A Sower Went Our to Sow

Next week, July 13, the following readings will meet us on Sunday morning. Perhaps we can learn together what it means for God's Word to be a "lantern unto our feet"...as the sower goes out to sow...

Collect of the Day for July 13, 2008

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Genesis 25:19-34
These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, "If it is to be this way, why do I live?" So she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said to her,
"Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger."
When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau's heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.
When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.
Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!" (Therefore he was called Edom.) Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright." Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?" Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Psalm 119:105-112 Page 772, BCP

105
Your word is a lantern to my feet *
and a light upon my path.
106
I have sworn and am determined *
to keep your righteous judgments.
107
I am deeply troubled; *
preserve my life, O LORD, according to your word.
108
Accept, O LORD, the willing tribute of my lips, *
and teach me your judgments.
109
My life is always in my hand, *
yet I do not forget your law.
110
The wicked have set a trap for me, *
but I have not strayed from your commandments.
111
Your decrees are my inheritance for ever; *
truly, they are the joy of my heart.
112
I have applied my heart to fulfill your statutes *
for ever and to the end.

Romans 8:1-11
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law-- indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23
Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!"
"Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

A Sower Went Out to Sow
Note here the role of “The Word (Logos) of God. For as the sower goes out to sow, so the word of God finds a home in the human heart. Likewise, as in the psalter, the Word of God becomes a lantern to our feet. In Romans Paul understands that because we live in the spirit we are no longer in the flesh, in a sense and so we come no longer under the law, but under the authority of the Word of God. The story of Jacob and Esau and the selling of the birthright (or pledge of “word”) between two brothers…is of great interest Thus next week we are invited by the lectionary to consider the Word of God…and our word to one another as central to the ordering of our common life.

I came across a few thoughts with regard to "the word". I shared them on Sunday and several folk asked for copies of what I said; Here then, a few simple thoughts:

Illustrations #1

God spoke and it was so. God spoke simply: Let there be light. Let us make humankind. Jesus spoke with similar simplicity; “Love one another”. It really is as simple as that. Churchill summarizes well, the power of a single word: “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope”

Illustration #2

Years ago I heard an old saying that has stuck with me through the years. It is one of those sayings that takes the same words, and rearranges them slightly to make an unforgettable point: the one to which I refer is; “I shall not live till I have seen God, and when I have seen God I shall never die!”

Illustration #3

Some say God is silent! Not so.
The Scripture is the Word of God, and has much to say. In the prologue to John’s great Gospel, Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, and Jesus is a never ending word of love in my heart. And according to Meister Eckhart: “Every creature is a Word of God”.
What a marvel that God is so articulate when so often so many cannot hear a word of God.

Something New

Hi folks,
As we prepare to celebrate our congregation's 275th anniversary I thought we'd try something just a little different. So to add a little life to this blog, let's get into the habit of sharing with you the readings for the coming Sunday. This will help us "get ready" for church by reading what the lectionary wants us to read ahead of time. We can then begin to form our questions about what the scripture is saying to us in our own hearts and then perhaps share some of that with our friends at Church on Sunday. For those of us at St. Peter's we can use some of this material as a basis for conversation at "Coffee Plus" after church.
Here then are the readings for this coming Sunday.

The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
June 29th.
The Parish Picnic at Winter Park
275 Years to the Day from the Founding of St. Peter's, Salem

Collect of the Day

Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Old Testament Reading:Genesis 22:1-14
God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you." So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.
When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."

Psalm 13 Page 597, Book of Common Prayer

1
How long, O LORD?
will you forget me for ever? *
how long will you hide your face from me?
2
How long shall I have perplexity in my mind,
and grief in my heart, day after day?*
how long shall my enemy triumph over me?
3
Look upon me and answer me, O LORD my God; *
give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death;
4
Lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," *
and my foes rejoice that I have fallen.
5
But I put my trust in your mercy; *
my heart is joyful because of your saving help.
6
I will sing to the LORD, for he has dealt with me richly; *
I will praise the Name of the Lord Most High.

Epistle: Romans 6:12-23
Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Gospel: Matthew 10:40-42
Jesus said, "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple-- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward."

There now...have questions...???
See you Sunday...or if you just happen to come across this blog, don't hesitate to leave a comment, or email me.

Blessings on all,
Fr. Paul

The Strong Name of the Trinity!

Trinity Sunday is among my favorite days of the Christian year...here follow a few thoughts for Trinity Sunday...I bind unto myself the strong name of the Trinity!
Paul of Salem.

Response for Trinity Sunday.

Where are we to get strength to face the challenge of our times? History brings us many challenges. Our ancestors in faith demonstrated great courage in the face of adversity. We too can come to the wellspring of courage they drew from. I am devoted to the notion of the Trinity, not as a doctrine but as to the source of a God given spirituality. There is great power in that spirituality.

We know that God “brooded” over the face of the waters of chaos at the creation. We also know that Jesus poured out his life for us on the cross. And we have reliable witnesses who told us about the experience of a “mighty wind” that rushed in upon the Apostles in the Upper Room, and the flames of fire that alighted upon them. Thus the biblical record clearly states that God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. In Sacred History our collective experience of God’s mighty power is called The Holy Trinity in short hand. This is no doctrine for me. This is the very power of God, and we have direct experience of it and access to it.

Thus there are terrorist attacks the like of which we have never seen before, and there will be more to follow. Nature will unleash her destructive forces in unprecedented dimensions particularly if we continue to ignore our own contribution to nature’s need for protection and conservation. Garden variety human sin as well as sin of a more heinous sort, political chicanery, and economic disquietude will often find us overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all.

But we must not despair. And we must never loose hope. We have in fact, seen it all before. We must read our history books. If we do not, we will repeat it all, time after time after tiresome time. The philosopher, George Santayana said it well; “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it!”

Whatever the world throws at us by way of human violence, nature’s fury, or our own folly, we still have won the Victory! That is the core of our faith. Good Friday will have its day. But Good Friday is not the end of the story. If that had been the end of the story for us, Christianity would have been nothing more than a byword. “Ho-hum, another good man died at the hands of brutality”, history would say by way of footnote.

But Jesus and Christianity is no footnote, and we had better wake up to the fact that God is not to be mocked, either by wicked people, or by our own timidity. God is nothing short of the power to redeem a fallen world. We are the Easter People, remember! It is time for us to get our nerve back and put some punch back into our Gospel. We are the hands and feet of the Gospel…and whatever catastrophe befalls us, we have much work to do.

There is a wonderful scene in “Fiddler on the Roof”. In it, the Great Wedding Feast is utterly destroyed by Cossack soldiers descending upon the merry making. Homes are set afire, tables overturned, china broken, and the entire scene is pillaged. In shock, in disbelief, the people look up to God in bewilderment…and ask Tevye, who always had something wise to say; “What are we to do now?” There was, of course a long pause, as Tevye resolutely picked up a chair, and defiantly said; “Clean up the mess”.

Tevye also wondered about being the “Chosen” people…by asking God at one point with a wry smile: “Couldn’t you choose somebody else, once in a while?” My dear friends, there is a futility in asking “why” to the constant onslaught of sin. It is understandable, but ultimately futile. What is much more fruitful will be Tevye’s faithful response to the experience of devastation. What we have to remember after 9/11, or after the onslaught of Tsunamis, Hurricanes and Cyclones, what we have to remember after our own sins, or the sins and wickedness of others; is the simple but Grace-filled proclamation; “Clean up the mess!”

Wonder of wonders, this is where God’s grace will be found; and more than that, this is where Christ’s Victory will be found. When we claim the Power of God to Create, To Save and to Sanctify, all the world will see that the Love of God is alive and well in us. As we dare to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this world, we will discover God’s Grace at work in us transforming us and the world we live in.

All the world will come to taste and see the Creative, Redeeming and Sanctifying Power of God as we remember who God has called us to be. I am not the first Celt to bind to myself the Strong Name of the Trinity. Patrick did so many, many years ago during his battle with the Irish slave trade. Bind yourself to it with me and all those who have looked to God for help before, you will no doubt discover the Power of God at work in you!

Peace Pentecost

Pentecost was a wonderful day at St. Peter's. The Gospel was read in six languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Greek, and Swahili...it was wonderful! And Mamadou, a new friend of the parish from Senegal, played the West African drums for us and rendered our music and our praise expecially joyful and exciting! What a day...and then marching "In the Light of God" we made our way to the Parish Hall where we feasted on a sumptuous Birthday Cake for the Church...

(The Following is what I based my sermon on for Pentecost)

Peace Pentecost!

To this day, people of faith greet one another “Shalom”, “salaam alaykum”, and of course the Christians say “Peace”. The root of the word “Jerusalem” means “Peace”, and is thus viewed as the Holy City. We say peace…but do we mean it?
As recently as today there is division, there is warfare. Can we transcend race, ethnicity and sexual politics? Will the measure of our wealth or the lack of it continue to divide or classify us? We are still, as it were, “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs”. All that is different in the dynamic of definition are the labels we use because now we are black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, Arab, Jew, Protestant, Catholic, and every ethnicity under the sun. And if we listen to the “still small voice of God” we’ll hear that Gospel message making us all ONE in Christ. Today let us pray for the Pentecost moment that it may alight upon us once again.
Cowering in fear in the Upper Room, they were…and then Jesus came to them. “Peace be unto you”, he says and then he repeats it. The room is filled with the sound of a mighty rush of wind. Flames appear over their heads and they are filled to the brim with the power and the goodness of God. And going forth then they speak the languages of a thousand tongues. Every division that humanity had known fell before breath of the Holy Spirit. They received Power when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they became witnesses for Christ unto the uttermost parts of the earth. (para. Acts 1:8)

It is so easy for us to classify human beings into every kind of convenient box. But then Jesus happens and all our sad divisions cease. When we allow Jesus to be the Christ, and when we find ourselves “in him” we are then no longer male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ. (Galatians 3:28)

Suddenly we are at Peace when we are living a Baptized life. In the Prayer Book Service the question is asked of the newly baptized; “Will you respect the dignity of every human being?” That really is an utterly astounding expectation. The Baptismal Covenant requires as much, however.

The Pentecost event proclaims that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on the whole creation. It is a curious irony that Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week. We have yet to fully embrace the power that Christ has poured out on us.

I suspect that when the world sees us so divided into all of our racial, ethnic, and economic pigeonholes, some of the power of our Gospel looses its impact. That impact will weaken us until all our sad divisions cease.

I cannot help but think of my mother on this day. It is not just Pentecost, it is Mother’s Day as well. When we said our prayers at night, my Mother, not a particularly religious woman, would sit with me by my bed at night. I’d kneel beside my bed and say my prayers. At the end of those prayers we would say the “God blesses…” “God bless mommy, and daddy. God bless grandma and grandpa, God bless the cat and the dog, and God bless my brother Bobby” (that was a hard one…) and then we’d say something extraordinary; “God bless everybody in the whole wide world. Amen”.

What my mother taught me quite by accident, I think was to wince just a bit when asking God’s blessing on anything less that everything and everyone. If we choose to ask God to bless this nation, the Pentecost moment is also asking us to bless every nation. If we love our own, we are asked to bless our enemies as well. Pentecost is a very generous and magnanimous moment.

Again on Mother’s Day, I would like to remember my grandmother for just a moment. When Thanksgiving Day came around once a year, she would get on the phone and call all the uncles and cousins and she would press them to into coming to the old family homestead for the holiday. After much grousing, they would relent. We would gather. We would be one, There would be gales of laughter, grand storytelling, a fair amount of gossip and general agreement that we should do this sort of thing more often. My grandmother was the glue that held us together as a family. When she died so did the “extended” family. We waited till funerals and weddings after that to gather.

Jesus I would submit to you is the “glue” that holds us all together as God’s family. Pentecost is the power of Jesus in the resurrection to pour out the spirit of God to gather us together to be one. In Pentecost we speak and we understand all cultures, all languages, all races, all ethnic folks, male, female, gay, straight, rich and poor. If Jesus is alive then we are all one. If we are not one, then Jesus cannot truly live in us. Peace comes to us in the living of Jesus. The Holy Spirit descends on us and turns our souls toward God and toward one another.

It is truly a lifelong task to work out the details of our salvation. Thankfully God has given us a lifetime to do that very work. We have been given the ministry of reconciliation. The fires of the Holy Spirit hover above us not all that far away. When God chases away our fears, we will then realize how close we are to God; how close we are to one another.

Come Holy Spirit, come!

Thoughts for Ascensiontide

* * *

In thinking about the ascension of Jesus, we can fall victim to a simplistic cosmology where heaven is "up there" and hell is "down there"... as if one can locate the holy and the profane geographically. Shakespeare also challenges the notion of a then-prevalent cosmology... particularly astrological notions of the influence of stars, constellations, moons, and suns over human behavior. Thus, these words find their way into the mouth of Edmond, the "out-of-wedlock" son of Gloucester. He asks rather convincingly whether we are responsible for our own behaviors or whether some kind of spherical influences have power to direct our lives:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, -- often the surfeit
of our own behavior, -- we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.

-- King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2

To be sure, you will find a horoscope in every newspaper, and lots of us "check it" just for fun... but do we really believe that the stars have such influences. Is the ascension of Jesus merely some kind of geographical event... or is the Bible pointing to something much deeper than that?

* * *

In the biblical tradition, God's nature is revealed always in relationship... in community, as it were. It comes then as no surprise that Jesus would ascend to the right hand of God to judge the living and the dead. God is community... a dynamic community creating, saving, and sanctifying -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is not a doctrine called the Trinity; God is a dynamic community intimately involved with the world he loves and gave his Son for. Thus, "no man is an island" as John Donne would say; every one of us is a parent, a child, a sister or brother, a colleague... we are all a community of people inextricably woven one to another for good or ill. With the ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God, a decisive challenge has been issued to make that community good!

* * *

It has been said that the more godlike God becomes, the more genuinely human God is; and conversely the more genuinely human we are, the more godlike we too become. Thus, in the wondrous work of the likes of Michelangelo, these kinds of words become possible:

My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth's loveliness.

-- Michelangelo

As we mark the ascension of Jesus let us keep in mind the ineffable quality of both heaven and earth and resist the temptation to trivialize either.

Everything You Need to Know About Sex...

Everything You Need to Know About Sex
In Order to Get to Heaven
by
Paul B. Bresnahan

Here is a light hearted, whimsical, satire that is dead serious and downright poignant too. This is a book whose eye catching title suggests that it is time for the church and the culture around it to grow up a bit and recognize the facts for what they are. Gay folks are here to stay and they are right smack dab in the middle of our families, workplaces, and yes, even in our churches. Using his own family and his own church as a microcosm, “Fr. Paul”, as he likes to be called, argues that human sexuality is a sacrament that gives all of us an exquisite way to express our love for one another. It is in the nature of things that our sexuality becomes a God given grace for human love to be expressed. For most of us, we’ll do that in a male/female configuration. But not always! From the beginning, there have been LGBT folk in our midst. They have often faced persecution, violence, vilification and marginalization yet they are still very much with us. One of them is now a Bishop in the Episcopal Church. His life has been threatened too (by Christians, of course). Come on folks, let’s get over this one. Let’s embrace yet another minority with the milk of human kindness and in a “kinder gentler” way. Open the book and discover with a Priest of the Church, how we are becoming “A House of Prayer for ALL People”.

Fr. Paul Bresnahan has been a Priest of the Episcopal Church for 35 years. He serves now at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Salem, Massachusetts, a remarkable congregation that cares very much for the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the marginalized. He has served churches in West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina, and now Massachusetts. His lifetime struggle against racism, economic disparity, homelessness now culminates in taking up the cudgels for yet another great group of outcasts. He was raised by a gay uncle, and now has two gay sons. He has a lot to say about this controversy. After all there’s a lot at stake. Best of all, he’s still smiling, because he’s convinced that there’s room in God’s heart for the love of EVERYONE!
available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com and autographed from the author at paulbresnahan@yahoo.com

Double Dawn...a poem

My son Michael gave his senior recital this past weekend...and I flew into Chicago during a vigorous nor'easter and stayed in a hotel overlooking Grant Park...and penned these lines for him by way of a gift in honor of the occasion at daybreak.

Double Dawning
By Paul Bresnahan

A crystal clear blue sky dawned this day
And Chicago stretched out her shoulders
Toward the lake where a frivolous and funny quay
Toppled toward a lakeside lighthouse,

While the hum of traffic glistened in the sun
And buzzed about like bees busy
Even on Sunday at Sunrise.

Articulated busses belched blue diesel
Against a blanket pure with snow
And lovely art is kept cozy and warm
Inside the embrace of the city’s sweet mother museum.

Downtown awakens toward the rising skies
Where stainless steel buildings strain their eyes
To see the blinding glare of morning’s glorious greeting.

Spires and steeples and statues stand about
Everywhere you look and a texture of trees
Bare with branches place themselves in a city park.

It could be said I like a sunny day in Chicago.
But I like Boston too; my home of
Athenian grace that sings symphonicly
Almost any day rabid with Fenway fervor
And painted with a Liberal cobalt blue
Whatever the weather!

Only yesterday, Boston’s blistering snows
De-iced a dark before dawn Airbus 757
And white knuckled me with glee to this toddlin’ town

And the East wind blew me breathless into O’Hare
Half and hour early where music will meet my ear
And a song will sing in my heart.

Perhaps it is life I love that gives me the good sense to stop
Sometimes and breathe and marvel at the miracle
Of a son that sings with a golden tenor tone
Michael!

Can This Church Life Again?

Can This Church Live Again?

Inasmuch as Lazarus was raised from his death by Jesus, so too our aging, dying, and often dead congregations can also live again. A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and American Life shows that more than a quarter of adult Americans have migrated from one religious affiliation to another. And too, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly asks on the cover page “Which Religion Will Win?” It is a time of much soul searching for many an American.

Between politics and religion there certainly is plenty for us to consider in the marketplace of ideas being developed here in the United States and abroad as well. But we seem to be a particularly “religious” nation. We seem to be going through a stage where we are migrating toward a more “conservative” and “evangelical” expression of our faith. But at the same time there is a rediscovery of the Compassionate inclusive Christ by many of our mainline denominations as well.

It is a fascinating time in which to find our way toward God. As I make my way through this time in our shared faith development, what strikes me is just how deeply our young people want to know of their spirituality. They want to “practice the presence of God”, if I may use the phrase Brother Lawrence used so many years ago. And it is not just the young that want to come to know about their journey toward God. Among almost all the folks that have recently visited our congregation, there is a deep and sincere desire to come to know of how the heart of God beats within the heart of each of us.

It is as if almost all by itself, the church is coming back to life from a long and sad slumber. Not long ago, a young man whose life had been marred by misuse of drugs and alcohol came to me seeking help. I turned him toward the Sermon on the Mount and the shortest and earliest of the Gospels: St. Mark. I pointed out that he could read both within an hour. I gave him a copy of the Good News Bible and he read through his assignment and came back to me with amazement and delight in his heart.

“God loves me” he said as if totally blown away by the Bible. But there was so much more to it than that. God loves everyone, he said with bright and beaming joyous eyes. God loves the poor, the outcast, the sinner, the sick, those in prison…he was utterly dumbfounded. I asked him why this surprised him so. He told me that when he watched television evangelists, he heard judgment, condemnation, and anger against the very people the Bible describes as being sought out and loved by Jesus.

It was a total surprise to my new young parishioner. So many of his friends had gotten caught up in drugs, sexual promiscuity, alcohol, and had or were “doing” time. He single-handedly became responsible for bringing many other young people to church, because he was coming to discover that the Good News was that Jesus does indeed love the sinner.

An old dying church was coming back to life again. Lazarus, lives! Another older couple migrated to our congregation from another denomination, because they had a gay uncle and there was a divorced daughter to be loved by Jesus. They found a place where God’s embrace was enfolding people in ever widening circles of inclusivity. And too those with mental and physical disabilities seem to be wandering into the doors of the church as well.

I don’t know for sure just what is going on here, but I will say this; if we stay on message about this all inclusive love of Jesus, and faithfully present the Compassionate One as being the One in whom we place our faith, I believe that there is much life still to be lived in these old churches of ours.

When I was a much younger priest, I was told that God does not ask us to be successful; God is asking us to be faithful. I must confess to you that I am praying for the day when our faithfulness will pay us off with just a little success.

In the meantime, I believe that Jesus is always close by his church and is always calling out for the dying part of us to live again. “Lazarus, come out!” It always amazes me that the power of God is best known at the time of death. My wife recently went to work for Hospice. She reports that she has never worked in a more cheerful setting. Isn’t that amazing when you think of it?

Perhaps this is what Paul meant when he said that “as often as we eat the bread and drink the wine of the Eucharist we show forth the Lord’s death until he comes again.” (I Corinthians 11:26). This may well be the key to our rising again.

May God grant us grace to hear Jesus call out to us; “Lazarus, come out!!

Red Doors and a Warm Welcome

Hi Everyone,
Well, it was bound to happen. I hit the front page of the Salem News with this fine article. My cousin asked if I was stirring up trouble again...my other cousin said..."not again, but still!"
Peace to all.

Pastor has door painted red to signify welcoming tradition

Tom Dalton

— SALEM | The massive double door on St. Peter Church is more than 200 years old but had gone largely unnoticed in recent years. Maybe that's because it was green and blended with the leafy surroundings of historic downtown Salem.
When the Rev. Paul Bresnahan, the church's new priest, arrived earlier this year, he was surprised to see a green door. "My wife said to me, 'What happened to the red door?'"
She asked about the color because Episcopal churches traditionally have red doors. It is the color of the blood of Christ and through history has served as a symbol of safety and sanctuary.
But the color red has even more meaning to Bresnahan. It also represents a welcoming church, a church that opens its arms and doors to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or sexual orientation.
That's important to the 61-year-old priest, who is married and has three sons.
"I was brought up by a gay uncle," he said, "and two of my kids are gay."
Sexual orientation might not be a big deal in some churches, but the issue has split the Episcopal church wide open. The headlines started in 2003 with the consecration of V. Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire -- the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States.
"We have always ordained gay folks," said Bresnahan, who has been a priest for more than 30 years. "We have always ordained gay bishops, but nobody who would be honest about it. Gene Robinson is the first man who's honest."
Several congregations have seceded from the U.S. Episcopal Church over the growing support for gay rights. Just last week, the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin, Calif., voted to leave the church.
There have been Episcopal churches in Massachusetts, including one in Hamilton, that have been torn over the issue, with some members believing that expanding the rights of homosexuals and lesbians within the church is contrary to the teachings of the Bible.
Bresnahan disagrees with that position and, as the father of gay sons, feels so strongly that he wrote a book last year: "Everything You Need to Know About Sex in Order to Get Into Heaven." It is dedicated to his wife and boys.
"Michael, I love you ..." he writes in one dedication, "precisely as you are and whoever you become."
"I have three kids, two of whom happen to be gay," Bresnahan said yesterday, sitting in his office in the old stone church, a photo of his three sons on his desk. "This is no big deal to (me and my wife) ...
"When they came out to me, there was never a question was there room in my heart for the love of them, or in God's heart."
Before coming to Salem, Bresnahan asked the members of St. Peter's to read the book. He wanted them to know about him and his family. It turned out to be no big deal to them either, he said, because St. Peter's is already a welcoming church, which has hosted a gay men's choir.
Although it wasn't his top priority at St. Peter's, Bresnahan said he started discussing the color of the door soon after his arrival. There were some objections, he said, but they had more to do with aesthetics than sex.
Painting the door bright red, he said, was a bow to tradition and the spirit of sanctuary, and also an acknowledgment of where St. Peter's stood at this time of controversy and dissent in the Episcopal church -- where St. Peter's has stood for a long time.
"For me," the new priest said, "it really comes down to the idea of being a house of prayer for all people."

Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.

Photos

The Rev. Paul Bresnahan stands in front of St. Peter Church in Salem. The red door symbolizes that all are welcome to the church. Staff Photo

Veteran's Day

This year Veteran's Day fell on a Sunday.
It was a good time to think about all those who have served this country and those who still are.
They find themselves, of course, in conflict now in Iraq and many of them are in harm's way.
Hats off to our veterans.
These are difficult times for our Vets. They serve in dangerous and unfriendly places often not knowing who the friendlies and the enemies are. Telling the difference is problematic.
And so they run patrols and find themselves at the mercy of blind fortune when struck by roadside bombs or coming home safe again. The trauma and stress of this kind of service takes its toll.
The Veteran's Administration tells us that upwards of 30% of the homeless in this country are Veterans and that on any given night 195,000 of them may be on the streets any given night.
We're in for a bunch more homeless if that is any indication when the current crop of men and women in uniform head back from home.
There are those who question the patriotism of people like me who raise questions about some recent wars...especially Viet Nam and now this one...the Second Gulf War.
Both were predicated on lies...yes I said lies.
In the case of Viet Nam it was shown many years later that LBJ trumped up the whole Gulf of Tonkin incident to get Congress to ratify his bellicose policy in South East Asia.
Now we have GWB giving us the line about weapons of mass destruction and Hussein's connection to terrorists to justify sending our country's finest young people into battle.
He did not tell us the truth.
Who would think that the President of the United States would deliberately lie about a matter such as this.
To be sure, Clinton's lie about Lewinsky was reprehensible and a ethical lapse of significance, but in that case, nobody had to die...it was a personal matter for a married couple to resolve and a family to deal with. As difficult as that is, they did it.
But in the case of the Iraq war, we had a deliberate lie that has led to the death of more than 3000 young people and hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi people.
And now we'll have thousands of our young people coming home with terrible wounds in body and spirit and many of them will be homeless.
Many of us have built homeless shelters. I did.
It was not an easy thing to do. People did not want homeless shelters in their neighborhoods.
Homeless people often have mental illnesses, some have alcohol and drug problems.
Many many of them are Veterans.
It is not easy to find a place for them to live.
It is even harder to find money to pay for shelters for them.
It is almost impossible to find the money to pay for the services they need to pay for their rehabilitation.
What kind of country is it that treat's its Veterans so?
And some call me unpatriotic for raising questions about this war.
Yes, we needed to go into Afghanistan and find BinLaden. We still haven't done that.
But it was hasty of us to go into Iraq.
We will pay for that blunder for years.
And so we come to Veteran's Day.
May God bless our young people.
May God protect them.
And may God bring us peace with justice in the Middle East.
So far our Government has been less than effective in moving us toward peace.

A Lament for the City

A Lament for the City

The Lament is an exquisite literary form that expresses something deep in human experience. There are times when it seems appropriate for a lamentation: such as when we saw the Twin Towers fall in New York. Thousands died. Heroic first responders gave their lives for those that were doomed as well as those who could be saved. The image of those towers gleaming against the clear blue sky and airplanes hurtling toward them will be forever fixed in our collective memory. And so we lament our loss.

So too those who live in Baghdad; they too grieve a grief too deep for words. The city is in ruins. The Great Museum is all but bereft of her treasures. Explosions kill innocents in the marketplace and worse still in the holy shrines. Terrible mistakes are made by the occupation force. A foreign army is misunderstood and resented and its commander in chief seems out of his depth in managing its deployment. And we, desperate to support our young people are so divided over whether we know what we’re doing there. And on and on it goes without an end in sight.

We will remember Pearl Harbor forever, and certainly our parents and grandparents will never forget. Those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are swept away with a blast that humankind had never seen before. London’s fearful nights and the dreadful incendiary attack against Dresden during World War II also elicit a profound lament from the human soul.

Jerusalem has seen it all too often, and the Walls of Jericho, that ancient city, have fallen at least 28 times if the archeologists are right about the way they read the Tell that is there.

And so the lamentations of human kind are all too pervasive in history. Can we find a way to sing the songs of our lamentation to God that can bring us hope or do we only find despair in our human experience?

Jesus tells us all we need is the faith of a mustard seed to make the mountains move. And Jesus goes one step further. He assures us that we already have enough faith to take us all the way to our deepest hopes. The greatest mountain to be moved is the rock that was moved away from the tomb in which Jesus lay.

Alleluia! The Lord is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Thus the Lamentation is written in the human heart and in the heart of God as something to remind us of something larger still. The Lamentation is only one verse in the Song of God. This week let us sing on toward the place where God’s hope and ours meet even when it begins with the sorrow of our common Lamentation.

THE WORD

Imagine if you will what it would be like to be taken “en masse” from our homes and placed in slave labor for an enemy under force of arms. Imagine if you will, our faith taken away from us, and our holy places left in a heap of ruins. Imagine generations and generations of our people thus kept for many, many years. That is exactly what did happen to the children of Israel and thus the book of Lamentations came into existence. The prophets were never trusted after that. They were often anti-war activists and were considered unpatriotic.

One after another, the prophets railed against the corruption of the Kings of Israel. Each king was a little worse that their predecessor, according to the record of the kings and the theological proclamation of the prophets. And to be faithful to God meant to tell the truth, even if it was at the cost of personal freedom and safety. Jeremiah and a host of prophets were thus quite shabbily treated by their own people. It is remarkable that their writings have reached us.

It was in the crucible of this kind of conflict that the Lament was developed as a literary art form. To be able to be so utterly honest with God in our spirituality, ultimately also assists in the discovery of the grace of hope.

The alternate Psalm for the day, Psalm 137 is another articulate lament, but in this case it culminates in a dreadful imprecation on the enemy.

Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, *
and dashes them against the rock!

Understandable to be sure; it was entirely likely that Israel’s precious little ones were likewise treated. And so the ethic of an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was thus proclaimed. But as history’s tiresome repetition shows, such an ethic leads only to a world where everyone is blind and all are toothless, as Gandhi so succinctly pointed out in the wisdom and humor of his understanding of the human heart.

St. Paul urges his people on in his letter to Timothy, with comforting and inspiring words. He is, interestingly enough, quite affirming of the feminine spirituality of Lois and Eunice, which belies his own admiration for those of faith whoever they are. In his better moments, Paul does see that we are one in Christ whether we are slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female. Even more astutely Paul encourages us not to succumb to cowardice, but through faith and the laying-on-of-hands to receive a “spirit of power, love and self-discipline.” The abolition of death then ultimately gives us heart…courage if you will to profess the faith and to engage the “powers and principalities” with the sprit we have in Christ.

“We are more than conquerors, through him who first loves us”. All these echoing phrases come to us in a song of God, whatever fear of terror we face. These are good days for us to remember the courage of Christ and his early followers. We live in an age of fear and terror that will require tremendous courage.

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that it will take but the tiniest seed of faith to move mountains; he goes on to say that we have that faith already, if we read the Greek phraseology correctly. Faith is a gift. It is absolutely free and with it we have conquered death and sin itself. What a gift! As we look to Jesus and ask for more faith, he looks back at us and tells us it is already there, sewn in our hearts by the free gift of his life.

THE WORLD

In the year before the current “Intifada” in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I took a group of young people to the Holy Land. We visited a refugee camp outside Bethlehem that has been much in the news in the years since our pilgrimage. Our Palestinian hosts lamented the conditions they lived with on a daily basis. We saw it with our own eyes. Twenty eight families living with one bathroom, for instance: it made us heartsick. Yet for sixty years the people have been living thus. Our hosts asked “why should we be called on to pay the price for the holocaust?” Our Israeli hosts, on the other hand, spoke of the violence they lived with on a daily basis. Innocent people died in the marketplaces where people did their daily rounds. And in the exchange of insult and misunderstanding, accusation, and recrimination, thousands upon thousands die. The heart of God must break that people of faith must live so, and treat each other so.

The last century and now this new one is witness to far too many instances of genocide. What is occurring in Darfur now, as the world watches far too passively, is excruciatingly painful. And the tears of the people drench the ground as does too much innocent blood.

In our own experience, we have fought in Viet Nam and now twice in the Persian Gulf and very little is resolved or settled. This is not like the Second World War which seemed to call us together in a way that few other national emergencies have. Now we seem divided by political opportunists who use our conflicted experience to win elections. In an earlier time, folk singers, while not quite developing the literature of lament, did produce a host of anti-war songs.

What we have yet to do, is find a way to articulate an honest song to God about the times in which we live. We seem bereft of an honest spirituality. If we could form a lament in our hearts that we could sing with our lips, then perhaps we could find our way to God. If we were to do that we’d also find another song of hope that would lead us to peace with justice for many.

After 911 we did come together for a little while. Our national leaders gathered as one at the National Cathedral and spoke with one voice. It lasted all too briefly. We seem to have lost our way and our resolve has become diffuse. We are not a united nation. And now conservatives blame liberals; liberals blame conservatives and all the talk show hosts vent their spleens at American people who dare to disagree. What will it take to save the nation?

CRAFTING THE SERMON

It must grieve the heart of God to see the human family behave so. In so many ways, and at so many times the very Name of God has been put to use to excuse our inhumanity to one another. Somehow a sense of righteous indignation seems to excuse terror and warfare, bigotry and violence.

It must grieve the heart of God to see the human family behave so. God sent the prophets to preach justice and peace. The very word peace, shalom and salaam, gave birth to the name of God’s own holy city Jerusalem. And there the holy city sits on Zion’s hill with Christians, Jews, and Muslim’s claiming her as their very own. Like little children playing “King of the Mountain” we push each other around and shame God’s love with our hatred.

Is it any wonder that the Lament has found its way into sacred literature? To be sure human beings do sing their songs of sorrow, but can you imagine God’s song when the blood of those same children spills into the sands and stones of Galilee. We call each other “enemy” like factious and feuding families. We refuse to speak to one another and posture our stiff necked hatred toward each other. The Lament we sing of our loss is only multiplied as God counts the losses even more exponentially for all the children of the human family are the flesh and blood of God.

Jesus came to give us the ministry of reconciliation. Jesus came to teach us to love our enemies. It is a difficult ministry. It may require the gift of a life. It required the gift of Jesus’ life to purchase the price of forgiveness. We are loath to pay the price, aren’t we? There are far too many willing to take our lives with glee for us to play into the hand of calumny and cruelty.

Perhaps if we were to sing sooner the song of God, we could find a way to Peace. If we could find a way to an honest articulation of Lamentation, then perhaps God could act. Perhaps God could direct our feet in the pathways of peace by showing us how to talk to one another. Better still perhaps God could help us by teaching us first to listen to one another.

Military action, political power, and diplomatic initiative are all part of a seamless piece when placed in the hands of God. Placing these matters in the hands of God is often the last thought of the expert in these disciplines. We ask God to be on our side and seldom honestly ask if we are on God’s side.

It is so easy to blame “the other” through our failure to see the humanity in the flesh and blood of our brothers and sisters. Some may wonder what color God is. Perhaps God is the color of America, or Britain. Others would say that God is the color of Arabia or Judaica. Some say that God is the color of Jesus, Moses or Muhammad. The laws of the universe that God created must find such parochialism too narrow. God is much, much bigger than any box we may seek to put God into.

God created the whole world according to the creation accounts in Genesis. Therefore it stands to reason that the color of God is far more diverse in hue than merely one particular color. As God sees the globe it has no national borders. As God created human beings there is only one flesh and blood, one heart for all, and one hope for all, and only one love to make everything possible.

When we were in the Holy Land an old Arabic woman asked us if we knew the color of God. We shrugged our shoulders. She said that the color of God is the color of water. It stands to reason when you think of it. More than 60% of the human body is water. And it is given life by electrical impulses to make the mind and heart work to the glory or the shame of the Creator.

Thus we come to this moment in time and still we need a savior. Moses taught us obedience through the law. The Prophet Muhammad taught us that God is the All Merciful. Jesus taught us that God is the All Loving.

We are a disobedient, unmerciful, and unloving lot because we refuse to listen to those God sent to us. May God have mercy on us ALL!

Perhaps there is time for us to sing the song of God’s own heart of sorrow as we mourn the terrible losses that we and God have suffered. If we sing that song with any skill we will learn to listen to the hope of God for a new tomorrow. Perhaps we will get a glimpse of the Dream of God to take the human hearts of stone and make it a heart of flesh and blood that beats with love for the whole human family.

We are servants of God as the Gospel points out. It is our duty to sing our song in such a way that serves God’s purposes on the earth. It is our duty. May it be said of us that “We have only done what we ought to have done”.

Thank God that the Lament is part of our sacred literature. May it teach us the way to God’s broken heart so the healing balm of God may help us sing on to other verses where the hope and love and forgiveness of God gives us all a way to Peace and Justice for all.

To Make a Saint; Start with a Sinner

The Only way to make a Saint:

Start with a Sinner

How many of our great leaders have fallen from grace? I remember how crestfallen I was when I learned as a young man that apparently John Fitzgerald Kennedy had some indiscretions with Marilyn Monroe, only to learn some years later, that this was but the tip of the iceberg. Then come to find out, no less a personage than Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself was thought to have had some liaisons with a “lady” or two at the White House. The revelations just seemed to multiply as we entered a period of “debunking” of our heroes. Even Abraham Lincoln did not go unscathed as he was reputed to have had a dalliance or two with a close male associate. That accusation is vehemently denied by many, doggedly insisted to by others.

On and on and on it goes, it seems, in a rather tiresome sequence of unending disappointment. Bill Clinton’s presidency will forever have the cloud of the Lewinsky episode as his legacy. At the same time so many so-called pro-family evangelicals have found themselves sullied by personal indiscretions. Newt Gingrich was busy with his mistress as his wife was dying of cancer at the same time as he vigorously led the charge against Clinton. More recently, Senators Foley and now Craig while seeking a constitutional amendment to deny same sex marriage for others, were themselves compromised by moral disgrace; in the former case with page boys in Congress and in the latter at a men’s room in a Minneapolis airport..

Now come to find out that no less a light than Mother Theresa had nagging doubts about God until the very day of her death. How in the world do we find redemption in a world where sin is so ubiquitous and where doubt is so real? I take some comfort in the notion of the potter in today’s Old Testament lesson. God is not finished with us yet. And too I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s famous quote; “God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”

That being the case, there is no better place for God to begin than with you and me!

Today let us consider how being a sinner can lead to sainthood…and if we’re not careful, vice versa.

The Word

The Jeremiah passage about the Potter’s clay is a wonderful resource for a preacher. I also like his turn of phrase “The word of the Lord came to me”. The way he uses the language, we come away with a sense that God speaks to the human heart not to the ear. God gives the sense of what the message is rather than giving a word for word directive. The warning that God is articulating in today’s lesson certainly needs to be given to Israel. But it can be given to any nation. It can be given to any individual, or family. The scripture becomes profoundly symbolic for me as we read it in this way. I hear God speaking then in my heart as God speaks for the poor, the outcast, or as God speaks to me and soberly invites me to honesty. It is a wonderful passage.

So too the psalm: here the psalmist postulates that God’s knowledge of us is so intimate and so close that God ends up knowing us better than we do ourselves. That’s often true. There’s much of ourselves that we often don’t want to face. But God will not let us get away with that. God’s will be done, because God presses in before and behind, and ultimately this knowledge is so wonderful that it becomes my salvation.

The passage from Philemon is a charming piece of redemptive literature too. We don’t know what there was about Onesimus but we do know that he once was utterly useless. Somehow, God found a use for him. Somehow this sinner became one of the saints and no less a light than Paul spoke up for him. He had to press the point. His “indiscretion” or “sin” must have been noteworthy, but ultimately he became another one of the redeemed of God.

The Gospel is difficult today. Taking up the cross to follow Jesus must ultimately rest on an honest appraisal of where we stand on our own with Jesus. No one in the family can stand in for us. We’re on our own. There’s no way to finesse our way to God. There is only the way of the cross. We cannot buy our way there. We cannot earn our way there. The only way to the heart of God and to the kingdom is through the reality of our own hearts and the truth of who we are.

The World

It is very sad, isn’t it? Senator Craig denied it. Foley denied it. Vitter denied it. Gingrich, Clinton, Nixon all denied it. My grandmother used to say “Denial is not a river in Egypt”. Denial is covering up something that needs a dose of truth. If there was one thing that my grandmother couldn’t tolerate, it was a liar. It is as if the lie is itself becomes a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, because the lie prohibits grace from doing its wonders. That’s what we find out in the 12 step program. Once we admit that we are powerless over our addictive behaviors; that is the moment of Grace. That is when God can get to work on us and make saints out of the sinners that we are. The sin never goes away, but God can make something beautiful with the sinner who has the courage to be truthful.

Crafting the Sermon

Michael Ramsey, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury, visited the United States often and once I heard him speak at Trinity Institute, one of the finest clergy conferences of the Episcopal Church held annually at Trinity Church, Wall Street. It is the place to be if an Episcopal Priest wants to be at the center of things in that church. The focus of the particular conference I attended was the ordained ministry. Ramsey loved the one liner and he had quite a few in his repertoire. Near the top of the list was the one about the quality of the clergy these days. Even then, in the seventies, there was quite a fuss about the “run of the mill” that ended up ordained. Ramsey flashed his twinkling eyes at the assembled gathering and said; “When people complain to me about the quality of the clergy, I respond rather sharply”, he quipped, “If you want better clergy, give us a better crop to pick from!”

It seems to me that the bishop was right on. When it comes to picking out clergy to lead us, we have no one to pick from but ourselves. The same can be said of politicians, diplomats, corporate leadership, teachers, or any other profession that is held to careful scrutiny these days. If we don’t offer ourselves for leadership, someone else will lead. All that apathy guarantees is that someone other than ourselves will lead. They will often not be up to our standards. But we ourselves often don’t want to get our hands dirty in the grit and grime of leadership.

And so yes we see a spate of revelations about clergy, politicians, corporate heads, teachers, and the list goes on. They all come from the general population. And we’re all tainted with the reality of human foibles. The only doctrine we can prove in the Christian experience is sin. There is ample evidence of it every day in the newspaper and on CNN. All other doctrine we must take on faith.

And so one by one our heroes fall, as their Achilles heels give way under the pressure that each of us brings to our several endeavors. It seems that it is when we cannot be honest about who we are, that sin gains special power over us. It is that so called “secret” sin that gains traction in its ability to corrupt us or to hide behind our own hypocrisy. We pick specks out of other human eyes while we cannot see the log that renders us blind in our own eyesight. (Loose paraphrase of Matthew 7:3) Never did Jesus speak more aptly to the human condition than in that famous “one liner”!

It is thus that several senators have lined up to fight for family values and personal probity, while they themselves were engaged in some decidedly compromising and bad habits. Gingrich and his affair while he chased down Clinton for his indiscretion, Foley and Craig fought for a ban on gay marriage while they themselves were reputed to be involved with pages in the former case, and lewd behavior in an airport in the latter. These are but a few of the kinds of cases we see where “the speck and the log” axiom seems to be at work.

But God does not create junk. And the Potter is busy at the wheel making beautiful things.

There is a case that leads to a better place it seems to me. Mother Theresa, come to find out, had her doubts about God. Her “Dark Night of the Soul” has come to light now on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The article quotes Mother Theresa as follows “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,” she wrote in 1959, “of God not wanting me — of God not being God — of God not existing.” This exquisite woman of faith opens her heart to us now even in her death. Her heart is like the hearts of so many, bleak not only with doubt, but sometimes even with a form of certitude that there simply is no God.

Part of me is disappointed. She looked so peaceful and serene…although as I think about it, she may have looked more holy, than peaceful or serene. She had so much to come to terms with. How could she work so closely with the utterly destitute and have faith? That really was the question. When the poor are so utterly cast away, how can we believe?

In the NY Times piece that appeared on August 29^th, Fr. James Martin, a perceptive Jesuit priest, points to the vital role of Spiritual Director for the child of God who dares to be honest to self and to God. “In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily. In this way she hoped to enter, in her words, the “dark holes” of the lives of the people with whom she worked. Paradoxically, then, Mother Teresa’s doubt may have contributed to the efficacy of one of the more notable faith-based initiatives of the last century.”

What is missing for so many of us is the honesty and truth that facing sin can give us. Whether it is addictive behavior around drugs, sex, alcohol, or perhaps greed, or an obsession with power and violence, we cannot even begin to find our way to forgiveness without at first being honest with ourselves and with God. The role of Confessor, and Spiritual Director, valued companion or “heart other” as it is called in spirituality is a well documented resource within the tradition of faith. “Come let us reason together” has been the dictum of faith it seems forever.

The prophet Isaiah gave us a first glimpse at the idea in the first chapter at the 18^th verse “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.?”

And thus we come to the thesis of this sermon idea; to make a saint God must begin with a sinner. Kierkegaard said it. I’ll repeat it. It is what Jeremiah had in mind when he wrote of God as being like the potter at his wheel fashioning clay vessels. He works by the hour to make something beautiful. But something goes wrong. He breaks the pot and starts again. So it is with us. We are clay in the hands of God. And so long as we can be honest to God and with ourselves, the hand of God can indeed touch us and make of us something that is pleasing to see, and something pleasing to be. Thus God makes saints out of sinners. There’s no better place to begin than with you. There’s no better place to begin than with me. The pathway toward holiness is not to pretend we have no sin. The pathway to holiness is to be honest to God and to ourselves about who we are. That is what we learn from the saints. They too were sinners each of them just like us. But they found a way to be honest about who they are.

It is interesting to me that when God revealed the divine personality, the verb “to be” is used. Hebrew is tough to translate on a good day, but the mood of the verb used in Exodus to Moses is roughly translated “I AM who I AM”… or “I AM whatever I WILL BE” or just “I AM”. You see, God was honest about the divine nature. No adjectives or adverbs were used, just a very tentative mood of the present tense that can be rendered perhaps a future conditional of some undetermined influence. That is precisely who God is. God will be whoever God will be! If we’re honest about it, the same must be said of ourselves. And at the very least the Bible is honest. The pathway to God’s redemptive power then is through this very kind of honesty.

Another bishop I know was fond of saying; “It is not the mission of the church to make good people better; it is the mission of the church to make bad people holy”. That’s why the first step in the recovery process is overcoming denial. It is to admit that I have no power over the sin that has me in its grip. Once we say that we’re on our way. The truth shall make us free. (John 8:32)

God, make of us what You will but please do make of us, and not as we will but as You will. Take Your hands and we will be clay for You. Mould us to Your purpose so that we can be something beautiful for you as Mother Theresa was something beautiful for you in her time.

Set Your Mind on Things that are Above

Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

Greed and Idolatry

Seeking the Things That are Above

The Gospel tells us this week to guard against all kinds of greed. If it is true that the love of money is at the root of all evil, then this is very good advice indeed. Life in America makes that ideal difficult, however. For instance, at the same time that the Gospel tells us to be against all kinds of greed, the minimum wage increased also from $5.15 to $5.85 and hour. It is the first increase in the minimum wage in more than 10 years. Some feel the adjustment is long overdue, and many others feel it will have an adverse effect on the economy. And as I write this Joe Naccio the ex-Qwest executive has been convicted of insider trading. In short, that means that while investors in his communications company watched their investments tumble from $60 to $2 a share, he "wisely" traded out his shares at a point that gave him a $52 million profit. Is there any greed in this dynamic?

Whatever the case, let me suggest that we have not altogether freed ourselves from idolatry and the "Golden Calf" mentality of our spiritual ancestors. I grew up in a home where we were taught to believe in "The Almighty Dollar" whether we were children of the working class or of management and the middle class. I am a product of a "mixed marriage". My mom came from a long line of "blue collar" folk and union people. She married into "management" and I remember vividly being snatched out of the coziness of the old neighborhood when they got married. Suddenly I found myself in a new subdivision complete with a privacy fence, an outdoor bar-b-cue and a sense of alienation between ourselves and our neighbors.

There was a cost/benefit ratio for me in the experience. In the old neighborhood schools few of us went on to college. In the new development everyone was "expected" to go to college. We had lots of homework and suddenly there were lots of books around to read, which was not the case in the "old" family. I became the first in my family to go to college, and I considered that then and still do a bit of an achievement.

I was rescued from a life sentence of minimum wage jobs. Most of the attractive union jobs held by my "old" family have gone overseas now. And I have gone on to the comfortable life of a respected clergyman. My family had appealed to me not to go into the church business. I protested. "I like people", I said..."then go into personnel at least" they pleaded.
Whether we were union or management, we all believed in the "bottom line". It was all right to go to church as long as you didn't take that too far. I took it all the way to the priesthood. That was way too far. We were a "born-again" secular family whether union or management and we believed the the power of the "Greenback".

Today's Gospel goes on to say that even when we lay up treasures for ourselves in our vast storehouses, our very lives are vulnerable to the very viccissitudes of life. We live and die. We are healthy and we get sick. We prosper and we loose our resources: just like the marriage service teaches us, in vows we so often take for granted and without a full appreciation of the truth they proclaim: we take each other for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, and until we are parted by death.

It seems to be dawning on many that as America grays, and as we horde our wealth, or health, or even life itself, all we manage to do is to tighten our grasp around the tangible. The tighter we grab onto what we have the more likely it will sift through our fingers as sand falls from a clenched fist. Have we forgotten that who we are and what we have is not ours but God's? Have we forgotten the simplest fact about us that we are "dust" and to the "dust" we shall return. This is what the Gospel is trying to remind the rich man in today's proclamation. You may indeed store up for yourself all kinds of grain in your vast storehouses, but if you forget that you belong to God, you risk endangering all that you have and all that you are. That's a risk we all face. We delude ourselves into thinking that what we have is "all mine". It is not. There is a wonderful collect that summarizes the reality in this turn of phrase "help us as we pass through things temporal, that we loose not things that are eternal".

Among those eternal gifts, are the gifts of life, and love and eternal life. Those are the things that matter. Those are the things that shall endure.

Sometimes we even think that if we give God 10% we're even. That could not be further from the truth. Everything we have and all that we are is from God. The 10% some give and some don't is merely the Biblical injunction to proportional giving...and proportional giving cheerfully! My dear friends 100% of it belongs to God. There is a turn of phrase in the Prayer Book Marriage Service that I'm fond of. As the bride and groom give one another rings they make this pledge "I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am and all that I have, I honor you." That's the ideal of the intimacy of human love. What a wonderful way to live in partnership with another human being; as a friend for life; as a partner whose very souls touch in the co-mingling of their lives. That image befits our intimacy with God as well. The plain and simple truth in the matter of our spiritual intimacy with God is that everything we have and all that we are is also God's. God is there at every moment knocking at the door, willing to be an open heart to us, eager to respond to our most humble and urgent requests. Yes everything we are and all that we have in life is from God. As we live out our lives we decide moment by moment how much we truly want to belong to God and to God's beloved. Nothing absolutely nothing goes with us, except for the thing that matters most; eternal life!

So while we have this breath to breathe, let us do ourselves the favor of doing it wisely and in the fear of God. As Paul advised rightly let us "seek the things that are above where where Christ is seated at the right hand of God". Let us put off the old self and put on Christ as we would a garment. Let us clothe ourselves carefully as we would any wardrobe to look our best, only let us remember that we are to present ourselves to God in the purity and in the joy of heaven.

The Pope Speaks again...ugh!

The Only True Church?

When I was a youngster my best friend told me that he was upset. I asked him why and he said that I was a nice enough guy and a great friend, but that I was not going to heaven. “Why?” said I. My friend told me I wasn’t Catholic, so I couldn’t go. Years later, when I worked in a warehouse in Toronto, a co-worker asked me if I was saved. I just don’t think in those terms so I said, “That’s God’s call, not mine.” I think I failed that exam too. In the meantime, I went on to become a priest in the Episcopal Church.

There are all kinds of ideas “out there” about which is the “true church”; or which television preacher has the “plain and simple truth” about what the bible says. In many cases the plain and simple truth plays out a set of inclusion/exclusion exercises based on the speaker’s understanding of the “plain and simple truth”. For me, too many people I love fall outside the salvation circle in both the former and in the latter pronouncements.

And so Pope Benedict has now entered the dialogue. In the post Vatican II world, many of us had hoped for more overtures to ecumenicity. Instead we now find that many of us are with “defect” and cannot even be called “church” in the most proper sense of the word.

The reader may remember that last year on September 12, 2006 to be exact at the University of Regensburg in Germany the Pope said the following; “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Pope was referring to a passage that originally appeared in the “Dialogue Held With A Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia”, written in 1391. It was an expression of the views of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, one of the last Christian rulers before the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire, on such issues as forced conversion, holy war, and the relationship between faith and reason. You may remember that the response from the Islamic world was instant and vigorous. The Vatican was forced to do a bit of backpedalling and no end of “clarification.”

In addition, after a number of impressive and magnanimous overtures to our sisters and brothers in Judaism, the revival of the Latin mass with its unfortunate and somewhat intemperate prayer for the conversion of the Jews, has certainly raised more than a few theological eyebrowse.
Now we have yet another statement that will cause no end of consternation within the Christian world. Pope Benedict has signed off on a statement observing that the Churches of the Reformation are “defective” since they do not have an episcopacy or a priesthood that arises out of the historic apostolic succession. The concluding paragraph is the most damaging part of the new statement: “These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called “Churches” in the proper sense.” That should provide plenty grist for the mill for those charged with the responsibility of cultivating ecumenical relationships around the world. To say that this is a setback from Vatican II would be an understatement indeed.

How then do we respond? Do we get into the game of theological one-upmanship? Is there any sense in which any “one” of us could claim to be the “one”, “true”, “church”. Rome is running very close to that position if it hasn’t already hit the bull’s-eye!
To be sure there are those who claim exclusive right to call themselves the “only” church, or the “true” church. There are certainly those who claim that their understanding of the Bible is the only true interpretation. We seem to be in an age where the need to be “right” trumps the need to be compassionate. And there are now a host of so called “non-denominational” churches, which are just each one yet another denomination of a singular sort…each of which claims a corner on the “Truth” or an issue that makes them “True”.

Is this what we really want? Do we want to be an “issue based” Christianity? If we do, we run the risk of dividing the Body of Christ. If our Christianity is based on our view of a particular issue like abortion, sexual orientation, the death penalty, the ordination of women, liberation theology and the like, we run the risk of alienation among sincere people of faith. All we manage in “issue based” Christianity is divisiveness.

There is another way.

Perhaps if we put our faith in Jesus, who is the perfect image of God, we may very well find a much more satisfying road to unity. Our unity must be based in Christ or we will have no unity at all. Paul makes clear that Jesus is the head of the church in today’s letter to the Colossians. In sublime language Paul reflects the person of Christ to the church: “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created” and again, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things”.

The ministry of reconciliation then seems somewhat close to the heart of God. It needs to be near to the heart of God’s church as well. It makes no sense whatever to me to engage in some kind of denominational competition to see who makes muster when it comes to some kind of competition around orthodoxy, catholicity, apostolicity, biblical absolutism or any other kind of standard other than the standard of Jesus himself.

How I wish we could get past that. Jesus is not very likely to check our denominational membership cards when it comes time for us to be presented before the great judgment seat of Christ.

Jesus is more likely to inquire how we treated the least of these; the hungry, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the homeless, the outcast. Jesus is likely to want to know whether our hearts were on fire for the poor, the leprous, the lame, the broken hearted, the widow, the orphan, the refugee from war, plague and pestilence.

Jesus will want to know if we were listening when he spoke to us. There is that part of me that is like Mary and another that is like Martha. Part of me wants to be like Mary and sit at the foot of Jesus and listen to him. That indeed is the better part. There is another part of me that is very busy in this work-a-day world. I never have time to sit at the foot of Jesus. I never seem to have time to listen to the voice of God. I don’t even seem to have time to listen to my own heart and give myself time to catch up with who I am or who I am becoming.

The story of Mary and Martha is not the story of two women one of whom gets to endulge in idle chatter about speculative theology, the other gets to do the grunt work at the kitchen sink. No this story is about us; each of us and whether we will listen to Jesus or whether we will exuse ourselves from our greater responsibilities because we are too busy to listen.

If I did listen to Jesus, then I would hear the voices of my brothers and sisters crying out for love and care in a world torn with grief, warfare and poverty. That is the issue. That is the only issue. The people of Jesus looking for someone to care. When Jesus spoke, that is what he wanted us to hear.

All the other issues of denominational affiliation, doctrinal correction, biblical understanding, as important as they are, pale in comparison to the urgent call to ministry on behalf of those in need.

It is no wonder so many turn away from the church. While we fuss about “in-house issues” of denominational bias or controversy, the rest of the world turns from one dangerous corner to another. We are a world at war. We are a people set on the edge of terror. And while injustice, poverty and disparity stare us in the face, we go on mindlessly busy.

We need to listen to Jesus for the sake of the world. The only true church is the church that listens to the voice of Jesus who is All in All. Jesus is Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Liberal, Conservative, Orthodox, and yes, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Hindu and Bhuddist. Jesus is All in All. And in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell!

St. Peter's Episcopal Church

For all my friends in Salem, Saint Albans, and Toronto and hither and yon, here is where I'm whiling away my time in retirement. A historic edifice with a remarkable story to tell. And if you want to hear me go on and on about it...just ask...I dare you.
Paul

Here are some more photos that Jeff Cox, a parishioner took not long ago. Enjoy!
http://picasaweb.google.com/jeffrey.cox2/StPeterSChurchSalemMA

Summer thoughts: Oblation, Camping, Disciple/Apostle?

Illustration #1

The Prayer of Oblation

A consumer society tends to pray for its needs, and the needs of others. It will be grateful for all the blessings that have been bestowed. It will ask for forgiveness and praise God for the wonders of God's doings. In prayerful silence this society is even capable of adoration and asking nothing of God other than to be there in the presence of the holy. These are typical of the kinds of prayer we know of in classical Christian thinking. The one kind of prayer we tend to forget though is the prayer Amos also resisted. It is the prayer God requires of us when it is time to do the very thing we're most justifiably afraid of doing. God needed Amos to tell Israel some very sobering truths. But it had to be done. And so finally Amos offered himself as an oblation to God for God's work...in a word that prayer is; "God you can count of me to do whatever you need to have done!". Now that is a rare prayer indeed!

Illustriation #2

Camping season

It is the season of camping. After a long day of swimming and hiking and perhaps some crafts done with the other young people, the children gather around the campfire. There they sing songs, and tell stories, and then it is not unusual for instructions to be given as to the tasks that lie ahead in the day that is to come. Thus the next day, there are more adventures, knees are scraped, more fun and games, more swimming, hiking and crafts and then back to the campfire to charge up and restore the weary campers' spirits. It is a little like the rhythm of our spirituality. Our life gives us an ample number of scrapes, and vigorous adventures and challenges that we live into day in and day out; week in and week out. Then comes the moment when we recognize Christ in our midst. Sunday! We gather at the fireside of God's Holy Spirit with God's holy people. We sing our songs, we listen to God's stories; we'll hear instructions for what is expected of us and thus we're off again to do the work God has given us to do. It is in this cycle of life that the ancient pattern repeats itself from apostolic times until now.

Illustration #3

Disciple to Apostle

I suspect that the lawyer followed Jesus a good long time. In fact following Jesus wasn't all that hard to do. Anyone can follow a great man and watch the signs and wonders that he does. But then when it comes time to put the Man to the test, the tables are turned. Here is where the Great Man tells the lawyer about a Samaritan of all things. A Samaritan! A despised and rejected Samaritan; one well outside the salvation circle of the "chosen ones". But it is this one who becomes a neighbor to the unfortunate victim of a senseless crime. Thus a follower is challenged to be an apostle..."Go and do likewise"! Who do you think won that test?

We too can follow Jesus only so long. Eventually he looks at us as much as to say, you've followed me long enough as my disciple. It is time now for you to be my apostle. Thus Jesus tells each of us as well; "Go and do likewise"!