Ask and . . . what?

Reflection by Fr. David

At our weekly Men’s Bible Study this morning, we discussed the final chapter of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which contains his famous words, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened.” Hmm. If there are any words of Jesus that are easy to disprove, it would seem to be these. We can all think of things we have asked God for but have not received, right? Material goods. Healing. Peace in the Middle East. Our families to behave. I mean, really, how are we to understand this teaching?

Obviously the Santa Clause interpretation won’t work ― and it shouldn’t work. At the end of the passage, Jesus gives us the necessary clue: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” God wants to give us the good things of the kingdom, which certainly include love, wholeness, and abundant life. But more than that, those good things include God’s very self. That is no doubt why Luke’s version of this passage concludes: “How much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Whenever we pray in any way, we are entering into the flow of the Holy Trinity, the unceasing stream of love poured out from Father to Son through the Spirit and back again. To pray is to let that divine love flow through us; to ask God for specific things is to direct that flow into real and concrete circumstances. The promise is that we can always do that, and more importantly, that God wants us to do that and will always move through our prayers to love and bless.

Do we believe that? So often in my pastoral ministry I encounter people who feel like prayer means trying to get the attention of a distant God “out there” and hoping against hope that maybe God will care and pay attention. This is not the faith that Christ calls us to! Every act of genuine prayer is an act of surrender and trust: surrender to the flow of God’s Spirit through us and trust that God will not only respond to our prayer but is actually present in the act of praying itself. We don’t need to get God’s attention: we have it. We don’t need to finagle God’s love: it’s already ours. Imagine knowing that and trusting that each time we prayed!

It has made all the difference for me. Plenty of bad things happen, and suffering abounds in our world. But God is continuously seeking to move through us for blessing and healing in the midst of it all. When I enter a hospital room or pray with a hurting person in my office, I know that God will flow in that moment of prayer because God WANTS to. What God will do I cannot control, but I can pray with peace and confidence because I know God is already moving the very moment I join into the unending stream of God’s love and power that is within us always. No wonder Jesus says “Ask, and it will be given you.” The very act of asking gives us God. Everything else flows from that.

SUNDAY SERMON - 3/26/17 by the Rev. Jeffrey P. Fishwick

John 9

The long and rambling Gospel reading for today (41 verses) gives the preacher many avenues in which to pursue. When I was first ordained as priest 40 years ago today I would have happily explored all of them, even as the congregation fell into a deep sleep.

But now perhaps a bit wiser and less long winded, my prayer and study of John 9 has led me to the end of the passage and to focus on Jesus’s statement “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”(v. 39)

Back in Jesus’ day, it was assumed that there was a connection between present disability and previous sin. The only question then was whose sin was it – the person’s or his parents? So, faced with a man blind from birth, the pharisees and Jesus’s disciples deduced that someone must have done something wrong for which his blindness was God’s punishment.

I doubt whether any of us today place the weight of sin on someone we see with a mental or physical disability, but clearly throughout history up until the present time people have been and are being judged negatively on the basis of their being different whether it be their physical appearance, religion, education, political views social status and so on. Today we hear some say: ‘panhandlers are drug addicts, illegal immigrants are all criminals and want to take away jobs from Americans; rural poorly educated Southern whites are racists.’

Allison Stanger, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, after a particularly angry and violent incident on that campus recently, wrote in the New York Times: “Americans today are deeply susceptible to a renunciation of reason and a celebration of ignorance. They know what they know without reading, discussing or engaging those who disagree with them.” So we have to ask are not these kind of blanket assumptions and knee-jerk judgements one of the reasons our civic and political life are so toxic these days?

Jesus firmly resists any such analysis of how the world is ordered. He challenges us to dismantle some of our cherished popular assumptions and let God remake them in a different way. He’s not big on our judgment of others. In His Sermon on the Mount he said, “Do not judge so that you may not be judged and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the big log in your own eye?” In his turning the assumptions and prejudices of his day and ours, upside down Jesus calls pharisees and those us with large doses of self-righteousness “blind.”

And that’s where we need to begin: to recognize our own need for healing; to begin to see is to recognize that we have blind spots in our lives, that there are dark places in our world view that are not healthy and do not lead to peace and reconciliation but rather to increased division and enmity. And even worse, such attitudes are tragic, indeed sinful because they cause us to

miss out on the power and love of God to heal and transform all lives starting with ourselves.

So, in the end this passage isn’t just about the healing of the blind man, it is John’s readers and we who are being led towards the light which is Jesus himself. As a verse in one of my favorite contemporary Christian hymns puts it: ‘Lord the light of your love is shining. In the midst of the darkness shining. Jesus light of the world shine upon us. Set us free by the truth you now bring us. Shine on me, shine on me.’

The real gift Jesus gave the blind man was not his sight but the faith to know who he Jesus really was. ‘Lord, he said, “I believe.” Our prayer needs to be ‘God, give me the faith to believe in you, to see you for who you really are and then Holy One work powerfully in my life to heal me; let your love flow into my life and let that love overflow into my attitude toward my neighbor,

especially those who seem unlovable.’

A person who has been a major influence in my ministry was a Southern Baptist minister named Will Campbell. Raised in poverty in rural Mississippi, Campbell as a white man was an early supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom he became a close friend and confident. He

marched, he protested, survived death threats. He became an outcast to many of the people he grew up with.

Yet despite his passion for the civil rights movement and very progressive political views, he always felt that because the Church’s main mission is always reconciliation. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he visited James Earl Ray, King’s killer, in prison and gave him communion. Later he reached out to members of the KKK and called his ministry “The First Church of Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” This too earned him enemies- this time on the left. In response he said, “Anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than a Christian. For after all, Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well.”

Someone asked Helen Keller, who had been blind since the age of 19 months if blindness was the worst thing that could befall a person. She answered that the worst thing that could befall a person was not to lose their sight but to lose their vision As my own active ministry is winding down, I pray that the Church and particularly the Episcopal Church, the Church I love, will not lose its vision; that it will always remember its primary mission is of reconciliation.

Building the peaceable kingdom. In today’s context that means engaging patiently, lovingly with all of God’s people – and respecting the dignity of every human being, especially those with whom we disagree.

Preferences will remain; politics will always be a tug of war; and free civil and open dialogue will always be a necessary component in democratic society, but with God’s help and healing power we can, as God calls us, to be a part of the solution not a part of the problem. Amen.

Daffodils that didn't bloom. A Weekly Reflection from Emily Rutledge

A year and a half ago I planted tulip and daffodil bulbs in my front flower bed.  I was dang proud of myself.  It had taken me almost a year to get the energy and organization to take on the task… planting things two season before you want them to bloom really messed with my mind.  I am intrinsically lazy while also a perfectionist so I dug the holes at equal distances and had my children and their friends place the bulbs and cover them up.

We waited. 

Things grew.

It was beautiful.

I was proud of myself (and the kids… but mostly myself for getting my act together).

And as it goes; the spring came and went and as summer arrived and my flowers began to die I promptly cut the flowers below the soil so that the dying leaves and buds did not make the front of my house look disheveled.  I did this without any research or thought.  Then I found out that it was exactly NOT how to deal with this gardening situation and that I needed to let the blooms die and dry and then cut them.  

Go figure.

So here we are, a year later, my daffodils and tulips have sprung forth from the ground and while everywhere I look there are daffodils blooming my blooms are nowhere to be seen.  Green stalks, no flowers.  I have a sinking feeling my desire for my flowerbed to look perfect has killed the new growth that I wanted.

Those flowers needed the mess, the death, the drying out to live again.

My desire for perfect killed my hope for renewal.

When we look at the ways we present ourselves to the world, it’s easy to do the same.  Cut down the messy, the withering, the dead, so it can’t be seen.  Present the perfect picture to the world, to our friends, to our neighbors, and not let the brokenness, the pain, the falling apart, show.  And in turn, they will do the same.  They will hide their own pain and brokenness from us because the reciprocity of vulnerability, the safety of transparency, will not exist.  Each of us will cut off our ability to allow the Holy Spirit to do what She does best; use the brokenness in our lives to feed our souls and allow us to bloom again, a testimony to the power of resurrection.

Being a community in Christ does not mean showing up on Sundays with the perfectly dressed family and a picture perfect life.  Being a community in Christ means being honest and transparent about our lives, our brokenness, our failures.  It also means holding space and bearing witness as our neighbors do the same.  It means not judging the wilting flowers but reminding each other that there is beauty to come; that the brokenness brings the beauty, that Christ had to die for Easter to come.  Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.  The old has gone, the new is here!”

When we allow ourselves to be honest with the world- to show our brokenness, our imperfections, our wilting flowers, we give others permission to do the same.  When we become a church where broken people show up without needing to hide any part of their journey we become a community alive.  There will be those spouting, blooming, drying out, and laying fallow for a new season, and together we become the living, breathing, body of the resurrected Christ.  When we drop our desire to look perfect we open the door to a life of resurrection where in each season we are surrounded and loved as we are.  Instead of being perfect and admired we are broken, transforming, and known.  

SUNDAY SERMON 3/19/17 by the Rev. David M. Stoddart

The slogan was first coined to sell phonographs in 1925. Since then, it has been used to describe Kodak film, a subscription to Sports Illustrated, a contribution to the United Way, and organ donation. Many people remember it from National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation,” when, instead of getting a Christmas bonus from work, Clark Griswold received a one-year membership in the Jelly-of-the-Month Club. The slogan? “The gift that keeps on giving.” and it has kept coming to my mind as I have sat and prayed with this Gospel passage.

Jesus asks this woman for water, but then suggests that he can give her water, living water. That’s a striking phrase, and it’s hard to know how the woman interpreted it. She was drawing from a well, so perhaps she thought Jesus knew of a source of running water somewhere close by. Certainly she was intrigued by the prospect of an endless water supply which would save her from constantly drawing water from the well. But although, from our perspective, we get what Jesus is really talking about and see that water is just a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, we might still fail to grasp the wondrous message of this passage. Jesus does not just promise that he will give her this water, that he will give her the Spirit. He promises something greater than that: Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. It is the gift that keeps on giving because those who receive the gift become the gift.

We become the gift. The Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God, gushing up in us, gushing up through us forever. Sometimes we experience that in exhilarating ways. You may remember that scene in the movie, “Chariots of Fire,” when the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell says, “I believe that God made me for a purpose . . . but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.” I listen sometimes to people describe moments in their lives when they know they are doing what God wants them to do and they can feel the Spirit rushing through them. But we don’t just experience that gushing Spirit in moments of joy. In fact, the promise is not that we will never hurt or feel distress: the promise is that the Spirit will never stop gushing. Again, look at this Gospel. When the woman says she wants this living water, Jesus immediately asks about her husband, and we find out that she has had five husbands. Five husbands. It doesn’t really matter whether they divorced her, or they died naturally, or she killed them off: no matter how you slice it, her story cannot be a happy one. And yet it is right then and there, in her broken life, that Jesus gives her the gift and she starts gushing. I mean literally: she runs into the village and starts telling people about Jesus. And there may be more to this than we even know. The woman has had five husbands, after all. She may well be a social pariah. Many commentators note the significance of this story taking place at noon, in the heat of the day. Most people drew water in the morning and the evening when it was cooler: there is an implication that this woman was something of an outcast who came to the well only when others were not around. If that is true, not only does Jesus show her love and understanding: he helps bring her back into better relationship with her neighbors, who come to know and believe in him through her. The water he gives really does become a spring gushing up in her and through her. She becomes the gift.

And it is all a gift. The Spirit lives in us, flows through us, becomes us because that’s what God wants. It has nothing to do with whether we have earned it or not. It has nothing to do with whether we are morally perfect or not. It is the nature of Love to give, and God gives God’s very self–continuously and forever. To believe in Jesus is to believe this is true. And if this is true, then the real tragedy, the real sin, would be damming up that Spirit and refusing to let her gush up in us.

So, let me suggest a Lenten approach to self-examination and repentance in light of this Gospel. The self-examination part is a simple question: as you go through your day, do you ever remember that the Spirit of God lives in you and wants to flow through you? Does that ever cross your mind? So many moments of anger, fear, resentment, dishonesty, and selfishness may ultimately just be the result of failing to acknowledge the gift of God within us. If so, the path of repentance is clear: own the gift. We have been baptized with it. Every moment of every day the Holy Spirit can gush up within us, an inexhaustible source of love, energy, and strength. Let the Spirit flow; ask the Spirit to flow; expect the Spirit to flow. I find this to be life-changing: whether I am visiting someone in the hospital or taking part in a finance meeting, whether I am preparing a sermon or chatting with a parishioner in my office: the Spirit is always welling up. And while that may often happen quietly, sometimes it comes with startling power. I was talking with a parishioner some time ago and she was describing a conversation she had had with someone going through a really hard time. All of the sudden, she found words flowing out of her, seemingly from nowhere. She found herself saying all the right things to this person, but she said it felt like someone else speaking through her. She intuited, I think correctly, that the Spirit used her to bless someone else. In that moment, she became the gift.

In ways great and small, this is our spiritual birthright. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. The water will keep on gushing, the gift will keep on giving, as long as we don’t stop it. So let it flow.

From the Hot Seat: Observations by Carolyn Voldrich, Parish Administrator

Last Friday a big guy came into the church with his son. Using broken English, he said he and his family were immigrants from Yugoslavia who were waiting for U.S. papers. They were on their way to New York to be with family in order to establish an address. Could we help them with gas or a hotel room? He looked legit and his son was a cutie.

It’s not unusual for people to come to the church looking for assistance, but the only on-site aid I can offer is our Food Pantry and it wasn’t open at that time.  He was very appreciative when I gave him the International Rescue Committee phone number, but he said they were desperate. Doing something I usually don’t do, I reached into my bag and gave him the entirety of what was in my wallet…which was all of $7. He was very grateful and I wished him well. At least it could buy a few gallons of gas.

Come Monday morning, a message arrived from Love, INC (In the Name of Christ), a downtown clearing-house of sorts of providing assistance to those in need. The description of the family who had been scamming every church in town with all sorts of inconsistent stories fit the folks who had come in our door. They had also been panhandling in every major shopping center in town, to be asked to leave by police. They dumped garbage from their car in parking lots where no one helped them. It was estimated that this family had collected between $700-800 from churches in a few days.

I was disappointed, not by my tiny contribution to them but in THEM. My fellow humans. Behaving badly, according to me.

I wonder if Jesus was ever scammed? He knew the intent of those seeking his help, and no doubt people did take advantage of him - some didn't even say "thanks". But we don’t read about this in the Gospels. Could it be because that’s not how Jesus looked at what he gave away and how he gave it? With no judgment but with love and generosity? That’s the only way Jesus gave. Not so much with us.

Why? Why can we nod in agreement when the Sunday reading tells us to love the stranger and give all we have? And yet feel our trust and generosity steadily chip away when we are disappointed? Do we believe in Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbor – no matter what – or just think it’s a good idea most of the time? Could it be that we don’t give our gifts freely, without invisible strings tied to our sense of what is right?

And what would it feel like to give as Jesus did? Somehow, I think it must feel glorious, euphoric. And that’s the way I want to feel. How about you?

SUNDAY SERMON 3/12/17 by the Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

An attractive young woman, whose career caused her to be on the road quite a bit, was asked if she was ever bothered by unwanted male attention.  She answered, “Never.  If I begin to feel pressured, I simply say five words and then I’m left alone.”  Of course she was asked, “What are the five words?”  With a sweet smile she said, “I simply ask, ‘Have you been born again?’”

Ah, that lovely phrase…“born again”...sometimes used as shorthand for a certain kind of religious zeal that can send people running in the opposite direction in order to avoid being overtaken by a potential religious fanatic.  “Born again” may seem like the exclusive property of one type of Christianity, but it’s not - at least it shouldn’t be.  Because being born again is a gift from God to all of us.  And we hear about that good news in our gospel reading today.

Jesus is approached at night by a Pharisee named Nicodemus - a genuine, if somewhat conflicted, seeker.  His loyalties are clearly with the Jewish establishment, but in private Nicodemus is open to the possibility that there might be something he is missing.  “Rabbi,” Nicodemus says, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  Embedded in this statement is the request, tell me more: help me understand.   And Jesus does just that, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." 

Hence the question, “Have you been born from above or, in many translations, born again?”  But what does that really mean?  Well, if you’re wondering take heart that you are not alone.  Nicodemus doesn’t get it either, "How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he questions, “Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?"

Nicodemus makes what is perhaps the most common mistake when it comes to understanding the Bible - confusing something that is supposed to be a metaphor with something meant to be literally true.  Like all of us, Nicodemus had already been physically, literally born.  This second birth Jesus is speaking of, being born again, is not a type of a do-over of a physical birth, but a spiritual birth.  In the original Greek the word often translated as born “again” is deliberately ambiguous - it could be born again, or born from above. or born anew which hints to the mystery that what is going on here is beyond our grasp.

It simply can’t be reduced into something we have control over - praying a certain way, or believing a certain way, or even participating in a certain Episcopal liturgy.  Being born again is the mysterious work of God resulting in a complete rebirth of our entire existence.  Does that make any more sense?  Well, maybe not so much.... 

How about we explore the metaphor that Jesus gives us to see if that can help. When a baby is born who does most of the work of labor and delivery? The baby? Ask any mother and you will get an emphatic, “No!”  It’s the mother, of course, the one who births who is doing most of the hard work.  So if that is the case, when Jesus speaks of being born again he’s really saying that it’s not something that Nicodemus, nor any of us, are able to do on our own.  Rather, it’s God’s work to do, and it is God who labors in love.  Rebirth is God’s gift to give.

Now in some circles of the Christian faith, being born again is understood as what you might call a “one and done” experience. But in real life a physical or a spiritual birth is far from a singular event.  It’s always a process, as it was for Nicodemus.

It’s fair to assume that in order to get Nicodemus, a faithful Pharisee, even to the point of seeking Jesus with genuine honesty that God’s Spirit had already been at work starting the labor process.  But his encounter with Jesus didn’t turn out to be a “come to Jesus” moment.  Following their conversation, Nicodemus returns to his normal life as a Pharisee.  However, deep down, something, ever so slightly beings to change, to move, to shift.  We know this because this is not the end of God’s labor and delivery story about Nicodemus.  Four chapters later in John chapter seven, Jesus is gaining in notoriety and the Pharisees, as you can imagine, are not pleased.  They are mulling over the idea of having Jesus arrested when Nicodemus speaks up in Jesus’s defense and reminds his colleagues that the law requires that a person be heard before being judged.  This is met with ridicule and Nicodemus is silenced.  But God isn’t done with him yet, the labor of love continues.  More time goes by until finally, Nicodemus appears for a third and final time at the end of John’s gospel where Jesus hangs crucified.  Most of the disciples have fled in fear, but not Nicodemus who now in the light of day for all to see is present.  His arms are laden with anointing oil and he is ready and willing to bear Jesus’s broken and lifeless body to it’s grave.  It’s here, don’t you think, that after all that time of the Spirit’s laboring work that Nicodemus is birthed into new life?  Mysteriously he is born again, born from above, born of water and the Spirit.

That’s Nicodemus’s story, what’s yours?  Because you have one, you know.  Or actually God has her own cherished labor and delivery story about you.  How her Spirit has been and continues to be at work in your life in ways seen and unseen.  That birthing process is going on even now.  So as we move deeper into Lent may we know ever more surely the love of our God who labors with us and for us so that each and every one of us might be born again into new and abundant life. 

It's not your imagination: your high school senior is a jerk. A weekly reflection from Emily Rutledge

Each year during the spring my job takes on a seasonal ministry.  It’s for a very select and elite group of students and their parents… I call it ‘your-kid-doesn’t-hate-you-they-are-just-an-irrational-high-school-senior-trying-to-make-leaving-easier’. Some of you have lived through this very special (read: frustrating and exhausting) time and others may still believe… never my child.

Guess what?  Your child.

Eight years of ministry.  What feels like a million seniors (it’s probably around 55 but once they are seniors the energy the need from me is 100 fold) and each one.  Each stinking one of them: total and complete jerks to their parents during the spring of their graduating year.  The levels have varied and correlate to their normal demeanor.  The sweetest most non-confrontational child will fall a little lower on the spectrum of being an utter handful while the most spirited may go ahead and get a tattoo, drive their car into a ditch, or just stop doing all school work because they are ‘already accepted to college’ (all real life events). 

Without fail emails, texts, and phone calls start coming around March with questions like,

• Have you noticed a change?
• What have I done wrong?
• Will you talk to them?
• Please go ahead and adopt my child because I can no longer be in charge of their well-being --I cannot have one conversations with them.  Every time we talk it escalates into an argument.
• Does the priest do exorcisms because this feels like an appropriate situation for one?

The pain, the fights, the tears, the smart-aleck comments, they are REAL.  The root of them doesn’t really matter when it is your child talking to YOU because it hurts.  While you are mourning the baby you put your entire heart into raising leaving your nest your child is an adult size toddler with poor reasoning skills informing you that you’ve done it all wrong. 

And all of it… every last comment and rolled eye… it’s because they love you.  It’s because they are so dang sad to leave you and so scared of what is to come the safest thing to do is to hurt, alienate, and infuriate the people who loves them most so it’s easier to walk away in late August.  So basically, they are being total jerks because you did a great job. 

My kindergartner will tell me, “mommy, I can’t wait for us to go to college together” and while that makes me tear up a little bit now I am one hundred percent sure that when she is 17 I will need a reminder that she is a good person and that I am not a failure parent and that we will survive this season of life. 

As people of faith letting our children grow more fully into the gifted and independent souls they are ends up meaning that we are asked to do the hard work of staying steady when they begin to shake.  We are tasked with keeping our arms open to our children even when they lash out in fear and anxiety.  We are tasked to be a reflection of God to the nastiest most unappealing side of our own children.  In the rest of our lives there is usually some trophy for staying the course on a task this hard: you are recognized at work, your friend sends you a thank-you note for your unwavering support, you finish a marathon, you launch an amazing project.  In this instance… the trophy will most likely come MUCH later in the form of a child who recognizes the ways that your love and support carried them even when they were not asking for it.  *do not expect this anytime in the next three years, I don’t want you to set yourself up for disappointment

So, sweet parents, you are doing a really good job.  Your kid is not going to tell you that.  They may be telling you the opposite, or nothing, or just crying a lot… but stay the course.  This is normal. THEY are normal(ish... as normal as any of us can be).  They are still all the awesome things you know them to be it's just a little blurry right now.  They are still gifted and kind and smart.  They are still a kid to be proud of.  They are just really really hard to parent for this season. When you mirror the love of Christ to your children, a love that can withstand all the complaining and yelling and raging, they will know God even more fully through you. Don't feel even a little bit bad about venting to your friends, partner, or anyone with an ear to listen... you deserve a break and to be heard by someone (since your senior will definitely not be that person)!  I promise, come September... they will miss you and you may even like them again.  

SUNDAY SERMON 3/5/17 by the Rev. David M. Stoddart

Matthew 4:1-11

There’s a story from the life of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish nun and mystic. She was a very prayerful woman, prone to visions and ecstatic encounters with God, who had to spend much of her time traveling and doing administrative work as a leader and reformer of her religious order―which she did reluctantly because she really preferred living a simple life devoted to prayer. One night she was caught in a terrible storm, and her carriage was blown over and she was thrown into the mud by the side of the road. She stood up, drenched and filthy, and yelled, “God, I’m trying to do what you want me to do. I’m working hard, I’m exhausted, and I keep asking for your help. Now this happens! Why?” And then she heard God speak within her heart, saying, “Teresa, this is the way I treat all my friends.” And she replied, “Ah, Lord, it’s no wonder that you have so few.”

I first told that story in a sermon many years ago at the beginning of my ordained ministry. I had a very clever point I was going to make with it; that story was going to beautifully illustrate what my sermon was all about. And then, standing up in front of the congregation without notes, I told the story―and then forgot what I was going to say. I mean, my mind went completely blank. If you’ve never stood in front of 150 people and completely lost your train of thought, let me just say that I don’t recommend it. I must have stood there for about 20 seconds, though it felt like eternity. Nothing came. I finally stammered out a few sentences about God meeting us in terrible circumstances, apologized, and then sat down. It was bad! I was mortified: I don’t think I have ever been more embarrassed. And I spent days beating myself up about it. I told a priest friend about it later that week, just to share my shame, and he looked at me and said, “That was probably the best thing that could have happened to you.” In that moment, I could not believe him. But good things did come of it. Lots of people expressed love and support for me, and several people actually said that they got a lot out of it. One woman told me she was so moved by my demonstrating how God uses human weakness—and it became clear in our conversation that she thought I had staged the whole thing! As much as I wanted to find something to feel good about, I did not let her go on believing that! (Oh, yeah, yeah, I did that on purpose!)

But most importantly, it made me confront in a deep way my own shadow side. Since there was no hiding from it, I asked God into it: my egotistical need to impress people, my vanity, my craving to feel perfect, my fear of failure, my mixed motives at the heart of everything I did as a priest. At some level, I thought I needed to ignore, deny, or repress all of that, but the Spirit said otherwise: what I really needed to do was acknowledge it and accept that God loved me in the midst of it. I have had many humiliating moments like that over the years, more than I care to admit, and the cumulative effect has been to convince me of how crucial it is that we bring our whole self to God, leaving nothing out. That is the only way to forgiveness, healing, and wholeness.

And I believe that Jesus models this very thing for us. It’s easy to hear this familiar Gospel passage and treat it like a cartoon: the devil with a pointy tail and pitchfork urging Jesus to do bad things, and Jesus standing firm and piously resisting such blandishments. I mean, who can really identify with such a scene? Far better, I believe, to see Jesus being human and confronting his own shadow side. He does not sin, but the Bible assures us that he undergoes real temptation. Think about that: part of him wants to do these things—wants to abuse his power to satisfy his own needs.  Part of him wants to sell out for the sake of personal glory. In this story, Jesus does not deny any of that: he recognizes it for what it is. He owns it. And I think that accounts for this wonderful detail at the end, about the angels coming to minister to him. Only by seeing the whole truth about himself can that happen. There would be no angels in the story if there were no devil. The only way for God to make us whole is to bring our whole self to God.

Every week we confess our sins in worship. That is not meant to be an act of self-flagellation—man, I’m such a terrible person!—but rather an act of probing spiritual honesty. It’s an honesty that we are called to always, and the season of Lent just drives the point home: we need to see ourselves as we truly are, dark aside and all. We can do this with safety and hope because through Jesus God assures us that the bottom line for us is always love, not judgment; mercy, not condemnation. We all have our own issues, of course, and the possibilities are endless: resentment, jealousy, dishonesty, pride, fear, greed, whatever. Rather than living in denial or shame, Christ calls us to bring ourselves, our full selves, to the light of God’s love and healing power.

If you do this, I don’t know what God will do in your life. I know what God has done in mine. Among many things, she has shown me that not only am I not perfect, I don’t have to try to pretend to be perfect; that the Holy Spirit will move through my weakness as much as, if not more than, through my strength; that God does not love the fantasy I once had of myself but loves me as I really am; that I can count on that love so much that I can take risks and be vulnerable. And I have learned that, I have experienced it in my heart and my gut, mostly by confronting my shortcomings, my failures, my shadow side. That is the promise of Jesus Christ: God will forgive, accept, and love us for who we are and will even use our worst qualities to transform us in ways that we cannot imagine. God is amazing: even our sin can be the means of life-changing grace. But for that to happen, we first need to own it. All of it. God will do the rest.

Just give up!

Reflection by Fr. David

The Ash Wednesday liturgy is always sobering. There's all that talk about sin, of course, but what particularly unsettles me is the list of things I should do if I really want to observe a holy Lent: self-examination, repentance, prayer, fasting, self-denial, reading and meditating on Scripture, and performing acts of charity. That would all be in addition to just living: loving and caring for my family, fulfilling my ministry as a priest, maintaining my friendships, exercising, getting enough sleep, and doing the myriad chores and errands one does just to get through the day. In what is already a busy and often hectic existence, Lent can feel like a hyper-caffeinated life coach barging in and saying, "Come on! You gotta do more!"

That can't be what this season's all about -- or at least, I refuse to believe that's what it's all about. So I will now share with you my primary Lenten discipline:

I just give up.

I don't mean that I don't observe Lent: I do, and I take it seriously. But over the years it has struck me more and more that what our tradition calls us to do at this time of year is to strip down and simplify our life. And if you're at all like me, that can seem impossible: it feels like everyone wants a piece of me, and there are more things I am supposed to do than I could ever hope to do in the course of a day. The drive to produce and achieve can feel relentless and unstoppable, raising my stress level and making me a decidedly less Christ-centered, Spirit-filled person.

So I just give up.

For me that takes concrete form by stopping everything during the middle of the day, usually in the afternoon. I turn off my phone, close my computer, and sit for half an hour. I practice contemplative prayer. I breathe. And I accomplish nothing. That means some emails won't get answered as quickly, some calls will not get returned right away. It may delay work on a sermon or a visit to the hospital. But I have come to see that this is the most spiritually significant and life-giving thing I can do because it connects me -- or rather, it re-minds me of the deep connection I already have -- with God.

Jesus says, "Abide in me as I abide in you" (John 15:4). Paul tells us that we are "being rooted and grounded in love" (Ephesians 3:17). All of our activity can only be meaningful and fruitful when we live deeply and deliberately connected to the One who is the source of life and love. No matter how busy he is, Jesus always takes time to simply be with his Abba and he exhorts his friends to do the same. Without that connection, we are just going through the motions with increasing rapidity and decreasing value.There is a better way: our culture may not embrace it, but our counter-cultural faith has taught it from the beginning. Abiding in Christ and grounding ourselves in love may take different forms for each of us, but if you are busy, frazzled, stressed, over-extended and over-worked, let me suggest a wonderful Lenten discipline:

Just give up.

Ash Wednesday Sermon by the Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

1 March 2017

A favorite word of teenagers:  hypocrite.  At least that was the case during my teenage years.  As a child my friends and I were under the delusion that parents, teachers, and adults in general were near perfect.  But then due to a mysterious combination of years of experience, brain-development, and stage of life it was around the age of thirteen - wow! - I saw the light!  Those adults weren’t perfect at all.  In fact, they were far from perfect: They were hypocrites!  Saying one thing and doing another, telling a teenager like me to be patient and then becoming frustrated when things didn’t happen quickly enough, expecting me to share things with my brother while demonstrating stinginess towards others in need.  I could go on and go - and I did back then.  Hypocrites, all of them.

But time passes and now those teenagers have grown into adulthood and, lucky us, we now get to be on the receiving end of all of that.  Idealistic teens look at our lives, see what we call inconsistencies, struggles or failures and often judge us harshly - we have become the hypocrites.   Indeed, in this case, what comes around goes around.

And it’s not just teenagers that are concerned about hypocrisy.  Jesus is no fan of it either - especially when it comes to using God and religion as a vehicle for self-promotion.  “Whenever you give alms,” we hear the warning today, “do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others...do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others...whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.”

Giving, praying, fasting - all good things.  And Jesus is instructing us, his disciples,  to engage in such practices, but to also beware of pride’s perverting power - how we can so easily twist what is supposed to be about God into something that is all about self.  A safeguard?  Secret: Practice giving, praying, fasting out of view of others - pray in private places, fast without making a fuss, and give discretely - to the point, Jesus says, that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.  Which is something to think about. 

It seems that what Jesus is talking about is not just a type of a “secret Santa” strategy of giving, where we can at least be secretly proud of getting just the right gift or giving a generous donation to a worthy cause.  The kind of giving that Jesus is after when he speaks of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing is the kind of giving that is so deeply hidden we don’t even recognize it - only God who sees in secret.  Perhaps you had this happen to you - someone comes up to you, you may not even recognize them and thanks you for something you don’t remember doing?  You may even wonder if you are being confused for someone else.  I helped you how?  That kind of giving goes beyond carefully planned generosity because such Spirit-led and Spirit-blessed offerings are not shaped by self-consciousness.  

For the ultimate aim of giving, fasting, and praying is to take our eyes off of ourselves - to lose ourselves so that we can find God’s own self.  The God of Love who often is found in secret and certainly sees in secret - sees our poverty and gives us alms, hears our prayers and holds the secrets of our hearts, knows our hunger and feeds us with his very self.  That is our reward.  In losing the consuming occupation with ourselves we are freed to develop a richer, more satisfying relationship with God. 

And thank goodness our God is not of the same ilk as a developing teenager - prone to judgement and criticism - because there are times, more than we’d like to admit, when we act in ways that are at best hypocritical, but more often just plain self-centered and sinful.  Ash Wednesday and all of Lent serves to remind us that, yes, we are broken, yet even so, we are forgiven and loved. 

So with all this talk about practicing our faith in secret isn’t it rather ironic that in a few moments from now we will be receiving ashes on our foreheads for all the world to see?  What’s up with that?  Well, first let me point out that the ashen crosses are neither prayer nor fasting nor almsgiving.  And that these ashes are not something you do, but something that is imposed upon you by another person, but granted that’s a bit of hair splitting.  One of the best ways I know to think about what we are about to do was taught by a six year old boy of a seminary student.  The student was planning on taking his son to an Ash Wednesday service and he wanted to make sure that his child understood that ashes would be put on his forehead.  “I know,” the boy replied, “and I can hardly wait.”  “Really?” the surprised dad questioned, “Why’s that?”  And then out of the mouths of babes came this remarkable insight: “That’s the one day of the year that we get to see the cross traced on our foreheads in baptism.”   The ashen crosses we are about to receive are not about our working for the recognition and praise of people, rather they are a silent, but bold proclamation of the great goodness of God who gives even us hypocrites and the world at large the undeserved reward of grace, mercy, and love.