New Blog! The Hopeful Priest

This is my last post on this Skeptical Priest blog. I've decided to move to a new blog, "The Hopeful Priest." Go to http://hopefulpriest.blogspot.com for my new blog.

It's true that there's a side of me that's skeptical. I am quickly bored by easy answers and false piety; a lot of theology seems self-serving to me. I love conversations with people who have honest, challenging questions about faith; I believe in "Living the Questions" and in the truth of existential authenticity.

But I'm also a priest and it's not because I'm skeptical. It's my faith (strengthened by questions) that led me to dedicate my life to God; it's my faith that has carried me through pain and into joy. My faith is informed by skepticism, but it leads me to hope -- and hope is in short supply these days.

So I'm changing my blog to "The Hopeful Priest." My hope is that we'll continue to support one another with honest conversations and deep questions, and, in the end, we'll all find new reasons for hope.

Cast All Your Votes for Dancing

I used this poem by Hafiz in my Ash Wednesday sermon. Several people asked me to post it. Here it is. In a hilarious coincidence, just as I completed the Eucharistic Prayer and was performing the Elevation -- the climax of the Eucharistic Prayer -- someone's cell phone went off -- with a Russian dancing song!

Cast All Your Votes For Dancing

I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.
I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.
But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.
You can stay that way
And even bloom!
Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter.
Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days
[Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.]
You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.
Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!
O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter
And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.
Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!
- Hafiz

note: I left out the part about the farting camel in my sermon -- too distracting!

Across the Universe

The Beatles recorded “Across the Universe” in 1968 as a tribute to their experience with Transcendental Meditation and its founder, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The song beautifully captures John Lennon's cosmic dream of “words, flying out like endless rain into a paper cup” and slipping away “across the universe...”

The song’s refrain is a phrase that Lennon learned from devotees of the Maharishi, who would greet one another with, “Jai guru dev” (literally, “hail to the divine guru”). This phrase has been interpreted as a recognition of the Maharishi’s teacher, Guru Dev; but it is more likely a general phrase of devotion to the "Divine Teacher” that lives within each of us and spans the cosmos. In the song, the phrase is completed by “Om”, the most sacred word in the sacred vocabulary of Sanskrit, the very sound of the universe’s vibration, and the root of words like “omniscient” and “omnipresent”.

The song was recorded on February 4, 1968. On the 40^th anniversary of the recording of that song, NASA turned Lennon’s dreamy notion into a reality, as it beamed the song literally across the universe – the first time a song has been transmitted into deep space. For the first time, the “vibration” of the universe was literally slung back into the heart of the universe, with words of gratitude and praise.

His work on earth completed, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died the very next day: February 5, 2008.

Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

As the song’s final lyric hurtles across the universe at the speed of light, headed toward that event horizon which shines “like a million suns”, perhaps the spirit of the Maharishi follows close behind.

“Maybe Now”... A New Year's Poem

Maybe now
on top of Hood Mountain.
Maybe now
when I can hear the sound of it all.
Yes, maybe now
in the silence of everything.
I will hear what it is that I want.

Or what he wants, maybe
or what we’ll do.

At the party, grim with resolutions,
I am followed into the kitchen:
“How did Jesus manage his time?” one asks,
looking as if I should know.

We waste our breath, guessing
how time was then pressing on his mind.
Then, in a second, comes his kitchen confession:

“I have so much stuff.
It’s piled in boxes;
I don’t even know why.”

Follow me to Hood Mountain
He would say;
I should say.
Maybe now.

Getting Beyond "Blue Christmas"

Christmas Eve, 2007

Good evening, and Merry Christmas.

I’m wondering if some of you heard the radio story this morning about the churches that are holding what are called “Blue Christmas” worship services. These are special worship services for those of us who are not feeling terribly “holly jolly” this Christmas.

According to the news report, the hymns at this service are sung in a minor key, and people are given an opportunity to reflect on the sorrow that they often feel during this holiday time.

If this sounds kind of weird to you, I would say “count your blessings” – because it has recently become very clear to me just how difficult this season can be for so many people.

Just two nights ago we opened our parish hall to the community for an evening of prayer and meditation. We got out our labyrinth and laid it out, and we circled it with candles and turned down the lights; we had some very talented musicians playing softly in the background, and we waited as people we didn’t know wandered in, and stepped onto the labyrinth and into prayer.

Suzanne Kurtz and I sat off to the side, and made ourselves available to people who wanted to talk and pray with us. I was surprised by the number of people who came by, and both Suzanne and I were especially moved by the

stories we heard – of loneliness, of broken families, of wistful memories and that special kind of sadness that comes around this time of year. By the end of the evening we had proof of Tolstoy’s saying, that “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Well, don’t worry, this isn’t a “Blue Christmas” service; but I wanted to start out by acknowledging this fact – that not everyone is feeling so jolly these days – and if you are one of those folks, you are not alone, no matter how alone you might feel. It is normal this time of year to think about the loved ones who are no longer with us, or who no longer speak to us; many of us remember about Christmases past when the family was more intact, when there seemed to be more magic in the air, and less worry.

If you are missing your family tonight, let this be your family. You are at home here. You are loved.

A few years ago, when the royal family was getting rather more publicity than it cared for, Queen Elizabeth tried to put a better face on it all by saying, “Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.”

What is true for the royal family is true, I’m afraid, for all of us. We all have our share of strained relations. No amount of money will solve the problem of the unloving father, or the alcoholic nephew, or the mentally-ill step-son. No fortune, no matter how vast, can salve the wound of loneliness; no gold can erase grief, no fur coat can warm a broken heart.

Which is why Christmas is such a poignant time for us – because once the gifts are unwrapped, and the tinsel and glitter are swept away, our lives remain, sometimes just as broken as before, and we wonder, “What was that all about?”

I grew up in a fairly large family; my mother had five children in six ½ years – and because we were so close in age our family system bore a greater similarity to Lord of the Flies than to the Partridge Family. We competed against one another so viciously it is a wonder we were not all completely destroyed in the process.

There is a reason why I live in California, while my family is in Minnesota. As George Burns said, “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family ... in another city.”

But then there was Christmas; this amazing ritual that required us to actually give to one another, rather than take; this amazing magic was in the air, which actually succeeded in getting us to focus beyond ourselves to something greater.

We always went to the midnight mass when we were kids, and there was always that moment in the mass when all of the bitter disputes and petty rivalries melted away, and we found ourselves kneeling, with the shepherds and the wise men, in front of the baby Jesus. And it no longer mattered that just an hour before my sister had called me a poopy head, or that my brother had threatened to flush my favorite teddy bear down the toilet. There we were, finally together, joined in devotion.

Which, I think, is the key to the whole “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men” theme of this season.

It’s not that some fairy godmother comes along and sprays magic dust on everyone and suddenly we all feel warm and fuzzy. The miracle of Christmas is not even that a baby was born to a virgin.

No, the miracle of Christmas is that, finally, we find an object worthy of our devotion.

This is the eternal truth that the prophets and the saints have been trying to get us to understand ever since the word “idolatry” was invented: there is only one object that is truly worthy of your devotion.

What are you worshipping in your life? I’m not asking about whether you go to church or even what religion you belong to. I’m asking what are you worshipping – is it your career? Your family? Your possessions? Your false sense of security? Because as Paul Tillich said, your god is defined by what has ultimate value for you.

In other words, whatever you are devoted to becomes your god; and the vast majority of us – Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims alike –we are all chasing after mere idols; we are running after mirages in the desert of your own minds. But when we find the true God – and again, you don’t have to be a Christian to find it – then finally there is hope for the world; because finally we will have found a God that pulls us out of prison of our own selfhood; we will have found a God that frees us from the madness of our own ego and the false assurance of our individuality and the insane denial of our mortality. When we find that one true God, we will finally, joyfully, find the courage to cast aside our petty differences, and find true brotherhood and sisterhood; true unity and peace and love.

I suspect that most of us grew up as I did, in a world that expects us to be primarily devoted to ourselves. And in a world in which every person is devoted first of all to him or her self, we have no option but to pit ourselves against everyone else; and the result is that we go through life asking, “What about me?” We see other people as competitors rather than as friends; we are easily threatened and more easily hurt.

When we are devoted primarily to ourselves, we worship in the temple of our own selfhood; and we decorate that temple with all the more-than-willing smaller gods of our self-perpetuation and comfort. We become devoted to acquisition and to consumption; we surround ourselves with the trinkets and baubles of a baroque palace of mirrors. In the process, we become like Snow White’s wicked step-mother, who owned a mirror that told her precisely what her frightened and selfish soul needed to hear.

We are all caught in this carnival house of mirrors; and the only way out is to find an object of devotion that is truly worthy of our worship. We do this through this wonderful gift of prayer.

It used to be said that the family that prays together, stays together. The problem with that saying is that not only is it a cliche, it is also not always true.

Unfortunately, prayer is not a cure for the human condition; it is, for example, still possible for a man to be in church with his family one day, fervently praying to be freed from his desire to drink himself into oblivion, and the next day find himself waking up in the local drunk tank with no memory of the previous 18 hours. As unfair as this is, prayer does not instantly cure every one of us of our every addiction, attachment, or stupid idea.

But on the other hand, as the testimony of millions of alcoholics teaches us, it is also nearly impossible to kick the bottle or any other addiction without some form of prayer. Whether it is putting yourself in the hands of a higher power or praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer – when directed at an object that is truly worthy of our devotion – is the vehicle by which we gain our freedom from the little gods that have laid claim to our souls.

Curtis Almquist, a monk who lives in Boston, asks us to consider the gods that we are worshipping through our compulsive shopping behavior. He reminds us that the promises made to us by the wizards of Wall Street rarely have anything to do with the actual things they are selling. When we respond to an ad for clothing or perfume or a beverage or a pastry, it is rarely the thing itself that we are responding to; more often it is the promise of something more. "What is really being marketed," he asks. Is it not “our need to belong, our need for self-esteem and recognition, our need to be attractive and desired, our need to appear successful and valuable. Our thirst for the real thing, our desire to stay young and even ... our longing for immortality."

Which is why we find, this night, finally, a glimpse of that one true God, in the form of the Christ child; finally, here we find a God of humility and absolute love, a God who comes into the world not to seize power for himself, but to give away all power in a last, desperate attempt to teach us, finally, how to love.

If it is true, as Carl Sandburg said, that “A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on,” then the baby Jesus is God’s opinion that the world is worth saving.

The Christmas miracle is here, in this brief, shining moment – a moment that can be so piercing that it lasts an eternity – because finally, as we kneel down with the shepherds and the angels, we are released from the petty tyranny of our own false gods, and discover, instead, the true meaning of Christmas.

“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.”

May you find that Holy Child, born within you this blessed night.

Amen.

Our Tradition of Innovation

At the risk of declaring the obvious, the tricky thing about being an Episcopalian in the 21^st Century is finding the right balance between innovation and tradition. When do we decide to embrace change, and when do we proudly preserve our ancient heritage?

Everyone has their unique answer to this question. No matter what balance we strike, some will find it too innovative, while others will complain that it is too conservative. We are all, it seems, at different levels of discomfort with whatever balance we strike.

Meanwhile, our culture is changing much faster than our church traditions can keep up. That’s fine on one level – we find a sacred comfort in the fact that our ancient traditions are so decidedly out of tune with our constantly changing, rarely improving culture.

But there is a cost to that as well, as fewer people speak the “language” of our ancient traditions. As time moves on, we become increasingly like the Russian-speaking Orthodox church, or the Latin-speaking Catholics, or the Amish. When we associate the sacred with that which is simply old, we become increasingly incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

We forget that once, the Amish drove buggies because everyone drove buggies -- there was nothing odd or particularly sacred about that way of life. What was special about being Amish then? We have become so focused on their archaisms that we forget the original point of being Amish, which had nothing to do with driving buggies and refusing to dress in modern clothes. (The original Amish split from the Mennonites because the Mennonites were not shunning one another strictly enough.)

So it goes with every church, including our own. The original idea of being an Anglican had nothing to do with worshiping God in the language of Queen Elizabeth. It had to do with worshiping God in English – the contemporary language of the people. It had to do with rejecting something that was considered ancient and thus sacred – Latin – for the sake of communicating more effectively with ordinary people.

When our church met in Convention in 1789, it faced the same problem: whether to change with the times, or hang on to ancient practices. They found their answer in the preface to the original English Prayer Book: “The particular Forms of Divine Worship... being things in their own nature indifferent, and alterable..., it is but reasonable that ..., according to the various exigency of times and occasions, such changes and alterations should be made therein....”

This is a tradition of innovation: a tradition of thoughtfully and prayerfully changing “according to the various exigency of times and occasions.” How have we preserved this tradition of innovation? As attendance among our own teenagers and young families proves, not so well. Thus we have CenterPoint: our attempt at recovering this lost tradition – a tradition of innovation.

I am enormously proud that we have committed ourselves to this project. Very few churches are making this effort. And what is especially remarkable is that we are doing so without sacrificing our other sacred ministries: our 8:00 am service is as close to the 1928 prayer book as we can get. Our 9:15 service continues to blend the traditional with the contemporary, and our 11:15 service beautifully preserves our classical traditions.

As our forefathers did before us, so shall we do: experiment in the difficult medium of innovation, for the sake of communicating with the rest of the world, especially our children and grandchildren.

I give thanks to God that this parish continues to enthusiastically support this ministry. More importantly, future generations of Christians will thank us.

At the Funeral of an 18 year-old

Good afternoon.

My name is Fr. Matt Lawrence; I’m the Rector of this church and on behalf of Anne and Scott and the rest of the Ferguson family, I want to sincerely thank you for being here today.

We are gathered here to pay our respects and to say goodbye to Peter Joseph William Ferguson, whose death we do not, and can not, begin to understand.

I did not know Peter; but my son, Tom, was a classmate of his at Maria Carillo High School. They were the same age; they had some friends in common. I spoke with my son about Peter yesterday; it hit him pretty hard, especially as the news of Peter’s death came on the anniversary of another Maria Carillo tragedy that is close to many of our hearts, the death of Jonathan Field one year ago yesterday.

My son and Peter shared a profound grief over the death of Jonathan; and both of them found ways to honor their friend. My son wrote a feature story about Jonathan for the school newspaper; and I am told that it was Peter who, a year ago, carved the giant tribute to Jon on the hillside overlooking Maria Carillo.

It seems like a rather bizarre set of coincidences, and worth pointing out for the strange wonder of it, that John’s picture commemorating the one year anniversary of his death appeared yesterday on the same page as Peter’s death announcement. When I pointed this out to Anne and Scott yesterday, Anne said, “This is God here! This is God!”

That the priest who happens to have been assigned Peter’s funeral also happens to have a connection to both of these young men through his own 18 year old son is also a rather strange coincidence.

Some of us interpret weird things like that as God’s little way of saying “Hello – I’m still here.” It’s like God waving from a distance. I often see things like this as proof that we are all connected, in an invisible web of love and relationship that is much bigger than we can know. It is proof to me of a divine energy that flows among us – this is what Christians call the Holy Spirit. It keeps calling us together, keeps reminding us to stay close, it keeps drawing us more deeply into relationship.

We are all connected by this web of love; and it stays strong even in the face of the greatest of tragedies, like this one, the sudden and untimely death of an 18 year-old young man who was just beginning to find his life. In fact, this web of love doesn’t just stay strong in the face of tragedy; we have all seen it grow ever stronger in the face of tragedy – again and again, during times of crisis, we feel this deep force within us that wells up and says, “Don’t do this alone; don’t hide in the corner; seek out your loved ones; bring your community together; hold on to your faith; believe in the goodness of people and in the importance of family and community.”

We saw this on 9/11; and we see the same thing today; we, who have come together; we, who today embrace one another despite whatever petty differences may have been there in the past – because we see with such clarity at times like this what is really important: that we support one another. We are all in this together.

We are all in this together; connected by this web of love, which Jesus refers to as “the vine”. And so in the midst of unspeakable tragedy we are reminded, in terms that we cannot ignore, that we are not alone.

This is especially important to remember when we are in the midst of grief. Because people who try to grieve on their own can grieve for a lifetime and never move beyond their grief; they can stay stuck on their grief until it consumes them, at the end of their days they find themselves embittered and broken and much smaller than they were before.

But those of us who learn how to grieve together – how to come together as a family and as a community – we learn that our grief never has the last word. When we come together in our grief, as we are doing right now, we become bigger than we were before the tragedy, we become stronger, and we grow into more loving, better people as a result.

In Christian terms, this is the work of the Holy Spirit.

This is why we are here – to support one another; especially to support Anne and Scott and Ian and Bobby and Beth. I know it didn’t begin here – I have heard about how many of you have been coming forward and supporting this family since the moment you heard about the tragedy; and of course it won’t end here either. The Fergusons are going to need your support and your love for some time. Let them lean on you. Let them fall apart on you. Let them talk; let them call you in the middle of the night. Let them weep and laugh inappropriately and weep some more, for as long as it takes, to turn this bitter, bitter pill into something that tastes like God.

This is what Jesus was getting at in the gospel reading today, when he says, “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” On one level, this is a message from Jesus himself, telling us not to worry, that Peter has found his home with God. But on another level, it is also about how Jesus is always drawing our attention to this process of coming together. Whenever we come together in love, something bigger than us is leading us there. Something bigger than the sum of our parts is feeding us -- “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry,” Jesus says; something bigger and more mysterious than anything we can imagine is calling us here.

We will never be able to understand Peter’s death. His death is not something that will ever fully make sense. But one thing we can say for sure – it has brought us here, to this sacred place and time; and now that we are here, we are presented with a choice: Do we follow that invitation to divine love, or do we turn away, in our own private grief and sorrow, rejecting the love that is offered, and rejecting God’s offer for healing and eventually, one day we pray, for joy?

In this church we practice the ancient tradition of Holy Communion, which is our way of recognizing and committing ourselves to this mysterious, divine force that calls us together; this Holy Spirit. As we kneel together at that altar we aren’t just enacting some empty symbolic ceremony; we are literally participating in this Divine Union – Comm-union – that unites us all, one to the other, the living to the dead, the human to the divine. In this sacred participation we tap into the eternal force that connects us all and has, by some strange process we can never understand, brought us here.

In this church, we invite all persons who seek to be in communion with this Holy Spirit to join us in this holy feast. We make this invitation, secure in the knowledge that Peter is already there; that he is waving us forward; that he is already participating in this relationship of grace and peace.

Peter knows fully, now, what we can only glimpse in our imagination: the perfection of all knowledge; the summation of all truth, contained in this simple little word, Love.

It is only love that gives any meaning to this strange life, this veil of tears, this darkened mirror. It is love that gives us the courage to stand up and be counted – as people who in the face of adversity will choose life over death, hope over despair, and friendship over estrangement. We are all in this together; and together, nothing can defeat us; nothing can separate us from God’s love.

As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans,

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

What about Peter’s death?

Will Peter’s death separate us?

We would be lying if we didn’t admit that it has thrown us, hard. We would not be human if this tragedy did not bring us to our knees, and to the brink of despair. But we also know that this grief will not last forever. For as it is written,

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,

not leukemia

not any kind of cancer

not the death of a son

not a friend’s suicide

nothing

will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8: 35-39

Say it may be so.

Amen.

Merry Christmas... and Bah Humbug

Sermon preached December 16, 2007

Good Morning.

The other day I realized that I have gotten to the age when I no longer expect the world to be consistent. In fact, I have come to expect quite the opposite – I even enjoy it a little bit – when I find myself holding two completely inconsistent and incompatible truths simultaneously.

Take Christmas, for example: on the one hand, there is every reason to give up on Christmas altogether; just quit it, let it go, reject it; and yet on the other hand I love Christmas; it’s in my blood; it has a grip on my imagination that will never be released. And so here I am, simultaneously holding two incompatible truths: Merry Christmas, and Bah Humbug.

And now, in my fifties, I find myself no longer needing to eliminate the contradiction; instead these days I find myself simply holding the two opposite ideas simultaneously, and enjoying the heat and the light that their clash produces.

It is perhaps immodest of me to mention this, but there are those who say that this capacity – to hold two contradictory positions at the same time – is a mark of intelligence. Albert Einstein, for example, made his great breakthrough in physics when he realized that an object can, in fact, be both at rest and in motion. In one of his famous thought experiments, he realized that if you take two rocks and drop them off the roof of a building at the same time, they are at rest, relative to each other, while they are also in motion, relative to the ground. Apparently this insight led him to the theory of relativity. (See Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations, Kim Cameron, editor; p.53)

Now I’m no Einstein, but it seems to me that everywhere I go these days I’m finding perfectly contradictory ideas, happily existing side by side.

Let’s talk about Christmas for a minute. Within the giant gift bag of Christmas there are so many contradictory ideas that it’s a wonder the whole thing doesn’t explode. In one simple holiday we find boatloads of generosity and also of greed; hackneyed sentimentalism and thrilling new insights; indecent waste and profound simplicity. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Christmas is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; or to paraphrase my son, it’s just a giant Mexican burrito enigma.

Capturing all of these contradictions for me was this article in the paper, which my wife Rose read to me yesterday. [“No Christmas for This Church,” by Tom Breen, Associated Press.] It’s about churches that reject the celebration of Christmas. This is nothing new, of course – this is just the most recent expression of an ancient theme within our tradition, which is our suspicion of paganism, which of course has its origins way before Christmas. 600 years before the baby Jesus, pagans used to cut down small trees this time of year, bring them into their homes, and decorate them with silver and gold. It looked like a nice thing to do and pretty soon the Jews at the time of King Josiah started to do it, too; that is, until the prophet Jeremiah found out about this and condemned the practice as a dangerous flirtation with paganism. (Jer. 10: 2-4).

800 years later, in Roman culture, we find the same issue. The festival of the winter solstice lasted a full week, during which time the birth of the god-man savior was celebrated, and many of the traditions that we associate with Christmas – the giving of gifts, general revelry – were practiced. Depending on the customs of your local household or village, you had your choice of divine-human savior gods, including Appolo, Baal, Dionysus, Helios, Hercules, Osiris, Theseus, and half a dozen others. At some point a little consistency was needed, so in the year 270 or so AD the Emperor Aurelian blended all of these Pagan solstice celebrations of the god-man into a single festival called the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun" and established the date for these celebrations as December 25.

So of course, many of the early Christians simply claimed Christ’s birth as the perfection of this Roman tradition, and saw nothing wrong with maintaining their gift giving and decorations in the name of Jesus.

But the age-old suspicion of paganism was still alive and well. Tertullian warned his flock in the strongest of terms not to imitate the pagan traditions; and ever since, Christians have had this deep ambivalence about this, their most important festival after Easter.

14 centuries after Tertullian, the debate still raged, in the form of Oliver Cromwell campaigning against the “the heathen traditions" of Christmas carols and decorated trees – just as the Puritan founders of our country fulminated against the “pagan mockery” of Christmas traditions. (Source: religioustolerance.org)

And so we find, in yesterday’s Press Democrat article, a modern group of puritans – the United Church of God – weighing in on the same issue, making the same ancient arguments. Meanwhile – and this is what I mean about the exquisite irony of the season – they also interview the senior pastor of Old South Church in Boston, which 250 years ago was the Puritan home of the anti-Christmas crusade: that church, it now turns out, happily sports a Christmas tree in its sanctuary and encourages the very traditions that it once deplored.

How can you not love that?

Where else need we look for proof of Emerson’s saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

The article goes on to remind us that Christmas did not really take over as a massive marketing bonanza until just over a century ago. And it wasn’t just a handful of scrooge-like preachers who opposed Christmas: according to the article, in the 19^th Century “schools and businesses remained open, [and] Congress met in session...” during Christmas. “Major American denominations – Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists and Congregationalists – either ignored the holiday or actively discouraged it...”

You’ll notice that the Episcopalians do not appear in this list. We have always cherished a healthy sense of irony, not to mention a fondness for spiked eggnog, and, truth be told, a measured appreciation for paganism, all of course in moderation.

But just to be clear, and let there be no doubt on this, we are not pagans nor do we encourage the worship of trees. As your priest, I must advise in the strictest of terms: you may have a tree in your living room; and you may even go ahead and decorate it with shiny objects; if you must, you may even gather in a circle around your tree holding hands and sing to it. Just don’t let me catch you worshipping Hercules. As long as we have that clear, I’m sure we’ll all be safe.

All of which leads me to the scripture this morning – which I’m sure you were wondering about – which is simply to point out the wild disparity between Christmas as it is practiced, and Christmas as it is intended by the historical heart of our faith. Because, while the rest of the Western world gorges itself on a neo-pagan orgy of consumerism, we are asked by our Bible to stop for a moment and reflect on the true meaning of all of this, which has to do with the irrepressible hope for justice for the poor. It has to do with the unquenchable longing for a godly revolution; the overturning of this corrupt present order; the final establishment of God’s reign over a world that has sold its soul for a few shiny trinkets.

While the rest of the world rushes headlong into the never-ending quest of more gew-gaws, we are asked by Isaiah to turn our thoughts to those who have nothing; those who have been left on the side of the 12-lane expressway called Progress and have nothing to their name but a God who promises rescue.

Isaiah’s people have been defeated militarily; their homes and their land has been taken; they have been driven on a death march across deserts and mountains to a foreign country that is as parched and dry to them as the Sudan. They have lost everything ... everything but their hope.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you."

Our God is a God of hope... for those who have nothing left but hope.

While the rest of the world is hurtling toward its own consumption, we are asked to pause for a moment and consider the world from the perspective of those who have been abandoned. As Sister Joan Chittister reminds us, the Bible asks us to look at the world, not through the eyes of the heir, but through the eyes of the disinherited.

Jesus, once again, is asked to account for himself – this time, by the disciples of John the Baptist. “Are you the one,” they ask. And Jesus answers, not in terms of his ancestry; he doesn’t make an argument based on his ideas or his followers or even the fact that, in John’s presence, a dove settled on him and the heavens opened.

Instead, Jesus replies in the language of our one true God – the God who distinguishes itself from its pagan neighbors by its commitment to and solidarity with the poor:

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

When will we know that Christmas has arrived? Not when calendar hits the arbitrary date of Dec. 25; but when the thousands of refugees living in the desert of the Sudan are free to live without fear of rape, starvation, and murder. When will Christmas arrive? When the children in Iraq have clean drinking water. When will Christmas arrive? When the thousands of acres of land that are turning into desert every day begin to sprout grass, and shade-giving trees, and springs of water once again.

This is our Christmas hope. It is a hope not for ourselves; it is for the poor and the dispossessed. And it is a hope not in our own strength, but in the grace and mercy of God. Come, Lord Jesus, into our lives; and save us from ourselves.

Amen.

Worshipping Pew Cushions

Good morning.

And welcome to Christ the King Sunday – the last Sunday before Advent, if you can believe that. The last Sunday in Ordinary Time. In liturgical and spiritual terms, we present ourselves to God as graduates, if you will, of Liturgical Year C. We are at the end of a journey that began on December 3, 2006, with the first Sunday of Advent.

Year C is my favorite year in the lectionary cycle because it tells the story of Jesus primarily through Luke’s eyes. As you know, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a lot of the same stories in common – but Luke has several that are unique, and they happen to be my favorites:

The story of how Jesus began his ministry by standing up in the synagogue and proclaiming Isaiah’s vision of the Jubilee: that God had “anointed him to bring good news to the poor,” for example.

And it’s only in Luke’s gospel that we have the story of the Prodigal Son, and the good Samaritan, and the story of the rich man who stored up a ton of grain in his silo, but did nothing to prepare for the afterlife.

So after having gone through all these stories, one would think that we had a pretty good sense of Jesus. If someone stopped us on the street and asked us to describe this person Jesus, I think most of us could paint a fairly accurate picture. But if this person asked us to speak about what Jesus really meant to us, what would we say?

Sometimes in our church service we almost casually throw around these terms about Jesus, like a millionaire handing-out hundred-dollar bills: he is the Christ; the Messiah; the Son of God; Prince of Peace. But what do those terms really mean to us?

Who is Jesus, to you?

I wonder if we could just take a moment to consider this question. And if we could, I’d like us to start by asking this on a feeling level -- what does it feel like to consider this question?

For me, even to this day, over 30 years since I accepted Christ as an adult; after over 20 years of devoting my working life to him, day in and day out... even to this day, that question still feels... huge. It is not a question like any other.

Who is Jesus to you? It has a looming quality; it hangs above us like a canopy holding back the waters; like a levy holding back the flood.

What does Jesus mean to you?

Everything hinges on how we answer.

No more powerful or dangerous question has ever been asked.

In her little book, Knowing Jesus in Your Life, Carol Anderson (who is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills) presents a surprisingly conventional view of Jesus. Conventional, yes, but still she makes some good points. She speaks of there being at least three ways that people become followers of Jesus.

Some of us are like the apostle Paul; we are happily riding along on our horse one day, cheerfully persecuting Christians, and WHAM! out of the blue we get hit by a vision of Christ and everything changes. This is the Big Conversion Story that we hear so often from evangelical preachers; and it is so dramatic that it is actually rather scary. It speaks most to people who are really desperate; people who are really ready to make a complete change in their lives; people who are finally ready for the blinding flash of light. Many of us have been there at one time or another; maybe you are at one of those points in your life right now. If you are, it is important to know that Jesus is here for you in a big way; Jesus is waiting; he is ready to turn your life around; Jesus can be as dramatic and as powerful as you need him to be.

There are others among us who are more like the apostle John, the beloved disciple. John just seemed to have a close relationship with Jesus from the beginning; they just clicked on a deep level; there was nothing especially dramatic, no bolts of lightning, just a constant, solid relationship of mutual love. These Christians aren’t looking for excitement; they are looking for nurture, for substance; for the long-term.

And then there’s Peter; who followed Jesus, but “had endless questions and struggles.” Anderson says, “He was like someone who goes to church on Sunday, listens to the sermon, is moved by the worship, finds it all makes sense, then it falls apart on Monday.” For Peter, it’s always “two steps forward and one step back.”

Anderson says she identifies with Peter, as do I; except for me, it’s more like two steps forward, three steps back, one step forward, sit there awhile, think about it, two steps to the left, run around in circles for awhile, do the hokey-pokey...

And the funny thing is that at different times in our lives, many of us have been all three of these disciples. Many of us have gone through a born again experience; and then we’ve matured into a stable comfortable faith, only to have everything crashing down on us; and then we’re picking up the pieces and figuring it all out again...

But one thing never changes. One thing about Jesus that remains constant throughout time; more important than all the scholarship about Jesus; more important than any book you might read. That is this: Jesus demands an answer.

In every one of the synoptic gospels, Jesus asks this question: “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus demands a response; he waits for an answer; this is the greatest and most important question; the first question of the rest of our lives.

Just last night, as I was working on this sermon, I found myself yet again asking myself this question. This is not one of those questions that, once you have answered it, you need never return to it. This is THE question, the question that we must answer again and again. It’s like a cup of coffee: every morning I have to answer this question – just to wake up. Because it’s not a question that is answered in the head; it is answered in the heart. It’s a question that asks, Who are you following? What are you basing your life on? What is the foundation of your life? What is its purpose? Whom are you attempting to serve? By what standard are you measuring your life? What gives your life value and meaning?

By the standards of our faith, there is only one answer to these questions: Jesus.

When your life is over; when there is nothing left to mark your time on earth but a crumbling piece of stone in a cemetery filled with thousands of such stones; what will it have meant then? What will have been the question that still demands an answer?

In each of the synoptic gospels, when Jesus asks who the disciples think he is, he follows up with these sayings:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, ^F68 will save it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

These are the questions that go to the heart of life itself. Who are we living for? Are we living for ourselves, in which case our end is in the grave; or are we living for Christ, in which case our end is as boundless as God; as infinite as eternity; as unbounded as God’s love.

This is what we were created for; this is why we are here.

Why are you here?

I can tell you that I am not here because you called me here. I am here because Jesus called me here. And I’m not leaving until Jesus tells me I’m finished here.

Why are you here? I hear that some people come here for the stained glass windows; or for the music; or for the preaching; or for our outreach ministries. But all of that is subject to change. This building could burn down tomorrow; none of them will last an eternity. If we are living for these things, we are chasing after bread, that is fresh today, and stale tomorrow.

Or are you here because Jesus calls you here.

You know, sometimes, whenever the question comes up in our church about some change or other that we are thinking of making, it happens like clockwork that someone comes forward and says, “Well, if they change that, then I’m outta here.” It happened just recently with the pew cushion controversy. Well, if they force me to sit on a pew cushion... or Well, after all these years of complaining about the pews, if they won’t put in a pew cushion, then I’m going to a different church.

To which I have to say – and I blame myself for this misunderstanding, “I’m sorry – I didn’t know that you were a worshiper of pew cushions. If you are a follower of pew cushions, you are in the wrong church. We here are followers of Jesus.”

To some people this might seem like a horrifying thought but this church does not exist to serve our needs.

Not your needs, or my needs. This church exists for only one purpose -- the glory of God.

Sometimes I think our church is being held hostage by about a dozen different little terrorist groups; each of them issuing their own demands for things like pew cushions or hymn favorites or special programs; and they expect that my job is to run around trying to meet their demands while maintaining some delicate balance of power between all of them.

But I hate to be the one to have to say this, and again, I blame myself for this misunderstanding, but that’s not how it works.

In the next few months, this parish is going to be facing some serious and difficult choices. We have reached a point where, unless something very dramatic happens, we will need to make some changes in order to balance our budget. Now, I continue to hold out hope that maybe a miracle might occur, but the realist in me sees that some hard choices will have to be made. As we enter into this time of difficult decisions, I need to be clear that we will be making these decisions not to please any group or person; but to respond to the call of Jesus.

I ask for your prayers for our vestry and for me and our staff. And before you come to me or a member of vestry to lobby for your favorite whatever, stop yourself and ask, Is this something you want for yourself, or is it genuinely what you believe Jesus is calling us to? If it’s the latter, I genuinely want to hear from you and I encourage you to speak; if it’s the former, well, get in line with all the others.

In the meantime, I pray that we will all come together, united in the spirit of Christ, and in the words of Paul, gifted with the “strength that comes from God’s glorious power, prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to God.” (2 Colossians 1:11). It gives me great joy to serve you; and even more, to serve Jesus. I pray it is the same for you.

Somebody say... Amen.