Second Sunday after the Epiphany by The Rev. Martin Elfert

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

Jan. 19, 2020

Lessons:

Isaiah 49:1-7

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

John 1:29-42

Psalm 40:1-12

If you have ever taken an acting class – maybe in high school, maybe in university, maybe somewhere else – then you will likely have done the exercise of selecting a short line of text and seeing how many different ways that you can say it. The line might be something that your teacher made up or it might be a famous line from a famous play. For the sake of exploration, let’s say that the line in question is what might be the most famous line ever spoken on the stage.

To be or not to be. That is the question.

How many ways could we say these words that Shakespeare gives to Hamlet?

Well, maybe we could lean hard into To be and then go soft on the rest of the line:

TO BE

(or not to be). That is the question.

Maybe we could borrow the technique of the late German actor, Bruno Ganz, who according to lore said:

To be

and then paused and paused and paused, waiting, legend has it, for more than two minutes of silence before concluding…

or not to be. That is the question.

Or maybe the first sentence with its contrasting choices isn’t as important as what comes next. How about:

(To be or not to be.)

THAT is the question.

We could keep on going as long as we wanted, as long as our imaginations lasted.

Scripture, like Shakespeare, doesn’t contain a lot of stage directions or other descriptions. Most of the time, folks in the Bible just say stuff. Their words are generally not followed by, “…she said, angrily” or “…he told them, with tears in his eyes and shaking hands.” The text does not volunteer whether their eyebrows are raised, whether they are speaking through gritted teeth, Clint Eastwood style, whether they are slurring their words, whether they are giggling as they talk.

And so here is my question for this morning. We are in the Gospel of John, right near its beginning. Jesus has just been baptised. And then the very first words that Jesus speaks go like this:

What are you looking for?

How shall we read Jesus’ words?

Let’s try out a few possibilities.

What are you looking for?

So, this is a Jesus who is aggressive, accusatory, and maybe wary. This is a Jesus who sees you glancing his way on the street and says, “What do you think you’re looking at?”

Now, stay with me here. Because we are so accustomed to Serene Jesus that we may want to reflexively rule out the possibility of Cranky Jesus. But I want to suggest that this is a thoroughly plausible reading of these words.

Because John the Baptist has just seen Jesus and announced to Andrew and his friend:

There goes the Lamb of God.

And what do we know about lambs? Well, we know that, as the old expression has it, they are led with some regularity to the slaughter. This is particularly true in Jesus’ time, where the sacrifice of animals is woven into the life of the temple. John is saying a lot of things when he announces that Jesus is the Lamb of God – there is a theological complexity to this statement that could and has filled up a few books. But one of the most basic things that it means is:

There is the one who is going to die in the service of the Lord.

Before Jesus predicts his own death – and as we know, Jesus predicts his dying early and often – John the Baptist predicts it.

And so we can understand why Jesus might speak with hostility, why he might say to Andrew and his friend:

What are you looking for?

Are you two here to watch me die? Are you like the people who slow down going past the car accident, equal parts horrified and titillated, both fearing and hoping that you will see blood on the asphalt?

Are you staring because I am a dead man walking?

What are you looking for?

Let’s try another possibility:

What are you looking for?

This is Jesus as the guru with the big beard on the mountaintop, this is Jesus as Yoda. Jesus is asking a question to which he already knows the answer. The purpose of the question is not for Jesus to learn anything, not for Jesus to find anything out. The purpose of the question is for the one being questioned to learn, for the seeker to learn. For you to learn.

This is maybe the Jesus with whom we are most familiar. And I can understand why: in a lot of ways, this is a reassuring Jesus: the Messiah who is in control, who is stable and powerful, who has something like superpowers.

Jesus asking the question in this way is like a guide on a journey. He knows the path on which we walk backwards and forwards, he cannot get lost. While he is on the journey with us, he shares in none of our discovery and none of our uncertainty. When we wander off of the way and into the briars or the poison ivy, he does not follow us. He stays on the path and asks his question: What are you looking for?

When Jesus ask his question, he is really saying: I know what you are looking for. Do you know what you are looking for?

Maybe there is a trace of a smile on his face as he speaks.

One more.

What are you looking for?

So, this is Jesus as genuinely curious. Not angry and challenging but not all-knowing either. This is the Son of God, shortly after his baptism, the day after the dove has descended and the voice of the one whom he calls Father has said:

This is my Son, the Beloved. In whom I delight.

This is Jesus wandering around in stunned wonder, standing in the wake of this profound mystical experience and not sure what is supposed to happen next. In the Synoptic Gospels (so, Matthew, Mark, and Luke) this is the moment when the Spirit drives or maybe leads Jesus out into the wilderness. Here in the Fourth Gospel, this is the moment when Jesus notices that two people have left John’s side and begun to follow him.

Picture him, blinking in the sunlight, his clothes maybe not entirely dry from that day before, the silt of the Jordan still in his hair. He looks at Andrew and his friend and says:

What are you looking for?

This is Jesus who is, himself, not sure what he is looking for. This is the Jesus who shares with us in our search. We are lost and hoping to be found. And so is Jesus.

Which reading is right? Which one is true? Is it one of these three or still another?­ How does Jesus sound when he looks at you and he says:

What are you looking for?

First Sunday after the Epiphany by the Rev. Jeanne Kaliszewski

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

Jan. 12, 2020

Lessons:

Isaiah 42:1-9

Acts 10:34-43

Matthew 3:13-17

Psalm 29

I was baptized when I was 4 or 5 and dressed in a scratchy dress and tight shoes. I stood at the front of an Episcopal congregation along with my younger brother and sister. The priest went to baptize us and screwed up my name….he transposed my middle name with my sister’s. This might have been a quickly forgotten incident had I not, some time later, decided to share this funny story with a friend at a sleepover. When I finished talking she looked at my with concern and said “You know what that means don’t you?” “No” I replied, “What?”. “It means you are not going to be able to get into heaven, because God is not going to know your name.”

I was also ‘baptized’ in seminary. I use air quotes around the word baptism because this was not my baptism, that happened when I was little. But water and oil were poured on me one June day in the courtyard of our CDSP in Berkeley. It was part of what is affectionately known as the ‘magic hands’ class in seminary, where we learn the sacramental acts we called to perform as ordained people. My friend, David, was assigned the rite of baptism and he asked me if I would be willing to be baptized by him. I immediately said yes, he is one of my dearest friends.

One of the gifts of this class was the freedom our instructor gave to just try things out…to go for it, as it were. So my friend David decided to baptize me with, um, generous abandon. As I knelt down in front of him he took huge bowlfuls of water and dumped them over my head three times, so much water I was gasping for breath a little and completely soaked through. Then took a bottle of olive oil and began pouring it over my head. I smelled like a caesar salad and it took about 3 days of washing my hair with dish soap to get all the oil out.

Baptism is one of what are called the two ‘great sacraments’ in the church, the other being the Eucharist. These are considered the primary sacraments because they were modeled by Christ in the scriptures and given to the Church. When we are participating in baptism and communion we are participating in the very acts which Jesus himself initiated over 2,000 years ago.

Which all sounds pretty straightforward, Jesus did it and now we do too, but the history of the sacrament of baptism is a complicated one indeed. Ritual immersion was a part of the Judaism that Jesus was raised in, as an act of purification that could be participated whenever necessary. John the Baptizer (and the Jewish sect called the Essenes, of which he may have been a part) took this practice but shifted it and made it less about a ritual purification and about metanoia, repentance.

Amongst early followers of Christ, in the first couple of centuries after the death and resurrection of Jesus, baptism continued to be a sacrament marking the entrance of one into the faith. But the theology of baptism remained fraught. In the 4th century deathbed baptism was a fairly common practice as people were afraid that they might sin again after the washing away of their sins they received in baptism. In fact, Constantine himself was baptized this way. And as families began to have their children baptized, the theology of original sin, that all humans are born sinners, was clearly articulated by Augustine as a rationale for the practice of infant baptizing.

During the Reformation even more visions and theologies of baptism began to flourish. Many reacted against the practice of infant baptism by arguiung that there is little scriptural warrant for the practice and instead a believer’s baptism, requiring someone to be of an age where they can articulate their beliefs and understand the sacrament they are participating in, became the norm in some denominations.

Baptism is a big thing. And all the controversy, all the passion around how and why and when one should be baptized is all because it is important …it is transformative…it is a holy and sacred act.

And this is clear in today’s Gospel. There is a lot going on in these few short verses from Matthew that tell us what is happening is very important. This is the first time we hear Jesus speak in the Gospel of Matthew. This is Jesus’ first act before beginning his ministry. This scene of Jesus being baptized is one of only two in the Gospel of Matthew in which the heavens open and God’s voice is heard (the other being the Transfiguration which occurs right before he turns toward Jerusalem and certain death). And this incarnated, physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit, described as being ‘like a dove’ is unique and appears in all four of the Gospels only during Jesus’ baptism.

Something big is going on here, bigger than the forgiveness of sins because what would Jesus need forgiving of anyway? And also, given that all these things are happening in this scene (the dove, the voice, the heavens opening up), it seems to me that the text is trying to tell us that something more is happening than just forgiveness.

When we consider this scene of Jesus’ baptism, perhaps we might look at it as offering us a vision of a new way of looking at baptism beyond a simple washing away of sin; in the story of me being baptized with the wrong name, what my childhood friend articulated is a theological view of baptism that is pretty common I think: that baptism is a gateway to salvation, that through baptism we become beloved of God.

But today’s Gospel story points to something else I think. I think it suggests that rather than being primarily about forgiveness, baptism is primarily about relationship. It is about our relationship with God and our relationship with the Church and our relationship with each other. This scene in Matthew seems organized around the concept of relationship; this is the ONLY time in the Gospels that all three members of the Trinity are present together. God is naming and claiming Jesus in baptism through the Holy Spirit and God is naming and claiming us baptism too.

And God’s claim on us flows from an abundant, powerful and overflowing love that surrounds us and cascades over us in the way the way the water hit my head and made me catch my breath that afternoon in seminary when David poured bowlfuls of water over my head in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I know this was not a ‘proper’ baptism, David was not ordained and I had already been baptized, but the way that water shook me and the feel of the oil cascading down my face were absolutely a sign of God’s abundant love. As one commentator suggested, God does not forgive us to make us beloved, we are already beloved so God forgives us. In baptism God claims us as God’s own.

In a few minutes we will renew our baptismal vows. For those of us who have been baptized, it is a chance to once again remember what it means to be claimed God’s Beloved in the waters of Baptism. For those who have not been baptized, it is a window into what this baptism thing is all about.

And one of the things I appreciate about our Baptismal vows is that they are framed as a covenant. And that language is intentional. A covenant is about relationship. In our baptism God welcomes us as God’s beloved child and we respond by sharing meals and prayers, by resisting evil, by proclaiming the Good News we have found in Christ, by loving our neighbors as ourselves, and by recognizing the dignity of every human being and working for justice and peace in a world that desperately needs it.

God spoke to Jesus that day when he was baptized in the River Jordan and named Jesus Beloved in front of all who were gathered there.

Just as God spoke to Jesus through the sacrament of baptism, so God speaks to us through the sacraments we share here in this place.

God speaks to us through wine.

God speaks to us through bread.

God speaks to us through oil.

God speaks to us through water.

 

God speaks to us and says “You are my child, my Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”

The Second Sunday after Christmas by The Rev. Martin Elfert

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

Jan. 5, 2020

Lessons:

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Psalm 84

A remarkable number of Christmas carols and Christmas songs and Christmas hymns have a wistful, melancholic, plain-old sad side to them.

In the Bleak Midwinter and The Little Drummer Boy are both sung in the voice of one who knows poverty: What can I give him, poor as I am? and I am a poor boy, too – pa rum pum pum-pum.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas speaks of finitude and randomness: Through the years we all will be together…

…if the fates allow…

and of troubles which, achingly, beautifully, the singer hopes and longs will now be miles away.

And even We Need a Little Christmas from the musical Mame:

We need a little Christmas, right this very minute!

Words that are almost impossible to sing without putting on your Angela Lansbury voice, a number as toe-tapping and danceable a Christmas song there is, tells us:

I’ve grown a little leaner
Grown a little colder
Grown a little sadder
Grown a little older

I bet that we could think of still more examples.

What’s going on? Why are so many pages of the Christmas song book stained with tears?

Some of it probably has to do with the time of the year. These short days are taxing and it is easy to feel out of gas. Some of it probably flows out of the dissonance that shows up when, in a season when you are kind of expected or even required to be happy, you realise that you are not: if Christmas sits for you in the shadow of loss or grief or loneliness and the world around you appears to be full-time joy and friendship and merriment and Christmas cards filled with success and success and winning and winning, that’s hard. And some of it is probably due to just having time off: if you, like me, are the sort of person whose preferred drug is not so much booze as it is busyness, getting a break from work or projects or school simply allows you the time to be sad.

And some of it has to do with Christmas itself – not the contemporary holiday, but the ancient story of the birth of Jesus. Sorrow is woven right into this tale, it is right there beside the joy. Here is a family living in poverty – remember in the Gospel of Luke that, when the holy family goes to the temple to make a sacrifice to the Lord in Jesus’ name, the family buys a pair of turtledoves and two pigeons, the cheapest possible animals available, a marker that tells you that their wallets are close to empty. Here is a family living with the indignity and fear of occupation – Mary must give birth on the road because that Empire commands them to travel. And here is a family who, shortly after Jesus’ birth, become refugees, who flee to Egypt, because Empire’s violence is coming for them.

Those of you who have been hanging around church for a while will know that, three days after the Feast of Christmas, there comes another Feast. This is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a day that keeps the memory all of the children under the age of two whom King Herod orders to be murdered in the hopes that Jesus will be among them.

The story of those murders, the story of what, beginning in the twentieth century, we would call a crime against humanity, is one that we probably ought to tell not just on December 28th but on this Sunday as well. Except, because of a curious choice made by the folks who framed the lectionary (i.e., the schedule of readings that we follow from one Sunday to the next), we just skip past it. Here is Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 13-15, in which Joseph is warned in a dream and flees with his family to Egypt. And then we pop ahead to Verse 19, which begins, “When Herod died,” and it is safe for the family to come home.

And they lived happily ever after! This is almost a Disney story.

Except missing from what we just read together are verses 16 through 18:

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

The Magi, in art and in nativity sets, are often these jovial, kind, harmless figures, gift-wrapped boxes in their hands. But what this story in its fullness tells us is that they are also tragic figures, sorrow-filled figures. They choose to trust Herod, choose to trust the King, someone who ought to be trustworthy, with the amazing good news that the Messiah has been born. And in so doing, they unwittingly invite Herod’s violence into Jesus’ life and Joseph and Mary’s lives and into the lives of who knows how many innocent and unnamed children.

Children who, now, will never get to grow up.

So. I have some distressing news to share with you. Over the last number of weeks, you may have received warning notice from Grace letting you know that there is a scammer or, maybe, multiple scammers hopping onto email pretending to be Jeanne or me or a parishioner here at Grace. And I’m really sorry to let you know that no fewer than two parishioners have been defrauded of money by this scam. One parishioner was defrauded of about $300. More recently, a second parishioner was defrauded of $1300.

Now, I want to be clear. I have just transitioned from the murder of children to the stealing of money, and I want to emphasise that the two are not the moral equivalent of one another. Of course they are not. What I am arguing, I guess, is that thefts such as these are microcosms, small versions, of other, bigger kinds of violence. Violence such as Herod inflicts, violence such as we hear about today in synagogues and churches.

Because in both cases, the violence is against trust, against community. We come to church or synagogue or other places of worship because we trust that we are going to find healing, belonging, and meaning in these places, we trust that we are going to find goodness and love in them, we trust that we are going to find safety in them, we trust that we are going to find God in them. These are places, we reckon, where we are home, where we are allowed to let down our guards.

And when someone takes advantage of that trust and pretends to be a member of the community asking for help or, far worse, brings a gun or a knife a machete into the community, it feels like an especially big violation. And it demands the question: how shall we respond?

Is church too going to be place where we must be on guard at all times?

For some of our fellow people of faith, the answer is “yes.” As you likely know, a recent shooting at a church in Texas was stopped and who knows how many murders prevented because several church goers were armed and one of them was able to shoot and kill the perpetrator. This is the famous “good guy with a gun,” except in real life. Is the takeaway that we at Grace should do the same, that acolytes and choir members ought to have pistols under their robes and keep a machine gun stowed in the pulpit? Microcosmically, do the recent scams mean that the trust that is so much part of this good place is something that we ought to regard with scepticism and suspicion?

Maybe a sensible answer, a street-smart answer, would be “yes.” But that’s not the answer that I want to give. And if Jesus is telling the truth when, in Gethsemane he tells his disciple to put away the sword, when he pushes back when that the disciples want to engage in violence, when, even on the cross, he chooses to forgive, then I don’t think that it is the answer that Jesus wants us to give either.

Maybe it is naïve or foolish or reckless. But I believe that Jesus, the child laying in the manger even as the soldiers draw near, wants us to keep on trusting in goodness and love, keep on hoping for goodness and love, keep on working for goodness and love.

Because I think Jesus’ trust, Jesus’ trust in humanity in spite of everything, is built right into Christmas. Theologians will sometimes say of the incarnation, of the Kingdom, of the Gospel, that these things have an already and a not yet quality. The kingdom is already here, Jesus is already among us. The church is already the body of Christ. And yet silly power struggles and hurt feelings remain. And scams remain. And the worst kind of violence remains.

And in a way, the not yet makes the already even more amazing, Here is all of this brokenness. And here is Jesus, here is God, showing up anyway. That is the best news.

Already and not yet is the paradox built into his paradoxical time of year, a time of year in which we sing paradoxical songs: songs of joy and glad tidings and loneliness and grief. Songs of hope, that Jesus is here among all of the hurt and that Jesus is coming and that Jesus will change everything. That is hope that I need, for which I long.

For we’ve grown a little leaner
Grown a little colder
Grown a little sadder
Grown a little older

We need a little Christmas. Now.

 

The First Sunday after Christmas Day by The Rev. Jeanne Kaliszewski

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

December 29, 2019a

Lessons:

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

John 1:1-18

Psalm 147

When our first child, Gwen, had just turned 4, I asked her to take her plate to the sink after dinner. We have this built in nook in our kitchen with a bench, and she stood up on the upholstered green cushion with her plate in her hand. As she reached the edge of the bench she dropped her plate and it broke on the floor and somehow, I did not see it happen, she fell on top of her broken plate and sliced open her hand. She was screaming and there was blood everywhere and we wrapped her hand up in a towel and scooped her younger brother up and rushed to Providence emergency room. It was January and all these folks were sick with the flu in the waiting room and Seth kept picking up things off the floor and sticking them in his mouth. We waited for hours and, when we finally saw a team, they all ran around anxiously when they saw how deep the cut was and scheduled her for surgery first thing in the morning. The plate had gone through through the fleshy part of her hand almost to the bone.

When our youngest, Tess, was about 14 months old she grabbed her sister’s sandwich, peanut butter and jelly, and started smearing it all over her face. It was dinner time and I think the pasta was boiling over or something so I ran to the stove and when I turned around again there were red welts starting to raise up on her face and chest where the peanut butter had touched her skin. I called 911 and they told me to give her some benadryl and I did and the angry skin calmed down and she seemed to be breathing ok. We took her to the doctor the next day and she explained, if this happened again and she had trouble breathing or her lips and tongue swelled, how we should inject the epi-pen into the fleshy part of her thigh. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…..And the Word became flesh and lived among us

 

What an extraordinary claim.

What a crazy thing to do.

These bodies of ours, our flesh, are wondrously complex and incomparably beautiful. Yet the are also so vulnerable, so easily broken open by the sharp edge of a broken dish, so quickly sent into a cascading and life-threatening spiral by a simple legume.

We don’t have sharp spines or bony plates to protect our soft parts. We are almost entirely composed of soft parts. And yet….

God took part of God’s own self, the Word, the complete and ultimate essence of God, God’s self and God’s child both at the same time (which is also an extraordinary claim, but that is for another sermon), and clothed it in this beautiful and paper thin body of blood and bone and flesh and sent him, Jesus, to us.

Which is, I will say again, pretty crazy. I mean, this is God right? Couldn’t God have, liked, amped up the design or the defenses a bit for Jesus? Couldn’t Jesus have had like stronger skin or plates like a dinosaur or super strength or some sort of superpower to keep God safe?

And the Word became flesh and lived among us….

The Greek is literally translated “And the Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us….” Part of that choice of language is very specific and intentional by the Gospel writer. It hearkens back to the stories of Exodus and to God who takes up residence in the tabernacle, a tent, and moves with the people as they travel in the wilderness in search of a home. The Gospel writer is making a deliberate connection between God in Christ and the God of the Hebrew scriptures.

The word for this tent, in Hebrew, is shekinah. In Exodus God resides in time and space in a physical structure. The Gospel takes this idea, this image, and extends and transforms it. Human flesh becomes the tent, the tabernacle; our bodies are the holy place of God. Our bodies become the shekinah.

We have been taught most of our lives that our bodies are bad, or at least not good enough. We have been taught that our bodies are the place of sin and far from God. That message seems almost universal. It is a hard one to resist. (Our bodies are vulnerable and creaturely and react in pain and desire and that is scary because our bodies are a reminder that we, too, are creatures. Our bodies are a reminder that we are vulnerable. Our bodies are a reminder that we are not in control. Our bodies are )

This prologue to the Gospel of John is a clear call to resist that message, whether we hear it at the gym or in a magazine or in the pulpit. Because our bodies are perfect, our bodies are sacred, our bodies are holy.

So we are called to not only resist this message that our bodies are somehow less, but to embrace our body in all its messiness and crankiness and creaturliness and fleshiness. We can know God in our bodies in a way that is different than in our minds. Trust those goosebumps and sudden tears and things that take your breath away….they often point to an encounter with the holy. As John O’ Donohue writes: Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie.

 

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known, the Gospel writer tells us.

And God in Jesus got a arms and legs and a belly for a tent and camped with us for a while and helped us see, the scripture tells us, the face of God which can never be gazed upon but that was, for a time at least – a face with beautiful brown skin with the most kind eyes you have ever seen.

So this nativity story of John with its nine short words “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” is about as scandalous a theological claim as exists in the Bible.

And about as glorious a theological claim as exists in the Bible.

 

God created these bodies and God became a body.

 

What an act of love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Third Sunday after Advent by The Rev. Martin Elfert

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

 

December 15, 2019

Lessons:

Isaiah 35:1-10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

 Canticle 15 

 

In 1989 I obtained my driver’s license. And then then partway through the next year, I became a full-time bicycle commuter.

These two changes – the driver’s license and the vastly expanded understanding of where all a bike might take me; suddenly my bike was suddenly taking me everywhere – brought with them two things into my life. The first was a profound freedom. Up until then I had been kind of limited, depending on the bus or my feet or the kindness of my parents and their car to get around. Now, I could more or less go where I wanted when I wanted.

The second thing was a new kind of anger. It is an anger that you may know about, an anger that in its extremer form actually has a name: Road rage. There is something uniquely aggravating about getting around on the modern system of streets. I don’t know if that is because it is dangerous – the bent metal of two cars meeting or, worse yet, a car and a bike meeting can send you to the hospital right now or to the morgue right now, and maybe that danger touches the reptilian parts of our brains, the fight or flight parts of our brains. Or maybe there is just something about travelling on asphalt that is plain-old frustrating. I’m curious if our ancestors getting around in buggies pulled by horses had this kind of rage. I’m guessing – and maybe I’m mistaken – that they did not, that there were rarely people hopping off of one horse to kick someone on another horse.

Regardless of the reason, I am glad that smartphones did not exist back then and the camcorders were uncommon, glad that (as far as I know) there are no videos of me on the streets of Vancouver with spit and profanity and fury flying out of my mouth. I blew my stack with some regularity. And looking back on Younger Me, I guess that some of my anger was reasonable: here were people taking stop signs as suggestions and merging across lanes and opening doors without any idea that the shoulder check had ever been invented.

Justified or not, reasonable or not, I rarely achieve that level of anger on the road today. Some of that has to do with aging, I’m sure – the years have rounded off my edges, much as the ocean rounds off the edges of broken glass. But some of it is also a choice.

Be patient, says James. Be patient for the coming of the Lord.

Be patient like the farmer is patient with the earth.

Be patient and do not grumble, lest you be judged.

The Lord is coming soon.

I don’t know if how we behave in traffic is a trivial example, a silly example; there are so many things to get angry about that matter way more than how and where someone merges on the highway. I do know that it’s a real example, an everyday example. And maybe how we meet others on the road is a kind of sacrament – a kind of outward and visible sign – of how we meet our neighbours in general.

I wonder if part of what James means by this entreaty to patience is that grumbling, that rage does nothing to make the Kingdom get here any sooner. And that sometimes it might even slow it down.

Because choosing to be patient – well, it doesn’t mean being morally lazy, acting as though nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Rather, I want to suggest that patience, holy patience, means allowing that your neighbour is as complex as you, as contradictory as you, as well-intended as you, as fallible and broken as you, as loved by God as you.

These days, I still do speak to people who run stop signs or don’t shoulder check. But I speak to them way differently than I did in 1990. Because what I noticed over the years is that when folks swore at me or yelled at me or sent sarcasm or accusation my way, I become all but completely unable to listen to what they had to say. I get closed off like a turtle, all of my energy reflexively going into defending myself.

These days I will say something like, Shoulder check, please! Or That’s a stop sign. I don’t know my patience changes anyone’s behaviour – there is no scientist to interview these folks and to measure their reactions. I do know, if absolutely nothing else, this way of being in the world changes me. To encounter my neighbour with patience – well, my blood pressure is lower, I am happier, I am more generous.

I trust that this practice matters. And I wonder what it would be like if I and we could find a way of practicing this kind of patience not just on the roads but more broadly. What if we met folks who lived differently or voted differently with holy patience? Again, not shrugging at our excusing injustice, but encountering injustice with the assumption that even those who perpetuate it are as complex as we are, as beloved of God as we are? That might change us. That might change everything.

To move around a major city such as Portland, whether it be by car or by bicycle or by foot or by something else, is to have abundant opportunities to lose your temper. There are so many people out there making choices that you just would not make: folks regarding stop signs as suggestions; folks merging or opening doors without any sense that the shoulder check has ever been invented; folks driving in the highway’s leftmost lane who are moving so epically slowly that they are very nearly going backwards; and of course folks so absorbed by their phones that they have no idea that the light changed several weeks ago.

I’ve been a bicycle commuter for very nearly thirty years, going back to my days at the University of British Columbia. And I’ve done my fair share of temper losing, my fair share of getting red in the face of and shouting words that you aren’t allowed to say in church at my fellow commuters.

And looking back on Younger Me, I guess I can understand why he blew his stack as often and as enthusiastically as he did. To be on a bike in traffic – remember that in the early nineties bike lanes essentially did not exist – is to be profoundly vulnerable, vulnerable not an emotional or psychic sense but in an “I might go to the hospital or to the morgue” kind of sense. And when someone in a truck or a car makes a choice that puts you in danger, that old cocktail of adrenaline and fear and anger is not far away. Yelling is maybe reasonable.

But reasonable or not, understandable or not, I don’t yell much on my bike anymore. It isn’t just that I am embarrassed by some of the stuff that I shouted on the streets of Vancouver all the years ago (although I am embarrassed – I hope that there are no video records of me with bulging eyes and pointing figures and spit flying out of my mouth) but more than I came to believe that my yelling wasn’t helping anyone to become a better driver. And it certainly wasn’t helping me.

Now, let me pause here and say that I am in no way advocating for shrugging in the face of injustice. Certain things are wrong and we have a duty as moral people and as disciples to say as much. Rather, I mean something more like this: even as we name what is wrong or unfair or unjust, even as we act in response, is there a way we can do so while also remembering and honoring the dignity and humanity of the one with whom we speak? Is there a way that we can remember that they are contradictory and complex, just like us, that they sometimes make bad decisions, just like us, that most of the time they are trying their best, just like us.

Imagine what politics in this country would be like if we chose to act that way. Rather than assuming that our neighbour is being awful on purpose, destructive on purpose, selfish on purpose.

These days I still do sometimes talk to other folks on the road. But I talk to them really differently than I did in 1990. If someone makes a merge without shoulder checking – and that, as you likely know, is a scary experience on a bike – I’ve gotten to the point where I am able to say, “Could you please shoulder check?”

The First Sunday of Advent by The Rev. Martin Elfert

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

Dec. 1, 2019

Lessons:

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

Psalm 122

Many of you, most of you, will know the famous prose-poem or, if you prefer, the famous confession by the Lutheran Pastor, Martin Niemöller. It’s about his time in Nazi Germany, and it goes like this:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

There are certain ideas that just hang out in our cultural waters. Even if you have never seen the original Star Wars trilogy (and I am appalled to think that there may be people who have never seen the original Star Wars trilogy), you know the broad arc of its tale: if someone puts on their James Earl Jones voice and says, “Luke, I am your father,” you probably know what they are talking about. Even if you have neither read Treasure Island nor seen Pirates of the Caribbean, you probably have a mental image of someone with a peg leg, a parrot, and an inexplicable fondness for prefacing sentences with the word arr.

And even if you have never read the Left Behind series, even if you have never hung out in a church that has something Left Behind-ish as part of its theology, you probably know about the rapture. And as a consequence, Left Behind probably shapes how you hear Jesus’ words today, it certainly shapes how I hear them:

Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.

Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.

Thanks to Left Behind, what do we know about what Jesus is teaching us here?

Well, first, to be taken is something supernatural. One minute you are standing there and the next – Pop! – you are not. Maybe you just vanish or maybe an angel come and gets you or maybe you are sucked into the sky. Julianne Moore was in a movie that came out maybe 15 years ago that featured people getting sucked into sky. Folks flew up, up, and away out of the frame as though on an invisible bungee cord. The movie was okay. But that effect was amazing.

The second thing that we know from Left Behind, that we know about the rapture, is that to be taken is good. You want to be taken, to be taken means that you are good with God. If you suddenly find yourself alone in a field when, just a moment ago, your co-worker was standing beside you, that is not good news. To be the one saying, “I have been left behind” or, as they express it in French, “Je suis gauche derrière,” means either that God has found out who is naughty and who is nice and you are in the wrong column or, at a minimum, it means that God has a seriously difficult task waiting for you.

Either way, being left behind in the field sucks.

Here is my thesis for this morning – or at least the first part of my thesis. I want to suggest that if you and I were to learn Aramaic and then hop into our time machines and hang out with the crowds following Jesus, and if we were to stand up on a rock and announce these two assumptions – to be taken is a supernatural event and to be taken is good – both the crowd around us and Jesus himself would be utterly gobsmacked.

Because what Jesus and his friends living under empire know is the same thing Martin Niemöller knew. And that is that there ain’t nothing supernatural about being taken. And there sure ain’t anything good about it.

If you are working in the fields and one of you is taken it is because the men in uniforms have come. If you are grinding meal and one of you is taken it is because those same men have just kicked the door off of its hinges. If you are taken, you are not going to heaven, at least not directly. You are going to a cage or to a box car or to a place remote enough that no one will hear either the screams or the gunshots.

My father is 94 years old. And like Martin Niemöller, he lived through Nazism, although Dad was a generation younger. And Dad has stories of people being taken. People who criticised the government or complained about the wrong thing of the wrong public figure. Usually the disappeared were never seen again. Although Dad does tell the story of one person who had been taken returning to their village. All of this man’s teeth had been kicked out. And no one, no one, dared to ask him:

What happened to you?

Taking people is how empire functions. Rome had its famous peace, the Nazis at the height of their power were able to occupy huge amounts of land without a whole lot of soldiers keeping an eye on things because everybody knew that to cross empire was to risk being taken and to risk the ones whom you loved being taken.

In a sense, therefore, there were and there are two ways of being taken by empire’s violence. The first is the obvious one, this is the scenario in which the soldier’s come and grab you. This is what happens to John the Baptist and to Saint Stephen and to the folks in my father’s hometown and to Jesus himself. Jesus is taken by the soldiers to the cross. But there is a second way of being taken, and that is the way that Niemöller talks about in his poem, in his confession. This is when we are taken up and into empire’s violence by witnessing and doing nothing.

I am not a communist, so I will not speak out.

I am not a homosexual, so I will not speak out.

I am not a Jew, so I will not speak out.

I am not black in America, so I will not speak out.

I am not transgender, so I will not speak out.

I am not an undocumented immigrant, so I will not speak out.

And while in this second scenario, in this second kind of taking, we may not be taken away in chains, our liberty is nonetheless taken from us, our consciences are taken from us, a part of our humanity is taken from us. Here is Peter, near the end of the story, denying that he knows Jesus.

And so while, a moment ago, I said that Jesus is taken by the soldiers, there is a sense in which Jesus is never taken at all. Because Jesus is the one who, up until the very end of his earthly life, refuses to be taken up into empire’s hatred or into violence. Remember what we read last week: as he hangs on the cross, Jesus could be excused for cursing the soldiers, he could be excused for cursing the thieves who mock him. What he says is forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing. What Jesus says is Today you will be with me in paradise.

And maybe this is the choice that all of us as Jesus’ followers must make. When empire and its violence comes, will we be silent, will we allow ourselves to be taken? Or will we do something hard and good, something Christ-like, and choose to be left behind?

The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King by The Rev. Martin Elfert

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

 

Nov. 24, 2019

Lessons:

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 46
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

It is the end of the church year and, as is always the case, we bring these liturgical 365 days to a close with the Feast of Christ the King. Now, what is unusual about this particular Feast Day, about this particular “always,” is that in this case “always” doesn’t actually mean that all that long. Christ the King is a Feast that was created by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Originally the Pope had Roman Catholics celebrating Christ the King on the final Sunday in October and then, in 1969 or 1970, depending on which part of the internet you ask, the Feast got moved to the last day of the church year.

It is not clear when the Episcopal Church started keeping the Feast of Christ the King. Indeed, if Scott Gunn, the editor of Forward Day by Day and one of the creators of Lenten Madness is to believed, the answer to that question is “never.” Gunn says that the Episcopal Church has never officially adopted this Feast at all and, therefore, what all real Episcopalians know is that what we are actually celebrating today is the Last Day of the Season of Pentecost.

Now maybe that is a lot of insider baseball. But I am bringing it up because I want to suggest the history of this Feast and the intention behind it may have some things to teach us.

Cast your mind back to 1925. Most of us here this morning had not yet finished college by then. But see if you can remember what was happening in the world at that time and, in particular, what was happening in and around Rome where the Vatican is located.

1925 was the year that Benito Mussolini came to power, that he became Prime Minister of Italy. So it was a time of rising nationalism and, still more specifically, of rising fascism. And one of the things that fascism looked and maybe still looks like is a leader, a human being, having this God-like status. Mussolini was someone who bordered on all-powerful, all-knowing. Whose will it was wrong to question, whose will it was maybe even impious to question. To question or to challenge Mussolini was very nearly to question or to challenge God.

Mussolini was Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

And it is in response to this understanding of the world, to this theocracy, to the model in which the leader overlaps with God, that Pope Pius says No. There is one King, there is one Lord, and he ain’t somebody goose stepping around Italy in brown pants.

This Feast, in other words, is explicitly political in nature. It declares that our faith as a Christians, as followers of Jesus, places profound demands on how we engage with the world of politics.

And if we want, we can regard Pius’ decision cynically. We can conclude that Pope Pius was lamenting the erosion of power by the Vatican and by the Pope in particular, that he was longing for centuries gone by in which the Pope was something pretty close to a monarch or a god himself.

And maybe that cynicism would be fair. But here is one of the things that I trust about God: God can and does take things human actions that maybe did not have the best motivations and find a way of making them holy. And no matter how pure or impure the intention behind this Feast may be, it has something important to say.

I think I have told you before about my late friend, Barbara. Barbara was well into her nineties by the time that I met her. She was full of years and full of wisdom. And Barbara said something to me that I think about often. She said:

We need to be careful about what we worship.

Because we will worship something.

To put Barbara’s thought another way, notwithstanding the hand-wringing that sometimes goes on in churches about a perceived decline in religious participation, in fact there has been no decline in religiosity whatsoever. To this day, 100% of human beings are religious, 100% of us our giving our lives, our attention, our hearts to something that is irrational or, if you prefer, transrational.

Virtually all of us, for instance – including virtually all of us here in church this morning – are worshipping early and often in the religion called consumerism. Consumerism is the promise that we will find healing, belonging, and meaning in stuff, that we will find transformation, in the accumulation of stuff. This is a religion that we keep on worshipping in even though it lets us down every single time. As Jeanne shared with us a couple of weeks ago, no matter how many shoes you accumulate, you will not satisfy your deep longings.

Some of us worship in the religion that is booze. It is our own Gary Tuck who pointed out to me that many bars feature row upon row of beautifully arranged and beautifully lit hard liquor, a setup that Gary calls An altar to alcohol. Some of us worship in the religion that is called work, boasting to our friends about how many hours we work and how little sleep we get, answering the question How are you? with the words I’m so busy. And some of us, as in the days of Mussolini, worship a public figure, a celebrity or a politician.

There are way, way more examples that we could find. And so our question is not, Am I religious? but rather it is something more like:

Have I chosen my religion critically and wisely and lovingly? and

Does my religion give life to me, life to my neighbour, life to God’s creation?

Maybe we could use the language of the Bible here and phrase those questions a different way:

Am I worshipping that which is joyous and true? Or am I worshipping a false idol?

Now, I want to stop here and emphasise that when I speak of idolatry, when I speak of bad religion, I am not speaking of other expressions of what we typically call faith. I am not the least bit troubled that someone is a Hindu or a Muslim or Buddhist or whatever. To the contrary, I am glad that those folks have a practice that invites them into conversation with the divine, I trust that, at some level beyond human understanding, those folks and you and I are talking about the same ultimate reality, about the same God.

No. When I speak of idolatry or bad religion, I am talking about that stuff that promises to fill the God-shaped hole that all of us have in our hearts and that fails spectacularly over and over again.

It is in response to this bad religion that comes the Feast of Christ the King. In response to the promises of Mussolini and his contemporary descendants, in response to the promise that you will find your salvation in iPhones and shoes, in response to the promise that you will find freedom in booze, in response to all of these idols, Christ the King says no. Here are religions that invite us into selfishness and apathy and maybe even self-destruction and hatred, and here is title of King, a title that belongs to the patriarchy and to the world of power and violence.

Here is given to a peasant who is murdered for telling too many people that all they really need to do is love God and to love neighbour.

Crown him with many crowns goes the old hymn. And this is the mystery of this Feast day, this is the mystery of our faith. That when all of the false idols gather together, when the bad religion that is empire takes Jesus, takes God, and nails him to a tree, there God reveals the futility and brokenness of empire’s violence once and for all. In God’s suffering on the cross, which God does in solidarity with every human being who suffers and with the suffering of the earth, we discover the staggering truth that Jesus Christ is King.

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost by The Rev. Jeanne Kaliszewski

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

 

Nov. 10, 2019

Lessons:

Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

 

We have been hearing Jesus in a lot of arguments these past few weeks, but this one feels different somehow. There is no back and forth between Jesus and the questioner, no probing questions from Jesus in response, no mysterious parable offered.

Jesus seems simply to have no time for this question because, I think, the question itself presupposes only death. It is death upon death upon death…7 times in fact. And the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God that called to Moses in the desert to free God’s people from bondage and slavery into freedom and justice and new life, has no patience with a worldview that starts and ends only in death.

Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive Jesus says.

Furthermore, the Sadducees riddle posits an afterlife which is pretty unimaginative. I mean, not only is the woman in this hypothetical viewed only in relationship to men in both life and death, and thus still subject in the afterlife to the same oppressive power structures Jesus’ whole ministry is in opposition to, but the resurrection described simply replicates the way life works here and now. This world, its relationships and problems and ways of living and interacting are simply transferred from this life to the next.

This is not how God works, Jesus says. In God we find a qualitatively different kind of life, and a qualitatively different kind of death. In God systems and relationships and structures which are not life-giving have no place. Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.

Jesus offers no details or description of what resurrection looks like. And much like I wish he would explicitly call out the patriarchal assumptions of the Sadducees, I also wish he provide more detail of how resurrection works….but that is not what we get.

What we do get is a clear response that life in God, resurrected life, is completely different than the life we live without God. The systems and ways we interact with one another are fundamentally changed in a resurrected life…are transformed in the love of God.

What is posited by the question in today’s Gospel is a transactional understanding of life and death. But Jesus says, hold up, that is not how God works. God is the God of the living. Life in God is not a series of transactions from birth to marriage to children to death. Life in God, even death in God, is transformed by the love of God which is always generative and creative.

And we are called to participate in that life of love.

We are all here, I think, because this is a place, this is a community of followers of Christ, where we find life. And that means, I think, as Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel, that this is a place where God creates new life and where the transactional patterns of the world are transformed into the life-giving love of the kingdom of God.

And one place where that contrast between transaction and transformation is clear is when it comes to money. The world tries to tell us that spending our money will lead to a new life…..but that’s a lie. Buying a new phone or new shoes or whatever can feel good for a bit, trust my friends I have a closet full of shoes to prove that….but it is ultimately deeply unsatisfying because it is only a transaction. I give someone my credit card and they give me something in return and that thing gets old or breaks or the novelty wears off and I am right where I started.

But sharing my money in this place, giving toward the life-giving work of God that is happening here….that is transformative. A few weeks ago Martin shared that he and Phoebe tithe, they give 10% of their money away. Since I started here with you good people, I have also pledged 10% of my salary from Grace to Grace.

Which from a transactional view seems kind of silly, right? I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to just say I will work for 10% less rather than go through the motions of you all paying me and then me returning the money back to Grace?

But something happens in that process…in that circle. In the process of Grace giving  me a stipend, in the process of you all in this room paying me, I am incorporated into the life and family of this place. And then when I pledge it back to Grace, it becomes so much more than simply a few hundred dollars per month. It is transformed, in and through God’s life-giving Spirit and the good work and people of this place, into something greater than it was……

And that is not to say that only money does that. It certainly does not. But just as resurrection is the promise that our whole selves, our entire being from the tops of our heads to the tips of our toes, will ultimately find new life in God, when we give of our whole selves to this place….our time, our talent, and yes, our treasure, we are fully participating in the life-giving kingdom of God.

God takes our offerings, our money and talents, our bread and wine, and transforms them into something life-giving. The experience of being in this place is far more than the sum of its parts….I mean we have to pay for the heat to be on and the lights to be lit and the space to be clean and the clergy to be here…but those transactions are transformed in and through and with God into a community of Sunday morning worship of song and praise, into a parish hall full of Phame students drumming along with We Will Rock You, into classrooms full of children making art and friendships every summer at Grace Art Camp, and into tables full of hot and delicious food for those who join us here every Friday night.  Just as God transforms everything, even death, into new life, so does God transform all we give to Grace into life and hope and love.

(For 10 am…. In a few minutes, right before the Peace, we will be taking some time to prayerfully consider our financial commitment to Grace for the upcoming year, fill out our pledge cards, and bring them up to the altar. I love that we do this together, as an act of worship and praise and community to be blessed and celebrated together. Thank you for all you are and all you do and all you bring to this place.).

Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.

 

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost by The Rev. Jeanne Kaliszewski

Posted on by gracememorialpdx

October 27, 2019

Lessons:

Jeremiah 14:7-10,19-22
Psalm 84:1-6
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

From the moment we enter this world we are quantified.

Newborns are whisked away from their parents and weighed and measured. They are scored 1 minute after birth and then again at 5 minutes on this scale called the Apgar scale, which from 1 to 10 rates how healthy they are when they are first born.

And this comes from a very good place, I think. This comes from an intention to protect something so vulnerable and new in the world.

But it keeps going, doesn’t it?

I remember as a new parent going anxiously to the pediatrician, at 3 months at 6 months, and given graphs showing where my child fell on the growth curve. I was given scores every 3 or 6 months of how well they were measuring up against the developmental milestones they were expected to be achieving every 3 or 6 months.

And this keeps going and going. When they enter school they have to know a certain number of sight words by the end of kindergarten and are ranked in their reading level compared to their peers in their grade. Assessments are given, standardized tests, college rankings, what major you should choose based on what you will earn…on and on and on. Our lives are quantified by mathematical formulas.

And I think this comes from the same place as it does at the beginning of our lives: to protect us from being a human being in this world, and unpredictable and scary world where we are so vulnerable. And so we hold onto these things we can quantify, these solid numbers that tell us “yes, our children are going to be ok, yes, we are  ok.”

And so in this morning’s Gospel when we hear the Pharisee go to the temple and begin to pray to God (and perhaps to those who are surrounding him) and share how he is measuring up in his life of prayer, in his righteousness, in his justification before God. He prays “I fast twice a week when only once is expected, I give 10% of my income.” I suspect that this impulse in the Pharisee is coming from a similar place, an attempt to guarantee his righteousness and holiness in front of God.

And before I go on I just want to make a quick note about the Pharisees, because it is easy, especially when we spend a lot of time in the Gospel of Luke, to kind of equate Pharisee with hypocrite or corrupt official. And that has more to do with the writer of the Gospel of Luke and the context in which he was writing than it does with the tradition of Pharasaical Judaism which is a rich, important and valuable tradition in the Jewish faith. In fact, there are many scholars who believe that Jesus himself was raised up within the Pharisee tradition. So just a sort of caveat as I go on in this sermon and any time we talk about the Pharisees, please know this is Jesus offering a parable, a character and not something we should use to judge this entire tradition within Judaism.

All that being said, Jesus is very, very critical of this Pharisee in today’s parable. He is critical of the way the Pharisee is attempting to quantify his righteousness and prove himself to be justified in front of God. But perhaps even more so Jesus is critical of this Pharisee when, in temple, when he is praying and the Pharisee looks across and sees a tax collector also there, praying, obviously deeply hurt and in pain, beating his breast, the Pharisee’s reaction is “Thank God, I am not like him.”

That image of the tax collector beating his breast is quite an arresting one, it is almost as if in the presence of God he is trying to break his own heart open, and present it to the Lord.

The academic and sociologist, Parker Palmer, suggests that there are two images we can keep in our mind’s eye when we think about a heart being broken. The first is imagining the heart as a brittle and fragile thing, that when it breaks it breaks like a wine glass dropped on the hard kitchen floor, smashing into thousands of pieces, shards flying everywhere, never to be made whole again.

The other image he suggests we use for a broken heart is that of a fist. A fist in the middle of our chest that when it is broken opens up like a hand, fingers splayed wide, to hold our own hurt but also to hold the hurt of the world in the palm of our hand.

I would suggest today that the tax collector in today’s Gospel, when the Pharisee saw him, was trying to do that very thing, to break open his heart like a hand to recognize in that moment that whatever hurt or anguish or pain had brought him to that place that day, he was ultimately and completely at God’s mercy, vulnerable before God reliant entirely on God’s grace and love.

What’s also interesting about this image, this gesture that the tax collector uses in the temple that morning, this gesture that Jesus refers to in describing him, this beating your breast or chest is one reserved for women in this culture that Jesus lived in. And more specifically women who were grieving a deep and painful loss.

There is perhaps no more powerful emotion in our human experience than that of grief. And perhaps within that spectrum of grief nothing more overwhelming and painful than a parent’s grief at losing a child. The image I imagine for this kind of grief is that it is like being dropped into a dark ocean, angry and stormy, with nothing to hold onto and no land in sight, trying desperately to keep your head above water.

I have some friends, Mary and Dustin, who I think are in this deep abyss of grief right now. I don’t know if y’all had heard of this story by there was a young man, named Owen Klinger, who went missing a couple of weeks ago and his parents were searching for him along with a lot of us as well. Owen was in kindergarten with my daughter and we have known Owen, and Owen’s parents, since those early school days. We did not know Owen well, I do remember Owen as a joyous, athletic, funny, musical kid who was always there. He was really a beautiful boy.

And so last week on Tuesday, at the University of Portland where Owen was in his first year, the community there had a mass to come together and grieve the loss of Owen who, after being missing for two weeks, his body was discovered in the Willamette River. It was clear that the deepest fears of his parents and those who knew him had come true, that he had died.

And this community gathered in the chapel of the University of Portland and mourned the loss of their friend, of their brother, of their son. And after that service Mary and Dustin went out to the press that had gathered in front of the chapel and spoke to them.

And in that moment Mary, most especially, embodied a heart which has been broken, not like glass on the kitchen floor but like a hand put forward to the world. She shared that when she had dropped Owen off at college a couple of months before, she had said to him “Owen, I want you to make a difference, I want you to impact this community.”  She said she had wondered whether he was listening to her. But she said that morning just leaving from a service grieving her son, she said she realized that he had been listening to her. She said that even in his death he had made an impact on this community, that he had brought  people together from all over the city who had looked for him, who had cared for him, who had prayed for him and who held him in prayer and love.

In that moment, her heart was broken open like a hand and she was saying, I think, that the value of his life could not be quantified in the too few years he had spent on this earth but in fact in the love and spirit he had embodied when he was alive and he continued to have in his death. In that moment, God held Mary’s heart and God held Owen’s as well.

I think, sometimes, we think of Christ’s divinity primarily in Christ’s strength, in the miraculous strength it took to overcome death and the power of the resurrection, in the joy we find on Easter morning. And my friends, that is real and there is true joy in the world and there is power in that image.

But I would also suggest that Christ’s divinity is found in his deep vulnerability, perhaps no more than when he was on the cross when he cried out in pain and anguish “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”. In that moment Christ is at his most human and most divine. And the good news is that even in that awful place, that there is no pain so deep, no grief so wide that Jesus or overwhelming that we human beings experience that Jesus is not there with us and always will be.

And we know that, I think, because every Sunday we gather at this altar and we remember Christ’s body broken and the blood poured out for us. And we offer up our hands and a piece of Christ’s heart is put in them and we take that piece of Christ and we bring it into ourselves. And we are called, my friends, to be brokenhearted people and sent out into the world, a world that desperately needs more broke hearts. Hearts broken open in sadness and grief, but also hearts broken open in joy and love.

I would like to leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver:

 

Lead

Here is a story

to break your heart.

Are you willing?

This winter

the loons came to our harbor

and died, one by one,

of nothing we could see.

A friend told me

of one on the shore

that lifted its head and opened

the elegant beak and cried out

in the long, sweet savoring of its life

which, if you have heard it,

you know is a sacred thing,

and for which, if you have not heard it,

you had better hurry to where

they still sing.

And, believe me, tell no one

just where that is.

The next morning

this loon, speckled

and iridescent and with a plan

to fly home

to some hidden lake,

was dead on the shore.

I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.