The Running Priest

Christ Church - 50 South Street - Warwick, NY

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

Mary turned round and saw Jesus, standing there.
- John 20:14

In some ways, I fear, we make too much of what happened on this morning those many years ago.  Think of all the stories and poems that have been written about the resurrection of Jesus, the symphonies composed and concerts given, paintings rendered and sculptures chiseled…think of the sermons, preached by the millions, over time.  It’s not that I fear we make too much of how important it is, for even those who do not believe a word of it would have to admit that whatever happened that first Easter morning utterly changed the course of human history, and continues to steer it even to this day.  What I wonder about is rather whether the way we imagine what happened – the way we conceive it – might be wrong.

When you picture exactly what happened on that first Easter Day, what do you see?  The resurrected Lord robed in light glowing so brightly that his disciples must turn away from his splendor?  A cacophony of an angelic chorus and quaking earth, shocking the ears with tidings of an astonishing miracle?  Those first witnesses to the empty tomb and his resurrected body, lying prostrate on the ground before him, in fear and awe of what this thing could mean?

They are powerful images – even perhaps assaulting to our senses.  They rise out of the different versions of the Bible account of what happened this day but more than that they arise from the deep desire of human beings - for whom this story matters so much – to convey what it has meant in their lives that Christ is risen.  It’s not hard to see why we make so much of what happened.

But a closer look at the story we heard this morning invites perhaps a different response.  For the resurrection of Jesus in John’s Gospel is first witnessed by a solitary and devoted friend, who in the gloom and grief of the empty tomb, sees him standing – just standing there alive and well – and who then calls out in a quiet psalm of hope and incomprehension: teacher?  They are no angels here.  There is no bright light.  No crowd of witnesses.  There is only a tiny movement of the heart and mind towards understanding and belief: is it you?

If we are not careful, we will charge right past Jesus - pushing him out of our way ten times a day - because we a so indoctrinated with teachings about the power, might and majesty of the risen Lord.  So certain are we about what the miracle of the resurrection looked like (and looks like) – the glowing garments, the gaggle of angles, the chorus of praise by a great cloud of witnesses –  that we fail to see him and recognize him when he is right here with us.

My dad has been in the hospital for several weeks.  He reluctantly agreed awhile back to going in for a back surgery that was to relieve some chronic pain in his back and legs.  The pain had gotten so bad that since about Christmas time he’d been using a walker to get around.  I think that was the straw that broke the camels back.  If I’m already using a walker to get around, what have I got to lose, he thought.  He was scheduled for surgery on March 4th, and though the surgery went a little longer than was anticipated on the big day, I was relived when my sister called on the evening of the surgery with the good news that dad was in recovery and his doc felt that things had gone well.

Days passed and all seemed to be fine, when out of the blue, another phone call from Omaha: dad is back in the hospital.  An infection has set in, immediate, emergency surgery is required.  That evening another call – he is in critical condition in the ICU – intubated and on a respirator - with failing kidneys and a failing heart.  The next 24 hours will tell the tale.

You have all been there.  Many of you are there right now.  You lost your job.  Your body or your mind is failing you.  Your child is out of control.  Your spouse has left you for another.  Someone you love is terribly ill…someone you love has just died.
If the wonder of Good Friday is seeing that God is present in human suffering – even that God can work in and through human suffering to accomplish God’s purposes – then the wonder of this day is seeing that no matter how the story seems to end, if we can but stay present and faithful, Christ will come.  And not it seems in a fury of light and sound, but in those intimate – seemingly even routine – moments of human experience when we like Mary stop, and look and see with new eyes what is right there before us: is it you?

Could that be the risen Jesus, when some little church person whom you hardly know, becomes aware of the tears in your eyes, and with a warm embrace asks, “Can I help?”  Could that be the risen Jesus, when a stranger appears with a gift that makes it possible to feed the family for one more week?  Could that be the risen Jesus, when an alienated friend suddenly offers themselves to you in a new way, and with sincerity and grace come and says: I am sorry and I have missed you?  Could that be the risen Jesus – in such intimate, daily and even routine moments, when all we’re aware of is a tiny movement of the heart and mind towards understanding and belief.

The answer is: yes. Emphatically, yes.  Wonderfully yes.  Joyfully, yes.  Abundantly, yes.  Triumphantly, yes.  Eternally, yes!  Christ is risen every time life beats back death.  Not just in grand miracles of earth shaking or headline grabbing wonder, but every time – every single time – we turn away from darkness, despair and selfishness, and turn toward faith and hope and love.

C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun.  Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

My dad is fine today.  He’s not out of the hospital yet but he got through that bad night, and his kidneys and heart started working right again, and within a week he was out of ICU and into a regular hospital ward where he now spends his days driving his nurses crazy.  He’s pretty loopy when I talk to him over the phone because of all the painkillers he’s on – and he now has a gaping wound in his back where the doctors had to cut out a pound of flesh to stop a staff infection.  He’s had four surgeries so far, the last one on Maundy Thursday.

There has been no miraculous cure, it would seem.  And yet…

He keeps on keeping on.  He cracks jokes when I call him on the phone and tracks carefully – even in his loopiness – what’s going on in the lives of his kids and his grandkids.  He has so many old friends bothering him with visits that my step-mom has had to put a sign on his hospital door that says, nicely: go away!  His days, I know even now, are full of joy and wonder, and Jesus is there, risen indeed.  In the healing power of the doctors who work with him: the risen Jesus.  In the caring touch of the nurses who minister over the hours: the risen Jesus.  In the smiling and devoted faces of all those old and true friends: the risen Jesus.  And maybe best of all, in the silence and dim when he seems to be all alone: the risen Jesus!

He is not alone.  I am not alone.  And you – no matter what you face this day or on any day my brothers and sisters – you are not alone.

It is the risen Lord with you…Jesus alive!

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

God so loved the world…
- John 3:16

We have passed the half way mark in this season of Lent.  While a majority of Americans do not attend any worship service on Sunday morning – and so are less likely to be tracking the progress of these forty days – the chances are that if you can hear me this morning, you are well aware of which season of the church year we’re in, and how far it has progressed.  What’s more, you are probably involved in keeping the season in some small way.  I know one friend who has given up chocolate for these forty days (a classic!)  I know another who has promised not to say anything unkind about any other person, period.  One pal is saving pocket change every day and donating the resulting take to our new food card ministry each Sunday.

It’s a very appealing thing – taking on some special discipline for Lent.  I know few Episcopalians who will say, “I’m not doing anything this year.”  That’s not to say of course that we all get organized about making some Lenten promise every year – let alone keeping it – but we really honestly like the idea.  We like the invitation to dig deeper, to try harder, to do more.

I think we know very well that when it comes to our relationship with God, we fall terribly short of what might be.  We try to make this OK by telling ourselves that God loves and no matter what and will forgive us no matter how badly we mess up…but deep down, we are uncomfortable with that.  We have a sense of responsibility that says: hey – pick it up now!  You can do better!  I think that’s why making a Lenten promise is so appealing.

I made three promises this Lent, one of which was simply that I would never eat alone at lunch time.  I’ve gotten in the habit of eating fast at my desk most every day.  And while that creates a little more time to do some work, it also strikes me wrong in some important ways.  Jesus tells me that being with others is an important part of life – that we need one another and that caring for one another is about honoring God.  But that cannot happen when I eat alone.  Jesus also tells me that eating with others is good and holy – he blesses many a banquet with his presence during his earthly ministry, often confounding his critics by consuming foods thought to be unclean – and consorting with people who were thought to be “less than.”  Eating alone is hardly in the spirit of a holy banquet!  Our faith also teaches us that our bodies are temples to be revered and cared for…I have to admit that the kind of food I’m likely to consume when I am sitting at my desk is not gonna be on anybody’s “healthy eating” menu.
So you can see that for a variety of reasons that tie directly to who I wish to be as a person of faith, my little promise of not eating lunch alone during Lent makes a lot of sense for me.  I took it on with real excitement.

I screwed up on day two.

That was Thursday February 26th and I drove down to General Seminary to interview students for our new Assistant’s position that day.  After a long morning of interviews, I stopped by a favorite bakery at the corner of 9th & 20th and bought a lovely croissant to go – I wanted to hurry up and get in the car to beat the traffic home.  I had snarfed down the whole thing as a flew up the Westside highway towards the GW, before I realized my mistake.  I had not made it through one full day of Lent, before my Lenten promise was undone.

I was pretty discouraged, and I started in right away with the rationalizations.  I told myself: Well this is a weird day.  You would not have slipped up in Warwick.  This won’t happen again.  I told myself: well it wasn’t really lunch.  Since I did not say “no snacking alone” there is probably a loop hole here for me.  I told myself: well – really this was inevitable.  Often the best result of our Lenten disciplines is the way they remind how dependant we are on God’s grace to live.

Still.  To mess up on day one…pretty humiliating!

Such a bumble is really just a sign of how life goes for us most of the time.  While we manage long arcs of competence, commitment and courage, sooner or later, we always foul things up.  We break the promise.  We lose our commitment.  We fail the test.  We blow it.

This morning we heard one of the most important passages in the New Testament.  It’s a not an exciting story, or a clear concise commandment about how to live.  In fact the words I have in mind do not even come from the mouth of Jesus.  They come rather from Saint Paul who writes of the nature of God’s love for humanity in his letter to the Ephesians:

All of us lived in the passions of our flesh…

But God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead…made us alive together with Christ…

By grace you have been saved through faith.

By grace you have been saved through faith.  Our little Lenten slip ups are signs of the deeper, more dangerous and hurtful mistakes that are also and always a part of who we are.  If we are self aware – and have some integrity about it – we have to admit that we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.  Our predicament can be pretty terrible, as Paul writes this morning.  We can foul up even to the point of death…that is, brokenness within that levels us completely hopeless and helpless, and brokenness without that severs all our healthy and supportive bonds of community, even our bond with God.  It can get terribly bad in our lives.

But Paul says today: Shape up and listen to me!  He says it does not matter how far you have wandered, how terribly you have fallen, how utterly you have fouled things up.  By grace you have been saved through faith.  God – out of great love – has saved you already.  It is a completed action.  All you’ve got to do is believe it.

I am haunted by the memory of a visit from a man that took place early in my ministry.  He was a soldier in some branch of our special forces, recently returned from a tour of covert operations in some place he could not reveal to me.  He was a huge young man, well groomed, well dressed – quite evidently physically fit and strong.  Why he came to the Cathedral that morning I do not know.  I had never seen him before, I have never seen him since.

But why he came to a church was evident.  He was a broken man, who within minutes confessed to having killed people under orders from his command whom he was certain should not have been killed.  He was tearful, shaky and pleading.  He could barley live with himself.  I was just a brand new cleric – maybe not even a priest yet – I don’t remember.  And I am not sure it would have mattered because the man’s sadness and guilt were so overwhelming that I was immediately caught up in his feelings.  His emotions of hopelessness and guilt were quite overwhelming.

I know I managed to say that day something about how his broken heartedness was evident, and that God can and does forgive our every sin by the power of Jesus.  But I also know that I was unable to say those things well enough and clearly enough to make the impression I longed to make.  I don’t think he believed what I was saying.  How could God possibly forgive what I have done, he said.

The cathedral’s high altar front was sculpted in a triptych of Jesus’ crucifixion.  It was cast in bronze…and rendered in the most vivid detail imaginable.  There was a terribly broken Jesus on the cross.  There was a shattered Mary at the foot of the tree.  There were all the little details from the story: even the tiny pair of dice which were cast to decide who would take home Jesus’ stolen clothing at the day’s end…

And there were soldiers.  Great strong men in armor with chiseled arms and fierce weapons in their hands: clubs, spears and the like.

I wish I had thought to take that young man into the Cathedral that day.  I wish I had made stoop down to look at the bronze on that altar.  You see, I might have said, here are the soldiers who do this unthinkable thing because they were following their orders.  And I might have said, do you remember how the story goes?  Do you remember what he is saying right here and right now in this picture?  “Father,” he is saying, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

He still says that.

God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead, gave his only begotten Son.  Everyone who believes in him is made alive together with him.  They will not perish but have eternal life.

By grace you have been saved through faith.

No matter what beloved… believe it.

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me.

The great temptation is to skip over the words Jesus utters this morning.  Or to manipulate them in a way that obscures their plain meaning.  Or to touch on them only briefly – like you might quickly move a hot log in the fire – but then get on to some other word…some other truth.  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

This teaching is too central to the story of Jesus and our calling as Christians to respond in any of these ways.  It is not that God does not love us, for God does.  More than we can imagine.  It is not that life is no good, for life is good…and wondrous and rich.  It is not that we’re supposed to feel guilty or rotten.  Knowing Jesus can sweep away all such negativity.  But these are all things that happen to us.  All these are truths beyond our control.  We are beloved.  We are forgiven.  We are freed and free.  We walk every moment of our lives in the company of a good and caring God.

This morning Jesus does not talk about what will happen to us.  Jesus does not talk about what we will feel.  Jesus does not talk about what we believe.  Instead, Jesus is talking this morning about what we are supposed to do.  Jesus is speaking about how we are supposed to act.  Jesus is telling us who we are called to be as Christians.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

We are a typically diverse church family.  We hail from many walks of life, many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.  Our families of origin run the gamut from happy and healthy to dysfunctional and dangerous, as do the families that we live in right now.  We bring different experiences to this community…we have different hopes and expectations of our lives.  We come in various states of health and dis-ease.  We are all very different people, and there are very few of us – on very few days – who’s lives and experience are lined up in such a way that what we come here hoping to be challenged in the way that we are challenged this morning.

One of the young men of the parish told me about attending the first official organizational meeting for the high school football team this week.  The coach was demanding and unyielding.  “You will never miss practice.  You will always give 100%.  You will not waiver from your commitment to this team.  “I understand that football may not be your life,” he said, “But it is mine.  And since this is my team, this is how it is going to be.”

There are very few of us – on very few days – who’s lives and experience are lined up in such a way that what we come here hoping to be challenged in the way that we are challenged this morning.  Rather, we come mostly instead in various sorts and conditions of pain: hungry…lonely…confused…doubtful…angry…sad…scared…tired.  We come to get our buckets filled up, our wounds dressed…our hearts massaged.  We come to hear good news, in the midst of a torrent of news that is not-so-good.  And with such hunger to hear what is good and to receive some comfort, hope and healing in the midst of the craziness of our lives, this: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Here’s the thing, team.

Unlike that young man who is even now deciding whether to embrace the commitment of playing football – and who in so deciding will count the cost of what that will mean for his life, weighing out the trade of pain and real sacrifice he’ll be asked to make and the possibility for remarkable gain and growth…

Unlike that young man, you’ve already signed up.  You are in this life.  Pain and sacrifice is part of the deal…all of that is part of what it is to be human.

When Jesus challenges us to “take up the cross” this morning, he does not offer the choice between whether life will be painful or not.  (And if you come here each week looking for assurance that life will be easy and pain-free, you will be disappointed.)  Jesus instead is offering a way to make meaning of what is painful – to find hope in what is hard.  Jesus is inviting us - to willingly and with eyes wide open – embrace what is difficult as God’s instrument for our growth and salvation.  As the coach might say, no pain no gain.

Because of our varied experience, that cross looks different in every one of our lives.  For one of us it is living with grace thru physical pain and finding solidarity with Jesus in that suffering.  For some other one it is willingly embracing grief and brokenheartedness to meet the grieving One.  For another it is settling into loneliness…finding God in solitude.  For some few, it is surrendering life itself, for some greater good.

I do not pretend to understand the mechanism by which God uses our pain and sacrifice to bring about life and life abundant.  Just because I know the story of what happened on the first Good Friday and Easter Sunday does not mean that I fully understand it.  Such mysteries lie far beyond our human comprehension.  But I can at least begin to rely on the truth of the thing – and to count on it’s power in my own life – for having seen the results, again and again and again, of what happens in a human life when one of us does in fact embrace the cross to follow Jesus.

I’ve seen it in terminal patients, who find the strength to embrace dying with open arms, and by that embrace find a richness and wonder at the end of life that surpasses anything that came before.

I’ve seen it in friends who have thrown off the shackles of high paying – and desperately meaningless jobs – to take on some servant ministry that is hard and scary…and that ends up filling the days with meaning and purpose.

We have seen it together in history – as when Nelson Mandela willingly went to prison and torture…or when Doctor King stayed public and embraced martyrdom…shoulderings of the cross which, in both cases, caused whole cultures of prejudice and hate to begin to crumble.

And I see it in small ways too.  As when a teenager decides to do something difficult and sacrificial – maybe in defiance of the expectation of friends and family – and ends up growing and living in a brand new way for having done a courageous and painful thing.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

This morning Jesus offers a way to make meaning of what is painful – to find hope in what is hard.  Jesus invites us - to willingly and with eyes wide open – to embrace what is difficult as God’s instrument for our salvation.

If we would be his followers, there is no other way.

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed –

JSB +

From the Collect for the First Sunday in Lent:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted of Satan: Make speed to help thy servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations.  And, as thou knowest [our] several infirmities, let each one find thee mighty to save, through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

This morning we hear the story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness – and his temptation by the devil.  It is equally a key story in the journey of Jesus to and through the cross, and a key story for application to our lives in this here and now.  Stories of temptation are regular threads in our biblical narrative.  It is a topic about which much is passed down to us in the tradition of the Church.  Temptation is a common theme in books and movies…and temptation is certainly something with which each one of us has a real personal familiarity.  But it is still in many ways a difficult topic to make good sense of and a tough topic to really get a hold on.

Part of the great difficulty in talking about temptation is Christian orthodoxy’s insistence that Satan - an incarnate evil being - is always at work when temptation surfaces in our lives.  On this point, you and I are not well served by the culture in which we live … a culture that portrays Satan as hideously unattractive and unreasonable in the temptations he would offer to human beings.  I think of Robert DeNiro in the movie “Angel Heart” or Al Pacino in “The Devil’s Advocate.”  Seriously creepy characters!  The truth is most of us do not encounter many violent maniacs - horned or otherwise - in the course of our daily routine.  When we do encounter such a being it is usually possible to quickly identify them as evil, and steer clear.

There is an episode in Christ’s life where Satan is portrayed in a very different light.  Where Satan is portrayed as an attractive, reasonable, really “for Jesus” kind of a guy.  The story provides for us an insight into how insidious the devil can be:

Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things … and be killed, and after three days rise again.

But hearing this, Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.  And turning, Jesus rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me Satan!  For you are not on the side of God, but of men.”

Peter – arguably Jesus’ best friend and most ardent supporter – has become Satan.
But now look where we’ve suddenly got to.  Are we to withhold our trust from those we love out of fear they are demonically possessed?  No, that would not be right.  Peter went on to extraordinary heights (eventually) and is certainly numbered among the great Saints of the Church.  Peter was no more Satan than you or I, except that, once anyway, Satan was in Peter -just as incarnate as can be - and tempted our Lord.  It still happens.  No human being is saintly enough to completely resist the power of evil. We need to take Satan seriously, for he is real and at times, closer than we think.

Now for some good news about temptation: at the times we are tempted - as in every other moment in our lives - God is with us.

It is vexing to me that God’s work is somehow accomplished even in temptation.  But I know this to be true.  Amazingly it was God – through the person of the Holy Spirit - that hurled Jesus out into the desert and toward his confrontation with Satan.  “The Holy Spirit drove him into the wilderness,” this morning’s story says.  Why in the world would God allow the one called “Son” into such a frightful and dangerous confrontation?  Why does God allow us to face such trials?

When I asked a friend about God and temptation he said, “God never temps us - Satan does that - God tests us.”  That is a helpful idea, but I do not think it fully answers this question.  Because I believe with all my heart that God is ruler of all creation - including the devil - I still have to assume that temptation is somehow part of God’s plan.  God would not allow it otherwise.  So again, why?  Why are we tempted?

Could it be that temptation is good for us?  Could it be there is potential for real, positive results in our lives when we are forced to confront evil?  Could it be that temptation helps us grow … that faithful people are actually drawn closer to God as a result of temptation?

Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is really the first act of his ministry.  He is Baptized, and then before he utters a single word of teaching, before there is one verse of prayer, before a single solitary soul is healed, Jesus is sent to the desert - faces down the demon - and wins.  There is no doubt, Jesus is shaped by the experience.  In those temptations Jesus learns about who he is and about the kind of awesome powers he possesses … because Satan asks him to do things that no mere mortal could possibly accomplish.  In those temptations Jesus learns about what his life will be … as in that desert heat, with little or nothing to eat and drink, he takes on the very Prince of Darkness … and gets a taste of the kind of extraordinary burdens he will be ask to bear during his days on earth.  And in those temptations Jesus learns how completely he can trust God…

Even when it appears God is doing something unfair and hurtful to him - Jesus experiences a continuous divine presence: in the Spirit which hurls him into that place, in the angels which minister to him there and as the courageous part of himself that faces down the evil one.  Jesus was granted a deeper insight and awareness of his own self - and a richer, fuller relationship with God - as a direct result of living through this temptation.

The same kind of growth is possible for you and me.  William Butler Yeats wrote:

Every conquering [of] temptation represents a new fund of moral energy.  Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

We have all experienced situations where temptation is overcome to the glory of God and for the enrichment of our human lives.  Every time we respond to an unreasonable angry word or violent act by turning the other cheek.  Every time we haul our old carcasses out of our warm beds on Sunday morning to receive Holy Communion and spend some time with the people of Christ.  Every time we take the risk of offering our love to those who we fear or hate, in the face of those voices around us which say, “he is too dangerous, or too different, or too evil, or too anything else to love.

In these and thousands of like episodes that populate our lives, we are presented with an opportunity.  Temptation offers us an opportunity to show and share our faith, an opportunity to thwart evil and opportunity to grow, both in our sense of self … and our relationship with that one who is “mighty to save” Jesus Christ our Lord.

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

We hear two bible stories of lepers this morning.  (Mark 1:40-45 & 2Kings 5:1-15b.)  These are stories which are dissimilar in some ways: taking place in very different settings, hundreds of years apart and lead by characters who have very different expectations about the possibility for healing and wholeness in their lives.  But stories which share in common the most important thing.  They are both tales of the divine gift of healing in the lives of diseased and hurting human beings.  Healing unexpected and undeserved.  They are both stories of the reality, the power, of God’s grace.

“Grace” means something along the lines of unmerited and freely given love.  But do not think of it as an emotional category or experience in the way you might normally think of the “L” word.  Grace is all concrete.  We experience grace as receiving a gift, a real tangible, meaningful something that conveys a profound message of charity: a great debt paid, a huge need met, a terrible disease healed.  On the continuum of activities by which human beings experience “love,” grace anchors one extreme end.  It is lavish, comes free of charge and with no strings attached.  It costs the giver profoundly…it costs the recipient nothing.

Grace, says the theologian Philip Yancey, is “the last best word” of Jesus and the Church.  We’ve have talked it to death for centuries and at times as an institution and a people have strayed impossibly far from knowing it and sharing it.  But when grace comes to us, it changes our lives as profoundly and concretely as did the healing the lepers experienced in this morning’s Bible stories.

I am confident that if you search your memory bank of experience, it will not take long for you to recall a moment when you saw true grace, or even better, found yourself receiving it.  There are little graces and great graces to be sure, but part of the beauty of the thing is that to be the recipient of true grace is to feel the same utterly unique, life-giving, and confidence-building jolt of affection, whether the cost to the giver was real…or almost beyond comprehension.

When I was a child we made May baskets in my family.

My mother would save those little green plastic strawberry containers all the year long, and on May first we would gather at our kitchen table for hours, weaving ribbons and flowers through the basket’s sides, baking cookies and brownies, and then filling the baskets with the various homemade treats we’d pulled together.  In the afternoon we would walk around the neighborhood dropping off the little baskets.

I’m not sure what guided my mother’s sense of who needed a May basket.  We were equally likely to knock on the doors of neighbors who were perennially grumpy and who I knew best from being hollered at as I cut through their yards or climbed their fences as we were to knock on the doors of people we knew well, liked a lot and saw nearly every day.  (The one constant in my mom’s agenda seemed to be that I had to deliver a basket to whatever neighborhood girl I happen to have a huge crush on a given May first.  Believe me, I did not tell my mother who I thought the dreamy ones were, but she figured it out and made me go ring their doorbells with a basket in hand just the same!)

I can still remember the faces of the people who got the little baskets.  Inevitably there would be a transformation, from mere recognition of the faces at the door, tinged perhaps with a note of suspicion at the doors of the misanthropes, to surprise, appreciation and even delight, as folks would sort through the various treats in the baskets and exclaim with “ooos” and “ahs” over their favorites.

Grace can be experienced as a rather bigger deal, too.

I recently heard a story from a friend who lived in Boston right after college.  This was about twenty years ago, and he thought he was king of the world when he scored his first job teaching music in a local school for $8,000 a year.  Needless to say, he soon figured out that he was going to have to get his hands on a little more cash each month to make it in the big city, and so to help make ends meet, he started  playing the piano for tips every week at a local bar.  On a good night, he might bring home a hundred bucks, which would quickly – often in the very nick of time – be applied to whatever bill lay at the top of the large pile at home.

Well, he did what every starving young educator-artist has done through the ages, a quickly fell in love and got engaged to the woman of his dreams.  (If I’m barely making it on my own it makes perfect sense to try and support two with what I’ve got!)  Needless to say, it would not be a fancy wedding.  And the possibility of a big wedding trip was not even considered.

Just before the wedding a telephone call came out of the blue.  It was British Airways: your tickets are ready to be picked up.  It turned out that a kind business man regular with whom he’d struck up a friendship at the piano bar was going to buy a honeymoon for the two newlyweds.  I want to fly you and your bride to England for a week on me – I’ll put you up too.  It came to pass in just that fashion.  The piano man and his sweetheart went on a grand European adventure for their honeymoon.  A whole week together in Merry Old… respite from the grind of Beantown and a great start to married life.

Can you imagine how confounding, surprising and simply awesome it would have felt to receive such a gift at such a moment?  (If you’d like to know, you can ask the Crone’s up in their choir loft after church today.  They are the pair who received that gracious gift!)

More than anything else, we are invited as followers of Jesus to let this little word “grace” be a constant and guiding presence in our lives.  We are invited to be a people who are on the lookout for grace – who will not let disappointment, hurt or cynicism stand in the way of a constant expectation that grace happens all the time.  We are invited to be evangelists for grace – not soldiers doing our “duty” to love (for is kindness flows from duty that’s not grace at all) but rather men women and children who simply and constantly live lives that reflect our knowledge that we are known and cared for by a good and loving God.  And we are encouraged to be ready to receive grace.  Ready and willing to be blessed in ways that we can hardly imagine, for which we are barely equipped.

We tell the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus every single week in this place.  While it is only rarely the appointed Bible story for the day, it is always told – in rather vivid detail – in the words of our communion prayers.  Every time we gather here together we tell that same story.  And I know that on some level that becomes predictable and routine and even perhaps more than a little bit boring.  But there is a reason why this story is told in this community on every single Sabbath day.

The story is told in the hope that on one of those hundreds and hundreds of occasions that you hear the tale – the story of how God became incarnate, endured harrowing and humiliating torture, surrendered to death by the most brutal means imaginable…and then came roaring back from the dead on that first Easter Day.  That story is told here again and again in the hope that one day, you will put yourself into the tale…and come to realize that Jesus had YOU – the very real, particular, one of a kind creation that is you and your life – Jesus had YOU in mind when he did these things.  Jesus died for you.

We may not understand entirely why that had to be – why God’s plan and the march of human history collided in such an astonishing event – we know it has something to do with setting right something that was out-of-whack in the world and in our lives.  We know that the ways we hurt each other and rebel against God play some part.  But we need not entirely understand why this gift had to happen.  In fact, it would not be “grace” if something was required of us by way of learning and accomplishment to receive it.

All we need to know is that once and forever, somebody loved us so much that they sacrificed their life for ours.  Jesus gave his whole life for you.

Unmerited.  Undeserved.  No strings attached – no expectation of payback or duty.  Pure.  Sacrificial.  Self-giving and self –emptying.  Astonishing.  Wondrous.  Powerful.  Everlasting.  Amazing…

Grace!

Keep Running, Keep praying, Godspeed

JSB +

He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.
- Mark 9:6

This morning we hear the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  This tale is among those Bible stories which reveals most directly and completely for us the identity – the deep truth - of who Jesus is for us.

In the story, Jesus journeys to a nearby mountaintop with the three disciples who are usually identified as his closest friends.  The three disciples, Peter James and John, witness several things on that mountaintop.  They see Jesus’ physical presence transfigured.  His clothes become “dazzling white” – in other Gospel versions of the story his skin itself becomes radiant and shines – all of which reveals that Jesus’ true nature is not only mortal, but heavenly.  Then the witnesses see Moses and Elijah speaking with Jesus.  Moses was the great law-giver and Elijah the great prophet of the Old Covenant people.  By the presence of these figures, we come to know that all the law and the prophets stand behind the person of Jesus.  Finally there is the great voice heard booming out from the heavens: “This is my Son the Beloved, listen to him.”  If there remained any doubt about who sent Jesus to us and what authority he can claim on earth, it is here resolved.  This can only be the voice of God.  And God says: this is my Son, listen to what he says.

What interested me as I was working with this story over the past week, was the response of the disciples to what they saw and heard.

Peter wants to build dwellings or “booths” for Moses, Elijah and Jesus.  Some understand this as a desire on Peters part to serve these great ones by providing comfort, some see an effort to tie this event to ancient liturgical and worship customs and some see it as an effort by Peter to “capture” the moment and make it last.  But whatever it was that Peter had in mind, it is the sentence of the story following Peter’s declaration that these dwellings should be built that is most instructive for you and me: He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

This booth building business is best understood as a demonstration of how utterly terrified Jesus’ friends were in this moment.  The story itself suggests that whatever it was Peter had in mind, it did not really make sense: they did not know what to say, they did not know what to do, they were terrified.  In the same way that most human beings react when they are deeply frightened – by doing impulsive, ill-considered and often pretty strange things (think of Jackie Kennedy climbing onto the back of that speeding limosine in Dallas) so too Jesus’ friends in this morning’s story.  They did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

I love to ask people “who is Jesus for you?”  I ask that of seminarians I interview for internships and other jobs.  I’ve asked it of search committees when I’ve gone looking for jobs of my own.  I’ve asked it of youth and adults alike in inquirers classes, confirmation classes and in church school.  People will say: Jesus is my friend.  Jesus is my savior.  Jesus is my rock.  Jesus is the one right here with me.  Jesus healed me.  Jesus is God.  You know what no one has ever said to me?  Jesus is the One who terrifies me.  And yet this morning we have this story of Jesus and three of his best friends in the world.  And when they see for themselves who Jesus really and truly is – in this very special moment when they suddenly “get it” because it would take a total fool not to – they all react in the very same way.  They are terrified.

Now fear can make us stupid.  That’s a truth this morning’s story recalls to us.  When we are really scared, we can do dumb things.  But you know what’s way more dangerous for us though.  It’s not being scared when we should be!  It’s skating in the middle of the lake on ice that is way too thin and telling ourselves that we don’t have anything to worry about; It’s gradually amping up the dose of our favorite drug every weekend to achieve the same high and telling ourselves that we can handle it; It’s going way too fast past the school on a weekday, and telling ourselves that if “something happens” we’ll have plenty of time to stop.  Yes, fear can make us do strange things.  But I suspect more damage is done in our lives and in this world when we fail to be frightened as we should be.

Jesus is your friend.  Jesus is your savior.  Jesus is the one that is “right here with you” in every moment and every place.  But as this story of his Transfiguration on the mountaintop makes clear, he is also equal in every way to the One who creates everything that is and so wields the awesome powers of life and death on this earth.  Demons quake at the utterance of his name!  Legions of angel guard him and do his every bidding!  He is master of the mighty earth itself and no law of nature can thwart his will.  He is the glorious One who cannot be shaken, moved or stopped.  He is the one who should scare us.

For our lives this means at least two hugely important things right now.

It means first that we need to take utterly seriously our commitments to worshipping and honoring Jesus, whatever they might be.  He charges us with praying together, supping together, caring for one another and zealously sharing with the rest of the world the Good News that he’s in our lives.  We live out these commandments in many and various ways and that’s well and good.  What is not so well and good is to pretend that those commitments do not really matter because Jesus is such a sweetie and “he’ll always understand.”

We really need to stop that.

If being here on Sunday is how you honor Jesus, then be here.  If serving others at the Thrift Shop, the soup kitchen or with Meals on Wheels is how you honor Jesus, then do it.  If reading scripture, saying the daily office at home and praying at home for the world is how you honor your Lord, then keep it up.  If singing or playing an instrument is the way you give voice to your Christian devotion, then sing on.  If writing big checks to charities is the best way you can share what you have to make Jesus known in the world, then don’t stop now!

And if you have not quite figured this out yet - if you bop from activity to activity and idea to idea never really settling on how you can honor Christ with your life - it’s time to commit.  Your effort to please God, does in fact please God.  Dithering and lack of commitment however is just not gonna work.  Whatever it is you do – however it is that you have figured out to “love and serve the Lord” in your life – exercise a little discipline, have some integrity, and take on that work like it matters.  It does.

And here is the other way our lives can be profoundly shaped by the fear of Jesus…
We do not fear him because he is mean.  We do not fear him because he is mercurial or arbitrary.  We do not fear him because he is alien or cannot be known.  We fear him because he is powerful.  All powerful.  From our logical fear of such power comes respect, devotion, a sense of duty, and even purpose in our faith lives.

But also – and best of all – is knowledge that this awesome power – one on par with God the Creator – is all about fighting for us.  In Jesus, we have the most mighty ally imaginable for a friend.

Do you remember The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the scene in the book and movie where Lucy is speaking to the Beavers about meeting Aslan the Lion for the first time?  “Is he - quite safe?” Lucy asks, “I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” asks Lucy.

“Safe?” says Mr. Beaver…”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.  He’s the King, I tell you.”

Jesus is not safe.  But he is good.

The Psalmist writes that, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

We are disinclined to be real about fearing of Jesus.  There are other images – other truths – about who he is for us, on which it is more comfortable to dwell.  But this story of the transfiguration is told in our lectionary cycle more than once every year and for good reason.  It is our reminder that knowing Jesus does not exempt us from fearing Jesus.   And that in fact our fear can be a gift.  For it helps us to be in right relationship with the one we call “King.”

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed –

JSB +

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

Lifted from another internet source, I give you: Runners Bible Trivia!

Q: Who outran a team of horses?
A: Elijah (1 Kings 18:46.)

Q: What evangelist ran to meet a foreign official in his chariot?
A: Philip (Acts 8:30.)

Q: What disciple outran Peter to Jesus’ tomb?
A: John (John 20:4.)

Q: What cousin of Jacob’s ran to tell her father when she found she and Jacob were related?
A: Rachel (Genesis 29:12.)

Q: What boy ran into the Philistine camp to confront their best warrior?
A: David (1 Samuel 17:48-49.)

Q: What short man ran to see Jesus but could not because of his height?
A: Zacchaeus (Luke 19:4.)

Q: Who ran to meet the Lord in the plains of Mamre?
A: Abraham (Genesis 18:1-2.)

Q: What man ran to meet Abraham’s servant at the well?
A: Laban (Genesis 24:29.)

Q: According to Isaiah, what sort of people can run and not be weary?
A: “They that wait upon the Lord” (Isaiah 40:31.)

Q: What prophet ran after another prophet to accept the appointment as his successor?
A: Elisha (1 Kings 19:19-21.)

Q: What did a man at Jesus’ crucifixion run to find for the dying Jesus?
A: A sponge (Matthew 27:46-48.)

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +

In the morning while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.
- Mark 1:35

We are still at the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, but already things are hopping.  Jesus appeared on the scene just a few paragraphs ago and he is already so busy: traveling the countryside, calling his followers, casting out demons, healing the sick.  The story will continue on apace for all fifteen chapters of Mark’s Gospel account.  As the shortest, oldest and most “immediate” account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark is often compared to a newspaper article.  It’s style and content give us just the facts of the story, an account of the action without gloss or poetry.  The tale is breathless in its pace.  Mark uses the word “immediately” in his Gospel 34 times!

And yet there is something else going on in Mark’s Gospel account.  Often – in the middle of all this activity – there will be a short phrase like the one which appears in the midst of the story we just heard:

In the morning while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

Right in the middle of all the activity, the press of people and the demands of ministry, Jesus retreats all by himself to a quiet place to pray.  This is not an isolated instance or an unusual moment in Jesus’ life.  Again and again in our Bible stories, Jesus does this same thing.  He withdraws to a place of solitude to pray.   I’m not sure of there has ever been an age or a people more desperately in need of this witness.  We too need to find with regularity a place and time in our busy lives to go be quiet, and to be with God.

Amazingly your vestry – who met for their annual retreat just Friday and yesterday – was assigned a book to read in preparation for their retreat that is all about this very thing.  Though the book was chosen months ago without any knowledge of what this weekend’s assigned Gospel reading might be, Out of Solitude, by Henri Nouwen, actually begins by quoting this morning’s Gospel passage:

In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.

Nouwen then goes on to contrast the relentless pace and busy-ness of our lives with this still moment.  “We are a people with a strong desire to accomplish something,” he says,

Some of us think in terms of great dramatic changes in society.  Others want to build a house, write a book, invent a machine or win a trophy…Christians may feel a special call to give advice, comfort…cast out a devil…preach the good news from place to place.

These are all fine things Nouwen suggests.  But sadly – even demonically – it happens over our lives’ course that we begin to identify ourselves with the results of all this action in our lives.  We come to think we matter because they need us at work.  We come to think we’re loved because we are a devoted partner or parent.  We feel we can stand tall because we’ve made a difference in our school, town or church.  We even start thinking that God loves us because we so busy doing the right things.

We set ourselves up in a terrible way when we derive our feelings of worth from our usefulness, for no human being has the power to continue and always succeed in such driving, active pursuit.  Other people will fail us, our best efforts will inevitably fall short of what we know might have been, over time our bodies and our energy level will just give out.  In the end, there are absolute limits to our usefulness.  But rather than face that fact we deny it, and get busier and busier trying to escape the truth staring us so plainly in the face: if we stake our self worth on how we perform in life, we are going to work ourselves to death in our constant scrambling for validation by others.

And now we see why Jesus retreats to those quiet places throughout the course of his ministry.  Now we see why it is so important to regularly touch base with God in solitude and silence.  “Jesus,” says Nouwen…

…went to a lonely place to pray, that is, to grow in the awareness that all the power he had was given to him; that all the words he spoke came from his Father; and that all the works he did were not really his but the works of the One who had sent him.  In the lonely place Jesus was made free to fail.

In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.

It’s not easy retreating to a quiet place.  We all have our different ways of avoiding true solitude and silence.  Some of us have to take a book or music into solitude – to assure the quiet we dread will be filled with noise.  Some of us have to take company on retreat with us – to hold at bay our fear of being alone.  Some of us have to take a notebook and pencil into silence, to make lists of things we think of and need too do: still busy and productive even in our quiet place.

What we are afraid of, of course, is that we will discover in solitude that we’re not all that useful and important after all.  We fear that we will discover that if we disappear from the scene for awhile life will go on fine without us.  We fear we will discover that if we look deeply into our selves we’ll discover there are things we’ve done and said that are hard to bear.  We fear we will discover that God really is present and active in our lives, but has desires for us that we are not respecting and into which we are not living.

The irony is that solitude – at-one-ness with God in sufficient quiet and surrender to be truly present to God – is the place where the cure for these fears and ills is located.  We are afraid of solitude because of our imperfections and brokenness, and yet the cure for our imperfections and brokenness can only be found in solitude.

In some years the youth of our Confirmation Class have a retreat with Ray Boswell who is a renowned local potter and a Christian.  Ray uses clay to tell the stories of our faith and to teach about right relationship with God.

I will never forget watching one year as Ray invited one of the youth to come forward all alone, and try their best to create a pot on his potter’s wheel.  The young person who went forward gamely began handling the clay on the turning wheel, and was able to at least start something that looked sort of pot-like.  They soon had a squat, rough, lump on the wheel, with a little indentation in the top – just enough to fit a couple of thumbs in.  But they could get no further in the work of creating a pot.  Time and again as the kid tried to press more firmly into the center of the turning lump of clay – or to pull at it’s rim to draw up real sides – the lump of clay would slide off the center of the wheel and go flying off into space.

The youth in question would not give up, however.  They sat there alone at the wheel, trying again and again to force this thing that they simply could not do.  Ray kept asking, “Would you like some help?”

And the youth kept responding, “No, I can do it!”

But they could not do it.  All that youth’s effort and will and pride could not make it happen.  And finally when the child literally had tears in their eyes – finally after that youth sat there alone for I don’t know how long, but long enough that they finally saw and admitted their own limitations to do this thing – the youth asked for help.  And Ray came up behind them and took the youth’s hands in his, and guided them forcefully down into the lump of spinning clay…

And so held by the hands of the potter, the youth’s own fingers soon brought into being a perfect vessel.  They made a beautiful thing.  But it could only happen when that youth admitted that they could not make a beautiful thing.

When we are really alone, we come to know how very much we need the presence of God in Christ in our lives – how little we can do without him.   The true embrace of our own limitations, which we encounter again and again when we take time in quiet and solitude to truly be with God, creates the possibility of a whole new kind of existence for us.  One in which we are not afraid to admit to our need for help.  One in which we are not ashamed to say that we really need one another in this life.  One in which we are bold to say that it is not about what we do in this life, but about what God does in us and for us.

In the morning while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

“In the center of breathless activities,” writes Nouwen,

…we hear restful breathing.  Surrounded by hours of moving, we find a moment of stillness.  In the heart of much involvement there are words of withdrawal.  In the midst of action there is contemplation.  After much togetherness there is solitude.

The more I read this nearly silent sentence locked in between the loud words of action, the more I have the sense that the secret of Jesus’ ministry is hidden in that lonely place where he went to pray, early in the morning, long before dawn.

Keep Running, Keep Praying, Godspeed -

JSB +