Habits of the Heart (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Habits of the Heart

April 25, 2018 

We often hear in Ashland the mantra, “I’m spiritual but not religious.”  I have heard some fellow clergy say that this expression is just a cheap way of trying to have the benefits of faith and religion without any of its inconveniences.  I am not so sure:  I think that what people are trying to get at in this saying is that they are deeply motivated by wonder at the world and have profound values, but are reluctant to let these feelings be co-opted by structures of authority that have proven again and again how flawed they are.   And that surely is something reaching for the loving and the true, a good thing to be sure.

The fact is, we need to maintain practices and habits that keep our eyes open to wonder and our hearts open to love.  Love does not come naturally:  it too often is corrupted by selfishness, fear, and a desire to control.   Practices like prayer, meditation, ongoing daily intentional attentiveness (what Buddhists call mindfulness or being in the moment), or even singing help open our eyes and our hearts.  So do walking, enjoying the natural world, and service.  

Fr. Richard Rohr put it this way: “Spirituality is whatever it takes to keep your heart space open. That is daily, constant work because your ego and the events of life want to close it down. The voices in the dominant culture tell you to judge, dismiss, hate, and fear. If you don’t have some spiritual practice that has kept your heart open in hell, I know you’re going to be a grumpy old man or a hateful old woman, [with] negativity [as] all you have left. You have to work to live in love, to develop a generosity of spirit, a readiness to smile, a willingness to serve instead of to take.” 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

A Good Shepherd, A Gracious Host (Easter 4B)

The Good Shepherd, Fr. John Giuliani

A Good Shepherd, A Gracious Host

Easter 4B
22 April 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Years ago, a friend of ours told us the story of how she grew up as a hearing child of two deaf parents. She was a gifted singer, and regularly sang in one of the state’s best high school choirs. Her parents attended every one of her performances. Once, other parents asked them why they came to all her concerts since they couldn’t hear her. “Oh,” they replied through an interpreter, “we don’t come to hear her sing. We come to see her sing.” This tells me a great deal about love.

Love is all about focusing on the beloved, and seeing to the beloved’s needs and desires, not on our own. 

You can see such a focus in a good host.  Elena’s sister Sally and brother-in-law Phillip live in Sisters Oregon.  They are devout Mormons, and scrupulous in following that faith’s dietary code, eschewing tobacco, alcohol, and coffee and tea.  When we first visited them we were afraid of perhaps being condemned because we had left that faith.  But we knew we were still loved when we found that they had made sure to buy a French coffee press and freshly ground Sisters Roasting Company coffee especially for us to greet each of those wonderful quiet and cold high desert mornings.  They themselves never partook, except for enjoying the aroma.   

Der Gute Hird, Sieger Koeder

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.  In the Gospel, Jesus says he is the good shepherd, whose flock is larger than we think.   The beloved 23rd Psalm describes God not only as a loving shepherd, but also as a gracious host.  Whether shepherd or host, Jesus is focused on our needs and desires, not on his. 

The Good Shepherd is not an image of an accountant, keeping track on a ledger all the little lambs, who is in the flock and who is out.  It is not a powerful defender of property, some Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone he-man armed with incredibly deadly weaponry to fend off all attackers, wolves, and false sheep.

A Good Shepherd.  A Gracious Host.  We are creatures of words and images. We tell stories, draw comparisons. We think and feel in metaphor and simile. We define ourselves in large part by the stories we choose to tell and not to tell, and by the images we choose to describe our world.

The Good Shepherd, Joyce Miller

What images do you use to think of God?

A sovereign monarch, or a gentle parent?

A supernatural being standing apart from the phenomenal universe, or the ground in which we live, and move, and have our being?

An intimate, or some abstract power?

A protector of privilege or a vindicator of the oppressed?

A law-giver and law-enforcer? Or a healer?

Is God for you a redundancy, a useless story that really doesn’t tell us anything about the world as it actually is?

Or does your God have the face of Jesus?

The Bible teaches all sorts of things, often at odds with each other.  There are plenty of passages where God is seen in militant, nasty, and even petty terms.  Should you take these as the heart of the Bible, and understand that when it speaks of God as love that this applies only to a few chosen people?  Or should you take the God as love passages as central, and understand pictures of a mean and nasty God as flawed expressions of how we damaged people at times experience God? 

Jesus gave us a clear example in this.  There are plenty of passages in the Psalter that say “keep away from the wicked,” and “hate and avoid sinners.” But instead of these, Jesus comes upon obscure passages in the Psalms that give glimpses of a gentle and loving God, and uses these to interpret all the other harsher, nastier descriptions of God.   He reads in Psalm 50:  “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine (Psalm 50:9-11).  And he ends up saying things like, “God counts the sparrows, so how could he not care about you?” “God clothes the wild flowers and feeds the birds, how could he not care for you?”  “God has compassion and equanimity, sending the blessing of rain and sunshine on both good and bad alike.”  He ends up thinking that joy, good, and justice are contagious, not impurity and wickedness.  

Haomushi, Yu Jiade 

 

When you read the Bible, does it lead you to the loving and compassionate God that Jesus called Abba or Papa?  Does it convince you that violence is evil, and that justice and compassion are basic requirements for human life?  Or does it lead to you to a condemning, jealous, vicious, and violent deity, distant and inhuman?  In a very true way, the Bible, in all its diversity, serves as a mirror on our own hearts.   

Though our tradition has been generally to use the metaphors “father” and “son” to speak of God, we mustn’t take this literally.  There are a few passages where God is described in feminine terms: a hen gathering her chicks, a mother nursing her child.  Blessed Julian of Norwich, following Jesus’ example of taking a rare glimpse into the love of God and letting it form all other expression, takes these rare images and boldly writes in one of our beloved canticles:  “God chose to be our mother in all things…  Christ came in our poor flesh to share a mother's care.”

Trusting God is at the heart of it.  And this means accepting our fears and sufferings: embracing them, not being in denial about them or trying to minimize them.  Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says the twenty-third Psalm is the answer to the question, “How do you live in a dangerous, unpredictable, frightening world?” Right after 9/11, many people asked him “How could God have let such a thing happen?” His answer was “God's promise was never that life would be fair. God's promise was, when it's your turn to confront the unfairness of life, no matter how hard it is, you'll be able to handle it, because He'll be on your side. He will give you the strength you need to find your way through. … “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” [does not mean], “I will fear no evil because evil only happens to people who deserve it.” [Rather,] “This is a scary, out-of-control world, but it doesn't scare me, because I know that God is on my side, not on the side of the . . . the terrible thing that [has] happened. And that's enough to give me the confidence.”

Trusting God, especially in times of woe, makes us realize that we all are in God’s hand. We realize the truth of the saying, “there but for the grace of God go I.”  And if we all are the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand, then certainly we ourselves must reach out our hands to all.

 Christ as Good Shepherd, mosaic in Galla Placida Mausoleum, Ravenna (early 400s)

So Jesus in today’s Gospel says that the good shepherd cares not only for the sheep already safely fenced in his secure pasture.  This good shepherd has “other sheep, not of this fold.”  He cares for them too.   That means our conceptions of us and them—who’s Christian and who’s pagan, who’s orthodox and who’s a heretic, or who’s righteous and who’s wicked, who’s naughty and who’s nice—must go by the boards.  There are more people in Jesus’ care that we in our tribalism and self-interest can conceive of.   And Jesus loves them, and died for them too.

Some of you may have noticed that in the Eucharistic prayer I make a slight modification to the phrase in the Prayer Book, “this is my Blood of the New Covenant which was shed for you and for many,” I usually say “shed for you and for all.”  This alternate language is authorized by the Episcopal Church:  it is how the phrase shows up in Enriching our Worship.  The language here comes from the Greek of the Last Supper story in Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus says, “this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24).   The use of Greek word polloi “many” here is the Gospel writer’s effort to represent an Aramaic word that Jesus would have used, that has the sense of “the many” without necessarily having the limitation of being only part of a whole.  The point is that Jesus died for a multitude, not for a few.  

Jesus’ death was for all of humanity, not just part of it.  Jesus may say, “the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many” Mark 10:45; Matthew 20:28).   But 1 Timothy 2:6 explains that this multitude is not just a few chosen ones:  “Christ Jesus… gave himself as a ransom for all.”   And John 1:29: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  So I use the word “all” in the prayer to avoid the misunderstanding that “many” here implies that others are excluded from Jesus’ grace.  Again, he is a good shepherd, and he has other sheep who are not in this flock.   

The surest way we can demonstrate our trust in this loving shepherd is by loving. The most direct way of showing our gratitude for our gracious host is by being gracious to others, especially those most unlike us.  Go to concerts even if we cannot hear them.  Give coffee even if we cannot drink it. 

May we all so partake of the feast our gracious host offers.  May we share the feast with others.  May we all let our shepherd gently lay us on his shoulder as he carries us home, and may we gently carry others. 

Amen. 

Good Shepherd, calendar image from catholictradition.org

Begin the Beguine

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

April 18, 2018

Begin the Beguine

One of the songs I sing to Elena to help with her Parkinson’s-impaired mobility (always helped out by music and rhythm in "dancing" transfers), is Cole Porter’s romantic “When they Begin the Beguine.”  “Beguine” is a Caribbean creole word for “a colonial white woman” used as the name of a close cheek-by-cheek slow dance.  But the word itself comes from 13^th-15^th century Northern Europe, and meant originally a woman religious who lived in quasi-monastic communities without taking the formal permanent vows of full-fledged nuns.  Instead, they made personal pledges to be bound by the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as long as they lived in the community. Poorer women, without the hefty dowry required to enter many nunneries, often became beguines and joined these independent community houses set up as a way of caring for impoverished women. To this day, the popular, vernacular way of referring to nuns of any kind in French is “beguines.” 

April 22 is the feast day of one of the greatest of all beguines, Hadewijch (also written as Edwige or Hedwig) of Brabant (the late medieval duchy that is now largely Belgium and Holland).  She was a poet and mystic who lived in the 1200s.    Her biographical details are somewhat unclear at this point; she is known today primarily through her Dutch, French, and Latin writings and the huge influence she had on later mystical writers like Meister Eckhart and John of Ruusbroec. 

She uses a form of French secular love poetry to describe the relationship between the speaker and God.   In her couplets, prose letters, and Book of Visions she sees Christ as a lover who pursues and courts each of us.  She describes such love in female terms:

“Of great Love in high thought I long to think, day and night.

She with her terrible might so opens my heart.

I must surrender all to her…

Sweet as Love’s nature is,

Where can she come by the strange hatred

With which she continually pursues me,

And that pierces the depths of my heart with storm?”

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Hungry Jesus (Easter 3B)

            “Hungry Jesus”

Easter 3B

15 April 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading is one of the many luminous Gospel stories about Jesus being seen alive and well, more than he had ever been before, by his friends, after his death on the cross.  This one takes place Easter evening, just after two of the disciples had dinner with a stranger on the road to Emmaus, a stranger who opened the scriptures to them, explained what had happened in the last few days, and whom they suddenly had recognized as Jesus “in the breaking of the bread.”  The two return to Jerusalem, tell the other disciples, and as they are talking, Jesus again appears.  And again, he asks for a meal:  “Do you have anything here to eat?” 

Hungry Jesus!  One would think that with a perfected resurrection body, you would be the source of your own energy, with no need for food.  But here you are, asking for meal after meal, like a growing adolescent with a serious case of the munchies.   First bread and wine with scriptural discussion.  Now, broiled fish and more scriptures.    Incarnation has God being made fully human.  Resurrection has a fully human person being made God, but one who remains in real ways fully human.  Resurrected Jesus is hungry, yearns, and still has scars on his body. 

Perhaps this is Luke’s way of telling us that this apparition is no ghost.  Jesus is fully alive, with the vim and vigor of the young man they had known before his death, with his appetites, hungers, and yearning, intact.  

I suspect, though, that something deeper is at work here than just trying to underscore the corporeal nature of Christ’s resurrection.  The disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize him by how he breaks the bread—a clear reference to the Eucharist.  Later in the evening, in today’s story, Jesus appears and the disciples and their companions are terrified.  Jesus reassures them that he is not a ghost, that it is truly him.  Then, as a way of consoling them and reassuring them, he expresses his hunger.  He eats fish, the very food item he had used with bread at the feeding of the 5000, an item he had used as an image for his desire, his hunger, for his disciples to go out and catch people, just like fish!

Hungry Jesus!  In your glorified state, you are not self-sufficient.  You need sustenance, yearn for it, and the companionship that goes with it.  You want companions, people you can share bread with—cum panem.   Remember that the group here is the disciples and their companions. 

There is an important doctrine being taught here. 

Sometimes people suggest that the resurrection “undoes” the passion and crucifixion, and somehow undoes the scandal of Jesus’ mortality.  But here Jesus shows them the wounds still in his body as a sign that it is truly him—the resurrection has not erased the harm, the suffering.  And Jesus shows them his hunger: he is not a polar opposite of what he had been: once dead now alive, once mortal now God, once earthly now heavenly.  No.  He is in a real sense a continuation of the Jesus they had always known:  Jesus the party animal, who turned water into wine, dined with whores and crooks, and welcomed all with a smile and open arms.

Hunger is part of being human.  It has a way of making us feel more alive, by sharpening our sense of need.  Cicero said “Hunger is the best spice.”  Things taste better when you’re hungry.

Hungry Jesus!  You’re fully alive, and really enjoying that bread and wine, that bit of roast fish, after three days without meals in the tomb!

And it’s not just about physical hunger.  Hunger is pat of all our desire, all our yearning.  We are hungry creatures.  St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being.  Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.”   In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy.  There is a hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God. 

This most basic and important need in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now.   In sacramental theology, it is re-presented by bread and wine.  

This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana.  It is the Christian doctrine closest to the idea of gratifying desire in secular hedonism.  But in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, through the negation of what it means to be human.  And in hedonism, the sating of desire means its end, at least for the moment.  But in Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire.   The presence of God both satisfies our hunger while it stimulates our appetite.

The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns, one I hope is sung at my funeral, one in the 1948 hymnal but not the 1982 one:

Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.

... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.

“Do you have anything to eat?” Hungry Jesus asks for food, invites companions.  Jesus is hungry for us to share with him.  God yearns for us.  Creator seeks creature just as we creatures have a yearning for God.   The great neo-Platonist theologian known to tradition as Dionysius the Areopagite, the proto-mystic of the church who inspired the desert fathers and mothers and the Benedictines later on, in his writing On the Names of God, at one point gives God the name, “Yearning.” 

The idea is expressed in hymn 516, by Italian mystic Bianco da Siena:

Come down, O love divine, seek Thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.

O let it freely burn, ‘til earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. …

And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace, till he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.

Hungry Jesus tells us it’s OK to be hungry, to yearn.  Hungry Jesus bids us offer him food, and offers to share food with us.  Hungry Jesus appears to us in the faces of all who hunger, whom we must feed.  As St. John Chrysostom taught, “If you are not able to find Christ in the beggar at the Church door, you will not find him in the chalice.” 

Yearning.  Satisfaction. Companionship. Ever-growing yearning.  Hunger.   Eat this bread, drink this wine.

Amen.  

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Death No Longer Has Dominion (Mid-week Message)

Death No Longer has Dominion

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

April 11, 2018

“But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.: (Romans 6:8-11)

The implications of Jesus being raised from the dead are endless:  if death is not final, we need not fear it; if life is our final end, we need to live into life at all times, even here and now; if the Empire’s worst threats (torture, death, and war) are hollow, we can live here and now in the Reign of God that Jesus announced. 

William Stringfellow said it clearly: 

“[T]he vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called.  The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death.”  (from Instead of Death)  

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Fellowship in Faith (Easter 2B)

Road to Emmaus, Lindel Littleton, 2010

 

“Fellowship in Faith”
Second Sunday of Easter (Year B)
8 April 2018

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.
Homily Delivered Trinity Parish Church, Ashland, Oregon

8 a.m. Said Mass, 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31; Psalm 133

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

 take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s readings are all about how faith and spiritual growth come from fellowship with others, love and unity, and sharing of stories.  The story of Thomas is not so much about a doubter who gets his come-uppance as it is about the basic truth that when it comes to matters of community and faith, simply showing up is the most important thing.  Thomas missed that church meeting on the evening of Easter and was left to wonder what foolishness had overtaken his fellow apostles.  The next Sunday, he is there in attendance and finally “gets” it.  The epistle declares: “What we have seen and heard, we announce also to you, so you too may have fellowship (or communion) with us, even what indeed we share with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ.” (1 John1:3) The Psalm says, “How good it is when siblings dwell in unity… It is like fine and abundant anointing oil in the Temple... like the dew of distant Mount Hermon distilling on the parched hills of Jerusalem.”  And the reading from Acts tells of the power of story-telling: “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”  “They were of one heart and mind, and shared all their possessions so that there was not a poor person among them.” 

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter.  Just as Christmas is both a day and a season, (December 25 and then the 12 days up to January 6), Easter is not limited to Easter Sunday.  It is a feast that lasts 50 days, what are called in the Eastern church, the Great Fifty Days.  I have always loved the fact that the Feast of Easter is 10 days longer than the Lenten Fast.  Joy always outweighs and outlasts regret and sorrow.  And during all the Great Fifty Days, we tell each other these stories of Jesus’ rising.  And we should share with each other how these stories have affected each one of us. 

Easter cannot be done in a day.  The Resurrection of Jesus demands an extended period, not just for joy and celebration, but also for processing and digesting its implications and exploring its deep meaning.  Bishop N. T. Wright says that the resurrection is so joyful and its implications so overwhelming that for breakfast each morning in these great 50 days, we should drink champagne,  or, (if I might add from the Episcopal Church’s General Convention), an equally attractive and abundant non-alcoholic alternative.  Madeleine L’Engle said, “[The resurrection of Jesus] is almost too brilliant for me to contemplate; it is like looking directly into the sun; I am burned and blinded by life.”  Take all 50 days to rehearse these stories, feel the joy, and pray into what they mean about our lives and hopes. 

The Easter story is the heart of my own personal faith.  I natively have a great difficulty in believing beyond what I see.  The death of family and friends is invariably devastating to me.  But not surprisingly, over the years, it is during this season that I have had fleeting glimpses of the life beyond, whether talking in a dream to the deceased—Elena’s mother, or my parents—or seeing for a moment in a darkened Trinity library a departed brother of the parish.   But even beyond this, the resurrection breaks the power of hopelessness in my life here and now, giving me an optimism and confidence that in the end, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.    Jesus back from the dead is a sign to me that everything he ever said about God’s love and care is true, that regardless of rotten things in life, the Reign of God is already among us. 

Tell each other your stories and how this story changes you.  Share faith, and it grows.  See faith grow in the ones with whom you have shared, and have your own faith affirmed.  Listen to the stories of others, and grow in affection and love.  In this way, we share fellowship not just with each other, but with God and Christ. 

Each Sunday, show up.  Each and every Sunday is a little Easter, a celebration of our Lord’s victory.  Don’t miss that Church service or meal where God descends and everyone present is changed.  And if you do miss occasionally, make up by sharing and serving all the more. 

Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Those are profound, earth- changing words.  Resurrection.  Life.  Hear, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.  Lean into them.  Share communion and fellowship.  Receive the hope and joy of the Easter Feast. 

In the name of God, Amen.

Icon, St. Thomas Believing

Go to Galilee (Trinitarian Article)

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

April 2018

Go to Galilee

[The angel] said to [the women at the tomb]:  Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.  Behold the place where they laid him.  But go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” (Mark 16:6-7)

I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land this time of year three years ago.  Since then, I have experienced Holy Week services very differently, with graphic mental images etched into my heart of the places where the events in the stories took place.  The grassy hills of Galilee were covered with wildflowers. 

“Go tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you.”  Now if this were John’s Gospel, the sentence would end, “and there in heaven he will prepare a place for you.”  But Mark’s focus remains on the here and now, on the reign of God Christ proclaimed breaking into the here and now.  

“He is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.” 

Why Galilee?  In Mark, both the men disciples and the women have all followed Jesus from Galilee on his ministry and ended up with him in Jerusalem.  Galilee was the backwater.  It was the sticks.  We see several times in the Mishna, the earliest part of the Talmud, stories where it is clear what people thought of Galilee, where people abuse each other with the term: Galili Shote’!  “You Fool of a Galilean!  You Galilean Idiot!” 

We are all invited to go to Galilee and meet once again with our beloved Jesus.  The men who abandoned him, the women who ran from the angel silent, all of us who have failed to take the hope and love of Jesus into our hearts and reorder our lives and the world by them, all of us.  Note the angel is clear:  “tell the disciples, even Peter”—who denied three times—“Jesus is going before you.” All of us can meet the resurrected Jesus.  But we must be willing to rethink everything from the start, and break all our habits and assumptions, and reach out to the strange and condemned.

Go to Galilee:  go to your roots, where you started out, and reconsider everything in light of this news. 

Go to Galilee:  go to the margins, the dregs of society.   Go to the ghetto.  Go to the other side of the tracks, where the hicks and rednecks live.  Go beyond the bounds of polite, acceptable society.  Go to Galilee:  go to the poor, the outcast, the unclean, the unrighteous, the ignorant. 

Go to Galilee, you foolish Galilean, and the living Jesus will appear to you there. Jesus will appear to you there, as he has promised you. 

Jesus in Galilee was all about crossing boundaries, expanding inclusion, serving those who others said deserved no service:  the oppressed, the marginalized, the persecuted.  Only by going back to our roots and retracing not our steps, but his, his steps of inclusive, wondrous love, can our eyes be opened and the mystery of the resurrection be revealed to us. 

He is not here.  But go to Galilee, and he will go before you.  And there you shall see him, just as he promised. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Bearing with our own and each others infirmities

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

April 4, 2018

Bearing with Our Own and Each Other’s Infirmities

We Episcopalians want to have beautiful and uplifting worship.   We want the music we sing and play, the readings and prayers we give, the rites and ceremonies we act out, the bulletins we produce, the vestments we wear, and the appointments of our worship space to be fitting offerings to God.  As a result, sometimes we get very hung up on the minutia of having things “just so.”  This is a good thing in that it encourages us to work toward a worthy offering, but can be a very bad thing if we let it distract us from the worship itself. 

We can be too hard on ourselves, and feel that we should not volunteer to participate if our offering is not “sufficient” in “quality.”  And we can be hard on others when their participation does not meet our own exacting standards or taste. 

I occasionally have to counsel parishioners reluctant to serve or who want to stop serving because of fears of not getting things “just right.”  What I tell them is this:  What we aim for in our worship leadership is relaxed attentiveness, not choreographed perfection.  What matters is bringing reverence and love to this service, and not being overly worried about occasional ‘mess ups.’  No one in the pews notices anyway, or at least should notice.   The fact is, getting the motions right comes from repetition and practice.  As the old saw says, ‘Wisdom is the fruit of experience, and experience is the fruit of getting things wrong.’  

Here in this theater town, everybody on occasion wants to be a critic.   And when we have such high standards set by truly gifted people—be they musicians, preachers, teachers, or readers—it can be tempting to apply our critical skills to others as well as ourselves.  But carping on other people’s failings, either in their presence or behind their backs, breaks the mutual love, respect, and charity to which Christ calls us.  It discourages participation and relaxed attentiveness rather than encourages it.  Critical carping usually tarts itself up as “only trying to make helpful suggestions.”   The difference is whether we really are trying to help, whether we have the right relationship and mutual affection, and the care we take in choosing an appropriate time and setting for the suggestions.  Here at Trinity, we are pretty good at this usually.   One of my great joys here is working with the worship committee, where our relationships are such that we can share our reactions and suggestions with each other candidly all in the context of mutual care and help.  But even here at loving little Trinity, I have had musicians, lectors, altar servers, and altar or flower guild ministers come to me in tears on occasions, hurt by ill-timed and unsympathetic “suggestions” by others.   

What we have to remember is that this service is an offering the person is making to God.  And it is not us up to us to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on the offering of another sister or brother in Christ. 

A confession: I once served at a Cathedral where the standard use for solemn Eucharist on Sundays was to sing the Eucharistic Prayer.  One of the priests was wholly tone deaf, but he followed the Dean’s orders to sing the prayer in accordance with the use.  The first time I heard him sing his off-key monotone, I was in the choir, and I winced visibly.  Afterwards, the choir master, himself a demanding musician whose standards were near perfection, took me aside.  “Tony,” he said, “you need to hear what the good father intends in his heart, not what his vocal chords produce.  We are here to pray and worship, not perform.”   

Striking a balance between “quality assurance” and acceptance of each other is always tricky.   We should focus on the intention of our worship.  Relaxed attentiveness, not perfection in performance is how we best connect with God and each other. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+