As I look back with the perfect vision of hindsight, even now, it seems that things are unfolding as they should though I often had no idea how they were related at the time. My education has brought me to this place in my spiritual journey even as my spiritual formation has affected my education choices. I can wish that my journey was more original but I cannot say that I would change anything.
It seems too cliché to start a personal essay with, “I was born.” But it is true none the less that my spiritual journey has been powerfully affected by the fact that I was born at all. As part of the first generation to grow up knowing that babies did not have to be born, I was powerfully reminded that “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” wasn’t about my soul, it was about my breathing. In my youth, the struggle for my soul was not between apathy and faith but between the moral certitudes of Southern Baptist and Catholic grandmothers.
I always went to church as a child. The God of my earliest memories lives in snow encrusted edifices lit by flickering candles. Gradually, He morphed into the revival tent God of simple truths, rousing songs and playdough. Eventually, He became a damning God of Revelation.
By the time I reached college, I had reached the end of my patience with the shaming God of my youth. One of those grandmothers had died, the other had lost interest, and my pastor had no answer but prayer. I took a Bible as Literature class and became furious that for so many years I had been expected to understand God’s Word in a vacuum. Convinced that the Church had no answers for the metaphysical questions of Truth or Beauty, I changed my major – to philosophy. It was through the philosophy department that I met my first spiritual mentor. Dr. Betty listened to my complaints, encouraged my questions and never presumed that his answers might be the only answers. The result was not a crisis of faith but a crisis of existence. It was through this drastic repositioning of myself in the cosmos that I was able to let go of the God of my youth and be receptive to adult faith.
The defining characteristic of life is that it only stops once. Eventually I got off the couch, got married, had kids and finished my philosophy degree. I did not go back to church and became quite indifferent to Christians. Unlike many families, I was not the instigator of our return to Church. My husband, who had never lost his faith so much as stopped watering it, needed to share his faith with our children and needed to find his own way back to God. I went along. I cried a lot. I was amazed to discover that the lessons of charity and community that I heard as a child had a place in the adult church.
It was at this church that I met my second faith mentor. Katherine was in the ordination process when I met her although I did not know it at the time. At 30 years old, a supposed inheritor of the womens movement, I had never met a woman who was a faith leader. I knew many women with power in the church, but that power was always resource power, a withholding or negative means of expression. As I watched Katherine’s ordination into the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, began to see that women could hold and share the positive, authoritative power of God’s love.
As I have answered God’s call, and not the altar call of belief, but the baptismal call to action, I have watched the Spirit expose hidden gifts that others have seen but I have not. In my mothering circle, I have been the one called in for miscarriages and broken relationships. I have many times been the first to receive good news of jobs, births and weddings. I have often been an arbitrator of moral dilemmas, the one to sound out the answer the question, “What should I do?” I have had to flip my self-perception head over heels. No longer am I a shy person who vomits at the mere thought of public speaking, but a preacher. No longer am I the only one home when things need hearing, I am available for that very need.
I have come to see how important it is for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Indeed, my perverse fear is that I may be extraordinary, and then how will I get anything done? It isn’t the martyrs or even the apostles who have impressed me with their abilities to preserve or testify the gospel of Christ, but the women who opened their homes, with or without permission, and formed the first communities. It isn’t the movers and shakers of theological debate that motivate my growth, it is the people who can listen to gossip and still see Christ in both the speaker and subject. I want to be one of those people.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Tradition - Old School
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Proper 27 Yr C BCP
It’s a funny thing-tradition. If you were to listen only to the news or only read the online journals of prominent Epsicopalians, you would think that our little corner of the Christian Church had managed to corner the market not only on pure Orthodox faith but the front row seats to the Apocalypse as well.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, the gospel today talks about the tradition of marriage and the resurrection and there are all sorts of views on marriage in our church and indeed, in the whole world vying to be the last word on tradition and I’ll get to that, but I found that spending some time with Paul and learning what he thought of tradition was actually more useful than choosing sides and picking out Pauline text to back me up.
Because here is the thing – Paul was a crazy traditionalist.
We are all actually a lot more like Paul than Peter. Paul did not know Jesus personified – he only knew Christ crucified and resurrected. In fact, our experience of Jesus is larger than Paul’s because he didn’t have the gospels. Paul didn’t even have Paul – he was truly living on the cutting edge of faith. So why was he going on about tradition? Edges seem like the sort of place where tradition would lose its authority.
Well, because Paul was Paul. He had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus; he didn’t get a concussion resulting in amnesia. Paul didn’t become someone else, he became Paul – renewed. In the same way, our baptism is our own conversion experience and no matter how sanctified the water is – it doesn’t drown out our past or give us amnesia about who we are, instead it allows us to see the same world but with renewed and indeed sanctified vision.
A lot of people didn’t get what Paul was doing – obviously, or he wouldn’t have had to keep writing letters saying, do what I said, already! One way of seeing what Paul was doing is to think of him as a tentmaker. Paul was tying knots in the fabric of Christianity but he wasn’t making thread. Tradition was the warp of his weaving. It was the thread that stabilized the newly formed cloth. Because remember, Paul really took to heart the idea that the Christ fulfilled the prophecy. It had to connect with the old if it was to fulfill it, but it didn’t have to be the same thing. One might say that for Paul, tradition had to be sanctified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And what the heck does that mean anyway. Well, it probably means I spend too much time reading theology books and need to get some more fresh air. But what it really means is that tradition, also known as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” only matters, only works, if it sets the thing it is about aside for the glory of God because Jesus died and was resurrected. So, I suspect that who Paul was writing to had a lot to do with what particular traditions needed to be maintained, to get people to stop paying attention to the small stuff, and to start paying attention to the huge amazing and astounding fact that Jesus was resurrected. It isn’t like this happened all the time. God really isn’t in the habit. Even today, we don’t bury Aunt Muriel and go back in three days to make sure she didn’t get resurrected or anything.
And that brings me to the gospel. Paul and Jesus were in complete accord on this. The resurrection makes talking about tradition sort of meaningless. Jesus spent a lot of his ministry telling and showing people how he was coming to fulfill the law and then showing us all how much we had mucked up the intention of the law with our traditions about it.
One of my favorite, oh, call him an anti-apologist curmudgeon, is GK Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy he says that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
So, in giving the vote to the dead, we have to remember that the dead not only can be dead wrong, but they are certainly entitled to change their mind now that they have come face to face with the glory of God. And don’t forget about the legion of dead who are there because some living person honored tradition over life itself. I suspect that the dead actually have a pretty radically different view of things now that they are not longer afraid of death. So let’s not assume how they would vote at all.
Instead, lets consider that Jesus is trying to tell the Saducees that the traditions of the living, like marriage, matter to the living, but that the priorities of the resurrected are all but incomprehensible to us. This is especially true if we spend too much time hanging onto traditions that aren’t working anymore. That way being – to keep us focused on the amazing astounding stupefying fact that Jesus was resurrected.
If we, as Christians, truly believe that we live in a now and not yet state of resurrection ourselves. If we as Christians truly believe that we are the hands and feet of Christ, then we are the tools of the resurrection. It is our duty, then, to make sure that all Christians(past present and future) live lives focused on the amazement of resurrection, of being a wholly new creature, set aside for God’s own joy. That is our mission, that is our story of salvation. Freedom from fear; fear of death, fear of being stranded at the altar, fear of being married to seven brothers.
Traditions are useful only in that they free us from our fears. Traditions are useful only if they liberate us to see God as clearly as possible, and the clearest we will ever see the Glory of God is to believe as literally as we can, the resurrection of the Christ. Because when we can really believe that, we can really believe that our sins are forgiven and we can really get on with the important stuff – which is liberating others from their fears and letting everyone see the face of God shining into the world.
All things come of thee, oh Lord
And of thine own, have we given thee.
I pray each of us goes into the world this day, a shining beacon of God who lights us all from the inside. And I pray each of us trust in our faith with the strength of our tradition, which is of Jesus Crucified and Christ Resurrected. Amen.
Proper 27 Yr C BCP
It’s a funny thing-tradition. If you were to listen only to the news or only read the online journals of prominent Epsicopalians, you would think that our little corner of the Christian Church had managed to corner the market not only on pure Orthodox faith but the front row seats to the Apocalypse as well.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, the gospel today talks about the tradition of marriage and the resurrection and there are all sorts of views on marriage in our church and indeed, in the whole world vying to be the last word on tradition and I’ll get to that, but I found that spending some time with Paul and learning what he thought of tradition was actually more useful than choosing sides and picking out Pauline text to back me up.
Because here is the thing – Paul was a crazy traditionalist.
We are all actually a lot more like Paul than Peter. Paul did not know Jesus personified – he only knew Christ crucified and resurrected. In fact, our experience of Jesus is larger than Paul’s because he didn’t have the gospels. Paul didn’t even have Paul – he was truly living on the cutting edge of faith. So why was he going on about tradition? Edges seem like the sort of place where tradition would lose its authority.
Well, because Paul was Paul. He had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus; he didn’t get a concussion resulting in amnesia. Paul didn’t become someone else, he became Paul – renewed. In the same way, our baptism is our own conversion experience and no matter how sanctified the water is – it doesn’t drown out our past or give us amnesia about who we are, instead it allows us to see the same world but with renewed and indeed sanctified vision.
A lot of people didn’t get what Paul was doing – obviously, or he wouldn’t have had to keep writing letters saying, do what I said, already! One way of seeing what Paul was doing is to think of him as a tentmaker. Paul was tying knots in the fabric of Christianity but he wasn’t making thread. Tradition was the warp of his weaving. It was the thread that stabilized the newly formed cloth. Because remember, Paul really took to heart the idea that the Christ fulfilled the prophecy. It had to connect with the old if it was to fulfill it, but it didn’t have to be the same thing. One might say that for Paul, tradition had to be sanctified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And what the heck does that mean anyway. Well, it probably means I spend too much time reading theology books and need to get some more fresh air. But what it really means is that tradition, also known as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” only matters, only works, if it sets the thing it is about aside for the glory of God because Jesus died and was resurrected. So, I suspect that who Paul was writing to had a lot to do with what particular traditions needed to be maintained, to get people to stop paying attention to the small stuff, and to start paying attention to the huge amazing and astounding fact that Jesus was resurrected. It isn’t like this happened all the time. God really isn’t in the habit. Even today, we don’t bury Aunt Muriel and go back in three days to make sure she didn’t get resurrected or anything.
And that brings me to the gospel. Paul and Jesus were in complete accord on this. The resurrection makes talking about tradition sort of meaningless. Jesus spent a lot of his ministry telling and showing people how he was coming to fulfill the law and then showing us all how much we had mucked up the intention of the law with our traditions about it.
One of my favorite, oh, call him an anti-apologist curmudgeon, is GK Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy he says that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
So, in giving the vote to the dead, we have to remember that the dead not only can be dead wrong, but they are certainly entitled to change their mind now that they have come face to face with the glory of God. And don’t forget about the legion of dead who are there because some living person honored tradition over life itself. I suspect that the dead actually have a pretty radically different view of things now that they are not longer afraid of death. So let’s not assume how they would vote at all.
Instead, lets consider that Jesus is trying to tell the Saducees that the traditions of the living, like marriage, matter to the living, but that the priorities of the resurrected are all but incomprehensible to us. This is especially true if we spend too much time hanging onto traditions that aren’t working anymore. That way being – to keep us focused on the amazing astounding stupefying fact that Jesus was resurrected.
If we, as Christians, truly believe that we live in a now and not yet state of resurrection ourselves. If we as Christians truly believe that we are the hands and feet of Christ, then we are the tools of the resurrection. It is our duty, then, to make sure that all Christians(past present and future) live lives focused on the amazement of resurrection, of being a wholly new creature, set aside for God’s own joy. That is our mission, that is our story of salvation. Freedom from fear; fear of death, fear of being stranded at the altar, fear of being married to seven brothers.
Traditions are useful only in that they free us from our fears. Traditions are useful only if they liberate us to see God as clearly as possible, and the clearest we will ever see the Glory of God is to believe as literally as we can, the resurrection of the Christ. Because when we can really believe that, we can really believe that our sins are forgiven and we can really get on with the important stuff – which is liberating others from their fears and letting everyone see the face of God shining into the world.
All things come of thee, oh Lord
And of thine own, have we given thee.
I pray each of us goes into the world this day, a shining beacon of God who lights us all from the inside. And I pray each of us trust in our faith with the strength of our tradition, which is of Jesus Crucified and Christ Resurrected. Amen.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Moving off Commonhouse
So, I am not adverse to technology, only adverse to upgrading. I have been putting off migrating my blog over to something more attractive and easier to use for about a year. Since I am about to leave town for a month, I am, of course, messing with it now.
No promises of substantive posts for the summer, but by fall, it should pick back up again.
No promises of substantive posts for the summer, but by fall, it should pick back up again.
Friday, February 23, 2007
And now a word from our church fathers....
My two cents on the Primates meeting last week, or somebody's two cents at least.
"Therefore I will put up with this church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me until I become better."
from Erasmus, found while reading The Reformation by Dairmaid McCulloch.
I mean, what else is there to say?
"Therefore I will put up with this church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me until I become better."
from Erasmus, found while reading The Reformation by Dairmaid McCulloch.
I mean, what else is there to say?
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A Welcome to Remember
Greetings to all from San Francisco. Many of you know that the Lee family has moved to California following God's call and a good job. We are aclimatizing quite well to the sunshine and dry weather, although my skin is starting to dry out! I have had discussions with many of you about welcome and visitors to St. David's and I have recently gotten the welcome that I would challenge all members of God's church to meet.
We arrived for the Sunday morning Christmas Eve service at 11am. As you can imagine, the service was light on people, many chosing to come in the evening service instead. It is easy enough to hide in a large crowd if you are a newbie, but as we all know at St. David's visitors are hightly visible with less than 20 people in a large room. I must admit I am not a wallflower, but I was definitely a visitor to the sights and customs of this parish. As the celebrants and attendants gathered for the begining of service, Rosa Lee, the vicar, walked right up to me and said, "Heather, it's about time you got here."
If we are builing heaven right here on earth, Rosa Lee is the chief door greeter. One of the blessings of community is the quality of being known. Christ reminds us often in the Gospel, that we are known to God. But to relish the fullness of joy in being known by God's people, we must first trust that if He finds us worthy, then we must indeed be worthy. It can be scary to come to a new place with different customs and expectations. As disconcerting as it is within the tradition, imagine how difficult it is for people who have not grown up in the church, or who have had that trust violated.
That was the perfect greeting for me, in that time and place. As most of you know, my husband had been in San Francisco for several months before we joined him, and I was pretty resistant to leave my loving and trusting community of faith. We may be a people of the book, but we all read it pretty differently. I am a preacher, and I had concerns that I would find a community that I could still speak to. I am a homebody and what I like best is deepening old relationships, not necessarily making new ones. How perfect then, for me, to receive a welcome of the tardy child rather than the potential stranger. I knew that it was not just a priest who greeted me but God reinforcing the rightness of this move for our family and for His work in our lives.
I realize that not everyone can or should be greeted in this manner. But I think that no one who enters the doors of our churches should encounter a challenging greeting or a lack of greeting at all. We all enter the building with the desire of encountering God. It is the responsibility of those of us who already inhabit the halls of God's house to remember that we are not only the hands and feet of God doing good work in the community, but we are the voice and comfort of God's love to those who seek. Anyone who enters our buildings has already been blessed and found worthy by God, all we have to do is make sure we and they don't forget it.
Thanks be to God!
We arrived for the Sunday morning Christmas Eve service at 11am. As you can imagine, the service was light on people, many chosing to come in the evening service instead. It is easy enough to hide in a large crowd if you are a newbie, but as we all know at St. David's visitors are hightly visible with less than 20 people in a large room. I must admit I am not a wallflower, but I was definitely a visitor to the sights and customs of this parish. As the celebrants and attendants gathered for the begining of service, Rosa Lee, the vicar, walked right up to me and said, "Heather, it's about time you got here."
If we are builing heaven right here on earth, Rosa Lee is the chief door greeter. One of the blessings of community is the quality of being known. Christ reminds us often in the Gospel, that we are known to God. But to relish the fullness of joy in being known by God's people, we must first trust that if He finds us worthy, then we must indeed be worthy. It can be scary to come to a new place with different customs and expectations. As disconcerting as it is within the tradition, imagine how difficult it is for people who have not grown up in the church, or who have had that trust violated.
That was the perfect greeting for me, in that time and place. As most of you know, my husband had been in San Francisco for several months before we joined him, and I was pretty resistant to leave my loving and trusting community of faith. We may be a people of the book, but we all read it pretty differently. I am a preacher, and I had concerns that I would find a community that I could still speak to. I am a homebody and what I like best is deepening old relationships, not necessarily making new ones. How perfect then, for me, to receive a welcome of the tardy child rather than the potential stranger. I knew that it was not just a priest who greeted me but God reinforcing the rightness of this move for our family and for His work in our lives.
I realize that not everyone can or should be greeted in this manner. But I think that no one who enters the doors of our churches should encounter a challenging greeting or a lack of greeting at all. We all enter the building with the desire of encountering God. It is the responsibility of those of us who already inhabit the halls of God's house to remember that we are not only the hands and feet of God doing good work in the community, but we are the voice and comfort of God's love to those who seek. Anyone who enters our buildings has already been blessed and found worthy by God, all we have to do is make sure we and they don't forget it.
Thanks be to God!
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
What are we waiting for?
Advent has rolled around again, and once again I am faced with the dual tasks of waiting and reflecting on the newborn Christ, and running around like a chicken with my head cut off shopping, decorating and attending holiday parties. This year, there is the added adventure of moving the week before Christmas Day. So, you would think that the fact that I have been snowed in for a week at my parent's house, on top of the week vacation I gave myself, would have me pulling out my hair. But I have, instead, found the space between waiting and running.
The week of my vacation, I had a lovely time. It was spent cooking for family that was coming for dinner and going out shopping for Christmas gifts. The week of Thanksgiving was spent in the same manner of all my weeks, running around trying to get as much done each day as possible.
But on Saturday, when I could and perhaps should have come home for church on Sunday, I instead accepted an invitation from my mom to stay and sew with some of her friends. We had a great time, of fellowship and laughter. We pieced utility (what my mom calls big squares stuck together in rows with no particular pattern) quilts for both children. We even quilted them, and mom was going to finish the binding and bring them for Christmas.
I did not watch the news until Saturday night. It turns out my window of opportunity to get home was Saturday. Saturday night brought in a storm so large and cold that it was the same storm in Seattle, WA as Denver, CO. It snowed all day on Sunday, a foot deep without drifting, in a sheltered area, on the back porch.
So, Sunday, we watched it snow, considered putting up the Christmas tree, and decided to bind those quilts. And start another one. We packed up our things in preparation of leaving Tuesday. I spent part of my time shoveling out the longest steepest driveway in America, and we started teaching the kids to sew. It did stop snowing, but it hasn't warmed above freezing yet.
Somewhere between Sunday and Wednesday, the frantic need to get home and get things done has been replaced by a complacency, a contentment to wait until it is safe and sane to be out again in the bustle. In the meantime, we have done more for my Christmas list than I ever imagined. My daughter is helping while learning to sew ( I won't say what, because some of you are getting them for Christmas.) The kids are not fighting and no one has said, "I'm bored."
I have learned a lesson about snow that I knew as a child but had forgotten once I grew up and moved away from it. The snow and the ice, which, in the right climate, are part and parcel of advent, are a physical reminder from God to slow down, and wait in hope, for good things. With no place else to go, we cannot run away from the problems and hurts. We cannot let them fester and we cannot ignore them. The trick, I think, is to use that snowed in experience as a metaphor for life writ large. Even if we are not snowed in, we need to remember the shut in, and we need to use this time to be with the hurt of the whole world. And we need to wait in hope, for with the coming of Christ, the healing of the problems and hurts is coming as well. And we need to remember that all year long. But we won't of course, and so we are given a season, each year, to reconnect with that feeling, with the waiting in hope, that is Christ born.
The week of my vacation, I had a lovely time. It was spent cooking for family that was coming for dinner and going out shopping for Christmas gifts. The week of Thanksgiving was spent in the same manner of all my weeks, running around trying to get as much done each day as possible.
But on Saturday, when I could and perhaps should have come home for church on Sunday, I instead accepted an invitation from my mom to stay and sew with some of her friends. We had a great time, of fellowship and laughter. We pieced utility (what my mom calls big squares stuck together in rows with no particular pattern) quilts for both children. We even quilted them, and mom was going to finish the binding and bring them for Christmas.
I did not watch the news until Saturday night. It turns out my window of opportunity to get home was Saturday. Saturday night brought in a storm so large and cold that it was the same storm in Seattle, WA as Denver, CO. It snowed all day on Sunday, a foot deep without drifting, in a sheltered area, on the back porch.
So, Sunday, we watched it snow, considered putting up the Christmas tree, and decided to bind those quilts. And start another one. We packed up our things in preparation of leaving Tuesday. I spent part of my time shoveling out the longest steepest driveway in America, and we started teaching the kids to sew. It did stop snowing, but it hasn't warmed above freezing yet.
Somewhere between Sunday and Wednesday, the frantic need to get home and get things done has been replaced by a complacency, a contentment to wait until it is safe and sane to be out again in the bustle. In the meantime, we have done more for my Christmas list than I ever imagined. My daughter is helping while learning to sew ( I won't say what, because some of you are getting them for Christmas.) The kids are not fighting and no one has said, "I'm bored."
I have learned a lesson about snow that I knew as a child but had forgotten once I grew up and moved away from it. The snow and the ice, which, in the right climate, are part and parcel of advent, are a physical reminder from God to slow down, and wait in hope, for good things. With no place else to go, we cannot run away from the problems and hurts. We cannot let them fester and we cannot ignore them. The trick, I think, is to use that snowed in experience as a metaphor for life writ large. Even if we are not snowed in, we need to remember the shut in, and we need to use this time to be with the hurt of the whole world. And we need to wait in hope, for with the coming of Christ, the healing of the problems and hurts is coming as well. And we need to remember that all year long. But we won't of course, and so we are given a season, each year, to reconnect with that feeling, with the waiting in hope, that is Christ born.
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Advent 1: final sermon@ St. David's
It is Advent again. It seems a strange time of the year for a beginning to me. None the less, I have had several beginnings during Advent in my own life, and it is the time of beginning for the Church as well.
I have always wondered why this is the time of new beginnings. Why is it the beginning of the calendar year? Why is it the beginning of the Church year? This is the end of the natural year. If anything, it is the beginning of fallow time, hunkering down and waiting for the beginning time.
As a child, this was, in fact, the worst time of the year. It was too cold and dark to play outside after school. It hadn’t snowed yet, so we still had to go to school. Christmas was coming, but having no cornucopia in my childhood, this and my birthday were my sole chance for a present the whole year. As a member of the first generation of children that Reagan opened direct advertising and marketing to, having the right stuff had everything to do with your popularity in school.
So, as you can see it is difficult for me to imagine becoming childlike in Christ at this time of year. As an adult with Seasonal Affective Disorder, this is definitely a beginning for me. The beginning of days when it is difficult to get out of bed or get things accomplished: A difficult time for me to make plans or imagine going out to do holiday activities.
Why is this the beginning? Why is this the Season of Light, when it seems clear to one and all that it is deadly dark at 4pm? Well, it’s about hope. And it’s about where beginnings really happen.
Do you remember the first seed you planted in school? The little wax paper cup that you poked a hole into and the moist black soil you put in and patted down with your fingers? The impossibly small seed that you pushed into the soil, and your finger made such a big hole compared to the seed that you had to push the soil over it. And then, the waiting: the hoping that you were not overwatering it or underwatering it and that it was getting enough light inside and maybe you should take it outside for some fresh air. And all this time, you are carrying around and fretting over what is for all appearances, a cup of dirt with a hole in it.
You never did see the beginning of that little plant. The beginning of that carrot or bean plant was shrouded in darkness and mystery. All you had was faith.
That is the faith of childhood. And any gardener who sows seeds feels it over and over again. I do not have that faith. I always by starts, and maybe two or three because I am going to kill at least one by the time I figure it out. In this, as in my Christian faith, I need someone more experienced than me to show the way.
There is a parable at the end of the Gospel this morning. It’s another fig tree. Jesus tells us that when the leaves sprout, summer is already near. It is so easy to see the sprouts and think, ah, the beginning. But the beginning happened deep inside that tree, down in the roots, deep in the soil, in a hidden place and time that is invisible to everyone but that fig tree and God.
This is Advent, the season to work on that hidden, deep in the soil faith that makes us shine out, in a few months, that Christ is Risen. It is time to nurture with no visible sign of future reward that we will be a force for good in the world.
The rest of the Gospel, the one that so many are tempted to read with self-righteous superiority instead of God and Other-centered righteousness. It doesn’t offer us rescue from the woes of this life, caused by nature or man, it tells us that, if we have done the work of tending our faith, when it was small and no-one could see it, then, we will have the strength and courage to do the work that God has given us to do. When there is “distress among nations” and when people “faint from fear and foreboding” then is the time that God will work the miracle of life on our hope and w will be able, like the fig to sprout leaves and roll up sleeves and bring the kingdom of God that much nearer to a world in need.
The other half of this sermon was given by Ellen, our diocesan Episcopal Relief and Development co-ordinator. She gave a plug for the Millenial Development goals. She also mentioned that Bono was all over this. Later, at coffee hour, I shared the latest joke I can actually remember the punchline to... "What is the difference between Jesus and Bono? Jesus doesn't think he is Bono." Please, someone get me a new joke. I can only remember one at a time.
I have always wondered why this is the time of new beginnings. Why is it the beginning of the calendar year? Why is it the beginning of the Church year? This is the end of the natural year. If anything, it is the beginning of fallow time, hunkering down and waiting for the beginning time.
As a child, this was, in fact, the worst time of the year. It was too cold and dark to play outside after school. It hadn’t snowed yet, so we still had to go to school. Christmas was coming, but having no cornucopia in my childhood, this and my birthday were my sole chance for a present the whole year. As a member of the first generation of children that Reagan opened direct advertising and marketing to, having the right stuff had everything to do with your popularity in school.
So, as you can see it is difficult for me to imagine becoming childlike in Christ at this time of year. As an adult with Seasonal Affective Disorder, this is definitely a beginning for me. The beginning of days when it is difficult to get out of bed or get things accomplished: A difficult time for me to make plans or imagine going out to do holiday activities.
Why is this the beginning? Why is this the Season of Light, when it seems clear to one and all that it is deadly dark at 4pm? Well, it’s about hope. And it’s about where beginnings really happen.
Do you remember the first seed you planted in school? The little wax paper cup that you poked a hole into and the moist black soil you put in and patted down with your fingers? The impossibly small seed that you pushed into the soil, and your finger made such a big hole compared to the seed that you had to push the soil over it. And then, the waiting: the hoping that you were not overwatering it or underwatering it and that it was getting enough light inside and maybe you should take it outside for some fresh air. And all this time, you are carrying around and fretting over what is for all appearances, a cup of dirt with a hole in it.
You never did see the beginning of that little plant. The beginning of that carrot or bean plant was shrouded in darkness and mystery. All you had was faith.
That is the faith of childhood. And any gardener who sows seeds feels it over and over again. I do not have that faith. I always by starts, and maybe two or three because I am going to kill at least one by the time I figure it out. In this, as in my Christian faith, I need someone more experienced than me to show the way.
There is a parable at the end of the Gospel this morning. It’s another fig tree. Jesus tells us that when the leaves sprout, summer is already near. It is so easy to see the sprouts and think, ah, the beginning. But the beginning happened deep inside that tree, down in the roots, deep in the soil, in a hidden place and time that is invisible to everyone but that fig tree and God.
This is Advent, the season to work on that hidden, deep in the soil faith that makes us shine out, in a few months, that Christ is Risen. It is time to nurture with no visible sign of future reward that we will be a force for good in the world.
The rest of the Gospel, the one that so many are tempted to read with self-righteous superiority instead of God and Other-centered righteousness. It doesn’t offer us rescue from the woes of this life, caused by nature or man, it tells us that, if we have done the work of tending our faith, when it was small and no-one could see it, then, we will have the strength and courage to do the work that God has given us to do. When there is “distress among nations” and when people “faint from fear and foreboding” then is the time that God will work the miracle of life on our hope and w will be able, like the fig to sprout leaves and roll up sleeves and bring the kingdom of God that much nearer to a world in need.
The other half of this sermon was given by Ellen, our diocesan Episcopal Relief and Development co-ordinator. She gave a plug for the Millenial Development goals. She also mentioned that Bono was all over this. Later, at coffee hour, I shared the latest joke I can actually remember the punchline to... "What is the difference between Jesus and Bono? Jesus doesn't think he is Bono." Please, someone get me a new joke. I can only remember one at a time.
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