes, I am willing

16 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

Barbara Brecht, St. David’s vestry member and William Temple House board member preached this fine sermon on Epiphany VI, February 12. 

So, this could be part three of the homilies Sara has given the past two weeks.  Kind of like a chapter series.  So, when we ended last week, we were left with these questions:

What is our mission?  Jesus message is a message on a mission, a message of liberty and abundant life, good news of healing and hope.  How do we proclaim our message of liberty and abundant life?  For what good news are we willing to be all things to all people, to get up and serve when we’d rather be on the couch?  When are we willing to give our all, because we know God is working through us?

Well, No easy answers to any of those questions.  But wonderful questions to help stir our curiosity about the unseen, and sometimes unrecognized opportunities, that really do exist around us if we are willing to see.

Today’s Gospel is very familiar to us.  A leper is in need of healing and takes the risk of telling Jesus about it.  The leper then states “If you choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus response is pretty pure Jesus:  an immediate sense of compassion, a desire to help and capacity to answer the request in a positive manner on the spot.

As I sat with this passage, thinking about what it may be calling me to be or do now, I was strongly reminded of a past experience that has been very formative in my life.  And how it has contributed to my understanding about how, as a follower of Jesus, “mission” emerges or is discovered.

I dropped out of college after my second year and moved from the Midwest to Boulder, Co., one of the major destinations in the early 1970’s for young adults on their quest for what life was all about.  The allure of the Rockies was irresistible.  My dormant Christian faith became activated at that time and I found myself living with a group of women about the same age, some in college, some working, some pondering and all of us invested in following Jesus and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide and lead us.  We were very naïve, but also truly engaged.  Word was out that Christians lived in our  house and folks came to hang out, crash for several nights, use our phone for long distance calls, have a meal, etc.  It fit what we thought was our mission well.

Then, one day we had yet another knock at the door.  The woman standing there was very tall, very slender, with long black, unkempt hair and had a blanket wrapped around her.  Her name was Beverly.  She swayed back and forth and then stated, “I want to be baptized.  Will you help me?”   We were somewhat taken aback and I know I was a bit anxious with her presentation.  There was a moment of hesitation, but then we invited her in.  In a halting manner she began to tell her story.  She had suffered from mental illness for years and did not want to have to be hospitalized any more, if possible.  She had a working relationship with a psychiatrist, religiously took her medication and described what situations could lead to her having psychotic symptoms.  Beverly felt if she lived with people who would value her and help her if and when her psychotic symptoms emerged, she would be able to move toward longer term stability and healing.  Beverly also had become a Christian and, having always felt unclean and like an outcast, she longed to belong somewhere and wanted to be baptized.

One person in the house, who is still one of my heroes, immediately embraced her and said we could all probably figure out how this could work.  And it did over a three year period.

It was extremely complicated at times, fun at times, moving at times and frustrating at times.  Beverly did have several psychotic episodes which lasted about five days each time and required 7/24 care.  None of us had the training at the time for this sort of work, but we worked with her psychiatrist and were able to keep her safe in our community until the medication adjustments kicked in and she was able to function.

Beverly did get better over time.  She procured a job.  She was a very talented artist who later illustrated two children’s books which were published.  She became such a source of wisdom in the house and helped us all to see the world in some wider ways than most of us had experienced.  She truly wanted to follow Jesus and found some of the most creative and kind of quirky ways to allow his presence to be known.  It was a privilege to have lived with her.

She also allowed the community to discover how important connection was for so many disconnected folks.  We began to have more folks show up who needed a place to be seen, to connect and to be valued.  Soon we needed a larger house for people who were coming, and we found one.  We also were discovered by a whole group of older women (at least old to me at the time, in their fifties) who had long been marginalized due to mental health issues and some came to live in the community.  It was extraordinary to see what it meant to them to have a place to be, to be seen, to be valued, and to have their contributions recognized and honored. It was an amazing place to be.  And, although it has moved, it still is in existence as one of my heroes is still inviting folks who need a place to be to join this community.

Mission was discovered in that place.  Through impulse, prayer, taking risks, messing up, laughter, tears, Jesus healing presence was evident in this community.  Without focusing on it, we practiced courage, compassion, and connection.  And without being consciously intentional, we tried to live into our call to be all things to all people.  We had discovered a mission in response to the question, “I want to be baptized.  Will you help me?”

I look back at that time now with great gratitude.  I am currently reading a book wonderfully titled “The Gifts of Imperfection”.  I can relate.  It endorses that we are more able to live in a more wholehearted, congruent manner when we embrace our imperfections.  As we acknowledge our  imperfections and practice courage, compassion and connection, we are more able to be open to many possibilities in regard to mission.  Discovering mission is so much about the willingness to stay curious, engaged, and willing to consider possibilities with a bias toward taking action.

And there is action in our diocese which we celebrate today.  Our Bishop has declared today “William Temple House Day in the Diocese.”  I serve as a Board member and have seen the excellent services being provided through the House.  You have the brochure in your bulletins which gives information about the services offered.  I chose to become involved as William Temple House is one of the last, if not the last, agencies in town that offers free counseling to those in need.  Father Abbot, the founder of WTH, recognized the need for the working poor to have access to counseling services as they fell between the cracks of coverage:  too poor to be able to afford health insurance, and too high of income to be eligible for Medicaid.  Dr. Susan Bettis heads the counseling services and is recognized throughout the professional community as providing outstanding supervision and oversight to the interns who work there.  I so appreciate her dedication for over the past 15 years in making these services increasingly professional and useful to the community.

As you can see from the brochure, the House also provides food and clothing to our friends in the community as well as some financial aid for very specific needs.  WTH takes no government monies and is completely funded from donations as well as proceeds from the WTH Thrift Store.  And if you have never shopped there, consider it.  It will be worth your while.

You also see the many opportunities in which we can choose to participate in this mission by “paying it forward” as a volunteer.   And volunteers are always needed and greatly appreciated.  It is worth considering from a perspective of curiosity and a bias to act.

At St. David’s we also support WTH every week by giving the loose change that we receive in the offering plate to the House.  (Baggie)  It is a great idea to emulate some of our parishoners who frequently drop a baggie full of coins, like this, in the plate. We can all be grateful for the work of WTH.

As we continue to consider mission here at St. David’s, each of us can  enlarge our capacity to practice courage, compassion and connection.  Paul’s admonition in today’s reading encourages practice, practice, practice as we further develop skills in ministry.  Through the hot meals program, Rahab’s Sister, UpStart PDX, Monday night Food not bombs, our community partners, and hopefully on and on, mission can be seen, embraced and enlarged.  New opportunities may be seen through “Spirit Spotting”, a chance for all of us to intermittently meet together and consider and share where we think God’s spirit may specifically be moving in and through our congregation.

For example, This past week several of us noted an article in the editorial section of the Oregonian.  It discussed community partnerships between “JOIN”, an organization that assists homeless families in staying in a home once one is found, and religious congregations.  Through financial, social and other supports, this appears to be an opportunity for some congregations, perhaps ours?, to be part of a larger mission in supporting our community and saying “yes” to Jesus’ call to be attentive to those with little voice or resource.  It is just one such possibility.

What is our mission?  It is manifold.  It is not a demand to get the right mission, or the only mission or the most hip new mission or, etc.  It is the joy of open curiosity coupled with courage, compassion and connection that allow us to joyfully consider and act.

We are in a partnership with Jesus and hopefully we are developing his likely response to most requests:  Yes, I am willing.

Calling All Heroes

24 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by danfitzmaurice in Sermons (after a fashion)

Much thanks to Heather Lee for preaching the following sermon this past Sunday, January 15!

You talkin’ to me?

15 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

One of my favorite books is Tattoos on the Heart.  The author is Fr. Gregory Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles to provide a whole lot of life-giving opportunities to gang-involved youth. The book is inspiring and poignant, and so funny in parts it makes you laugh out loud. One of those parts—at least for me—is when Fr. Boyle—whom everyone calls “G”—meets with a young man for an initial intake conversation. It’s just the two of them in G’s simple office and he starts out by asking the young man:

“How old are you?”

The guy answers: “Me?”

“Well, yes, you,” answers G. There’s no one else there.

“Oh, I’m eighteen.”

Then G asks: “Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

This story of Fr. Boyle trying to start a conversation with this particular homeboy reminds me of today’s story of God trying to start a conversation with Samuel. The difference is that that Samuel knows someone is talking to him, but he doesn’t know who.

Both stories—the one from Tattoos on the Heart and the one from Samuel—capture a thread running through all of our lessons today: We don’t always understand the implications of being in relationship with God, a relationship spelled out so beautifully in Psalm 139. You trace my journeys and my resting places/and are acquainted with all my ways…You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Nathanael is a good example of someone who doesn’t entirely understand how God is speaking to him, or what it all means. Nathanael is completely captivated by Jesus’ having recognized him from an earlier encounter under a fig tree. There’s more too it than that, Jesus says.

And there’s a lot more I could say about Jesus and Nathanael from this morning’s gospel, but then I would just be avoiding the reading we just heard from the Letter to the Corinthians.

We enter a conversation already in progress, between the good people of Corinth and the Apostle Paul, in which Paul has some choice words for his readers:

The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body, he writes. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shun fornication! Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you….you are not your own.

These were not popular sentiments at the time of Paul’s writing, and I’m guessing they’re not popular sentiments now.

The city of Corinth was known as a licentious place, a bustling seaport full of people trading in money and power. In the city there was a temple dedicated to Asclepius, the ancient Greek God of healing and medicine. But the Corinthian version of this temple had a reputation for functioning more like the spa at an exclusive country club than a temple, and people who frequented it were used to having their own way in style and comfort, meeting their bodily needs at the expense of slaves and prostitutes.

Many of the Christians in Corinth understood that being Christian meant that they could continue to do whatever they pleased with their bodies, because all that mattered was their spirit. Their soul belonged to God, while their body belonged to them, to do with whatever they wished. Right? By no means! Our bodies are members of Christ, and are not our own. Our bodies belong to God because our whole self belongs to God. Remember the psalm? You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb

For centuries, we have assumed that basically our identity as sexual beings, with physical bodies, is something that we should split off, separate from our lives with God. What Paul says here is that as people who strive to live in union with God with our whole selves—which is the only way to be in union with God—our sexuality is as important as any other aspect of who we are, more important even. The moral teaching here is not about the evils of sex, but rather that our sexual ethics must reflect our relationship with God. The word translated in this passage as body is soma, which actually means the whole self, body and soul. The body is not something we have, but something we are. This is why the Body of Christ is such a rich and multilayered metaphor. When we separate body and soul, we often don’t care for our bodies in the same way as when we see ourselves as body and spirit, body and soul.

When Paul writes about the evils of fornication, and uses the example of union with a prostituted woman, he is not calling her evil, but rather saying that physical relationships that do not include a whole, spiritual union, take us away from relationship with God.

We were bought with a price, Paul says, and God dwells within us. God is present in all of our encounters, not just the ones that we might think are appropriately holy. In order to be the body of Christ, the church, we need to think of all of our relationships as spiritual union, and shun relationships to which we cannot bring our whole selves.

All of our relationships? Really?

I had an experience the other day, a minor thing that I hope helps to illustrate what I’m talking about. I was driving around on the West side where I always get lost, looking for an Office Depot. By the time I found it, I was tired and hungry and disappointed that they didn’t have everything I wanted. I was checking out, paying for the things I did find, and I was really not nice to the guy behind the counter. I know some priests who I just know are nice all the time and I really wish I were one of them.

Then suddenly, in the last 30 or 40 seconds of our transaction, by some miracle of God’s grace I saw myself from the perspective of the guy behind the counter, I thought a little bit about his job, and I thought: I can do better than this. I made eye contact, I smiled, I thanked him for his help, and I told him to have a great day. I’m not saying this to point out how great I am, but because later when I was reflecting on this passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, I kept thinking about that guy at Office Depot and how, as brief as it was, I had a relationship with him, and I needed to bring my whole self to that relationship. Not just my credit card and my crabbiness. When I was able to make that little shift, I could feel for a moment that the Holy Spirit was indeed dwelling within me, just like the Good Book says.

*

            Samuel said “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Sometimes I think we are more like the young man in Tattoos of the Heart who says “who, me?” We don’t think that we are candidates for God’s grace, for hope, for union with the Holy. But we are. We are the ones God speaks to. We are the ones God wants. Each one of us, with all of our whole selves.

Let there be light

08 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

God said, “Let there be light.” God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

This is the season for light.

I was at a diocesan committee meeting last Thursday at another Episcopal Church. Our group likes to think that we do some important work in the diocese, and we have been trying to create a better atmosphere in the room where we meet. So each month someone brings something nice to eat, and we take turns creating some intentional time for opening prayer. Thursday, I brought some candles, thinking that would make the space more conducive to our work. But I forgot the matches. I asked the person in the church office if she had any, and she said oh, no, you’re not allowed to light candles. No candles in the church? I checked in with the priest, who said oh, go ahead, of course you can light candles. Then he asked his parish secretary to call the diocesan insurance administrator. She did, and I learned something new: it’s okay to use candles for liturgical purposes, but not decorative purposes. So now you know.

What followed in our group was a lot of raucous conversation about what passes for liturgical versus decorative when it comes to candles. We concluded that any meal, anywhere, was a liturgical occasion, as was any kind of meeting that includes prayer, and some meetings that don’t include prayer. And so on.

This is the season for light.

At our 12^th night party we heard the Epiphany story of the wise men following the star, which miraculously stopped to shine its light over the town where the Christ child lay. Light led them to Light. As we prepared for the party I put out a call for Epiphany poems. What was amazing to me was how dark many of them were, poems about fear and angst and longing.

There’s W.H. Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio”:

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.

And T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”:

Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

This time of year is never easy to navigate, even for the three wise men. And even though the days are getting longer and Christmas is over and past, this is still a dark time of year.

This is the season for light.

There is perhaps no light brighter, no light more important, than the light I cannot help but imagine accompanied the Spirit descending like a dove at Jesus’ baptism. If light could talk, I think it would say something like “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Those words mark Jesus’ anointing: he is God’s beloved, God is well pleased with him, and he and God have work to do.

So at our baptism, the light of Christ, the light of God’s Spirit comes into our lives and hopefully we, too, hear the voice of the Holy One saying to each of us: You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased. And, with God, through the example of Jesus and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we, too, have work to do. In a dark world, we are to bear light and to be light.

What is this work, and how do we do it? How are we to be light? How are we to bear light? The work for which we are anointed is to continue the ministry of Jesus as proclaimers of good news, peacemakers, reconcilers, and healers, as people who break bread together and pray together. In a few minutes, we’ll renew our baptismal covenant, our condensed version of the playbook for being a Christian.

When we follow Jesus through the waters of Baptism, we promise to follow him in very specific ways which we reaffirm each time we renew our baptismal promises. This is how we live out our anointing to God’s mission, our belovedness.

Jesus doesn’t need to be baptized. He does it anyway. He does it in order to lead the way into and through the baptismal life, so that we, too, might see the heavens open, and know that we, too, are God’s beloved.

This is the season for Light.

There’s a beautiful Christmas collect which we didn’t pray this year because the Feast of the Holy Name fell on a Sunday, but it’s worth praying, and it goes like this:

Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives.

This new light is with us whether or not we are faithful at every moment, whether or not we feel enveloped by the darkness of fear or loneliness or cynicism, whether or not we feel God’s presence. We all know what it’s like not to feel God’s presence: when we yell at our kids or think bad thoughts about the person in line at the grocery store or otherwise fail to live up to God’s call to us as followers of Jesus. It makes no difference. We are God’s beloved. As a friend recently wrote to me: light is light.

God said, “Let there be light,” God separated the light from the darkness, and God saw that the light was good.

Jesus, occupy us

26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

Jesus, come among us and occupy us.

Every year on the Sunday before Christmas, we pray the same opening prayer: Purify our conscience, Almighty God, that your son Jesus, when he comes, will find in us a mansion prepared for himself. This past week I have found myself reflecting a lot on this prayer and I’ve been wondering what it really means to prepare a mansion for Jesus, a mansion in our hearts.

One of my favorite people around here has been heard to say “you know, people in this neighborhood, they might get uncomfortable hearing the word ‘Jesus’ over and over again. Don’t say ‘Jesus’ so much in your sermons.” But Jesus is God walking around as one of us! What’s not to like?

If Christmas isn’t about Jesus, what’s the big deal? Why do we do this to ourselves, the shopping, the decorating, the cleaning, the airports…I thought about roaming through the crowd with a microphone to ask some of you: what’s the big deal about Christmas? Why are you here? Why are you here? What does it mean to you, to come to this drafty old pile of mid-century modern brick on this cold night?

For me, Christmas is a big deal because it’s a celebration of the word made flesh. It is so outrageous, when we really think of it, that God became human and was born in a dark, smelly stable in a little nothing town in the middle of the desert.  I love it. The other thing is I love God’s outrageousness in sending Godself to become human in a family, a nuclear family of all things. Why didn’t God come to the synagogue when the wise teachers and leaders were gathered? Why wasn’t God born flesh in the middle of the Roman senate? Or at the very least, in the master bedroom of the rich landowner down the road? Jesus was born into a human family, that most fragile, easily broken unit of our society.

God chose to become human in an earthy, messy, unlikely, untidy place, as a reminder that that’s who we are.

Who we are—with all of our unique messiness—is where God wants to be. Who we are—with all of our messiness—is where God is.

Christmas is truly a Feast of the Incarnation. God’s fleshiness. Our Godliness. My favorite definition of incarnation comes from our friend saint Irenaeus:  God became human, that we might become divine.

Some people squirm when they hear this because they think that in order to become divine, we have to behave ourselves a lot better than we have been. But what if that’s not true? What if incarnation—God’s fleshiness—means that we get to encounter God right where we are, tonight, this weekend, next week, last week, last month? What if God’s longing is to find a home in us, exactly as we are? This is the good news of Christmas.

And this good news is for everyone. Think about the most un-divine, ungodly person you can think of. Think about your worst enemy, or the person you envy the most, or some crazy, violent, unkempt stranger that makes you want to cross to the other side of the street. These are the people the grown-up Jesus hung around with, God walking around in the world loving the unlovable, seeing God in the ungodly. The good news of Christmas is that God is born in them, too.

This is the big deal about Christmas: that the word becomes flesh. St. John the Evangelist put it this way: The word became flesh and dwelt among us. My favorite translation of that verse is The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.

What would Jesus find in our neighborhood? Or, if you’re not from around here, what would the Word made flesh find in your neighborhood? And if the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood, would we recognize it? Look around. Look for the most unlikely place in your city for God to be, the most unlikely person to be occupied by God, and think about that place as holy. Think about that person as the home of God’s word made flesh.

Every year at Christmas we sing “Joy to the World.” One of the lines hidden among all of the let heaven and nature sing verses is “Let every heart prepare him room.” Jesus wants to find room in every one of us, to dwell in us, occupy us, transform us, take back our hearts from all the distractions of our lives. If Jesus moved into the neighborhood, would he find empty space in your heart, longing to be filled? If Jesus moved into your neighborhood looking for someone to be born in, maybe someone a little bit untidy, messy, and unlikely, would he find room?

We have much to celebrate at Christmas. Even if your house is a mess or your life is a mess or you know you won’t get the gift you think you really want, or you can’t be with the one you love, there’s good news to be had. Good tidings of great joy. God is coming. God is here.

Jesus, occupy us, dwell in us, give us eyes to see the world as you see it, give us ears to hear the cry of the poor, give us courageous hearts longing to love as you love, Jesus, be born in us.

Nothing is impossible with God

18 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

The Rev. P. Joshua Griffin preached on Advent IV this morning.

In the name of God the Creator, Liberator, and Animator of the Universe.

In our reading from Second Samuel, King David finds it unfair that he is to live “in a house of cedar,” while “the ark of God stays in a tent.”  As King, David has achieved some sense of stability in his life, some semblance of control, a sense of power, and he feels that the Lord deserves the same manner of comfort.

But God replies: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and tabernacle.”

And here it is: the fundamental transcendence, motility, vitality, infinity, irreducibility of God—or the Holy, or the Divine, or Love.  Take your pick, none of these words can contain what they refer to.  A transcendent universal Love so radical, so mobile, cannot be reduced to words.

The great Anglican poet T.S. Eliot reminds us:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

And yet words are what we have, and stories are one way we communicate the Mystery.  This time of year we tell the story of infinity drawing near, of God coming to dwell in history:

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a tiny town in Galilee, a remote backwater called Nazareth, to a Jewish virgin named Mary, who was engaged to a tradesman, a common laborer, named Joseph.

Gabriel said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.  Do not fear, for you have found favor with God!  And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, Jesus, and he will be great, and holy, a servant of Love, ‘the Son of God.’”

But she was afraid, terrified, mystified, and stupefied.  “How can this be, for I am a virgin?”

The angel said to her “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you…. Oh, and by the way, your cranky old cousin, Elizabeth—the barren one—yeah, she’s pregnant too.”

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  Then the angel departed from her.

These two stories, of King David and of Mary, present us with a paradox.  Each reveals a fundamentally different image of God.  The first presents a transcendent, wandering God, who cannot be contained by structure or word.  In the second, it is announced that this same God will come to dwell in Mary’s womb, housed and held in human flesh.

And so we encounter a fundamental quality, not just of Christian life, but of all human experience. Theologians call this “the coincidence of opposites,” that place and moment when the transcendent collides with the imminent, the infinite with the finite.  Too often we whittle down this paradox, yet the spiritual invitation is not to resolve it, but to live within it, to hold it as Mary did.

As God-bearers, each one of us trembles with Mary, even as we say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  We live in service of an already/not-yet Kingdom, a paradox we feel at every level: in our hearts, in our families, in our parish, in our neighborhoods, in our Church, in our city, in our country, and in our world.

This Advent, as we struggle to make way for the coming of the Lord—the infant King who redeems all our earthly humanity, we might take comfort in the words of the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, written to a younger monk:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

The angel said to Mary, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”

The infinity of Love will be enfleshed in the womb of Mary, and will be born in a sordid encampment. Nothing will be impossible with God.

Mourning shall turn to joy, darkness to light, death shall give way to life.  All tears shall be wiped away. Nothing is impossible with God.

The lowly are lifted up and the powerful brought down from their thrones. Nothing is impossible with God.

The hungry shall be filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. Nothing is impossible with God.

Justice and peace shall encompass the earth.  Equilibrium shall be achieved.  Competition shall be set aside, cooperation shall be the norm. Nothing is impossible with God.

The infinite will collide with the finite, and the impossible shall be rendered possible.

As we labor for God’s Kingdom, as we labor with the earth, in our homes, and in our hearts, may we not fear what we do not understand.  May we continue to seek after that which we cannot express —the infinite, uncontainable, unpredictable Love of God.

Amen.

God’s Dream

11 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment

by Sara in Sermons (after a fashion)

Who does Isaiah think he is? Can you imagine walking through town or standing on a street corner saying “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me?” And yet, after all the doom and gloom we’ve been hearing from the prophets the past few weeks, all the doom and gloom that we have been hearing in our own world, we could use a little good news, and Isaiah has it in abundance. I hope that if we have good news to share about God’s promises, we will proclaim it.

If you’ve ever read my office door really thoroughly, past the New Yorker cartoons, you’ll remember that there’s something posted right on the window glass that comes from a friend’s blog post last year. It starts with someone asking him: “What do you understand to be God’s Dream?” He replied:  “Well, I don’t think it gets any better than this!” and proceeded to quote the first three verses of Isaiah 61, which we heard this morning.

Just to review, the prophet understands his mission to be

To bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;

To provide for those who mourn…
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

God’s dream, then, is a dream of reversal—reversal of our expectations, faint spirits (ours included) lifted up by praise, and the transformation of the world’s economy into God’s economy.

About five hundred years after these words were written, St. Luke attributes to Mary the remarkable song that has come down to us as the Magnificat. And in the Magnificat, Mary the mother of God’s promises says pretty much the same thing that Isaiah said centuries earlier.

God has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

The God whom Mary knows is the God who promises to turn the world’s economy into God’s economy. When I was in England I came across a small book called “Mary the Mother of Socialism.” It’s a collection of essays by a bunch of Anglo-Catholic Socialists—my very favorite kind of Anglo-Catholics, and my favorite kind of socialists—essays on the Magnificat as a manifesto from God about very real redistribution of wealth.

A friend recently said: “using words ‘redistribution of wealth’ together in a sermon can be a career-changing sermon.”  We are so afraid to talk about this stuff, and yet this is what Jesus talks about more than anything else! If it occasionally makes us squirm, it may be that we are, in today’s world, the mighty and the rich. But Jesus is not making this up. He gets it from Isaiah and from his own reading of his scriptures, of the world, and of God’s dream.

In the 4^th chapter of Luke, Jesus gets up and reads aloud in the synagogue—right there an act of audacious reversal—Jesus reads this passage from Isaiah 61 and says: This is what I’m about.  And people responded to him then in the same way they probably responded to Isaiah and would respond to you or me: who the heck does he think he is? Getting up here and saying God has anointed him to bring good news to the poor?

Do you have a favorite passage of scripture that you can point to and say: That’s what I’m talking about?

What does God’s turning the world upside down look like? The deaf hear, the blind receive their sight, the hungry become full. Last week God surprised and overwhelmed us through the Voices Unlimited Choir, a choir made up mostly of people with autism and other disabilities, singing carols and reading lessons with a passion and a clarity that humbled our hearts and made our hearts sing.

Today’s words from Isaiah and from the Song of Mary are our proof-text for what God promises to do in the world, but so is our own life’s experience. We have to look for it, and proclaim it. Last week’s lessons and Carols was one of those experiences. The image of a recently homeless family of five children, whose mother wants only winter coats and a Fred Meyer gift card, receiving the extravagance of response through our giving tree is one of those experiences. The unlikely people who gather in this building week in and week out is a proclamation of God’s reign.

What is your life experience of God turning the world upside down? As we prepare for the great Good News of the angel’s message to Mary, which we’ll hear next Sunday, and of the angels’ announcement to the shepherds, which we’ll hear the week after that, think about what your great good news is. God is coming, God is here.

God’s dream starts with the words of Isaiah, the words of Luke, the words of all the prophets before and since, and with story after story about God’s confounding our expectations and turning the world upside down. The dream continues with us, with our stories and our words. In this season of Good News, can we have the same audacity of Isaiah? Let’s try.

Repeat after me:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

Because the Lord has anointed me.

He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

To bind up the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives,

And release to the prisoners.

You get the idea. God’s dream is our dream, God’s story is our story, God’s words are our words. God is coming, God is here.