Featured Story

Why not??

October 11, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Philippians 4:1-9

OK, it is true confession time:

How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? … How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? iTunes? An iPod? An iPhone? An iMac? A MacBook? An iPad?

Isn’t it amazing how ubiquitous those little things are?

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company that he had co-founded with Steve Wozniak, the company that had fired him, and within a few years of his return, our world was a different place.

First he gave us the iPod, that magical little device that carried thousands of our songs.

Two years after that, he gave us iTunes, the fastest, cheapest way and most legal way to buy those songs.

Then he gave us the iMac, the first personal computer that was not steel gray. Then he gave us the iBook. And then the MacBook. And then iPhone. And then MacBook Air. And then the iPad.

In 10 years, one decade, Steve Jobs changed the world.

You know how he did it? He managed to change the world by refusing to settle. He would not settle for seeing things as they were and asking, “Why?” Steve Jobs dreamed of the way things could be and he asked, “Why not?”[1]

“Why not?”

Now whether you are a Mac person or not – and here is my true confession: I am – you have to admit that Steve Jobs, who died last Wednesday, changed the world. He did so because he always, always, was striving for the “Why not?” He was always striving for the pure, for the pleasing, and for the commendable, and whatever he dreamed, he made happen.

In many ways, Steve Jobs emulated what the Apostle Paul charges us with this morning in his love letter to the Philippians:

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Now, I know that when we are listening to Paul’s instructions, they can be somewhat Pollyanish, they can seem like they are some over-the-moon optimism that completely, completely divorces us from the reality that is our lives.

Because when we take a good hard look at our lives right now, when we take an honest look at our lives right now, we know that life is not all that great.

To quote Jim Wallis from his God’s Politics blog on Friday:

“Tomorrow, almost 14 million Americans will still be unemployed.

“Tomorrow, the homes of more than 2,500 new U.S. families will enter foreclosure.

“Tomorrow, one in seven U.S. households still will not know where their next meal is coming from.

“Tomorrow, one in four American children under the age of six will still be living below the poverty line.

“Tomorrow, three billion people around the globe will still be living on less than $2.50 a day.

“Tomorrow, 400 million children will still lack access to clean water.

“Tomorrow, 300 children under the age of five will die in the Horn of Africa because of famine.”[2]

When you paint a portrait of the world with those numbers, the situation seems bleak.

And it seems very nearly impossible to find, much less name, that which is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable. It seems even more impossible to find any excellence.

Quite frankly, when we use those numbers to paint the portrait of the world, most of us think that the world has already gone to hell in a handbasket. And that there’s not much that we can do about it.

And yet …

And yet … there is Paul, writing to us from prison, from a Roman prison, in chains, facing death and still demanding that we look for that which is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, and excellent.

Paul writes these instructions because Paul knew that all things come of God, and therefore, all things are good. Paul knew that each and every one of us comes from God, and therefore, each and every one of us is a beloved child of God.

Paul was looking at the world with God’s eyes, not with human eyes. He was not trying to advocate the “power of positive thinking.” He was not trying to get us to go with a “technique and persuasion”[3] that was Pollyanish. Instead, what he was doing was trying to show us how to fill ourselves with God so that we could go out into the world and take God’s life with us into that world. He didn’t want us to be a bunch of Pollyanas paying no attention to the truth! He was not trying to get us to turn a blind eye to the needs of the world! Or to make us pretend that there’s really nothing wrong, because “I’ve got mine and I don’t really care if other people got theirs.”

Paul is trying to get us up off our duffs and get us to go out into the world with God’s life in us and share God’s life with the world.[4]

Paul wants us to change the world.

To stop looking at things as they are and crying out, “Why, Lord, why???” and to start dreaming of things as they can be and saying, “Why not?!”

Why not?!

Why not focus on the good things and the holy things, the things that come from God and are blessed by God?

Why not build on God’s holy foundations, so that we can make the world a better place – not the guy up the street, us, so that we can make the world a better place!

Why not make the “why not’s” of our dreams and make them come to fruition?!

This is our moment, my friends.

This is our time …

It is our time to stop the negative comments that pass for conversation in our lives and to start enunciating every good, God-blessed thing that we can find in each other.

It is our time to give grace, even when nobody’s giving grace back!

It is our time to work together for the common good, not for our gain, but for the common good!

This is our time to change the way things are, so that we can make them the way they can be.

Right now, when the world seems to be in such desperate straits, when our public conversation is so nasty that we don’t even want to expose our children to it, when our leaders cannot even go one day – one day, one, measly day – without denigrating people on the other side of the aisle, right now, this is our time, this is our opportunity to change the world.

It is not enough for us to simply say, “Well, this is wrong, and this is bad, and this is awful!”

It is not enough to denounce evil, because “denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”[5]

What we have to do is dream of the way things can be and say, “Why not?”

And then go make those things happen!

And we can do this. We can focus on even the tiniest of things, that are true, that are honorable, that are just and pure and pleasing and commendable. If we spent more time looking for what is excellent and worthy of any praise, and less time looking for what we can tear down, we could make the world a better place!

This is our call.

And now is our time.

Now, is anybody here going to be the next Steve Jobs?

Anybody?

I know I’m not.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t emulate him. That doesn’t mean that I can’t dream the way that Steve Jobs dreamed. That doesn’t mean that I can’t change the world.

We have an opportunity. We have an opportunity to dare to dream … as Paul dreamed … as Jobs dreamed.

And we have the ability to make those dreams come true.

Right now.

Why not?

Amen.

Sermon preached at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Burke, Va., on the 17th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23, Year A, 9 October 2011.

[1] Paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw, the Serpent to Eve, in Back To Methuselah.

[2] Jim Wallis, “Praying for peace and looking for Jesus at #Occupy Wall Street,” God’s Politics blog, http://blog.sojo.net/2011/10/06/praying-for-peace-and-looking-for-jesus-at-occupywallstreet/.

[3] paraphrase from William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia, http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/AEpPentecost17.htm

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.” ~ Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, the story of the Rwandan genocide.

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Define yourself …

October 3, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Philippians 3:4b-14

Who are you?

Who are you?

How do you define yourself?

When I was a child, back in the ‘60s (and yes, I’m telling you my age now) we used to define ourselves by our ethnicity … who was Irish, who was Italian, who was French, who was English. And while we might have been nice about the terms we used to define ourselves, we certainly were not nice when it came to defining others.

By the time I was 7, I think I knew every derogatory term out there. You name an ethnicity, and I knew the name.

And I used it.

Because that’s what we did in those days.

We used names – horrible names – to define each other.

I am one-half French, one-quarter Irish and one-quarter Russian. I got called names right along with the rest of my friends.

And I thought that was normal. Because that’s the way the world was in those days …

Thankfully, the world has changed somewhat in the last 40 years, to the point where a lot of the youths I know don’t even know what those derogatory names mean, much less use them.

Which is a good thing on every level, I admit, but in the long run, it turns out those names never meant a thing anyway.

Because those names? They don’t define us. Our ethnic heritage, like so many other attributes of our lives, is nothing more than an accident of nature.

What defines us … the only thing that defines us … is that we are beloved children of God, created in God’s image, called into being by God’s love for us … for each of us.

Everything else?

Whether we’re tall or short, black or white or Latino or Asian, blue-eyed or brown-eyed? The countries we come from? The countries our ancestors came from?

They don’t mean a thing.

Because they really are but accidents of nature.

Think about it: You don’t get to choose where you are born. You don’t get to choose the color of your skin or your eyes or your hair. Where your parents came from? You have no say in that. So these things … which so often seem so important to us … really do not define us.

What defines us … what really defines us … is that we are beloved children of God.

This is what Paul is trying to teach us this morning in his letter to the Philippians.

He is writing to a community – a new community – in Philippi, a city filled with people from all over the world, with Roman citizens and slaves, with Greeks and Romans and Jews and Africans and any other nationality you can think of. In that community, you kept to your own, as it were. Sometimes, your own was defined by your faith or ethnicity. More commonly, it was defined by your trade … so stone-layers belonged to an association of stone-builders. Tent-makers hung out with tent-makers. Each form of labor had an association of some kind, and that association was your community.

But the community to which Paul was writing was breaking those boundaries. Tent-makers and stone-layers and everyone else was all mixed together in this new community of Christ followers, this community that broke all the boundaries that normally fenced the people in in those days: boundaries of race and religion and work and citizenship.

Paul is telling the Philippians that it was OK to cross those boundaries, because they didn’t define the people any more. What defined them, Paul says, is their faith in Christ Jesus, which taught them, as they had never been taught before, that each of them was a beloved child of God.

To make sure that the Philippians understand this idea of radically realigning their lives, of radically and dangerously going against the grain that Roman society demanded, Paul lays out his own credentials first. He was, he says:

• “Circumcised on the eighth day” – meaning according to the Law, meaning, he came from a Law-abiding family.

• “A member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin” – meaning that he was descended from Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest son, meaning that Paul’s parents were not some Johnny-come-lately Jews, but were descended from a long and faithful line of Jews.

• “A Hebrew born of Hebrews” – again, Paul was not a convert. He was born into the faith.

• “A Pharisee” – meaning that not only had he studied the Law with the very best teachers, but he could interpret the Law and then tell you how it applied to you.

• “A persecutor of the church” – remember, this is Paul, who once was Saul, who stood by and held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen, the first deacon to be martyred. This is Paul, who once was Saul, who was on that road to Damascus precisely so he could arrest these Christians and haul them back to Jerusalem to be tried, found guilty and stoned to death just like Stephen.

• “As to righteousness under the law, blameless” – This is Paul at his arrogant best: I knew I was in right relationship with God.

Paul is explaining that he knew exactly who he was, defining himself through worldly standards (and yes, even the Law was, in Paul’s estimation, a worldly standard). And he was darned proud of who he was in the world.

But now, he says, now … all those definitions are gone. They no longer matter.

Because now, he says, he defines himself solely as belonging to Christ, he names himself a beloved child of God, saved through Christ, obedient to Christ, following Christ, every moment of every day.

Those old definitions? he asks.

They are nothing but rubbish. Garbage. Basura.

Because Paul knows, to the core of his being, that he belongs to God, and he defines his belonging through Jesus Christ.

The truth is, we are just like Paul.

Like him, we have been asked to give up our past – glorious or desperate, it matters not – asked to give up our worldly identities so that we can find, so that Christ can define us.

Everything in the past? Not important.

Because our future lies in the future, with God.

Now imagine what our world would look like if we took this definition to heart, if we really defined ourselves in this way.

How would we treat ourselves? What would it feel like to know that the single most important part of our identity is being the beloved?

Defining ourselves in God means that we accept people for who they are – beloved children of God – and then we act as though everyone – everyone – actually is a beloved child of God.

Imagine what the world would look like if we actually lived this way. If we actually dared to be as bold as Paul, to define ourselves not by the world’s standards, but by God’s standards, and then acted that way?

I can tell you what happens: The world looks at us and says, “You can’t do this. You’re a dreamer. You’re a fool.”

But what the world has to say about this is not important, because the world doesn’t get to make those decisions. God does!

And God, who created us all in God’s image, declares that all of us belong, that all of us are equal, that all of us are beloved.

So let’s do this:

Let’s be radical go out into the world today – and every day after today – and let’s live as the people we truly are: God’s.

And let’s treat everyone else as the people they truly are: God’s.

This is the greatest gift we can give to the world: To stop defining ourselves by accidents of nature and start defining ourselves by the only thing that matters:

We are beloved children of God.

Full stop.

Amen.

Sermon preached on the 16^th Sunday after Pentecost at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bailey’s Crossroads, Va., Proper 22, Year A, 2 October 2011.

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Gospel-worthy

September 18, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Philippians 1:21-30

The House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church is meeting in Quito, Ecuador, this week. One hundred and sixteen bishops from the 109 dioceses spread out over 16 nations have gathered to pray, to learn … and to think …

One thing they were asked to think about came from Don Compier, a liberation theologian who recounted to the bishops a recent conversation he had had.

Compier told them that “he was recently asked by someone in another denomination: ‘If you care about the poor, why are you an Episcopalian? Aren’t you just interested in liturgy?’ Compier reminded the bishops that “our tradition of witness to the concerns for the poor is not well known, even by us.”[1]

What Compier was asking the bishops to think about was, in essence, the same thing St. Paul asks, in a variety of ways, throughout his letters: How then shall we live?

Shall we live as people who are in love with liturgy?

Or shall we live our lives in a manner worthy of the Gospel, as Paul exhorts us this morning?

And what, pray tell, does that even mean, to live our lives in a manner worthy of the Gospel?

For Paul (and implicitly, for the person who asked Compier that question), Gospel-worthy lives begin and end in community.

Gospel-worthy lives are never about us … They are never about getting ahead or getting more, never about adopting the attitude of “I’ve-got-mine-and-I-don’t-care-if-you-get-yours,” never about leaving others behind.

Gospel-worthy lives are about love.

Gospel-worthy lives are love.

Paul makes this clear in what is known as his “love letter to his friends in the church at Philippi.”[2] Everything he writes them is about how we are to live in love and in community because this is what God desires for us.

As Walter Brueggemann, one of the most respected theologians of our times, preached not long ago:

Paul says to his beloved church, imagine your life caught up in the great divine drama in order that you may not imagine your life as a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, in order that you may not imagine your life as an endless rat race that no one can win, in order that you will not imagine your life as an endless series of accidents that amount to very little. Christians (he says) are people who imagine and receive their lives differently, bracketed and ordered by God’s goodness and God’s resolve for us.[3]

Our lives will have meaning, our lives will fulfill God’s desires for us, if we bracket and order our lives in God’s goodness, in God’s resolve, if we live focused not on ourselves but on God’s beloved community.

That’s what Paul is talking about when he says “living is Christ,” that living is “fruitful labor” for him, that it is “more necessary for you.”

Paul is talking about community, which can only be lived in love.

Even the word Paul uses to instruct his beloved friends in Philippi underscores this. The Greek word for “live your life” is politeusthe – which comes from the Greek word for “city” – polis – which according to one commentator “has the sense of ‘live as a free citizen,’ [or] ‘conduct your public life.’”[4]

So Paul is crystal clear that our lives are never to be about “me-me-me, mine-mine-mine.” Not only are they are always to be focused on others, but, Paul insists, we are to bring our focus as a community.

Because we are the Body of Christ, Paul teaches, we are to act as the Body of Christ.

If all of us were to focus our lives and our love together, there wouldn’t be 52 million Americans living in poverty right now. There wouldn’t be 48 million Americans living right now without health insurance.

If we focused our lives and love together, there wouldn’t be 14 million unemployed people in our own country, there wouldn’t be millions of our children going to school hungry every morning, there wouldn’t be a wealth disparity in this country and in this world that more closely models medieval times than modern times.

If we brought our Gospel-worthy lives to bear on the problems of the world, do you really think there would be 650,000 Somalis about to starve to death in the Horn of Africa right now, because no one will give them food?

Would there really be children who die of easily cured diseases – diseases we can cure for less than one dollar per child – because no one will give them medicine?

If we lived Gospel-worthy lives – and we can easily choose to do so – each person, each beloved child of God in this world – would have enough – not too much, not an over-abundance of things, but enough – enough food and water, enough shelter, enough education, enough money to not just survive but thrive.

Paul “is speaking (to us) about how a community whose common life is founded and sustained by the crucified and risen Christ should live together.” [5] And, he’s telling us, this is our choice to make.

Now, I need to warn you:

Being Gospel-worthy – living Gospel-worthy lives – is dangerous. It gets us in trouble. It upsets the status quo. And sometimes, when we focus our lives in this way … sometimes … we end up in jail … like Paul. Sometimes, we end up dying … like Jesus and Paul.

You don’t think Paul was hauled off to prison – which is where he was when he wrote this love letter to the Philippians – just because he didn’t pay his taxes, do you?

As Paul himself would say, Me genito! By no means!

Paul ended up in jail – Paul ended up being executed – because he upset the Roman apple cart!

Because he kept getting in the face of those in power, he kept threatening those in power, with the Gospel … with Jesus’ instructions to care for those in need, to feed the hungry, to cure the sick and touch the leper and eat with the tax collectors and worship with the prostitutes and the destitute … to give hope to the hopeless and power to the powerless, to include the excluded, to love the unloved.

And that’s just not where the world – or, I should say, where the powers-that-be in the world – want us to go.

The powers-that-be in no way want us to stand up and say, No more. Nada mas. Bas. Basta.

In no way do the powers-that-be want us – members of the Body of Christ – to upset their apply carts.

But we are the Body of Christ, commanded by none other than Christ, to love God and love our neighbor – to live in love and community every moment of our lives, to make choices – every moment of our lives – that are for the common good, not for our own good only.

• • •

This past summer, I was at Camp McDowell, the Diocese of Alabama’s camp and retreat center, helping to lead a week-long summer camp program for 125 seventh- and eight-graders. Our program was focused on how to live together as the Body of Christ.

We called it, OMG, Y’all! (That stands for … wait for it … wait for it …) On a Mission From God, Y’all. (Not what you thought, eh?)

One part of the camp program was a game called “Survival,” in which we asked each small group of about 10 campers to become a “nation,” to which we then gave red and green beads.

Each red bead, we told the campers, represented 1,000 people.

Each green bead, we said, represented enough food for 1,000 people.

No group – no nation – started off with an equal amount of beads.

Some nations had lots of red beads – lots of people – and very few green beads – very little food.

Other nations had enough food to feed their people several times over.

The goal of the game, we said, was for each nation to end up with an equal number of red and green beads – with enough food to care for all their people.

Now, what normally happens in this game is that the nations swap food and people with each other – all the while dealing with disasters or blessings, with locusts or emigration, with tornadoes or gentle rainfall, with drought or bumper crops, with whatever disaster or blessing we decided to drop on them, whenever we decided to do so. What normally happens is that at the end, each nation has enough food to feed its people, but some nations are huge, and others are small.

That’s what normally happens.

Not at Camp McDowell, of course.

There, the kids decided first that they would take care of each other. One group, every time it found itself with a surplus of food, started going to other groups and simply giving their extra food away for free, asking nothing in return. Others entered covenants: You take care of us, we’ll take care of you. Still others formed coalitions, sharing food and people equally.

And then, in the end, in a completely unexpected turn of events (which I have never seen before), the groups decided they no longer wanted to experience famine or overcrowding. So they joined together.

All 12 groups.

Into one nation.

That way, they reasoned, everyone would have enough to eat. No one would go hungry ever again.

May I remind you that these children were in seventh and eighth grade? That they ranged in age from 11 to 14?

These children understood what it means to live Gospel-worthy lives.

And then they lived them.

Let me tell you: Those children in Alabama? They knew how to answer Paul’s great question of “How then shall we live?” Yes, it was just a game in a week filled with games. But they still did it. For them, it was a no-brainer! (Actually, I believe what they said to me was, “Duh!”)

And if those children can do it, can’t we as well? If they can see this solution as a “Duh!” can’t we do the same? After all, we are the adults here!

The children already know this, and they teach us about our call in life. Their answer Paul’s question:

We are called … as members of the Body of Christ … to live Gospel-worthy lives.

We are called to be Gospel-worthy.

Gospel-worthy.

Amen.

Sermon preached on the 14^th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20, Year A, 18 September 2011, at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Blue Grass, Va.

[1] Quoted in “Theology of Liberation” on the blog of The Rt. Rev. Michael Hanley, Bishop of Oregon, http://www.bishop.episcopaldioceseoregon.org/, 15 September 2011. Compier is a professor at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Mo.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, “A Love Letter…concerning a Work in Progress,” First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Mich., 6 December 2009, http://www.fpcbirmingham.org/worship/sermons/a-love-letter/, emphasis added.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Susan Eastman, Assistant Professor of the Practice of the Bible and Christian Formation,

Duke Divinity School, Durham, N.C., “Reciprocating Glory,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx.

[5] Stephen E. Fowl. Philippians (Two Horizons New Testament Commentary), 79, Kindle Edition.

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Filed Under: Blog Articles, Featured Story, Scriptures, Sermons Tagged With: Camp McDowell, Diocese of Alabama, Don Compier, Famine, Gospel-worthy, Health care, Paul, Philippians, Somalia, Unemployment, Walter Brueggemann, Wealth disparity

Extravagant forgiveness, extravagant love

September 11, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Matthew 18:21-22

How many of you have found yourself weeping this week?

How many of you have found yourself turning off your televisions and radios, turning past stories in the newspaper, skipping the Facebook comments …

… because you just can’t go there again?

Ten years after the horrible tragedies of 9/11, many of us, myself included, are still filled with grief.

We have moved on from the immediate shock, from the numbness, from the piercing pain that came with the attacks.

But we are still filled with grief.

• • •

This morning’s Gospel lesson from Matthew – chosen years and years and years ago, long before September 11, 2001 – is about forgiveness. In it we hear the story of Peter – poor, befuddled Peter, who never quite gets it but never stops trying – asking Jesus how many times he has to forgive.

“As many as seven times?” he asks, knowing that seven times’ worth of forgiveness would be wildly extravagant.

No, Jesus replies. “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

This is, I tell you, a lesson in extravagance, in the extravagant, wild, radical, never-ending love of God that Jesus proclaims in his preaching, in his teaching, in his healing, and in the end, with his own life.

We are, Jesus says, to forgive extravagantly. More than we want. More than we can imagine.

And yet, on this morning, on this tenth anniversary of terror and murder, that kind of forgiveness seems … well, it almost seems out of our reach.

It almost seems as if God is asking us to do something far greater, far grander than we can possibly imagine, much less accomplish.

And yet … it is what God is asking of us.

Forgive.

More than you want.

More than you can imagine.

I don’t know about you, but I need to admit something, I need to put something out on the table:

I am not certain I know how to do this.

I am not certain I can forgive as extravagantly as Jesus asks.

And I think that is why I am still weeping, 10 years after the fact.

Like you, I remember that day.

I remember hearing the plane fly over my parish in Annandale and saying to the secretary, “Wow, that guy is way off course.”

I remember hearing the plane hit the Pentagon and saying to her, “Man, that guy just dropped a load,” because I thought it was a construction accident.

I remember returning hours later to my apartment, less than a mile from the Pentagon, and finding it filled with dust and ashes … because I had left the windows open – it was such a beautiful day, wasn’t it?

I remember being unable to keep my apartment clean or to sleep soundly for weeks afterwards, because the trucks carrying the debris – the dust and the ashes – drove by my place, day after day, night after night, constantly spreading more dust, more ash, constantly rumbling along.

Like you, I remember the military jets that flew overhead night and day, watching as they left lazy contrails in their wake.

I remember the fear … the grief … the loss …

I remember …

And because I remember … so vividly … so profoundly … I think I cannot fully forgive.

Not as Jesus asks.

Not seventy-seven times.

Not yet.

• • •

And yet …

I want to forgive.

Really, I do.

I want to forgive because it is what Jesus taught us to do. It is what we pray for when we pray in the very words that Jesus gave us: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

I want to forgive, because I think if I don’t, my very soul may be in danger.

But I’m not certain I’m there yet.

Which is why, especially this past week, I have cried.

• • •

You know what is that I cannot forgive?

It’s not the hijackers, Mohammed Atta and those 18 others who turned airplanes into missiles.

And it’s not Osama bin Laden and all who have followed his misbegotten ideas of faith.

No, what I cannot forgive is the hatred that fueled those men to do commit these atrocities.

What I cannot forgive is anyone bastardizing the love of God for all of God’s beloved children.

And what I cannot forgive is the suffering that these men caused, all so they could – they thought – have their own way.

I agree with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who wrote, in 1955:

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and a willingness to remain vulnerable.”[1]

The hatred they rained upon us, the deliberate misinterpretation of God’s will, the suffering they caused … for what? I ask you … those are the stumbling blocks on my path to forgiveness.

From conversations I have had with others, from news stories I have read and the very few news shows I have watched or listened to, I think I am not alone in this pain.

And so I think that perhaps now, on this day, the tenth anniversary of that awful day, which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try, I think that perhaps today is a day to … let go.

A day to … set my feelings free.

A day … for release.

For that is what the word forgive means, in the Greek. It means release. To let go. To set free.

Because only by releasing, by letting go, by setting free, do we have a chance … a chance … not of moving on, but of moving forward.

Author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor, writing in 1998 – again, years before 9/11, proclaimed:

When you allow your enemy to stop being your enemy, all the rules change. Nobody knows how to act anymore, because forgiveness is an act of transformation. It does not offer the adrenaline rush of anger, nor the feeling of power that comes from a well-established resentment. It is a quiet revolution, as easy to miss as a fist uncurling to become an open hand, but it changes people in ways anger only wishes it could.[2]

I want fists to uncurl today. Not just my fist, but all fists. I want our hands to be open … to the possibility of transformation … to the possibility of peace … to the possibility of love.

The Rev. David F. Sellery, a priest in Bay Shore, N.Y., wrote about forgiveness in a reflection for today:

Forgiveness, he says, “is the essence of Christian love. … It is not a largesse we dispense by power of our innate superiority [but rather] the grace of God transmitted through us. It is,” he says, “the ultimate witness of Christ’s love in the world.”[3]

Sellery knows that the pain of 9/11 remains. And he is clear that forgiveness is not a “get-out-of-jail-free card for perpetrators.” God, he says, “has not issued an easy-pass for evil in the world to benefit the bad guys.”[4] There is to be justice – as long as it is not revenge.

Sellery concludes: “The choice is ours. We can live in love or we can live in hate. Both are transformative forces. We can become what we value and love or we can risk becoming the evil we obsess upon.”[5]

Forgiveness, it seems, really is about opening our fists to the possibilities of new life.

Writing in The Washington Post last Tuesday, Lynne Steuerle Schofield, whose mother, Norma Lange Steuerle, died on American Flight 77 when it flew into the Pentagon, suggested the same kind of transformation, the same willingness to open our fists to release. She said that with every anniversary, it is as though she is being asked to go to her mother’s funeral over and over and over again. Instead, she wrote:

What if we all spent the 11^th anniversary of the attacks (she is speaking of next year) reflecting on what we admired most about our lost loved ones and trying to emulate those ideals? Or what if we spent time building not another structure in memorial but, instead, building our relationships with others? Or raising money for our favorite charity?[6]

If we want the world to be more compassionate, safer and more equitable, she writes, we have to work to make that happen. We all have to be on board. We should reflect on the characteristics of our loves ones that we want to keep alive, and then we must behave that way.[7]

Our Gospel today, my friends, teaches us about forgiveness. It teaches us about extravagant forgiveness, which can only come from extravagant love.

Not our love.

For our love is, sadly to say, far too often far too small.

But God’s forgiveness?

God’s forgiveness is extravagant. It is overwhelming.

Because it comes from God’s extravagant love.

And it is what God is calling us to.

I may not be there … yet.

But if I can’t forgive extravagantly, perhaps I can love … just a little bit more extravagantly. Perhaps I can, as Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori says, be “more inclined toward peace,” at least a little bit more extravagantly.

Perhaps I can relax my hand on the pain that still grips me – and in that moment, release the pain as I reach out to others still in pain, still in mourning.

I think that this morning, I am more like Peter than I realize: I haven’t quite gotten it yet, I still can’t quite go to where Jesus wants me, but I am still trying to understand. Still trying to be extravagant with my forgiveness, my release, my love.

My prayer for us this morning … for those of us here, for the Church as a whole, for this nation and for the world … is that we relax our hands, opening them as much as we can. My prayer is that we focus on the extravagance of God’s love for us, and in the releasing of our pain and sorrow, we set that love free for the whole world to see and know and hear and feel.

We do not have to forget.

We cannot forget.

But perhaps … just perhaps … with the help of our Lord, we can forgive.

Amen.

Sermon preached for the Service of Remembrance on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church, Leesburg, Va., Sept. 11, 2011. (Proper 19, Year A)

[1] Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea, 1955.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Christianity Today, Feb. 9, 1998.

[3]The Rev. David F. Sellery is rector of St. Peter’s By-the-Sea Church and Day School in Bay Shore, New York. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/80050_129713_ENG_HTM.htm

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Lynne Steuerle Schofield, “A 9/11 event that embraces the future,” The Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-911-event-that-embraces-the-future/2011/09/01/gIQAm6np7J_story.html?fb_ref=NetworkNews&fb_source=profile_multiline.

[7] Ibid.

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Filed Under: Featured Story, Scriptures, Sermons Tagged With: 9/11, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, David F. Sellery, Extravagance, Forgiveness, Grief, Katharine Jefferts Schori, Letting go, Love, Lynne Steuerle Schofield, Matthew, Mourning, Peter

You are invited to the dance … whatchya gonna do?

September 10, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

The keynote address at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, College Park, Md., at their Homecoming Dinner, 10 September 2011.

A story from the 2^nd century after Christ, of two monks in the Egyptian desert:

A disciple went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I am able, I keep my little rule, my little fast and my little prayer. I strive to cleanse my mind of all evils thoughts and my heart of all evil intents. Now, what more should I do?”Abba Joseph rose up and stretched his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He answered, “Why not be transformed into fire?”[1]

Why not be transformed … into fire?

• • •

My friends, how many times have we been like the disciple seeking guidance from the Abba? How many times have we said, “Now, what more should I do?”

The disciple kept all the rules of the monastic community, what he calls the “little” things – not meaning those things of minor importance but rather his private disciplines. He followed the rules set out for each monk: good works, hospitality, moderation of the mind and mouth, humility, obedience, communal living and communal property, stability … His “little fast” was eating two simple meals a day, less in Lent and Advent … His “little prayer” was the private prayer time each monk was enjoined to have daily … He did his best to cleanse his mind and heart of evil thoughts and intentions …

In other words, the disciple was as faithful as he could possibly be.

But he sensed … somehow … that there was something more. Or rather, that there was something missing.

So he went to the Abba, the abbot, of the monastery, to Joseph, a holy man, who led the monks, who directed them in the lives and prayers, a man, the disciple was certain, who would know what more the disciple could do.

The answer Abba Joseph gave was, most likely, not the one the disciple expected.

Because rather than focusing on yet another thing to do, Abba Joseph urged the disciple to focus on who he could be.

“Why not be transformed into fire?” the holy man asked.

And why not?

Why not be transformed into fire?

Why not become something entirely new, something possibly uncontrollable, something all-consuming, something passionate?

Abba Joseph didn’t tell the disciple he had to stop doing the “little” things, because Abba Joseph knew those little things were important. After all, who can argue with good works … hospitality … moderation of the mind and mouth … humility … obedience … communal living and communal property … stability (imagine what our world would be like if we practiced all those things every single day … intentionally)?

Who can argue with eating a little less … intentionally?

Who can argue with daily prayer … especially if it is intentional?

And who, pray tell, would ever argue with cleansing our minds of evil thoughts, or cleansing our lives of evil deeds?

So the abbot, you see, wasn’t saying: Stop doing these things.

Instead, he was urging the monk to let those practices take him to the next step, the next practice … to transformation.

Like the inhabitants of Jerusalem whom the prophet Jeremiah addressed, proclaiming, Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it …” the disciple was standing at a crossroad.

Do more?

Be more?

Focus on doing the little things?

Let those little things transform me?

Isn’t this the same place where we find ourselves this night, this night when you as the people of St. Andrew’s celebrate your Homecoming?

Isn’t this night a crossroads for you, as it was for the disciple, as it was for the inhabitants of Jerusalem?

You are gathered here this night to celebrate who you have been, and you are gathered there this night to consider who you might be.

Your parish has been here for 121 years. You began your life together in a small room over Calvert’s Hall, with a mission “directly related to serving the students of the Maryland Agricultural College, now the University of Maryland at College Park.”[2]

You moved from Calvert’s Hall to a building that first was a tobacco barn, then a stable, then a Presbyterian church. You built this church in 1930, added a parish house in 1954, and built the parish hall in 1967.[3]

But this is not a night in which to focus only on what you have done.

And it is not a night to focus only on what you might do.

No, my friends, this night is the night for you to focus on who you can be.

You have done, and are doing, many marvelous things. You have taken, and are taking, care of the little things that are so important. You follow the little disciplines, you pray, you feast when you can, fast when you must, you provide hospitality, you pay your bills and you practice, as best you can, humility.

But still …

Is there something more?

Not something more that you can do …

But something more that you can be …?

• • •

Another story.

But first … some background.

For four years, I served as a missionary in Sudan, living in the town of Renk, in the northernmost portion of South Sudan, at that place where North met South, where Arabs met Blacks, where Muslims met Christians.

I arrived in Sudan three days before the peace agreement that ended Sudan’s third – and longest – and deadliest – civil war went into effect. I arrived at a time when Northerners and Southerners, Arabs and Blacks, Muslims and Christians still distrusted each other, still grew still in each other’s presence, still judged each other by the color of their skin, the language they spoke, the tribe to which they belonged.

The town of Renk, in the Diocese of Renk of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, was, throughout the 21-year civil war (the third, the longest, the deadliest civil war) a garrison town, meaning that at some point early in that war, the North took over the town, stationed thousands of Northern, Arab, Muslim soldiers (and their families) there, and made sure that the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the army of the South, had no ability to function – or to fight – there.

Being a garrison town means that Renk grew from a small village of Southerners belonging to the Dinka tribe to a small town peopled by members of more than a dozen tribes from North, South, East and West.

Because each tribe speaks a different language, and each tribal language has up to 100 dialects, the most common language in South Sudan is actually Arabic. Not because the Southerners want to speak that language, but because the North forced that language upon them.

Which means that disparate peoples from all over Africa’s largest nation had only one way to communicate: in the language of the oppressor.

So when I arrived, on July 6, 2005, it was obvious to me that the language I most needed to learn was Arabic. Or, to be more accurate, Araby souk, known by linguists as Sudanese Creole. (In other words, heaven forfend we should bother to conjugate a verb!)

Speaking Arabic meant I could communicate with everyone.

But speaking Arabic also meant that I faced tough questions and uncomfortable moments.

Because I deliberately did not identify with any one tribe.

That’s the background.

And now, the story:

About three years into my service, I was sitting on a log on a dusty street corner in downtown Khartoum, then the nation’s capital, drinking tea. (Tea and coffee shops in Sudan are not like tea shops in the United States. We’re not talking about Starbucks here. There are no nice seats, no air conditioning, no espresso machines or milk steamers, no wi-fi … just low-sitting stools and logs, a charcoal fire, water purchased from the latest donkey cart to go by, powdered milk …)

Several young men, all from the Dinka tribe, became upset when they heard me speaking Arabic.

Why, they demanded – in English, no less –Why was I speaking that language? Why wasn’t I speaking Dinka?

Because, I replied, Arabic is the language most people understood in Sudan.

Did I even know Dinka?

Yes, I said – in Dinka. I know some.

After they berated me for not knowing Dinka, the language of the people where I lived, they challenged me: “To which tribe do you belong?”

Now, this might not seem like an important question here in the United States, but in Sudan, this is a loaded question … very loaded. Declare the right tribe, and you had friend for life, who would stick by you and defend you, no matter what.

Declare the wrong tribe, and you could find yourself caught up in a long-standing tribal or ethnic or blood feud.

So I thought carefully about my answer:

I belong, I finally said, to the tribe of God, to the only tribe that matters.

• • •

Far too often in our lives, when we find ourselves standing at the crossroads, trying to decide whether to go right or left, forward or backward, we fall back on our tribal ways. We rely on the practice of TAWADDI – That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It (you know the old Episcopal joke, right? Change that light bulb? Change that light bulb? You can’t change that light bulb! My grandmother gave that light bulb!)

But in doing so, we forget …

We forget that the only tribe that matters is the tribe of God.

The color of our skin, the language we speak, our gender, our sexual orientation, our ethnicity … none of those things matter. Not to God. Those things are but accidents of history.

Because to God, each of us is … and all of us are … beloved children of God.

Which is what we need to remember … when we are standing at the crossroads of our lives.

Before we can decide what to do, we need to remember who we are, and we need to remember whose we are.

We are beloved children of God.

And we belong to God.

We know that we are beloved because God says so. God declared, in the very beginning, that we were to be created in God’s image. And what is God’s image, if it is not first and foremost that of love?

Our creation is not a matter of God’s need, for we are not necessary to God. We know that because God was before we were, and God will be after we are, so we simply cannot be necessary to God. Which means that God wantedus, that God desired us, that God loved us into being.

And isn’t that wonderful news?

To know that we are loved … from before time began, throughout our lives, and until the ages of ages?

Isn’t that what we all are seeking?

Love?

Let me be clear here: I tell this to every infant, every child, every adult I baptize. The most important thing about you, the most important thing you’ll ever need to know in your life is this:

God loves you.

God … loves … you. And you. And you. And you. And you.

As I’m walking each infant, each child, each adult up and down the aisle after the baptism, this is what I tell them.

God loves you.

And don’t you ever forget that!

The most important piece of your identity is this:

You are a beloved child of God.

Nothing else matters. Nothing.

So as we stand at the crossroads of our lives, before we decide to left or right, forward or back, we know who we are – we are the beloved – and we know whose we are: We belong to God.

But … (you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?)

This identity does not exist in a vacuum.

Our identity comes with responsibility.

Because, you see, we are Christians.

Meaning that we believe, we profess, we confess that we believe in a Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We believe, we profess, we confess the community of God.

Which means that being created in the image of God means that we are created in the image of community.

We, my friends, are created in love and community to live in love and community.

And that, my friends, is our mission in life.

To live … in love … and community … every moment … of our lives.

• • •

When the prophet Jeremiah spoke of seeking the ancient paths, he wasn’t saying that it was time for us to go back to what so many call the “good old days” that weren’t really that “good.”

No, Jeremiah was telling the inhabitants of Jerusalem that it was time to go even farther back … to the days when the people knew they were God’s beloved, and lived as though they were God’s beloved.

Jeremiah was taking the people back to that time when the Lord proclaimed,

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born, I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations. …”

Jeremiah is taking us back to the commands of the Lord:

“… for you shall go to all to whom I send you,

and you shall speak whatever I command you.

Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” says the Lord.

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth;

and the Lord said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth.

See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms,

to pluck up and to pull down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant.”[4]

Lest anyone misinterpret these powerful directions, take a moment to think about them.

The command is go into the world (a command that would be reiterated over and over again, culminating with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s command to do the same, at the moment of his ascension), the command to tear down that which gets in the way of God’s desires, God’s dreams for us so that in its place, we can build and plant that which fulfills God’s desires and dreams for us.

The late lay theologian Verna Dozier explained God’s dream for us; it is, she wrote, a dream of “a good creation of a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky.”[5]

A “good creation of a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky.”

Now, before anyone says (as one of my seminary classmates once did, with great disdain), “Friends? God wants us to be friends? That’s it?!” – he later was ordained), let me remind you: God’s definition of “friend” is not the same as that which most of us use for a definition.

Because when God talks about friendship, God is not talking about the casual acquaintance we may list among our friends. God is not talking about Facebook friends. No, in God’s mind, friendship, true friendship, comes when we abide with God and allow God to abide with us. True friendship is about living in God’s joy, which gives us joy.

On the night before he died for us, our Lord Jesus Christ said to his disciples:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.[6]

So for Jesus … for God … friendship is not some easy-going, casual, let’s- barbeque-on-the-back-deck-and-have-some-lemonade-to-drink kind of thing.

For God, “friendship” is about commitment to each other (“abide in me as I abide in you”[7]). It is about accountability (“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”[8]). It is about love (“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”[9]) It is about obedience (“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”[10]) And it is, truly, about joy – the joy we take in each other (“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”[11]).

• • •

Another story:

In World War II, a musician by the name of Larry LaPrise served in the European Theater. After the war, he and some friends moved moved to Sun Valley, Idaho – before it became Sun Valley, really – to ski and sing and work the after-ski crowd in that gorgeous mountain setting.

LaPrise and his friends formed a band called the Ram Trio that entertained the crowds coming off a day of skiing. One of the songs he wrote – or so the story goes – is one that all of us know: The Hokey-Pokey.

You know this song, right? Most of us have sung it and danced to it, usually as kids and then again, for some unknown reason, at weddings.

It goes like this:

You put your right hand in,

you put your right hand out,

you put your right hand in and you shake it all about.

Then you do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.

That’s what it’s all about.

And you know how the rest of the song follows:

You put your left hand in, then your right leg, then your left leg, then your right side, then your left side (and then, if you want to draw this song out to its extremes), you put your nose in, your backside in, and then your head, and finally … finally! What do you do? … You put your whole self in.

The words “Hokey Pokey” come from the words “hocus pocus,” which most of us know are the words you speak when you’re doing magic. The words “hocus pocus” comes from the Latin phrase, Hoc est corpus meum – “This is my body,” the words the priest speaks when he or she elevates the bread during the Eucharist. In the old days, when the priests would celebrate in great stone cathedrals, they would turn their backs to the people (because that was how it was done in those days), and sign the Mass: Hoc est corpus meum. Their voices would reverberate throughout the cathedrals, and as the echo moved throughout the stone churches and cathedrals, what they would be signing – Hoc est corpus meum – would sound like Hocus pocus (drawn out).

From that term – hocus pocus – LaPrise came up with the Hokey Pokey (although there are some who claim that the song and dance existed in England during the war). In 1949, LaPrise and the Ram Trio recorded the song (now later, there was a lawsuit from people in England who claimed it was their song, but the suit was settled out of court, and that’s another story), and the song soon became nationally known.

• • •

How many of you have ever been to a wedding or a party where the Hokey-Pokey was played?

And how many of you have been called upon to participate in this dance? You may not have wanted to participate, but heck, everyone else was up there, so why not? So someone from the dancing group comes along, and grabs your hand, or waves at you extravagantly, and pretty soon, you’re up there putting your right hand in, and taking your right hand out … right there with the rest of the folks.

Pulled in, whether you wanted to dance or not.

Being a beloved child of God, created in love and community to live in love and community, means that you have been chosen.

Remember the words of Jesus:

“You did not choose me, but I chose you.”[12]

God chose you … each of you … each of us … to participate in the dance, the perichoresis, of the Holy Trinity.

British theologian Alister McGrath defines perichoresis as that which “allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of” of others.[13] Now, McGrath and other theologians use perichoresis to describe the interpersonal relationship of the Holy Trinity.

But since we are created in the image of the Holy Trinity, of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, we, too, are created to dance in the what McGrath calls the ‘community of being’ … .”[14]

This dance, this perichoresis, is why we were created.

It is the very reason for our existence.

We who have been chosen are chosen, we are appointed “to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last … I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”[15]

This is our mission: to go into the world, to love one another as Christ loved us.[16]

As Christians, as members of the Body of Christ, as the living embodiment of Christ in this world, is about committing ourselves – every moment of our lives – to living out God’s desires for us.

Desires of friendship – true friendship.

Desires of love – true love.

Desires of community – true community.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Sister Joan Chittister, a well-known Benedictine nun, theologian, spiritual director, author, preacher and commentator, says it this way:

Thomas Merton spoke out against the Vietnam War. Catherine of Siena walked the streets of the city feeding the poor. Hildegard of Bingen preached the word of justice to emperors and to popes. Charles de Foucauld lived among the poor and accepted the enemy. Benedict of Nursia sheltered strangers and educated peasants. And so must we do whatever justice must be done in our time if we claim to be serious about really sinking into the heart of God. A spiritual path that does not lead to a living commitment to the coming of the will of God everywhere for everyone is not path at all. It is, at best, a pious morass, a dead end on the way to God.[17]

When we are standing at the crossroads of lives, individually and as a community, trying to decide whether to go right or left, backward or forward, we are called, as beloved children of God, to always choose God’s path, the one that is for everyone.

We who are blessed, we who are chosen, we who have been consecrated since before we were born … we are standing at those crossroads right now.

We know that we are God’s beloved.

We know that we belong to God.

God is stretching God’s hand out to us … right now … right here … in this place, inviting us into the dance.

It’s decision time.

The question is,

Whatchya gonna do?

Are you going to get up and participate in the dance?

As you think about your decision, remember:

We are all on a mission from God, a “journey to the common good,”[18] as theologian Walter Brueggemann labels it, a “a trek that all serious human beings must make, a growth out beyond private interest and sectarian passion”[19] to all of humanity, not for our sake but for God’s sake.

It is not always easy – there will always be nay-sayers, even among us. Choosing the ancient path, the one that will give our souls rest, is hard in a society, a world, that is all about getting ahead, all about making sure that you have more than the Joneses, all about getting-mine-and-I-don’t-care-if-you-get-yours.

Nobel Peace Laureate and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking from his own experience about making the hard decisions and choosing the right paths, affirms for us that “the demonstration of love in action can take us to dangerous places. [But] our love and our own goodness compel us to make choices that self-preservation would eschew.”[20]

Or, if you like, listen to American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who says:

Whatever course you decide upon,

there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.

There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe

that your critics are right.

To map out a course of action and follow it requires courage.[21]

But, Tutu points out, “the onerous duty of ‘doing good’ disappears once we recognize that we have no need to impress God with our success. When we really grasp our own goodness, we realize that we have no need to ‘buy’ God’s approval. We are already loved. We are already accepted. When we can accept our acceptance, the texture of life changes. The fear that has held us hostage will release its stranglehold on us.”[22]

So the question we face, as we stand at the crossroads, once again is this:

Whatchya gonna do?

• • •

Tutu ends his book with a love poem, from God, to us. I want us to listen to this poem, written by one of the holiest men of our time, speaking on God’s behalf:

You are my child,

My beloved.

With you I am well pleased.

Stand beside me and see yourself,

Borrow my eyes so you can see perfectly.

When you look with my eyes then you will see

That the wrong you have done and the good left undone,

The words you have said that should not have been spoken,

The words you should have spoken but left unsaid,

The hurts you have caused,

The help you’ve not given

Are not the whole of the story of you.

You are not defined by what you did not achieve.

Your worth is not determined by success.

You were priceless before you drew your first breath,

Beautiful before dress or artifice,

Good at the core.

And now is time for unveiling

The goodness that is hidden behind the fear of failing.

You shout down your impulse to kindness in case it is shunned,

You suck in your smile,

You smother your laughter,

You hold back the hand that would help.

You crush your indignation

When you see people wronged or in pain

In case all you can do is not enough,

In case you cannot fix the fault,

In case you cannot soothe the searing,

In case you cannot make it right.

What does it matter if you do not make it right?

What does it matter if your efforts move no mountains?

It matters not at all.

It only matters that you live the truth of you.

It only matters that you push back the veil to let your goodness shine through.

It only matters that you live as I have made you.

It only matters that you are made for me,

Made like me,

Made for goodness.[23]

• • •

So … let’s go back to the Hokey-Pokey. Think again about the last part of the song:

You put your whole self in,

you put your whole self out,

you put your whole self in and you shake it all about.

You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.

That’s what it’s all about!

Participating in the dance … putting your whole self in … is a commitment not to silliness but to God.

It is a decision to walk in God’s ways and delight in God’s will to the glory of God’s name.

Whatchya gonna do?

Are you going to accept the invitation?

Is anybody willing to dance?

(Stand up … everyone dance … first verse and last verse of the song.)

It’s up to you, folks.

You’ve been invited into the holy dance, the dance of love and community.

Whatchya gonna do?

Amen.

[1] From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Translated by Benedicta Ward. Cistercian Studies Series, number 59. This is saying 7 of Abba Joseph of Panephysis and appears on page 103.

[2] From “History,” St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, College Park, http://www.saeccp.org/history.php.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jer. 1:4-10, NRSV.

[5] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1991), 125.

[6]John 15:12-15, NRSV.

[7] John 15:4, NRSV.

[8] Micah 6:8, NRSV.

[9] John 15:9, NRSV.

[10] John 15:10, NRSV.

[11] John 15:11, NRSV.

[12] John 15:16, NRSV.

[13] Alister McGrath, Christian Theology, 325, emphasis added.

[14] Ibid.

[15] John 15:16-17, NRSV.

[16] John 13:34, Ephesians 5:2, NRSV.

[17] Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pa., from Good for the Soul, http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/chittister_4910.htm, sermon preached on 4 December 2005, accessed 9 September 2011, emphasis added.

[18] Walter Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good, 2.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference, Kindle locations 432-433.

[21] This quote is thought to have come from Emerson, although no source can be found.

[22] Tutu, locations 2266-2269.

[23] Ibid, Kindle locations 2359-2385.

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Go ahead: I dare you. I double dare you!

September 4, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

‎In the summer of 2003, I attended the General Convention of The Episcopal Church, out in Minneapolis. You all know that Convention – that’s the one where Gene Robinson’s election as bishop of New Hampshire was consented to by the Deputies and Bishops. If you remember, after the House of Deputies consented to Gene’s election, but before the Bishops voted, allegations of sexual misconduct were raised against Gene.

My job at General Convention is not to be a deputy but to be a reporter for the Diocese of Virginia’s daily newspaper, the Center Aisle. Because I spent so many years as a journalist, I also spend time as an informal adviser to the secular press who come to cover Convention and often don’t know very much about the Church, about who we are and what we believe, much less what we do.

When the controversy erupted over the misconduct allegations, I was but one of many Episcopalians trying to explain to the world that an allegation made between votes by the separate Houses was something new to us; that no, we actually did not have anything in our canons that covered this; no, we were not trying to hide anything from the world, and that yes, that we were investigating the allegations, for which we had a procedure.

Forty-eight hours later, it turned out that the allegations were not valid, that Gene had not been involved in sexual misconduct, and the charges were dropped.

Now, what was interesting is that as soon as that happened, my friends in the media rushed to ask, “What will you all do now? Will there be retribution against the person who made the allegations? Will Gene or the Church retaliate?” They were practically daring us to live out our revenge, our retribution, on the front pages of their newspapers and at the top of their newscasts.

But we didn’t. We didn’t retaliate. There was no retribution. We simply asked forgiveness, gave forgiveness, sought understanding, and most of all, we loved.

We did such a good job that a few days later, the Dallas Morning News, in an editorial, wrote:

“…We have been struck by the calm and deliberative process the Episcopalians followed in reaching their conclusion. … Watching these Episcopalians of all beliefs reason their way through their disagreement on this issue could serve as a guidepost for the larger society. … Perhaps their thoughtfulness and mutual respect for one another on this issue will have a positive impact on how all of us Americans carry on our larger societal debates. At least we hope so.”

Now, I know that you, more than the majority of the Church, know how much pain the ultimate decision to consent to Gene Robinson’s election, and his subsequent consecration caused. You lost your home. You’ve spent the last four-and-a-half years in exile.

But you did not retaliate. You have not sought retribution. Instead, you have focused on the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who told us exactly how he wanted us to act as Church in this morning’s Gospel.

Jesus says, If a brother or sister (and yes, he actually says “brother,” which in the Greek would include “sister,” and not just a “member of the Church”), if a brother or sister sins against you, go talk with him or her. Try to work it out.

If that doesn’t work, Jesus says, go get one or two others, and all of you go talk to the one who has sinned against you.

And if that doesn’t work, Jesus says, well, heck, tell the whole church (and here Jesus does say Church), and try to work it out in church.

And if that doesn’t work, Jesus says, well, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Now, most people believe that in this passage, Jesus is telling us, “If you can’t convince a person that you are right and he or she is wrong, cast that person out. Make him an outsider. Turn your back on her. Shun that person.”

But I don’t believe that’s what Jesus means. In fact, I think that right here, Jesus is being both subversive and subtle. Because he certainly didn’t do what most people think he did. He didn’t shun Gentiles and tax collectors, did he?

Remember, this is the man who healed the centurion’s servant, who was a Gentile. (Matthew 8:13) He was the one who casted the demons out of the two demoniacs in Gadarene, which was Gentile territory. (Matt. 8:28-34) He healed the daughter of the Canaanite woman, a Gentile, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. (Matt. 15:22-28)

And did he not say that we are to “go … and make disciples of all nations (meaning, the Gentiles), baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you”? (Matthew 28:19-20a)

Jesus treated Gentiles with love and compassion, not with hatred and condemnation. He did not exclude them. He welcomed them in, showered them with love, healed their sick, fed them, preached to them, prayed over them.

And how did he treat the tax collectors? Well, you know all those examples I just gave you? They come from Matthew’s Gospel … Matthew, the tax collector, whom Jesus called to be one of his disciples, a member of the inner circle, (Matt. 9:9-13), who was sent out by Jesus (Matt. 10), along with the other 11 disciples, to preach, teach, pray with and heal.

What I’m saying is this: When Jesus said to treat those who disagree with us, who sin against us, as Gentiles and tax collectors, he was not telling us to turn our backs on them, to disparage them, to make them outcasts. Not if the examples from Jesus’ own life and ministry are to make any sense to us.

In essence, Jesus was saying, Go ahead. I dare you. I double dare you. Treat those people the way I do: Love them!

If you read Matthew the way most people do, which I think is the wrong way, you end up excluding people. And you all know about that – because that’s what happened with you.

But if you read Matthew the way I think Jesus intended for us to read it, then you end up loving people. You end up doing exactly what Paul says in his Epistle to the Church in Rome:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments … are summed up in this word, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love, Paul says, does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

The great German theologian Karl Barth, in his commentary on this epistle, sums up Paul’s words this way: “Love of one another ought to be undertaken as the protest against the course of this world, and it ought to continue without interruption.”[1]

Even when people sin against us.

Imagine what would happen if we actually took Jesus at his word, if we actually took him up on his dare and dared to love people, no matter what? Imagine what the world would look like then?

You all already know what it looks like when people read Matthew as permission to exclude. And you all already know what it looks like when you read Matthew as an injunction to include.

Now imagine what would happen if everyone read Jesus’ words as a dare to love … Wouldn’t that be a protest against the course of this world?

We live in a society where partisanship is our way of life. Look at the gridlock in Washington, just across the river. Look at it! Our leaders – with a whole lot of help from the rest of us (and yes, we are just as guilty as the politicians and their staffs are) – can’t get anything done because everyone, it seems, is committed to excluding, to condemning, to making sure that our way is the only way.

Is anyone in Washington – anyone – daring to take Jesus up on his dare?

You and I both know there are some people who are attempting to do this, but louder, more strident voices are drowning them out.

Which is where we come in.

We, who follow Jesus, are the ones who are called to set the example. To say to others, “Wait. There’s a better way.”

To say, “Actually, Jesus didn’t mean we were to shut people out. Jesus wants us to love one another, and we can’t do that if we exclude them.”

And we are the ones who are called to love one another – again and again, no matter how hard that is, no matter how many times we want to walk away, no matter now many times others walk away from us.

We are the ones who have to dare to stand up against the vitriol, dare to include those with whom we disagree, dare to be with those who do not like us, much less love us.

My friends, this Gospel, which so many have used to exclude and to hate, is really a command to include and to love. It’s an instruction manual about how we are to love one another even when we don’t like each other, even when others are pushing every button we have, annoying us, hurting us, making us feel like dirt. In Jesus’ eyes, none of that matters.

Because above all else, we are still called to love.

One person at a time, one community at a time.

Edward Everett Hale, a 19^th century author, historian and Unitarian minister, points the way for us when he says:

I am only one.

But I am still one.

I cannot do everything.

But still I can do something:

And because I cannot do everything

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.[2]

Each of us, alone, may not be able to do much.

But all of us, together, can change the world.

Jesus is daring us to do that. In fact, he’s double-daring us.

To love.

Amen.

Sermon preached on the 12^th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18, Year A, at The Falls Church (Episcopal), Falls Church, Va., on 4 September 2011.

[1] Karl Barth, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 492.

[2] Edward Everett Hale, “The One,” via Emergent Village Daily Communique, 29 August 2011.

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Be transformed!

August 21, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Romans 12:1-8

A few weeks ago, I read Katheryn Stockett’s beautiful novel, The Help, which came out a couple of years ago and just this month debuted as a movie.

It’s a beautiful book, my friends, telling the story of women, white and black, in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963 and ’64, at the height of the civil rights movement. Despite the darkness of the story – and there was a lot of darkness at that time in the history of our country – it was so well told that when I finished, I simply … sighed … with satisfaction.

And then I heard that the movie was coming out and thought, “Hmmm. I think I want to see that.”

Until, of course, the movie actually came out, and the criticisms began to rain down as if from on high.

Yet another movie about white people telling black people’s stories, the critics said. Why do black people always need white people to speak for them? they asked. Don’t people realize that black people have voices too?

When I heard these critiques, I stopped for a moment and wondered: Have any of these people actually read this book?

Don’t they know that this book – I don’t know about the movie; I haven’t seen it yet – that this book is not just about a white woman telling the stories of black maids? That it is, in reality, a story about transformation?

Because that’s what the book really is, my friends. It’s the story of women – black and white – who in telling their stories realize that they are not bound by the story that formed them from before they were born.

It is a story about women – white and black – who realize they do not have to conform to the world in which they were born and raised.

In the telling of their stories, these women are transformed by the renewing of their minds – by the setting aside of prejudices and hatred and fear – so that they indeed can realize what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The Help is the story of transformation from evil to good, from mistrust to love, from silence to bold proclamation.

And isn’t that what it means to be a Christian? To be transformed? To have our whole lives turned upside down and inside out so that we can then go out into the world and by our very lives, transform it?

Of course, you all don’t have to read this book or see this movie to know about transformation, do you?

For the past two-plus years, you’ve had Cynthia Gilliatt here with you as your priest, and if ever there was a person who refused to conform to the world, it was Cynthia. Like the women in the book, Cynthia refused to conform to a world that wanted to shut her down and shut her out.

I know the news of her death this week came as a shock to all of you, as it did to all of her friends and acquaintances around the Church. We had not known she was ill. We were not prepared for her death.

At Cynthia’s funeral yesterday in Harrisonburg, The Rev. Grace Cangialosi, a good friend and colleague, talked about Cynthia’s refusal to conform to the world., about her desire instead to not only be transformed by the Gospel herself, but to transform the world around her through the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And Grace talked about how Cynthia had paid the price for not conforming: About how the Church that ordained her would not let her serve fully as a priest for a long time, because … well, because, sometimes, the Church is stupid. Sometimes, the Church gets so caught up in the politics of the moment that it misses the person right in front of it.

Which is why, Grace said, Good Shepherd was so important to Cynthia – this place became a place for Cynthia to call home, a place for her to fully be priest, a place where you all were blessed to baptize two children, the grandchildren of parishioners, in a strong show of support for a couple who were concerned they might not be accepted everywhere by everyone. Those baptisms were holy for Cynthia, transformative, and she reveled in them.

• • •

For the past five days, I have seen nearly 100 messages from people all over our Church, from all over our nation, through that lovely piece of social media, Facebook. All of the people talked about how Cynthia had transformed them by her presence, her courage, her grace. Cynthia, they said, lived what Paul wrote in this morning’s Letter to the Romans:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Peter Gomes, the late preacher at Harvard, called this passage “perhaps the most dangerous verse in all the Bible.”[1]

Paul, Gomes said, “is telling his readers not to do that which comes naturally to them. An invitation to nonconformity is a dangerous thing, and thoughtful nonconformity … is all the more dangerous because nonconformity is an intention … [that is] likely to get one into trouble.”[2]

Cynthia didn’t conform – and it got her into some trouble. She knew that. She knew she could have gone along to get along, but that’s not who she was.

Instead, she chose to not only be transformed herself, but to devote her life to transforming others, so that the will of God would reign on this earth.

It wasn’t easy – and Cynthia knew that.

But faithfulness isn’t always about “easy” – it’s about doing what is right. And that is what Cynthia did – what is right, no matter how much resistance she met along the way. And she did meet resistance, when the Church was being stupid, and she paid a price for living her life with integrity. But she never quit, and she never conformed.

• • •

I have to tell you, there’s a new acronym in the Church these days: TAWWADI. It stands for: “That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It.” It’s a phrase some Church leaders are beginning to use whenever they run into resistance to change, resistance to new thinking, resistance to transformation.

TAWWADI’s cousin is But We’ve Never Done It That Way Before – which makes for an unpronounceable acronym but means the same thing. It doesn’t matter which approach the resisters take – we’ve always done it that way, or we’ve never done it this way – the fact is, that kind of resistance most often is rooted in conformity, in going along to get along, in refusing to take the chance that perhaps – perhaps – God has a better way.

Cynthia knew that God had a better way – for her, and for all the people around her. She knew she was called to priesthood, and that as a priest, she could live out a sacramental life, a Gospel life, and thus transform the world.

Theologian Paul Hiebert could have been talking about Cynthia when he wrote:

“The gospel is about transformed lives. When we bear witness to Christ, we invite people to a whole new life, not simply some modifications of their old lives. This transformation is radical and total. It involves changes at all levels of their culture, including their worldviews. It also changes them physically, biologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. This is the transformation that God works in them if they follow him.”[3]

Doesn’t that sound like Cynthia? Didn’t she invite people – didn’t she invite you – to a whole new, transformed life? She didn’t go along to get along – there was no TAWADDI in her life!

Because Cynthia was a Gospel person. She was transformed by it, and through it, she transformed others. And that’s quite a legacy to leave behind.

As you move forward, in these next weeks and months, with different clergy who will come to lead your services and care for you pastorally, I ask you to remember a few things:

First, I want to reassure you: Your bishop, your convocation dean and all of the leaders of this Diocese will be here for you. They will support you, they will care for you, they will love you, and they will help you move into the next stage of your transformed lives as children of God.

And second, please, I ask you – I beg you: Do not forget what it means to be transformed. For the last two-plus years, Cynthia Gilliatt has been with you, transforming you by word and deed. If you want to truly honor her, be as bold, as loving, as she was. Let the Gospel transform you, and then go out into the world, and transform it.

Tell the stories – tell your stories, tell Cynthia’s story, tell the story of you and Cynthia together.

Then tell the story – the story of God who loves you from before you were born, who loves you every moment of your life, and who will love you to the ages of ages.

Because in doing so, in telling these stories, you, like the women in The Help, and like Cynthia, will be transformed.

Amen.

Sermon preached at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Blue Grass, Va., on 21 August 2011, the 10^th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16, Year A, in honor of The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Gilliatt, priest-in-charge who died on 16 August 2011.

[1] Peter J. Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. (New York: HarperCollins e-books), Kindle Edition, 45.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Paul G. Hiebert. Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Kindle Locations 4598-4600). Kindle Edition.

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Step away from the lawn mower …

July 18, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

More than half my life ago, after I graduated from junior college, I moved to Milwaukee to live with my brother and his family while I attended university. I hadn’t been there very long when the family went on vacation, leaving me in charge of the house, the dog, the yard and my sister-in-law’s vegetable and flower gardens.

I have to admit, while my family was gone, I probably wasn’t the best caretaker there ever was. So on the day they were due back home , I worked diligently – and frantically. I cleaned the house, and then worked outside. I weeded, I mowed, I edged. And when I was done, after several hours of hard work, I was pretty pleased with myself.

Until I looked over at one flower bed and discovered, to my great horror, a huge weed. A giant weed. A ginORmous weed. How could that have gotten there? I thought. And then I thought: How dare that thing grow in my sister-in-law’s beautiful flower garden?

So I restarted the mower, went over to that ginormous eyesore, and I mowed it into oblivion. Back and forth I went, making sure this … this … thing … was dead, dead, dead.

Then I went and got a trowel and I dug up the roots, removing every trace of this eyesore.

Just as I was satisfied that I had done a good job (no, really, it was a great job!), my family pulled up.

Out jumped my two nieces and one nephew, my brother and my sister-in-law. I was hugging my nephew and chatting with my brother when I heard this terrible shriek from behind me.

“Mom! Where’s my straw plant?!?!?!?”

I looked at my brother and he looked at me, and then he looked at the lawn mower, at the flower bed, at his daughter (who by now was crying hysterically), at his wife, and finally, again, at me.

“Used the lawn mower, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Straw plant?” I whispered. “What’s a straw plant?”

“You had to use the mower, didn’t you?” my brother whispered back.

And then I heard my sister-in-law’s voice behind me.

“Lauren?” she said. (That’s it. She didn’t say anything else. Just “Lauren?”)

I turned and walked across the yard, dragging my feet as I listened to my 6-year-old niece cry – actually, she was wailing – about her beloved straw plant and how it hadn’t grown while she was gone, and what was she going to tell her teacher when she went back to school.

“You used the mower, didn’t you?” she said in that voice that only a mother can use.

“Um, well … I used the mower to cut down a weed,” I said. “Really. It was just a weed. What exactly is a straw plant?”

“It looks like a weed,” she said. “And you cut it down. With the mower.”

“um ….”

“You used the mower to cut down Jennifer’s straw plant.”

My sister-in-law was not amused.

In fact, she was so not amused that the very next day, my brother and I found ourselves lugging railroad ties into the backyard and placing them around all the flower beds.

“I can’t trust you two not to use the mower,” my sister-in-law mumbled under her breath while she supervised us. “See something you don’t recognize and zoom! Mow it down! I swear, you two know nothing – nothing! – about gardening! I can’t trust either of you with my flowers, can I?”

The lesson I learned that day, the lesson I have never forgotten, was simple:

Do not presume that just because something looks like a weed, it is a weed.

Because there’s a very good chance that what looks like a weed to you is precious in the sight of others.

So don’t take a mower to it!

This is the same lesson that Jesus is trying to teach us in this morning’s Gospel lesson from Matthew: What looks like a weed to us very well could be precious in the sight of God.

Let’s go back to the parable for a moment: The word Matthew quotes Jesus using to name the weeds in the master’s fields – zizania – “in modern botanical terms refers … to wild rice grasses.”[1] But what Matthew is most likely talking about is something called darnel, which is prolific in Palestine. The problem with darnel is that you can’t tell the difference between that and real wheat until harvest time, when both plants have matured. Then, the darnel – bearing nothing life-giving for us – stands up straight and tall. The wheat, on the other hand, droops over from the weight of its life-giving grains.[2] So if you go out into the field before harvest time to weed? The chances are good that you will take out just as much wheat as weed.

So what Jesus is saying is that we have to be careful, to not take a mower to every weed we see, because there’s a chance that what’s a weed to us is precious to God.

Now, let’s be clear about one thing here:

Jesus is talking about evil in this parable, but he is not talking about Capital-E Evil. He’s not talking about injustice and hatred, intolerance and bias, disease and famine and violence and war and genocide. We know what that evil looks like, and we know what we’re supposed to do about those evil thing: we have to working against them and stop them, because if we don’t, then justice will never flow like waters and righteousness like an ever-living stream.

What Jesus is talking about are the smaller evils, the weeds that grow in us: greed, bias, hatred, the need to get ahead by leaving others behind. Anger, and the times we lash out at folks who pass us on the highway or make our jobs more difficult. Jealousy, because someone else has more than we have. Those are the weeds that grow in us all the time.

Those are the same weeds that we like to find in others all the time, don’t we? We love to tell others about their weeds.

But just because we think they’re weeds doesn’t mean God does.

So be careful. Be careful about rooting them out. And for God’s sake, don’t take a mower to them!

• • •

In a couple of days, I’m heading down to Alabama to lead a program for rising 7^th and 8^th graders at Camp McDowell, the diocesan summer camp. A friend of mine and I are going to lead a program focused on teaching the kids – all 185 of them[3] — that they were created for mission. That God, who created each of us in God’s image of love and community, created us to live in love and community. And that living in love and community is our mission in life.

I want them to learn that God created us to live lives of mission, every moment of their lives.

We’ve come up with a great name for our eight-day program: OMG, Y’all! On a Mission from God, Y’all! (Remember, this is Alabama …) We’re trying to teach these campers that because they are created in the image of God, the image of love and community, they are called to live in that image, to live in love and community every day. And that living in love and community is their mission in life.

But living our lives in love and community is hard. It’s hard, because we see people, we see things that are different, and we react as though that difference is bad, and next thing you know, we’re ready to take a lawnmower to those people and those things, never stopping to think that perhaps God sees things differently, and that what we thought were weeds are precious in God’s sight.

So one of the big lessons I want the campers to learn is this: Different is simply different. It is not better. It is not worse. It simply is different.

Meaning: Just because it looks like a weed to you, don’t – do not – take the lawn mower to it. Not just yet.

Because you never know:

It might just be precious in God’s sight.

So leave the mowers alone, OK?

Amen.

A sermon preached on the 5th Sunday after Pentecost, 17 July 2011, Proper 11, Year A, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, Va.

[1] Elisabeth Johnson, Pastor, Watertown, Minn., “Commentary on the Gospel,” on http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?tab=4&alt=1, lectionary for July 17, 2011.

[2] Ibid.

[3] (or however many register this year)

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Go. Baptize. Teach. Need I say more?

June 19, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Matthew 28:16-20

Well, folks, this is it.

Rublev's Holy Trinity icon

This is the day when we celebrate the Trinity, that seemingly impenetrable mystery of Three in One and One in Three, something about which thousands and thousands, no, millions of words have been written and which many will tell you is impossible to completely understand.

But I have to tell you, if Jesus were here with us, he would probably be confused. Because for Jesus, the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not a mystery, it’s not impenetrable, and it’s not his focus.

You see, Jesus understood the Trinity because he was one manifestation of the Trinity. So to him, the Three in One and One in Three makes perfect sense.

And if he were here today, he’d probably look at us and say, “Folks, this is not rocket science.”
And then he would wonder …

“Why aren’t you concentrating on that other trinity? You know, the one I gave you as I ascended into heaven?”

But before we go there, before we focus on what Jesus really wants us to focus on, let’s spend a few minutes on the part that Jesus says isn’t that complicated after all but others claim we can’t quite get.

We believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

We believe in One God.

Before anyone tells you this whole concept is too mind-boggling, let me share with you the two easiest ways I know of to explain that Trinity:

(holds up clear glass bowl and glass with blue water)

This is God the Father, the Creator, who brought all things into being.

(pours blue water into bowl, then holds up glass with yellow water)

This is God the Son, who came to be one of us as one of us, who lived for us, who preached and taught and healed and then died for us.

(pours yellow water into bowl with blue water, which now turns green, then holds up glass with red water)

This is God the Holy Spirit, who inspires us, who literally gives us breath – when a baby is born, we all wait anxiously for that baby to breathe in that first breathe, to inspire that first breath – and who tells us what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.

(pours red water into bowl with green water, which now turns amber, then swirls the water around)

Now … you tell me:

Which is which?

Can you separate out God the Father from God the Son from God the Holy Spirit?

No.

Because they are all one.

My friends, that’s the Trinity.

Another way to explain the Trinity so that it makes sense to us?

I am a daughter. I am my mother’s oldest daughter, and even though my mother died nine years ago, I will always be my mother’s daughter.

I am a sister. I have seven siblings … two brothers, two stepbrothers, one step sister and two half-sisters. (It’s a complicated family, trust me.) No matter what happens to me in this life, when I die, my obituary will say that I have seven siblings.

And I am an aunt. I have 19 nieces and nephews, and seven great nieces and nephews, and I am their Aunt LoLo. And no matter what happens in my life, I will always be Aunt LoLo to them.

A daughter. A sister. An aunt.

So here’s the question:

How many of me are there?

One?

Or three?

As Jesus would say, “It’s not that complicated.” Because it’s not!

And again, if Jesus were here with us, he would ask us:

“Are you paying attention to that other trinity?”

You know …

The one where he stood on the mountaintop in front of his disciples and said:

Go make disciples.

Baptize them.

Teach them to obey.

….

Go.

Baptize.

Teach

That’s the trinity Jesus cares about.

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus spend any time worrying about and explaining how God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are together, are one being, are God. To Jesus, it makes perfect sense. Just as me being a daughter, a sister and an aunt all at the same time makes perfect sense.

But Jesus does concentrate on that other trinity – Go. Baptize. Teach. – all the time.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was constantly teaching us how we are to live our lives, what we are to do with our lives.

Go make disciples …

Jesus talked about it, he modeled it for us, he got into debates over it (remember Zebedee’s wife, trying to ensure that her sons, James and John, got the coveted seats at the right hand of Jesus in heaven? Remember all those debates with the Pharisees about healing people on the Sabbath? Remember how the Pharisees tried to trick him into saying blasphemous and illegal things about paying taxes and being sent by the Father? Remember how they railed at him for eating with prostitutes and beggars and fishermen?).

Jesus was very clear: If we are going to follow him, we cannot do so in a vacuum. We are not to be blind imitators, but active ministers – constantly modeling God’s love for everyone, wherever we go, so that they, too, can see God’s love in action and commit their lives to that love.

Baptize them …

Do you remember what happened when Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan? He heard God on high say to him: This is my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.

Go baptize others, Jesus tells us, so that they can hear God’s voice as well, so that they can experience God’s love, so that they can commit themselves to that love.

Teach them to obey …

Jesus was a teacher. Pure and simple, that’s what he did: He taught. Every moment of his life, by word, thought and deed, he made sure that we understood what it was that God wanted us to do.

And the key thing he taught was that we are loved, and that we are to love. We are to love each other not just as ourselves – I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again: There are some days when I don’t love myself very much, and on those days, I can tell you, it’s really hard for me to love anyone else – no, we have to love each other a whole lot more than that. We are called to love each other as Jesus loved us!

Which means we are the ones called to feed the hungry until there are no more hungry people in the world. We are the ones who are to give water – clean water – until everyone’s thirst is slaked. We are the ones who are supposed to heal the sick and raise the dead, comfort the prisoner and lift the poor out of poverty.

Not someone else, my friends.

Us.

This is our job, our way of life, because Jesus said so!

Jesus’ Trinity is not some convoluted, impenetrable mystery that sidetracks us from our calling in life.

Jesus’ trinity is the Great Commission.

And the Great Commission is our set of marching orders.

You want to know how to live your lives as followers of Jesus?

Look no farther than Jesus’ final words to his disciples.

Standing on that mountaintop, preparing to ascend into heaven, Jesus very clearly, very succinctly tells them – tells us:

Go make disciples.

Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Teach them to obey all the commandments I have given you.

I’m telling you, this is not rocket science. This is not some esoteric debate about how to figure out the Three-in-One. Because Jesus is not interested in that kind of religion.

Jesus cares about, Jesus loves God’s people.

So, standing on that mountaintop, Jesus lays it all out for his disciples:

My work is done here. I’ve taught you everything you need to know, shown you everything you need to be shown, modeled a way of life for you, even modeled a way of death for you. Everything I’ve taught you, shown you, modeled for you? It’s all about love – God’s love for all of God’s beloved children.

Now it’s your turn, he says.

You go out into the world and love God’s people.

You show them how much God loves them.

It’s your job … your life … now.

You want to understand the Trinity on Trinity Sunday?

It’s as simple as this:

Go.

Baptize.

Teach.

Need I say more?

Amen.

A sermon preached on Trinity Sunday, 19 June 2011, Year A, at St. Paul’s, Bailey’s Crossroads, Falls Church, Va.

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Filed Under: Blog Articles, Featured Story, Mission, Scriptures, Sermons Tagged With: Baptize, Great Commission, Matthew's Gospel, One in Three, Preach, Teach, Three in One, Trinity

The little things …

May 23, 2011 by Lauren Stanley

Amazon Kindle 3

1 Peter 2:2-10

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a rather convoluted trip covering six states in 60 hours. This is what I do: I’m a missionary who travels constantly to preach and teach and witness.

Halfway through my trip, I discovered that I somehow had managed to lose my Kindle.

Y’all know what a Kindle is, right? It’s the Amazon e-reader that literally changed my life as a missionary. It kept me sane and kept me company when I was alone, a stranger in a strange land.

I’m very partial to my Kindle. I have about 400 books on it, and it has traveled the world with me. Partway through my travels, I realized I had left my Kindle on the plane.

I tried valiantly to get it back, I really did: I called the airlines, I filed a report, I went to baggage claim (where I found someone else’s Kindle, but not mine), I called Amazon, I even posted a note on Facebook (you know, just in case) … to no avail.

But my Kindle didn’t show up. And didn’t show up …

So I ordered another one, and pretty much gave up on ever finding the one that was lost.

Imagine my surprise, then, when last Wednesday I received an email from a man saying that his son had found my Kindle on the plane and had tried but failed to connect with me on Facebook. That morning, the teen-ager asked his father: Can you find the owner? He did.

The father and I had a marvelous conversation, not just about the Kindle but about our families and my service as a missionary and what I do and what he does, and where I’ve been and where he wants to go. In the end, I sold the once-lost-now-found Kindle to him for a severe discount, telling him that the balance of its worth was my gift to them, because they not only found my Kindle, they took the time and made the effort to track me down.

Then, because I’m a social creature, I shared my good news on Facebook.

The responses were astounding! People from all over the country commented, all seeing such good news in this story. This is wonderful, they said. You all are blessed! they gushed. This is a soul-to-soul connection, they wrote. This is not a co-incidence, one opined, but a “God-incident.”

Now … I know this story really only affects a few of us, and in the grand scheme of life it means very little. But for those of us involved, it is an important story. Because out of my carelessness, a new connection, a “soul-to-soul” connection has been established.

One little thing has brought us together – a family in Cincinnati and me, a missionary who gallivants all over the country on a weekly basis.

This, my friends, is what the Apostle Peter is talking about in his Epistle this morning … he’s talking about the little things of life, the little things we do not because we have to do them, but because we belong to God.

When Peter writes that we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy tribe (that’s a better translation from the Greek than

The Apostle Peter

“nation,”) God’s own people,” he’s not talking about us saving the world single-handedly.

Peter is talking about us saving the world one little thing at a time.

Remember … Peter is writing this letter to people who thought Jesus was coming back any second now – only Jesus hadn’t come back yet. So Peter is instructing the people how they are to live until that moment happens.

Does this sound familiar?

Doesn’t this sound rather like what we just went through yesterday, with the alleged Rapture that Harold Camping and his followers told us was going to happen at 6 o’clock last night?

Now you and I can laugh and make jokes about Mr. Camping and his predictions.

But in Peter’s day, Jesus’ followers were just as confident as Mr. Camping’s followers that the Risen Lord was due back at any second.

And since the Risen Lord hadn’t come back yet, Jesus’ followers were a bit confused, and rather anxious, and a tad uncertain how they were to live their lives.

So the Apostle told them:

You are a holy tribe … you are God’s own people. Your job, your mission, is to live your lives in holiness.

In every little thing.

We live holy lives when we love one another as God loves us. Every word we say – or don’t say … every gesture we make — or don’t make … everything in our lives is to reflect God’s wild, radical, inexplicable, eternal love for us.

I know this sounds rather simplistic. But the truth is, those little things we think aren’t all that important? The ones we may be tempted to think don’t really matter … especially in the greater scheme of life? They are important and they do matter.

Because those little things add up. Those little things are the mustard seeds that start out so very small and grow … and grow … and grow … into huge bushes. Trust me, you plant a mustard seed and it will grow so big so fast that you’ll be astonished. You think kudzu is bad? Try mustard. It’s one of the little things.

Face it, my friends: We live in a world that does not support us in our calling as God’s own people, a holy tribe. We live in a world that tells us we have to get ahead – and leave others behind. That tells us we have to spend, spend, spend, buy, buy, buy … so that we can die with the most toys. That whispers that it is OK to forget those in need … because those in need? They’re not us.

But we are God’s own people. We are God’s holy tribe. And we are not called to live our lives as society tells us. Because we are, as Father Michael said in his sermon a few weeks ago, homo eucharisticus, thankful people whose mission is to live lives of thanksgiving.

And we do that one little thing at a time …

We live lives of love because we are created in love. Remember: God did not need to create us. We are not necessary to God! God is necessary to us, but we are not necessary to God! We know this is true, because God was before we were, and God will be after we are, so we cannot possibly be necessary to God. Which means that God wants us, that God desires us, that God loves us into being.

And since that is how God created us – in love — that is how we are to live our lives: In love.

This is our calling.

This is our mission.

This is what it means to be a holy tribe. To be God’s own people. To be homo eucharisticus.

And it doesn’t matter what the world has to say about this, what society tries to teach us!

Every moment of our lives, because we are God’s own, we are called, in every little thing, to live in the same wild, radical, inexplicable, eternal love for others that God has for us.

And we know what God’s incredible love looks like, don’t we? We know the way and the truth that lead us to life.

By caring for those in need. Mourning with those who are mourning. Rejoicing with those who are filled with joy. Feeding the hungry. Giving water to the thirsty. Making the blind see and the deaf hear and the mute sing and the lame leap for joy! By proclaiming the year of the Lord not once every fifty years, but every year!

We know how to do this and we can do this!

But … we can’t do this all at once! We can’t just wave our hands and cure the world of all its ills. Because we are not God!

But we are God’s holy people.

And as God’s holy people, we can cure the world one little thing at a time.

We can live our lives in love, every single moment of every single day in everything we do, big, little or anywhere in between.

We can take the time to greet the stranger … and let her know she is welcome. We can let that person who is in such a great hurry on I-65 pass us … without saying a bad word, without making a gesture we will regret. We can, as Robert Fulghum once famously wrote in his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learn in Kindergarten: Hold hands crossing the street. Help little old ladies. Share your cookies. (You think sharing your cookies is not important? Let me tell you, I’ve lived in countries where we didn’t have enough to eat, and anyone who shared a cookie with you let you know that you deserved to live!)

We can hold this child Timothy Alexander, who was baptized this morning, and tell him, over and over again, that God loves him. That we love him.

We do not have to save the world all by ourselves.

That is God’s job.

Our job, our mission, is to save the world one little thing at a time.

You know … like returning my Kindle … even when you don’t have to.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta echoed Peter’s words when she said, “God does not demand that I be successful. God demands that I be faithful. When facing God,” she said, “results are not important. Faithfulness is ….”

In every little thing.

Mother Teresa even gives us guidance on how we are to live our holy lives:

‎”The good you do today,” she said, “may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

“Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.

“What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

“People who really want help may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway.

“Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.”

You want to live as God’s holy people? You want to show the world what it means to be homo eucharisticus, to be God’s holy tribe?

Do good.

Be honest.

Help those in need.

Give the world your best.

Every single day.

In every little thing.

And if I ever lose my Kindle again?

I’d appreciate it if you’d return it to me.

Amen.

Sermon for the 5^th Sunday of Easter, 22 May 2011, Year A, at Christ Episcopal Church, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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Filed Under: Blog Articles, Easter, Featured Story, Sermons Tagged With: 1 Peter, Apostle Peter, Facebook, Faithfulness, Holy people, Homo eucharisticus, Kindle 3, Litte things, Mission, Mother Teresa, Robert Fulghum

Why not??

Define yourself …

Gospel-worthy

Extravagant forgiveness, extravagant love

You are invited to the dance … whatchya gonna do?

Go ahead: I dare you. I double dare you!

Be transformed!

Step away from the lawn mower …

Go. Baptize. Teach. Need I say more?

The little things …

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley

Where in the world …?

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