A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 25, 2017.  The lectionary readings are Jeremiah 20:7-13, Psalm 69: 8-11, (12-17), 18-20, Romans 6:1b-11, and Matthew 10:24-39. 

Listen to the sermon HERE.

The other day I saw a little girl who was wearing a headband made up of Guatemalan “worry dolls.” You may have seen these little figures—they’re tiny, usually less than an inch tall, and often they come 5 or 6 little figures in one small box or bag. The idea is that before going to bed at night, you tell a worry or fear to each of the little dolls, then put them back in their place. Then you’ll be able to sleep better.

I looked at the little girl with the headband and I wondered what she might possibly have to worry about? What would she be telling her worry dolls?

But then, I guess we have worries and fears, no matter what age. A child might worry about a pet, or a friend, or a parent or grandparent. A teenager worries about what other people think, about grades and appearance, about keeping up with expectations and progressing toward the future. And adults have new fears and worries every day—if it’s not increasing rent, debt, or turmoil at work, it might be issues around aging, or taking care of a relative, or any number of things. We notice how economic trends are often based on fear, and we know all too well how politics can be motivated around fear.  We live in fearful times, but when we look at the record of faith, other people, too have wrestled with fear.

The reading we heard from Jeremiah was filled with fear, though it doesn’t come right out and use that word. Jeremiah feels like he’s been made a fool of. He feels like God has set him up and left him looking like an idiot. He’s hurt and he’s angry at God, but he’s also deeply, deeply, deeply in love with God. He fears that God might have turned away. He fears that people will get the best of him, that what people say at their most cynical, might actually be true. They whisper the worst: “Terror is all around! Let’s get him while he’s down, he’s been criticizing us and saying it’s from God. But God is ignoring him and has left him all alone.”  Jeremiah worries this might be true.

In this section of scripture, I think we have a long period of time condensed. This complicated love triangle between Jeremiah and God and the people was probably played out over a much longer time. Built up over a long time, Jeremiah’s fears don’t go away immediately. They don’t simply vanish with a few wise words from a friend, the latest book, the perfect prayer, or even the most elaborate religious ritual.

Instead, fear is slowly eroded by faith, by faith that might even feel like blind trust, at times.  Fear fades sometimes through putting one’s trust outside oneself—in others, and in one’s higher power (whether that be some notion of God, or a sense of community, or perhaps even just in one friend upon whom one can really trust.)

Jeremiah eventually moves through his fear to a faith that can feel the strength of God.  And so he sings; he praises; he feels the deliverance and salvation of God.

In today’s Gospel Jesus warns the disciples about the times ahead when they will feel like Jeremiah—when they’ll feel misunderstood and forgotten, passed over even by God. Just as Jeremiah was rejected by his people, the disciples of Jesus are going to come into conflict.  Sometimes that conflict will be with strangers, and sometimes it will be with family and loved ones.

Here, Jesus is not offering justification for arguing with family.  He’s not trying to makes us feel better about disagreements or fights among family where there needs to be confession and forgiveness.  And he’s not encouraging us to make problems or to use religion to belittle or to distance. But Jesus is suggesting that sometimes in relationships, in families, in churches, in denominations, in religious communions— taking up one’s cross can lead into conflict. But Jesus shows us how “taking up our cross” – when it is a cross of love and self-sacrifice – helps move through fear.

It’s often pointed out that the cross has both a vertical and horizontal axis. The vertical one connects us with God. It reminds us that sometimes when the fear sets in, the way to deal with it comes from deep within, as God reinforces some secret reserve within us that we perhaps didn’t even know we had. We can carry fear straight to God and allow God to work on it.

But then there’s also the horizontal axis of the cross, the stretching out, the reaching out. That involves the Body of Christ, the church, one another. The part of the cross that stretches out involves all of those who God sends our way. We become the Body of Christ for one another through simple acts of kindness and remembrance (like sending a note, or agreeing to pray for someone) or through more dramatic ways of showing solidarity, friendship and love.

The cross stretches through the life of this parish. People call each other. People care for each other.  People look out for each other. When people are afraid of tangible things than can be addressed, we connect with Health Advocates for Older People, or Search and Care, or another community organization that helps us confront fear by breaking it down into small problems to be addressed and solved.

The storms and tornadoes over the last few days reminded me of a story from a few years ago.  You may recall the tragedy of a tornado ripping through a Boy Scout camp in Iowa.  Four boys were killed when a chimney they were hiding under collapsed in the storm, but all the other kids made it through.  Their story recounts how as the storms and winds were picking up around the camp, the scouts went about their preparations, just like they had practiced. There had to have been almost unimaginable fear. I’m sure they were terrified. But several of the boys did what they could to lessen the fears of others. One 14-year-old, Zack Jessen, yelled for his friends to duck under the table. He covered the head of another boy with his own body, and those boys were saved.

Fear is funny that way—when we share it, when we share in it, it lessens. It doesn’t always go away completely. And sometimes bad things still happen. But holding the hand of another, praying together, serving together—is love—the kind of love that “casts out all fear.”

Overcoming fear is a big part of the spirit of this last Sunday in June, when close to 2 million people will be watching, marching, and participating in numerous ways in this year’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride parade.  Many of the people marching are doing so only after spending years overcoming their fear.  Many of those watching will still be negotiating fear—fear of being fired for being gay, fear of losing friends, fear of losing family, fear of violence.  Many people of faith will also be in the parade today as a reminder and invitation that God’s love can cast out all fear. As the well-known meal program with the so-appropriate name reminds us, “God’s love delivers.”  It delivers every time.

Sometimes when we are afraid, the only thing we can do is to say our prayers, sort of duck for cover, and wait on God to show himself. We live into that vertical dimension of the cross. But at other times, we live into the horizontal direction. We can lean on each other, we can call on each other, and we can be the Body of Christ to one another. We can be like the disciples were to one another—to share support and strength and nurture and love.

Thanks be to God that, in the words of 1 John, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The other week, our church’s Facebook page invited parishioners and friends to join with others from the Diocese of New York for this Sunday’s parade demonstrating support for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Community.  The event is commonly referred to as the “Pride March.”  A priest I know tried to be clever by posting a response to our invitation, suggesting that there was something odd about having a parade “celebrating one of the seven deadly sins.”  While his comment was unhelpful and showed a real pastoral ignorance, it also underscored for me just how easy it is for the Church to silence, shove aside, and ignore groups of people by suggesting that they are sinful whenever they assert their humanity.

The heart of our faith involves our knowing and celebrating that we are made in God’s image, we are redeemed by Christ’s Incarnation and sacrifice, and we are renewed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  We should be proud to be Christians.

Of course, pride in the extreme can be a problem. Whenever it becomes a “love of one’s own excellence” pride can blind us to the needs of others and to the reality of our own humanity.  But just as humility sometimes is misunderstood as silence and letting others walk all over us, pride is sometimes too quickly seen as negative.

True humility and Christian pride come together in faithful discipleship.  When Jesus called the little children to himself, don’t you suppose they felt an appropriate pride?  When Jesus said to the many on the mount, “blessed are you…” , don’t you imagine them just about bursting with pride?  And as Jesus welcomed women, and outcasts, and those who had been thrown down and out by society, don’t you think they might have felt pride for the first time in their lives?

In St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians there is a masterful speech to the puffed up, self-congratulatory, egomaniacal in his midst.  He uses irony to say, “You want boasting?  I’ll show you boasting…” And then Paul lets loose.  He maked fun of the various things people boast about, the roots of their pride.  He concludes, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness” (2 Cor. 11).

When we boast of weakness, we show solidarity with the poor, the children, the aged, the sick, the outcast, the misunderstood… and that’s Christian pride.  Through such pride, we can grow to understand ourselves to be accepted by God as good, blessed, and capable of great holiness. Through vulnerable confidence, Christ brings us to an appropriate place of prideful humility, a kind of “pride-ility,” if you will.  Paul echoes the earlier words of Jeremiah the prophet who hears God say, “Let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD: I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight” (Jer. 9:24).

I invite you to join me and others this Sunday in celebrating LGBT Pride.  Marching as a priest in a clerical collar, under the banner of my church and diocese, I will be encouraging others to come to know Jesus Christ as God’s humility and humanity among us—and that makes me very proud, indeed.

A sermon for the Sunday commemorating the Holy Eucharist, The Body and Blood of Christ: Corpus Christi.  The lectionary readings are Deuteronomy 8:2-3, Psalm 34, 1 Corinthians 10:1-4, 16-17, and John 6:47-58.

Listen to the sermon HERE. 

The other day I was making plans to meet a parishioner for coffee.  We agreed that we’d meet at the coffee shop, “Le Pain Quotidien.”  Just as I thought our plans were set and before hanging up the phone, my friend added, “Ok, see you on Second Ave.”  I quickly called him back.  “Second Avenue?  I thought we were meeting on Lexington.”  We both looked online, realized the confusion, and settled our meeting place.  We laughed as we saw the massive opportunity for missing each other—we could have met on 1^st Avenue, Fifth Avenue, or at any of the other many locations of that restaurant.  “Pain Quotidien,” is of course French for “Daily Bread.”

The irony was not lost of me that I encounter “Pain Quotidian” or Daily Bread every day and pass right by.  But if that’s true for my walking by the restaurant chain, it’s even truer for the Daily Bread provided by God in other ways.  I don’t always notice.  I’m not always grateful.

We pray for daily bread whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and on this Sunday when we meditate on the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion, the Eucharist) we can explore how the Sacrament of Communion is also an answer to our prayer for the bread that sustains— not just for today, but for tomorrow, and the next day as well.

The Old Testament Lesson for today recalls the time when the Israelites had been wandering in the wilderness, they became tired and irritable, and God fed them with manna. In the words of the psalmist, “[God] rained down manna upon them to eat and gave them grain from heaven. So mortals ate the bread of angels; he provided for them food enough.” (Psalm 78:24-25).

But the manna was only for the day. It was daily manna and needed to be consumed or it would spoil. If they left it out it became wormy. If it remained in the sun, it melted. This is because the manna was food, but it was more than food. Manna was meant to be consumed with faith. It took faith to rely upon the Lord to lead through the wilderness. It took faith to go to sleep each night trusting that there would be manna for the morrow. Perhaps it’s from that old, ancient story that the prayer began to be formed that would pray for daily manna, or daily bread.

Biblical scholars sometimes point out that the Greek in Lord’s Prayer actually conveys this sense of praying for the bread for tomorrow. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, reflects on this in a meditation as he writes

Rivers of ink have been spilt over the exact meaning of “give us this day our daily bread”, because the word that’s used in the Greek is a very, very strange one that you hardly find anywhere else.

It probably means daily, it probably means the stuff we need to survive, but at least some people in the early church understood it to mean the bread we want for tomorrow or even the bread of tomorrow; “give us today tomorrow’s bread”.

And they’ve thought that might mean give us now a taste of the bread we shall eat in the Kingdom of God. Give us a foretaste of that great banquet and celebration where the universe is drawn together by Christ in the presence of God the Father.

And so that connects for a lot of Christians with Holy Communion. Of course, because Holy Communion is, at one level, bread for today, it’s very much our daily bread, it’s the food we need to keep going; but it’s also a foretaste of the bread of heaven, a foretaste of enjoying the presence of Jesus in heaven at his table at his banquet, as the gospels put it. Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “The one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that [one] may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, they will live for ever.”

By taking into ourselves the Body of Christ, we become one with Jesus and the Father through the Holy Spirit. Communion happens to us. Communion overtakes us. Communion is God moving toward us and inviting us closer. Communion is our reaching out toward one another and even reaching beyond the church into the world.

Communion happens all the time and all over the place.  We invite others to meet Christ at the altar when we worship.  But we also invite others to experience Christ offered himself and receiving all who come, in other ways, as well—on Tuesdays with the senior lunch, on Saturdays with the community dinner, most nights of the week in the shelter.  We offer “Bread for Tomorrow” through the simplicity of our hospitality, allowing strangers and neighbors alike to rest in the garden and perhaps learn something of the God who comes to us in the “beauty of holiness.” But whether we offer literal food, or spiritual food, the food of friendship, support, encouragement, or prayer– We move with invitation, inviting others to “taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they who trust in him!” (Psalm 34:8)

Sometimes the bread for which we pray and long for is less tangible than food and drink, or even a sacrament.  Sometimes we hunger and thirst for love, companionship, health, work, peace… all these hopes can be like something for which we have a taste but are a long way away from.  The ancient Israelites prayed for the bread that would feed their bodies, but also the bread that would feed their souls and their ambitions and their loves.  The friends and followers of Jesus understood his presence as feeding them, but they also prayed for the bread of tomorrow as they longed for his presence in prayer and the Holy Spirit. And we do the same, filled with confidence that just as surely as God satisfied those before us, God fills us with what we need.

Bread for today is a gift. Bread for tomorrow is a promise. We are called to live with hope and with faith for whatever tomorrow brings.  The Holy Eucharist allows us to practice receiving God, apprehending God, noticing God, hearing God, and feeling God moving in us and around us.

Jesus promises, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” May we grow in the faith and love of Christ, especially as we encounter him in the Holy Eucharist.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

 

On Trinity Sunday, June 11, 2017, The Church of the Holy Trinity offered one worship service so that everyone could be together for the visitation of the Rt. Rev. Mary D. Glasspool, Assistant Bishop of New York.  The music included gifts of our Sunday Evening Contemporary musicians as well as our Holy Trinity Choir.

Bishop Glasspool presided and preached.  The bishop also confirmed five, received one, and reaffirmed the faith of two parishioners. After a reception with the congregation, the bishop had lunch with the vestry at the rectory.

Listen to the entire worship service HERE.

A sermon for the Day of Pentecost, June 4, 2017.  The lectionary readings are Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, and John 20:19-23. 

Listen to the sermon HERE.

When I was in high school, there were two girls in our classes who always wore long skirts. Their hair was very long—it seemed like they never cut it, but either wore it tied back, or fastened in a bun of some kind. They never wore makeup, and everyone knew (or my friends, at least knew) that Lisa and Lori were from a Pentecostal family. For a while, I thought that these two girls and their families were what Pentecostal looked like. Until I became friends with Rachel.

Rachel’s father was a Pentecostal minister, but Rachel wore makeup, was a cheerleader at high school, and her whole family seemed like most other people, except that their church was a called a Church of God, and their belief was that one is baptized by water, but one is also baptized by the Holy Spirit, and that second baptism causes one to speak in tongues. Others are given the gift of interpreting tongues. And so, knowing Rachel and her family, who were very modern but also spoke in tongues—I thought they were what Pentecostals looked like.

That word, Pentecostal, has to do with the Day of Pentecost, the day we celebrate today. The “pente” of Pentecost is just like the “pente” of Pentagon. It means five. And Pentecost is the day that is fifty days after Easter. Originally, this coincided with the Jewish feast of weeks, or Shavuot. As we heard in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that fiftieth day after Easter was when the Holy Spirit appeared to the disciples in a strange and dramatic way. They were overcome by something, and they were changed.

The Acts passage says that the apostles received a gift of tongues, that each one could hear others speaking in a language that made sense to each. And while that is no small thing, there are other places in scripture that talk about the gifts of the spirit. The spiritual gifts go far beyond the ability to speak in tongues or understand another’s tongue. Pentecostalism is the religious movement that highlights the gifts of the Spirit, but especially the gift of tongues, and arose especially in the late 19th century, as a movement of evangelical revival in Great Britain and in the United States. Pentecostals are the people who participate in this movement, like my friends I mentioned in the beginning of this sermon.

But there are other spiritual gifts. In his First letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul describes a fuller picture. There are varieties of gifts [ Paul says] but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

As I’ve grown in my own faith, and especially as I’ve grown in my own experience of the Church and Christians who populate the Church, I’ve changed my mind about what a Pentecostal looks like.

As I reflect on MY experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church, I see what Paul is talking about. There are those with gifts of tongues, but I have been witness to that gift being manifest through languages that others don’t understand. Instead, I think of the teacher I know who is able to put complex thought into simple language, so that it can be understood. I think of the person who always has just the right word of grace to speak—which brings peace, brings healing, and brings hope. I think of the person who can speak the truth in the midst of cloudy gibberish, like the Word of God we hear about in scripture “Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

When I hear Paul’s description of spiritual gifts, I think of those who work for the “common good,” as Paul puts it. And there are those who participate in miracles—not just miracles of healing (and they do happen– sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly).

Being Pentecostal looks like a lot of us….
Trinity Cares
Volunteers in HTNC
Music program
People who pray for others…

On this day, we celebrate the coming of God’s Holy Spirit in surprising and startling ways. The spirit stirs and sings. The spirit crashes and calms. The spirit tears down what is old, or broken, or dead in order to make room for new life:for energy, hope, and resurrection. Let us be open to God’s Holy Spirit and let us be faithful Pentecostals.

A homily for Evensong on the Eve of Pentecost, June 3, 2017.  The readings are Exodus 19:1-8, 16-20 and 1 Peter 2:2-10.

Listen to the homily HERE.

The late comedian and actor Robin Williams was also an Episcopalian and during the height of the David Letterman show and the nightly listing of the “top ten things” for this or that, Robin Williams compiled a list he called, “The Top Ten Reasons to be an Episcopalian.”  On his list, number 6 says simply “Pew aerobics.”  We sit, we stand, we kneel.

There is a lot of up and down.

To some extent our “pew aerobics” are intended to go along with our words and our intentions.  The Book of Common Prayer is very careful to suggest postures, not to control people in worship, but because of the idea that posture can promote or encourage particular feelings.

God’s people stand for joy, in full gratitude that God has blessed us to such an extent as to be born in the world as one of us, to become incarnate, and to honor the material world.

We sometimes kneel when we’re sorry—for ourselves or for others.  We kneel when we feel small and need to ask for care or guidance or direction.

And we sit to listen or to be in community.  Sometimes we sit when we’re worn out and don’t have the energy or physical ability to do anything else.

So there’s a lot of up and down to our posture, just as there’s a lot of up and down in our lives—times to celebrate and times to despair.

The up and down nature of things also pertains to God, as people have tried to get their minds around God.  Almost every religion somehow imagines the divinity as being “up” and the opposite of divinity as being “down.”

Our first reading from scripture includes this idea in a way that many of us have probably felt.  Moses meets God in the mountains.  High up, with a perspective that can see miles away, with the air a little thinner and cleaner.  High on a mountain, one can surely meet God.

The Church has just celebrated the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in which we have heard stories, prayed prayers, and sung music about Christ going “up.” And in fact, the anthem the choir sings in just a few minutes underscores this point.

And yet, even as the anthem quotes Psalm 47, “God is gone up with a triumphant shout,” the anthem continues by reminding us of other psalms, especially Psalm 24:, “Life up your heads, O gates, and let the King of Glory in.”

In the anthem, as in our worship, as in our lives, there’s a tension between locating God—that Higher Power, that Source of All Being, that “something” that is BEYOND, while at the same time, being somehow “WITHIN.”

In the Christian tradition, we hear Jesus say again and again in the Gospels, “Don’t look for the kingdom of God over there, or far away.  The Kingdom of God (God’s fullest presence) is already among you.  Look within yourself.  Look at your neighbor.

We gather on the Eve of Pentecost, that day in which the early followers of Jesus saw and felt God’s Spirit in a radically new way. Pentecost brings many messages and, in fact, we have a whole season of Sundays to reflect on what it means that the full Spirit of God lives among us and within us, but especially around the Day of Pentecost, I think it’s helpful to recall that the Spirit of God comes whenever called.

God’s Spirit may not show up exactly the way we imagine—we’ll hear tomorrow how those early followers of Jesus were blown away by the Spirit’s presence—it was nothing like what they were expecting.  But God comes when invited, when called, when invoked.

The Second reading from scripture that we heard comes from St. Peter who tries to remind his audience (and us) that we are God’s beloved.  God has created each one of us not as lifeless rocks to be thrown away or ignored, but as “living stones,” spiritual bodies—in God’s eyes capable, precious, and beautiful.

The Gifts of the Spirit are ours for the asking.  God is ours for the asking. Perhaps we ask with words. Perhaps we ask with our bodies.  Perhaps we ask in silence.  Perhaps we ask with music.

At the end of our Evensong this afternoon, we’ll sing the wonderful old hymn, “Come down, O Love divine.”  The familiar tune is by Ralph Vaughan Williams but the words are by Richard Frederick Littledale, who was an Anglican priest who was deeply affected by the English Pre-Raphaelites.  He joined many in idealizing much of the medieval Church and piety and loved the words of the Bianca da Siena, a 14^th century Italian mystic.  “Come down, O Love Divine,” invites God into our hearts, to comfort, to burn away whatever is extra or needs to go, and to warm our hearts so that a flame of love can burn within us.

Though the images of God’s being up or down might help us to think about our own place in creation, and gain a new perspective, may we always remember that God is neither up or down, in or out, but always and everywhere as close as our breath—if only we ask.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.