Sermon for Trinity Sunday: "What Will Your Verse Be?"

"Trinity Sunday: What Will Your Verse Be?"

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Transcribed from Sermon Preached at South Wedge Mission

Rochester, New York

Feast of the Holy Trinity

31 May 2015

Day Texts: Isaiah 6.1-8

John 3.1-17

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Ascension.  Pentecost.  Trinity.  These last three services have focused on this trio of feast days in the liturgical calendar, and together, they could be almost considered a trilogy of sorts.  Let’s call the whole thing: “Birth of Church.”  

In Birth of Church, Part I: Ascension, we see Jesus auditioning for the part of Thor in the next Avengers as he flies off into heaven, entrusting his disciples to remain on earth and continue the mission of proclaiming the Gospel to the nations.  

Next, Birth of Church, Part II: Pentecost finds those same disciples “catching fire” (see what I did there?) as they receive the power to carry out that mission via the gift of the wild goose of the Holy Spirt.

So we’ve got the mission.  We’ve got the power.  Everything’s set for an exciting climax.  And then, Birth of Church III: Trinity, delivers…the doctrine. 

Seriously.  Doctrine.  No epic battle of five armies.  No super team assembling.  Not even a surprise “return of Jesus” moment.  Just a doctrine.  Like many a trilogy before it, Birth of Church just seems to come up short at the end.  At least they didn’t go all Twilight and split it into two movies.  

Because let’s be honest.  Unless you’re an uber theology geek (like me), there’s really nothing less exciting than doctrine.  And what’s more, it’s not even a very good one!  It’s complicated (1+1+1 =…1 …and 3???), it’s confusing (“so you have three different gods?”) and to top it off, it’s not even explicitly in the Bible.  A promising premise about the restoration of the world ends up collapsing under the weight of its own Christopher Nolan-esque complexity and navel-gazing.   

If doctrine is the ultimate conclusion of this story, its no wonder it seems to continue flopping in the box office of modern religious opinion.       

Thing is, though, the early church didn’t develop Trinity as a doctrine.  Or rather, that’s not how doctrine worked for them.  See, doctrine wasn’t really about proof-texting or mere theological calculus.  Rather, doctrine was much more like blocking notes for stage actors; dance steps for teaching rhythm; a musical score for a conductor and orchestra.  It wasn’t meant to replace the drama of the story; it was meant to help immerse participants more deeply so as to better tell the story.      

In a sense, when we see the word “Trinity,” we should think less about figuring out a formula; instead, what if we saw a shorthand, a reminder, a guide, a particular way of telling the story of who God is and how God is for us?

Work with me here.  “Trinity” is a story.  The story.  The whole story, of the Old and New Testaments, from Creation to Cross to Conclusion.  Early Christians never really needed to make it explicit because it simply was and is the story.  In their worship and in their baptizing and in their praying and in their Eucharists, they would have invoked the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” all the time.  They lived the story.  And so there was no need to make it explicit as a doctrine.  

As an influential person in history, its natural that lots of people told stories about Jesus.  In the early church, there were actually a number of different “Christianities” practiced in response to Jesus’ life.  You usually read about them around Christmas or Easter time, when Newsweek or Time report on them in some special “Secret Hidden History of Jesus” report.  Most of these end up being the equivalent of tall tales and folk stories.  Fascinating to study.  Rooted in history.  But ultimately, lacking in substance or truth.

It wasn’t until one particular alternative telling of Jesus’ story rose to major prominence and influence that the early church finally decided it was time to explicitly endorse and define the story of Trinity as a doctrine.  This other story was called “Gnosticism,” and while it was an ancient heresy, it’s influence continues to this day. 

To understand the Gnostics, imagine a people who basically thought that the movie The Matrix was real.  Ie, that the material world that we live in is actually a prison, created by an evil being (called “Yaladbaoth”) to imprison our divine spirits in mortal material bodies.  In fact, all things matter were considered corrupt and defiled, and the villainous creator, equated with the God of the Old Testament, instituted all sorts of do’s and don’ts in order to keep humanity enslaved in the dark.  

Enter Jesus, played by Keeanu Reeves in this movie.  Like Neo, the pure spirit being Jesus voluntarily plugs Himself into the prison of matter in order to teach an elect enlightened few the truth about reality, and to help them escape their chains into the world of pure light.  Jesus’ body was not a real body, but a clever disguise he put on in order to reach the chosen few and share his secret “Gnosis” with them.  

And you thought the Trinity thing was complicated.   

Gnosticism was a compelling story in a world full of suffering.  It taught people that bodies were only temporary, and offered the chosen enlightened few the promise and hope of an escape from the messy dirtiness of physical existence.  It was especially appealing to the wealthy and the elite, who naturally had more leisure time to discover the secret of escape, and because it labeled matter and suffering as unclean, reinforced their privileged status over the disease-ridden suffering masses around them.  

And therein we should recognize why the “more orthodox” Christians began to take issue with their Gnostic rivals.  Because if matter and suffering were considered signs of evil and corruption, and special knowledge and privilege were equated with divinity, then a large portion of the folks Jesus actually ministered to - the sick, the poor, the lame, the outcast, and the uneducated - were almost immediately excluded from this version of God’s kingdom.  Which meant that Jesus did not come in solidarity with the world and its brokenness - but only to go through the motions for the sake of the strong and the few.  

Ultimately, the Gnostic Gospel promised enlightenment, but at the price of escapism and exclusion.  And the early Church deemed this too high a price for continued tolerance.  They needed to tell a different story about a different Gospel.

And lest this seem like ancient history, if we’re honest, we’re often not too far off from the Gnostic mentality in our own day and age.  Because even if we don’t believe their mythology, we can very easily fall into a Gnostic way of practicing our faith in the world.

I think we’re especially prone to this mentality when the messiness and difficulty of life in our bodies, and the reality of other bodies, causes us suffering and struggle.  We act Gnostically when, confronted with the challenges of engaging with created reality, we instead readily choose escape from it into some exclusionary simulacrum of enlightenment or specialness.  

So, for example, when our commitments to our friendships and our family start to take us into uncomfortable territory, well, no problem!  There’s a special world called the internet, where we can disengage from the difficulty of face-to-face interactions and live a disembodied existence floating above it all while revealing in the vast feeling of connection and enlightenment that the web provides us.  

Or, maybe church is your problem!  Because when real-life community and spirituality forces us to face our own brokenness and selfishness, and challenges us to share life together with other broken people whose dysfunction doesn’t fix my own dysfunction, well, damn it, I’ll jettison all that “religion” stuff and just be spiritual.  By myself.  Alone.  Where I can make the rules.

Or is the poverty and injustice and segregation of our fair city getting you down?  No need to actually meet poor people and hear their stories!  Simply read about social justice, allow yourself to feel really indignant about racism, and make sure to pursue an enlightened progressive awareness.  Let others do the messy work, and make sure they notice you noticing them.  And voila!  Gnosticism provides you an easy way out from ever having to dirty your hands helping a homeless person, or even having to really give money. 

In so many ways, Gnosticism is our Gospel of choice when, like those ancient Christians, we are confronted by the messiness and suffering of this world, and simply can’t handle the pain it causes us and others.  Even the all-American tradition of “pulling myself up by my bootstraps” is, in its basest form, a type of Gnosticism, as it creates a sense of separation and specialness, where we rise above the common ways and rise into a higher class following our exceptionalist dreams.  It’s the air we live and breathe in a culture that’s perfected the art of peddling escapism and calling it enlightenment.    

Problem is, it’s not God’s story.  And it’s not the story of God’s world.  And it’s not 

the mission we’re called to in Christ.  

In response to this other story about God, the early Christians offered the story named by Trinity.  Because in declaring that God is “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” the early Christians were essentially pointing to the story speaking from the Bible.  Out of the Old and New Testament.  The story that Jesus came to tell.   

It is the story of the God who created the world and all of its people, and when God did so, said, “this world is good.”  This God delighted in the world, made it because it was good and because God loved it.  And, as our Gospel lesson today reminds us, “God so loved the world that He sent His only Son…not to condemn the world, but to save it.”  The same God who made the world good is committed to God’s world, such that God would rather die Himself than see it lost.  The same God who made the world became a part of that world in Jesus, and died and rose as part of that world, so that that whole world might be restored, reconciled and renewed.

And, this same God that created the world and redeemed it continues to sustain it through the Holy Spirit.  And through the Church.  The same Spirit that breathed life into the first pile of human dust breathes life into the Body of Christ in the world, and continues to cooperate with human beings, co-creating with and through them, and making contributions to that world through the lives of God’s children.  

Trinity names the story of a God who loves the world God made, and will do anything and everything that God is able to do to make sure that the world will remain a blessing for God’s beloved children.

Trinity names the story of a God who, far from withdrawing or escaping from messiness, suffering, death and despair, enters fully into them, taking them upon Godself, and transforming them into new possibilities and new beginnings.

Trinity names the story of a God who does not raise up an elite few while leaving behind the many, but rather, continues to dwell in and renew the world God loves until every single one of God’s beloved children can know herself as God’s own, as a contribution and a gift that God is giving to the world.

While in times of suffering and of disappointment, Gnosticism may seem like a promising Gospel, it pales in comparison to the story named by Trinity.  Just think about it for a moment.  God made the world because God loves the world.  God made me because God loves me.  God made others because God loves others.  God created.  God redeems.  God sustains.  And I am a part of it.  

It reminds me of a famous scene from one of my favorite films, Dead Poets’ Society.  The free-spirited Mr. Thomas Keating, played by the late Robin Williams, is a teacher at an elite New England boarding school.  While the strict curriculum is designed to help society’s upper crust rise above the lower classes and their boorishness, Mr. Keating is determined to arouse their souls through beauty and poetry.  In the midst of one class, he asks, “why do we read and write poetry?”  His answer:

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.  We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary for to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.  To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life!…of the questions recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless…of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’  Answer.  That you are here - that life exists…that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.  That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.  What will your verse be?”

That’s the question presented by the story named by Trinity.  What will your verse be?  Because as part of this world that exists, that exists because God wanted it to, that is good because God delights in it, and is here because God is sustaining it, you and your life matter.  You are a part of it.  Your story is a verse in God’s powerful play.  This existence, this creation, is no accident.  It is music, and poetry, and it is good, and God has given you a part in it.  You are meant to be.  And God is making a contribution through you.

And not just when things are good.  Trinity names the story of God’s creating you, God’s commitment to you, and God’s contribution of you.  Including the messy times.  The broken times.  The failing times.  The times when life seems overwhelming and we want nothing more than to hide away or escape.  God wants to take the lowest moments of your life and transfigure them into the very stuff that will enable you to love and serve others.  God wants all of you.  And God wants to give all of you.  What will your verse be?

Which means that God also wants all of this world.  And wants to contribute all of this world.  To those who the world believes are unenlightened because they are shackled by poverty and oppression, or by failure or by class, or by the opinion so others or the judgements of their own egos, God says, I created you; I am committed to you; I want to contribute you.  What will your verse be?  

God has created.  God is committed.  God is contributing.  Like the prophet Isaiah, God wants to touch your unclean lips with the burning coal of God’s delight and love, and wants you to speak forth your life into the world.  God doesn’t take away those unclean lips - God touches them.  And speaks God’s contribution in and through us into a world that god loves.  What will your verse be?

Trinity means that your life has a purpose.  You are intended.  You may not believe you have a purpose.  You may not want a purpose.  If you’re like me, you may not really know what that purpose is.  And that’s ok.  Because you don’t need to have it figured out for God to be contributing you into this world.  

What we are called to is simply to believe this Good News, and receive the gift of our lives with gratitude, from the God who created, who is committed, and who desires to contribute you.  In a world where the Gnosticism of enlightened escape and avoidance of reality’s brokenness is the spirituality of choice, this story is more vital than ever.  We’ve been given the mission of proclaiming God’s love for God’s world.  We’ve been given the power to do so through the contributing Spirit.  Now we are given the story that ties it all together.  

Maybe the trilogy didn’t end so badly after all.  Maybe it hasn’t ended yet at all.  The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

What will your verse be?

Amen.  

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Afterword: For Open Space, members of the Mission were invited to take up a practice from Upstate NY Synod of the ELCA's Synod Assembly, whose theme was "God's Story, Our Voices."  Using a simple line on a page (see below), they were invited to map their personal story.  Above the line, they were invited to depict the high points of their life.  Below, they were invited to place the low points.  At the end, all were asked to circle the entire timeline and write "God's story."  They were also invited to consider: perhaps the lowest moments, as much as the highest, are the places God is calling you to minister from - the places where, far from being evil, compassion and the possibility of healing and serving others is most likely to arise.  The places we may very well discover our truest vocations.  All of our story, from top to bottom, is part of the verse God is contributing to the story through our lives. 

Click on the image of the timeline below - and try out the practice for yourself if you feel so led!  

Sermon for Pentecost 2015: The Advocate, the Accuser, and the Puffy Face: Towards a Practical Pentecostalism

"The Advocate, the Accuser and the Puffy Face: Towards a Practical Pentecostalism"

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Transcript of Extemporaneous Sermon 

Preached at: South Wedge Mission and Trinity Episcopal Church

Rochester, New York

24 May 2015

Day Texts: Acts 2.1-21

John 15.26-27, 16.4-15

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An audio recording from Trinity Episcopal in Greece, NY can be heard here

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Synopsis: While being "Pentecostal" can feel foreign and even intimidating, according to Jesus it's actually pretty practical; it involves learning to hear and discern the voice of the Advocate in the midst of the world of the Accuser, and becoming advocates on behalf of what God is bringing to life in the gifts and possibilities of others.  

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We pastors love Pentecost.  Because the liturgical color for the feast is red.  Which means we get to wear our red stoles.  Usually, the stoles we received at our ordinations.  And if there’s anything pastors love more than preening about in their favorite vestments, its preening with an added injection of nostalgia.

I’m no different with my red stole.  And I especially love this image, the picture of the Wild Goose.  See, for the Celtic Christians, the Wild Goose was a perfect symbol for the Holy Spirit, that mysterious, often elusive third member of the Trinity.  The Wild Goose was, well, wild.  Free.  Uncontrollable.  In John 3, Jesus compares her to the wind, blowing in unpredictable, untamable directions.  The Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit refuses to be boxed in or defined.

Which is maybe why I personally also need a slightly more concrete avian concept to help me understand the oft-perplexing Holy Firebird.  Which is why I turn to that other love of my life - my chickens.  

As those of you who know me know, I love my chickens - even more than my ordination stole.  There’s Stripey - because she’s striped.  Red, because she’s red.  Shrieker, because she shrieks…and, well you get the picture.  But first among this noble brood of hens is my personal favorite: Puffy Face.  Because she has feathers all over her face.  Like a beard.  Like me.  

She also burned the top of her head this winter on the heat lamp.  Not unlike the monks of old who cut their hair in a tonsure, Friar-Tuck style, to symbolize that, like the disciples on Pentecost, they too had been specially visited by the Holy Spirit, Puffy is slightly bald on top, and mostly burned in the brain.  

And like the Holy Spirit, Puffy has one sole purpose: escaping to freedom.  Every morning I go to check the eggs.  Every morning, Puffy is casually crouched in the tulips, chowing away.  Puffy is put back in the pen.  I go inside with the eggs.  I look out the window.  Puffy is once more out and about, this time heading for the strawberries or the vegetables.  No matter how many times I staple shut the gaps in the fence or secure the loose door, no matter how short we clip her wings or how often we thwart her, Puffy finds a way.  She defies confinement.  She seeks freedom.  And often, tries to lead her sisters to liberation as well.

And while all of this talk of wild geese and chickens and tongues of fire may seem birdbrained in themselves, when it comes to the Holy Spirit, they’re often the best we have to go on.  Particularly for those of us from more “introverted” Christian traditions, the Spirit is talked about often, encountered seldom.  Certainly, she shows up when we bother to recite the creed; we invoke her over the waters of baptism and ask God to pour her out over the Eucharistic elements.  We even call upon her as a kind of stamp of approval at the culmination of churchy procedures like committee meetings and ordinations, often paying her lip service - “it seems pleasing to the Holy Spirit that measure X should be enacted.”  Because, after all, the Holy Spirit would never desire for us to go back to committee.  Not even Satan would encourage that line of torture.  

But in general, if you’re like me, you often wonder why we bother at all to play at the whole “Holy Spirit” thing.  Certainly, other churches seem to have the market cornered as far as being Pentecostal and Charismatic goes.  They speak in tongues.  They display a fiery level of exuberance and passion that makes us Lutherans and Episcopalians blush and edge our chairs away uncomfortably.  It’s not that I doubt for a second the reality of their experience - it’s just, I’d prefer them to experience the Spirit a little further away from me and my quiet, solitary contemplation of my prayer book.

And yet, if I’m honest, my real discomfort might also stem from a bit of jealously.  Those churches seem to have a spark of life I often find lacking in my own faith practice.  And, what’s more, it’s just plain confusing.  After all, in my baptism, I was told that God anointed me with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Every week, during the blessing of the Eucharist, we ask God to “pour out your Spirit upon us; make us holy.”  And yet, it’s kind of a let down to leave Sunday evening and head into the regular week of life and work and feel so…not-spiritual.  Uninspired.  Unempowered.

Generally, if you ask someone if they’re racist, they’ll always say “no,” when almost always, the truth is, “yes.”  In the same way, if you ask someone if they’re “spiritual,” the general reply will be “yes,” when the reality is, “I’m not really sure.”

If you’re like me, perhaps you wish you could get a little bit of that Wild Goose power in you.  After all, who doesn’t want a little extra power and exuberance in their everyday lives and practice?  I don’t need to speak in tongues.  But I’d like to know that the Holy Spirit is a practical promise for my life and not merely an imaginary number to balance the doctrinal equation of Trinity.  

Luckily, in today’s Gospel lesson from St. John, Jesus Himself offers what I think is a really helpful starting point for embracing a more practical Pentecostalism in our lives.  

As part of His farewell prayer to His disciples, Jesus promises not to leave the disciples abandoned upon his departure.  Even though He’s going away (see: Feast of the Ascension - last Sunday), reinforcements are on the way.  Help will arrive in the form of the Holy Spirit, who Jesus here refers to as “the Advocate.”  And the Advocate will help, He continues, by leading them into all truth; by proving the world wrong “about sin and righteousness and judgement.”  

Notice here that Jesus doesn’t mention speaking in tongues or anything externally supernatural.  Instead, the words Jesus uses here sound much more to me like the language of discernment.  As if to say, “there’s a certain way that the world thinks about these really important things - sin, righteousness, judgment - and it’s not the whole truth.  The Spirit will help you see rightly.  I’m sending you the Spirit so you can learn to see grace and mercy and love rightly in the midst of a world of lies and half-truths.”  

And why exactly do we need such a vision, these “Gospel goggles?”  Jesus drops another hint when he makes the powerful pronouncement: “about judgement, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”  The ruler of this world, in scripture, is none other than Satan.  And in ancient Hebrew, the word Satan actually means “the Accuser.”  

So track with me here: Jesus has just drawn up a mini metaphor of the state of reality.  It’s like a courtroom, and we are the defendants.  One the one side stands the Prosecuting Attorney, the Accuser, the one who makes the rules of this world.  On the other side, fighting for our freedom, is the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.

Something about living a practical Pentecostalism means grasping this dichotomy between the Accuser and the Advocate.  

And it’s a matter of life and death that we do.  Because if we’re honest with ourselves, we know what the world according to the Accuser looks like.  It’s the world we live in when we leave church and head back to the workplace.  The world where we operate on principles of fear and scarcity.  Where things are valued according to success and failure.  Where we have to compete with one another for approval, coerce one another for control, and persecute one another for power.

The world that the Accuser shapes in his twisted image is one in which there is no freedom, only the chains of calculation and measurement.  It’s a world where some human beings are deemed more valuable because of their paycheck or their assets, while others are condemned to poverty and prison because of their race or their neighborhood or their orientation.  

In the Accuser’s world, we don’t get a second-chance at marriage because that first divorce means we lost our chance at happiness.  In the Accuser’s world, you are worthy of notice depending on how many Facebook friends and likes you have received, and anonymity and rejection are hells reserved for the unpopular the unbeautiful.  In the Accuser’s world, you are judged righteous because of your accomplishments, and you are a sinner if you fail to play the game of blame, shame, slander and guilt that you’ve been rigged into since the day you started breathing.

We’ve all felt the lash of an Accuser’s scorn.  And, if we’re honest, we’ve also benefitted from serving as the Accuser’s informants and co-conspirators.  In the Accuser’s world, grace and freedom and love are beautiful ideals to aspire to on a Sunday afternoon - but are left behind as mere sentiment and weakness when we enter into the real world. 

The Accuser’s world is not the world God intended.  It is the world Christ came to destroy so that the world God loves can be reborn.  And that is the promise when Jesus declares that the “ruler of this world has been condemned.”  The Accuser is a liar.  The Cross of Christ says that the Accuser is a liar.  The Advocate is given to us so that we can remember who we are and whose we are.

No truth has made a bigger difference in my own spiritual life than the discovery that the Advocate is not the Accuser.  A little over two years ago, I was brought to the point of having to make some major changes in my life before my decisions destroyed me.  The very next day after finally surrendering, I heard this same Gospel lesson preached.  I heard the Holy Spirit called “the Advocate.”  And I suddenly realized: that voice of accusation I’d hear my whole life - it wasn’t God’s.  The voice of shame, that told me I was finished because of my failures; that I would never be good enough for grace; that I was defined by my doubts and my destructive choices - this voice was not God’s, and was never God’s.  It was the Accuser’s.  And it was a lie.

Which meant that I had never actually really heard or listened to God’s actual voice.  Tears of relief and amazement rushed over me as a I realized that God’s Spirit is an Advocate - that God wanted the best for me, wanted the encourage and inspire me to let go of the chains in my life, not to condemn me, but to set me free.  That God loved me and had always loved me and was always in my corner, fighting for me and speaking words of kindness and forgiveness on my behalf.  

The voice of truth and the truth of the Spirit is one of Advocacy, not Accusation.  

And we live, not in the Accuser’s world, but the world of the Advocate.  Just as, at the creation of the world, God took the dust and the darkness and formed it into a world, and breathed the Holy Spirit into that dust and gave it life, so, in the Advocate’s world, God is taking our dead ends and our failures and our brokenness and our shame and gathered them into this body, this community, this new creation, this church, and breathing the Spirit of Life into them.  

In the Advocate’s world, shame does not exist, only second-chances and fresh improvisations.  There is no condemnation, but possibility, and potential, and a new world about to dawn.  In the Advocate’s world, we can live, not as if tonight might be our last night on earth, but as if tomorrow might be the first day of the rest of our lives.  In the Advocate’s world, each of you, you and you, and me, has a gift and a contribution to make, and God’s Spirit is swirling about like the wind, waiting to inspire you and breathe the glory of your beauty into the midst of the darkness of the Accuser’s lies and declare a more splendorous truth.

The Holy Spirit is our Advocate, and this means that, truly, God is FOR US, on our side, and desires to see the world flourish and become wild and free, as God first made it to be.  If you’ve ever had an advocate in your life - a coach, a teacher, a friend, or someone else - then you know what it feels like to suddenly come alive when someone believes in you.  Well, even if you’ve never heard such a voice before, consider yourself informed this day: God believes in you.  God has a plan for you.  God has a gift to give the world for you.  And God will advocate for you and through you, in order to bless the world with the goodness with which God created you.

Because, see, in the Advocate’s world, there is no competition or scarcity, only communion and abundance.  Which means we are freed from having to play the game of life as if grace for you means scraps for me.  God’s body, the Church, is called to be a community that Advocates.  Believing God’s promise of abundance to be true, we no longer fear using our words, our actions and our lives to advocate for and encourage others.  We are free to live in the real world - God’s world - no matter what the Accuser’s lies may say.

And believe me, while it’s a far cry from speaking in tongues, when we speak with the grammar of gift and grace, it’s going to sound like we’re drunk at nine in the morning like those first disciples.  It’s a language of poetry and possibility that makes no sense to the cold computational calculus of the Accuser’s logic.  In a world where some believe that black voices forfeit their right to be heard because of their rage, the Church advocates: listen to them, because therein, you might just hear the voice of God calling us to repentance.  

In a world that predicts prison bed counts based on the failed test scores of third graders and consigns struggling children to lives of crime and poverty, it will sound like a rushing wind to suggest that perhaps our corporations would do well to invest in these same lives, because maybe, just maybe, their resilience, creativity and experience of oppression might be more valuable to a company and a world than another good boy in a suit and tie.

The Gospel of the Advocate will sound strange to a world addicted to the syrupy sound of the Accuser’s lies.  And yet, it is precisely this Gospel, and this Spirit of Advocacy, that is the Church’s calling.  It’s our mission, and it’s for each one of us.  

And you don’t need to prophecy before the masses to embrace your anointing for Practical Pentecostalism.  This week, maybe it starts with something simple.  Take this practice suggested by my good friend Rev. Keith Anderson, the Lutheran church’s social media guru.  What if, say, for every one facebook post or tweet about ourselves, we used our bandwidth to then offer ten posts highlighting the gifts and contributions of others?  What if the Church stopped worrying about winning the Accuser’s measurement game - and simply lived the freedom of getting to live a life of encouraging and discovering and midwifing the beauty being born in our fellow children of God all around us?

Practical Pentecostalism is, in that sense, deceptively simple.  And not a little bit challenging.  It means, like Puffy Face the chicken, never accepting the chains and the locked gates of the coop as the final word.  It means constantly inviting ourselves to self-awareness: am I acting out of trust in the Accuser’s promises right now, or out of a conviction of the Gospel of the Advocate?  Are my words and actions and my life helping to lock doors and box in God’s children - or to break locks, magnify possibility, and unleash the potential freedom in the world and the people that God loves?

This week, courageously try playing the Advocate game.  Ask God: who has been an advocate in my life?  How did that person advocate for me, and how did that make me feel?  Where am I calling to advocate on someone else’s behalf this week?  And then, ask for the grace and the faith and the wild inspiration of the Holy Spirit to help love their life into being.  

Like Puffy face, we are called to let no chains constrain us.  We are children of God.  We are made free by the Cross which has condemned the condemnation of the Accuser, and opened the doors to a world in which grace and peace are the way things really are.  This is Practical Pentecostalism.  Go out, in whatever language necessary, and proclaim it to the world.  Live it into the world.  Live.  In Jesus Name.    Amen.  

The Tao of Lent

"The Tao of Lent"

Rowan Williams: "The baptized person is not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle, but in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  That surely is one of the most extraordinary mysteries of being Christian.  We are in the middle of two things that seem quite contradictory: in the middle of the heart of God, the ecstatic joy of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain.  And because Jesus has taken his stand right in the middle of those two realities, that is where we take ours.  As he says, 'Where I am, there will my servant be also (John 12.26).'"

(from Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer - p7)

Transfiguring Lent: Resources for Preparing in the Snow

Transfiguring Lent: Resources for Preparing in the Snow

Feast of the Transfiguration

15 February 2015

Gospel: Mark 9.2-9

This weekend, Rochester was visited by Winter Storm Neptune, causing many to cancel services.  This post includes a homily and two original songs based in the Feast of the Transfiguration, and with an orientation towards preparing for Lent.  If you or folks from your community missed church today,  I humbly offer these as a possible way to connect with God today.  

Unsure if South Wedge Mission would share their fate, my friend Matt Townsend of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester and I went out to nearby Highland Park to record a short homily about snow, beauty, disruption, and the ways that Transfiguration makes Lent into a time to "inhale, and be rejuvenated by the grace of God as we seek more life."  

Also, please enjoy samples of SWM's two latest worship songs.  Inspired by Hindu kirtan music and by the Taize community, I take a simple word or phrase from scripture, tradition, or literature, and then we sing it repeatedly.  The goal is not content-focused, but communion-oriented - we hope that by sinking deeply into the repetitions and the words, the music creates a space for us to enjoy our intention of being in community with God and with one another.

The first piece, "St. Iraneus Song," is based on the church father's famous quotation that "the glory of God is a human being fully alive."  The full text: 

The Glory of God

is God's children

fully alive

and full of life

We will sing of the beauty

and the duty of delight

We will dance in the light 

The second, "Eagles' Wings," was written for last week's text from Isaiah 40.21-31, but also speaks about the process of Lent - one, as the 12-step groups note, is about "progress, not perfection." Full text:

Arise Beloved Child
and run and not grow faint
Shine like the rising sun
and fly on eagles' wings



Grace, peace and more life unto you!

"Fred Phelps IS Your Cousin, By the Way:" Thoughts in Response to the President's National Prayer Breakfast Remarks

I acknowledge, own, lament, and despise the violence inherent in my Christian family's history. Within the half-century, Christians have lynched Black bodies and then taken pictures they shared as postcards, driven GLBTQ youth to suicide, to be tortured and murdered with hate speech from the pulpit, and generally, been prime examples of everything wrong with mis-used religion. I am a part of this family, and this tradition. There is no escaping that. Fred Phelps and the Grand Wizard of the KKK and MLK Jr are all part of my family. We're all part of the best and worst that humanity has offered.  To deny this is to already miss the point of the cross.  

Which is why the (mostly) liberal celebration of President Obama's brief comments at the National Prayer Breakfast calling Christians to remember their own history of violence has been hard for me to stomach. Not the President's comments - they seemed appropriately fitting, and came AFTER a round condemnation of the current violence perpetrated by ISIS. No issues there.  

Here's where I'm feeling torn:

1) When we condemn Christian violence, is it to imply a distance between we "enlightened modern liberal" Christians and either the barbarians of the past or the conservative rubes of the present? Ie are we somehow, tongue-in-cheek, implying that "of course WE know better?" Which is, I think, to miss the point of the presidents' address. Those who have suffered and are suffering don't need us to chide, moralize, or simply crown ourselves with a different brand of triumphalism. They need us to stop seeking crowns int he first place. 

2) ISIS is committing mass torture and murder against not only Christians, but also fellow Muslims, Zoroastrians, and seculars who refuse to submit to forced conversion (sometimes pre-emptive of that). I think the President's timing was great in waiting until after he had condemned said violence before turning introspective. At the same, time, brutal mass murder is being perpetrated, with media and political impunity. I often feel that there's a kind of "she deserved to get raped" mentality from people who think that Christianity's failures in the past mean that we somehow have to ignore the violence done against children, women, and men in the present. Not saying that this is people's intent. But the inescapable level of indifference and even apathy in the media, in government, and in the churches about what is going on is horrible - and it feels like people are using Obama's speech as justification to continue this. I repeat - Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, and secular CHILDREN are being raped, tortured, crucified, sold into slavery, abused, and murdered. And a simple google-search will show you the extent of the world's ability to give-a-shit. 

3) President Obama is one of those Christians who has and IS continuing to commit mass violence - using drones, the military, torture, etc - in the name of religion - the ideology of the religion of America. He is not a prophet - he's like any of us - a sinner-saint who gets it right sometimes, fails miserable in others, and most of the time, I think, is just trying to do his best to do some good amidst all of the impossible decisions he has to make. I'm less concerned with the President specifically here - and more concerned at how quickly Christians are jumping on his words as if somehow he's revealing something we don't all already know - and willingly participate in on a daily basis thorough our consumer choices, our taxes rendered, and our allegiance pledged.  There is no Christian hand unstained by the blood of innocents.  We are ALL still part of the problem - not just those conservatives/liberals/anyone-different-than-us. It's why, ostensibly, we need Christ in the first place.

I think we as Christians need to repent each and every single day of the violence of our family. But it is OUR family's violence - we don't get to pick and choose who our relatives are. And that should humble us, as well as keep us from self-righteousness, or from the kind of self-flagellating guilt that keeps us from acknowledging that many of our children - and the children of other faiths or lack-thereof- still need us to work together for their sake.

Imagine if we used all of the Facebook posts, all of the vitriol and outrage, all of the inspiration and all of the hope inspired by the President's speech, as an actual call to conversion, rather than condemnation; as a call to action rather than avoidance; as a call to active non-violence and love, rather than name-calling and lecturing.  I'm not sure religious people would not still be shitty to others.  I do think it's what Jesus would have wanted in His Name.    

Sermon: "Listen," or, "On the Sound of the Tearing Heavens"

"Listen" or "On the Sound of the Tearing Heavens"

Photo by Matt Townsend

I preach extemporaneously - 
this is an edited/remembered transcript of homilies proclaimed at:

South Wedge Mission, Rochester, New York
St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Pittsford, New York

30 November 2014
First Sunday of Advent
Day Text: Isaiah 64.1-9

~

I’d like to invite you to hear and once more consider the words of the prophet Isaiah this day.

Do not listen to them with the cold detachment of a scholar, or the savy of a media-saturated millenial, or a cynicism of a skeptical critic.

Try to hear them from within.  From within the broken hearts of people lamenting the loss of justice for their dead son.  From within the war-torn streets wracked by looting and rioting, by destruction and despair.  From within a community whose parents could tell them stories of broken dreams, burning crosses, and lynching trees.

(At the SWM service, we also took time to listen to a recording by the Rev. Timothy Flemming, Sr. of the Old-Meter hymn, I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorn” - hear a recording in the same style by Mahalia Jackson here.  Thanks to the Rev. Julien Pridgen for sharing his heritage with me here.)

Listen.

1 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, 
so that the mountains would quake at your presence-- 

2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil-- 
to make your name known to your adversaries, 
so that the nations might tremble at your presence! 

3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, 
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. 

4 From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, 
no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. 

5 You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. 
But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. 

6 We have all become like one who is unclean, 
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. 
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 

7 There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; 
for you have hidden your face from us, 
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. 

8 Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; 
we are all the work of your hand. 

9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. 
Now consider, we are all your people.

Advent is not really about waiting for sweet baby Jesus.  He’s already been born.  Done that.  The manger is emptied of its precious cargo.  

He took that body to the cross, and the cross is empty too.  Christ has come.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  

But the lynching tree is not empty.

Christ will come again.    

That’s what Advent is about.  Christ.  Coming again.  We desperately need Christ to come again.  And we should be terrified.    

“OH that you would tear the heavens apart!”  cries the prophet.  What if he’s not just referring to some Percy Jackson-era conception of cosmology?  What if he’s talking about our heavens?  The ones that we have built out of our own efforts.  The ones we turn to for protection.  The ones that surround and salute and sanctify the privileges we enjoy.  The ones we look to for justification.  

What if the heavens that need tearing open, this Advent and every Advent, are our own shoddy approximations of the real thing?  The pearly gated communities and cocoons we weave around ourselves?  The heavens that are being torn apart by looters and rioters and the cries of outrage and the calls for justice - because they are the ones we have refused to tear down ourselves?  

Listen.  This is not a word in response to Ferguson.  It’s a word demanded by the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Who was born into the manger, homeless, living under occupation, exposed, dripping with the fluids and blood of his teenage mother, mixed with the blood of the innocents massacred by a tyrant terrified of change.  It’s demanded by the cross, the first lynching tree in a long and tattered history in which it would be used more often by Christians than against them.  It’s demanded by St. Paul, who in 2 Corinthians lays down our orders to “practice the ministry of reconciliation.”  

It’s not a new calling.  Just an old and very much neglected one.  

Advent should terrify us.  Because in it, we await the day when Christ will come again.  To set right not only what we could not set right ourselves.  But to set right what we refused to set right ourselves.  Because that’s the irony in all this: even in an age when we congratulate ourselves on our liberalism, our progressivism, or our conservatism - when poll after poll celebrates the desires of young adults to “get involved and help others” - when it seems like it’s enough for us to just “be good people and not hurt others” - history finds ways to insult us with our utterly inability to do any better than the Roman soldiers 2000 years ago.  

Because less than half a century ago, across this country, Christian men and women still gathered around lamp posts and flag poles on which hung the “strange fruit” of Black bodies.  Children were paraded before it like a demonic Eucharistic adoration.  Photographs were taken, and postcards were sent: “look what we did last Sunday, hugs and kisses.”  

Because today, despite calls for the removal of the Common Core, more parents are removing their students to the sanctuary of the suburban schools, lamenting their own lack of resolve, while silently thanking whatever power they pray to that their child won’t be exposed to the “failure of the city schools” - code to mean, “at least they’ll be harassed by other white children with iPhones instead of students of color with Eubonics.”  

Because today, we’d rather post hash-tags and well-meaning Facebook posts and selfies of us pretending to be assaulted by the police, instead of taking our bodies to the pews of Black churches and other places of worship and gathering to simply listen - to listen to the voices of lament, the pleas for recognition, the wild re-incarnation of the prophet Isaiah, who cry before a deaf world: “oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

 The world is not right.  The rules are not fair.  We know it should be different.  We have utterly failed to cash in on the promises of our best intentions and deepest sentiments.  All our best efforts at being nice, good people who want to make help others?  Nothing, in the end, but "filthy rags."

It is not my intention to make you feel guilted today into taking action.  It is not my intention to somehow imply that I am any less racist or more engaged than my colleagues who choose not to preach on this today.  It’s not my intention to promote an agenda of hatred towards the police, most of whom work with honor and integrity at a thankless job filled with life-and-death no-win decisions.

It is not my intention to say that looting and pillaging is justified.  But let me be clear, and please hear me say this: it is absolutely my intention that, today, and whenever possible, we must make it a priority to hear the cry of the Lord Jesus Christ rising from the modern day cross, demanding us to listen as it laments: “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

We cannot afford not to hear this call this Advent.  We cannot afford to justify ourselves because of our hard work, or our respectability, or our commitment to law and order.  As Isaiah makes very clear to us, no one is justified before God.  God is the potter; we are the clay.  The Gospel we have fallen short of makes plain and clear the fault lines and cracks in our delusions of generosity and justice.  

But we can also ill afford to avoid this call this Advent because without it, we cannot truly hear the Gospel as the Good News we so desperately need.  We need our heavens torn apart - our false heavens where “fairness” is a set of rules devised by the winners to the exclusion of the losers.  False heavens where we have the luxury to change the channel from am impassioned speech to the fourth re-run of our favorite zombie show.  False heavens where we can afford to make commitments to justice we break as soon as something better comes along, while leaving our neighbors with the second-rate hand-me-downs of yesterday’s sentimentality.

Because it is a blessing, brothers and sisters - it is a gift, the gift, that we are being prepared to receive in Advent - to have our idols smashed.  It is such a profound and powerful present for God to reveal to us that the heaven we thought we had achieved is actually a luxury suite in hell.  It is the very grace of God to be shown that, beyond our fears and our excuses and our avoidances, there is a bigger heaven, a new earth, a better kingdom, one in which the prophets’ words are not prediction but pronouncement: “we are all your children.”

This is not something to vote on.  Or to hashtag.  Or to consider.  It is not even something that has to be accomplished.  It is a fact of creation that each and every single human being is the unrepeatable expression of God’s creative love.  Each and every single human person has been blessed with the mission that follows from the manger - to be agents of reconciliation, and prophets of the new creation, in which all live by the politics of peace and the economy of grace.  If our communities do not reflect this yet, it’s not because we haven’t “progressed” that far yet - it’s that we haven’t kept up with the speed of God’s love.  

The Good News is that God loves us, loves this world, far too much to leave us as we are - prisoners, all of us, to the pseudo-paradises we have built.  Using our communities, our voices, our privilege to be the amplifiers of the voices crying out in the wilderness is not a zero-sum game.  The more the Gospel is proclaimed, the more we all can receive and live from our truest selves.  It might not make us comfortable or happy.  But it will make us more free.  All of us.  More free.

And I think it starts with simply being willing to listen.  To admit that Christ's coming again means we cannot do this all on our own.  To consider that maybe the voice of God calling us to repentance and conversion might be coming from the same place it's always been found - the cross.  And the lynching tree.

So here’s my Advent challenge to you: during this season, each morning when you rise, make it a point to ask God: help me hear a voice I’ve ignored today.  Maybe it’s reading an article from an opposing view.  Maybe it’s going to a protest, or worshipping at a Black church, and doing so without judgement or evaluation.  Try to hear; try to listen.  

And it’s not limited merely to race.  We can all afford to Tevo that favorite show to make time to have dinner with people close to us whose stories we barely know.  Maybe you have an employee at work who’s always excluded, and could use a listening ear.  Maybe it’s spending time hearing stories with the guys under the bridge, or going to view the hauntingly beautiful AIDS memorial quilts at Equal Grounds.  Start where you're at.  Just don't stay there.    

I want to close with an experience I had just a few days ago.  As some of you know, I’ve been trying to do my best to post about happenings in Ferguson.  I had sat down to write our weekly email, with a special “pastoral letter” about things.  As I was just finishing, my Pages program crashed.  No lie.  It’s never happened before.  I couldn’t believe it.  Surely, some racist demon had shut down my prophetic portal in an attempt to personally silence me!

After some very un-prophetic choice four letter words, I walked to Equal Grounds to cool off and re-write the letter.  As I entered the shop, who should I encounter but Deacon and Paulette and Kelly, the current leaders of Unity Fellowship Church.  You know, the Black church that shares our building with us.  The Black church that, in all of this and over the past year or so, we’ve barely engaged with at all.  At the coffee shop.  Right then.

UFC is not only a Black church.  It’s a Black GLBTQ community of liberation.  They’ve drawn a double ticket of oppression within their home context.  They’ve been without a pastor since Spring, and have seen the community dwindle to the point where they aren’t regularly worshipping at SWM.  But, as we sat and talked and shared coffee, Kelly and Paulette shared their burning desire to still “do church.”  They shared their idea to start a fourth-Sunday meal for single parents in the neighborhood.  Would we be willing to let them use our kitchen for that?

Now my four-letter words were in amazement.  We’ve been praying and discerning recently how SWM might be called to engage our neglected neighbors more.  We also happen to do a Supper liturgy every third Sunday.  Except ours is usually only us.  Just like that, from one little accidental conversation, we found ourselves agreeing to pray together about the possibility of SWM and UFC regularly using fourth Sundays as joint outreach-service ministries together.  

Maybe that spirit that crashed my email wasn’t so demonic after all.  Maybe it was the Holy Spirit, saying, “Matthew, shut up, and go listen to what I have to say.”

Listen.  It's the sound of the heavens tearing.  And its terrifying.  But it's also the sound of the Gospel.  Proclaiming freedom.  Proclaiming a new creation.  Proclaiming "we are all Your children."  It is the sound of the spirituals and the blues.  The sound of riots and of revelation.  It is the sound of the prophets and of the poor.  It is calling us out.  And calling us into freedom.

Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ is coming again.

Listen!