Abiding in Love. April 29, 2018 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

1 John 4:7-21

We always have interesting discussions at Men’s Bible Study (Thursdays at 7:00am — breakfast provided. I recommend it!). A couple weeks ago our discussion prompted one of the participants to email me. He made a number of thoughtful comments in that email, and then wrote:

I have heard all my life, WWJD [What Would Jesus Do?], but that never really resonated with me. I could never really apply that to my life. After this morning’s study, I am thinking more along the lines of “what would love do?” If I can live my life and base my actions and relationships with people on “what would love do”, maybe that will get me a little closer to leading the kind of life that God wants of me.

That is such a simple and profoundly important statement. And it seems impossible to me that we could hear this passage today from the First Letter of John and reach any other conclusion: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.`

How do we forget that? We get so easily distracted. And what perhaps distracts us religious people as much as anything else is our need to be right. We need to have the right doctrine, for example, as if God cares about whether we have memorized the Nicene Creed or understand the exact nature of the Trinity (as if we could!). We need to have the right formulas, as if God just needs us to say the correct words in the correct order. We need to have the right rituals, as if it matters to God whether we say “alleluia” in Lent or we stand and sit at the right times. We need to follow the right rules, as if God primarily created us to follow rules. We need to belong to the right church, we need to wear the right clothes when we go to church, and so on and so forth. We need to be right, or at least our egos need that in order to feel secure or somehow justified in our faith. And, of course, all too often those same egos dictate that in order for us to be right, then other people must be wrong. And therein lies the twisted thinking that has led to untold bigotry, intolerance, violence, and senseless hatred.

But Jesus doesn’t preach that we have to be right.  We are, in fact, justified (the word literally means “made right”) by the sheer grace of God. We are all right because God loves us. Jesus calls us to receive that love, live that love, and share that love. He doesn’t seem to care if we’re correct in our creed or right in our ritual: he cares that we love. Jesus sums up the entire Law in two commandments: Love God with your whole being, and love others the same way you love yourself. Nothing else ultimately matters. Everything we do in this parish — worship, ministries, programs, budgets — all of it is meant to help us experience and share God’s love.

And, truly, the entire biblical story reveals the long, slow, arduous, often painful process of people coming to realize that God really is love. There’s an old Jewish saying that goes: God created human beings in his image, and then human beings returned the favor. We have all too often tried to make God in our own image, and so we have projected onto God our own hatred and violence, our inability to forgive and our need to punish. But that’s our baggage, not God’s. Hear these words: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

And if God is love, then all love is of God. We cannot separate loving God from loving other people: Jesus won’t let us because it is all one love. So John goes on to write, Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters. And that is what we see in Jesus, who loves his Abba by loving everyone: not just his disciples, not just his fellow Jews, but Romans, Samaritans, outcasts, the criminal crucified next to him — everyone. There is one love. We are called to receive that love, live that love, and share that love.

I had an epiphany this week, reminding me of that. And, as it happens, it pertains to the Men’s Bible Study. A number of the men in that group like to go fishing, and one of them recently caught a big fish. I won’t embarrass him by saying who it was, but for the sake of the story, let’s just call him Greg Anderson. So we all passed a phone around with the photo of Greg holding his fish: it was a fun, bonding moment. Well, the very next day I attended Friday prayers at the masjid, the mosque on Pine Street where the local Muslim community worships. I do that regularly to show friendship and build bridges. Well, after prayers ended, one of the men I know there, named Tarek, came up to me, gave me a big hug — and then whipped out his phone and showed me a picture of him holding a fish he had just caught. And it hit me how one we truly are. We come from different religions and different cultures — Tarek was born and raised as a Muslim in Egypt — but we’re all bound together. Like many people in this parish, he likes to fish, and he wanted to show me the fish he had caught. We are all just human. We are all created and cherished by the same God. This is what Jesus teaches us and what Jesus shows us. There is one love, and we are all called to participate in it.

That love is within us right now, through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us as a gift. That love is all around us. We will share that love at the Peace; we will eat and drink that love at the altar. I don’t know how you understand worship or what you are looking for when you come here, but let me urge you not to think of it as a dry obligation, something we do to placate a distant and difficult god. It is, rather, an opportunity for all of us to soak in God’s love: to let it flow into us and through us. We don’t have to make God love us or do anything to make ourselves worthy of God’s love. We already have it. The big question, the only question, for us and for everyone we will touch this week, is whether we will receive it, and live it, and share it.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Generous Love. 4/22/18 The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Can money buy happiness?  Maybe.  At least that’s what one study done several years ago concluded.^[1]  In that study researchers took a group of people and surveyed them on how happy they were.  Then they gave everyone a small amount of money - up to $20. Half were told to spend the money on themselves and the other half were to spend it on someone else.  At the end of the day, the participants were again asked to rate their happiness and the results showed that those who spent money on others reported a much greater happiness boost than the ones who spent money on themselves.  

As a person of faith I believe the reason for this is that when we are generous, when we are doing something for the benefit of another we are living as we were created to live - that is, in harmony with the flow of God’s great and generous love.  A love that surrounds us.  A love that is being poured into us all the time.  And when we let it flow through us as it is intended to do, instead of holding it in and keeping it to ourselves, then we are in harmony with God’s love and experience a deep sense of well-being.

Our reading from 1 John speaks to this nature of this flow.  “We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”  Love begins with God.  And we’ve been loved from our beginning.  We are being loved right now by the love of God, the love that is God.  Love that is filling us even as I speak.  Maybe you can feel it, maybe not.  Our perceptions changes and feelings come and go.  That is why we have a need to know love “not [just] in word or speech,” as 1 John puts it, “but in truth and action.” So God reveals God’s love most concretely in truth and action by Jesus’ act of freely laying his life down for us.

And because we know this love we are called to let that love flow by laying down our lives for others.  Now there are rare occasions where we can be faced with the choice of literally laying down our lives for another - I think of the French police officer, a practicing Catholic, who last month traded his life for a hostage and was killed in that person’s place.  The reason it made the news is because it was so sensational.  Thankfully we are not faced with such crises very often or ever in our lifetimes.  And 1 John knows this for the writer goes on to show what a laying-down-one’s-life type of love looks like not just in extreme moments of sacrifice, but in the daily give and take of loving life by asking the question, “How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”  Loving others in truth and action by laying our lives down in love means that we are to share or even give up some of the things we think we need so that others who really are in need might not be so. 

But perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here.  I suspect that most, if not all of us here, have already signed on to the idea of sharing, of serving, of sacrificing on behalf of others.  I certainly see it every day in countless acts of love that are done both in and beyond our community.  Yet I also see and know that many of us struggle.  Part of that struggle has to do with what love looks like, how does one lay down their life in love in particularly hard circumstances.  I hear questions like, “How do I love and help a friend who is ruining his life because he’s an alcoholic?” or, “Now that I have awakened to systematic racism, what do I do now?”  Or here’s something we all face almost every day if we drive around Charlottesville.  It’s the question, “What is the most loving thing to do when you’re sitting in your car at a red light and someone is standing right next to you asking for money?”

That question was actually posed at WAC (Wednesdays at COOS) last year when we had a speaker come from The Haven, a day shelter which provides various services to help people facing homelessness.   “What is the best thing to do when someone asks you for money?”  The room went silent because we all wanted to know.  What was striking, though, was that this homeless advocate, this “expert,” confessed that she too did not exactly know.  But she was emphatic about one thing:  that whether a person gives or not, there is one thing we should all do and that is don’t judge.  Although it was comforting to know that even she struggled with what to do I think we all would have appreciated an answer that would settle the issue once and for all.

But the reality is, is that life is full of complex situations where answers may never be clear.  Still God’s love never stops and we continue to be called to let it flow through us and to not hold back because we are unsure or afraid of being wrong.  I know whenever I feel as if I am groping in the dark in my attempts to love or, really, when I’m facing anything unknown there’s a prayer by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and mystic of the 20th century, that gives me hope and peace.  It’s entitled The Road Ahead and it goes…

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always…

Take heart for the desire to love others and please God does indeed please God.  When we are generous, when we share what we have with others, when we spend even a few dollars on someone else we experience a boost of happiness because we are pleasing God, we are abiding in God, we are letting God’s love flow freely in us and through us.  Today, let us continue to follow the way of love, the way of Jesus who is our good shepherd.  For as we do so we will find that just like it was for Jesus so it is for us, that laying down our lives in love turns out not to be the end of life, but the beginning of new life - a life more real and authentic, a life more meaningful and true - a life that brings the greatest happiness of all - God’s resurrection life. 

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^[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88682320

Sharing in the Risen Life of Jesus. 4/8/18 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Acts 4:32-35

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

At Exploring the Word, our Thursday afternoon Bible study, we talked some this week about exchanging the peace. For many people, that is an appealing part of our liturgy, but not for everyone. At the parish I served in when I was first ordained, there was a couple who always sat in the front row — friendly, faithful, there every week, but the moment the celebrant uttered those words, “The Peace of the Lord be with you,” they dropped to their knees, bowed their heads, covered their faces with their hands, and avoided peacing anyone. And back in the day, for many Episcopalians, exchanging the peace just meant exchanging the liturgical words with the priest and nothing else, except maybe an icy nod at your neighbor. At Bible study, I shared my first experience of worship at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, in New York City, which is a very traditional and formal parish, with a beautiful building and an amazing boys’ choir, but not the warmest place to be on a Sunday morning. At any rate, not knowing better, when the celebrant said, “The Peace of the Lord be with you,” I turned to the person next to me in the pew, an impeccably dressed older woman, who said, “Young man, don’t touch me.” I am very grateful that we give one another the peace so warmly in this parish, thought know  it still stretches people. I just had someone tell me that he had taken a serious step in his life: at the peace last week, he crossed the aisle. Christ is Risen indeed!

All of this is apropos of our reading from Acts today. The church in Acts is a resurrection community. Jesus is risen, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on his followers, and they are living that out in some remarkable ways: No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. This is extraordinary generosity, and apparently not mandated by anyone. The apostles aren’t preaching about giving away possessions and helping the poor: they are preaching that Jesus is risen from the dead. What happens in the life of the church happens because they are a resurrection community, an Easter people.

And that is what I would like us to focus on today. Now, I’m not going to ask you to sell your house or give your car away to someone who needs it, so don’t panic. Those acts of generosity are the result of something, not the something itself. To get at that, we need only read the opening words from that passage in Acts: Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul. Yes, that’s where we want to land, that’s what we need to embrace: being of one heart and soul. Everything else flows from that.

You see, here’s the thing about the resurrection: it is not a form of personal life insurance. It’s not like we can say, “Okay, I believe Jesus was raised from the dead, so I’m in. I’m going to  heaven when I die, and in the meantime I can pursue my own private, ego-driven agenda.” No, it doesn’t work that way. Sharing in the resurrection of Jesus necessarily means sharing in the life of Jesus, which we do through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. We are one with Christ in the Spirit – his life is our life, his heart is our heart, his values are our values. Which means, among other things, that we are one with each other, in the deepest possible way. Unity in love is a central theme of Jesus’s teaching. In John’s Gospel, the final prayer he offers is that his followers be one, just as he is one with them and the Father is one with him. The church in Acts was living that out. The resurrection of Jesus accompanied by the outpouring of his Spirit made it all clear. They saw and experienced the truth: they were bound together by a love stronger than death. Providing for people in need? Well, duh! That’s what love does! And the resurrected life, which begins even now, is all about love: the life-changing, death-conquering love that we all share in.

You’ll notice, however, that those believers were one in heart and soul: they were not necessarily one in mind. They were human, and no doubt they disagreed at times. In fact, both the book of Acts and Paul’s letters attest to that fact. But that is the wonder of it all: they could be one in love even when they disagreed with each other. Is there a more important witness that the Church of Jesus Christ can make in our world right now than that? We can be one, even when we disagree, we can love each other even when we don’t like each other’s opinions. In a world where we are so fiercely polarized and divided over so many issues, those of us sharing in the Risen Life of Jesus have a vital witness to make. We make it with our words, but even more importantly, with the quality of our common life.

Which brings me back to the Peace. The Peace is not just halftime in the worship service, a pleasant break from the liturgy when we can say hi to our friends. It is theologically one of the most important things we do in worship, and, as it happens, it is one of the oldest parts of the liturgy. When we exchange the Peace, we acknowledge that we together share in the peace of Christ. More than that, it says that I need you to fully experience Christ, and you need me and we need each other. We may not always agree with each other or even like each other, but we belong to each other. We are one in the Risen Lord. He is our peace.

I’m not asking us to make that happen, because we don’t make it happen: God does. And God already has. Nor am I asking us to conjure up warm, fuzzy feelings for the people sitting near us in the pews: our unity goes deeper than passing feelings. I am asking that we be open to the truth. I’m asking that when we exchange the Peace, or receive Communion, or chat with someone in the gathering area, that we remember we really are one in Christ. Only when we see that, can love flow freely among us. Only then can we fully grasp the life-changing truth of our acclamation today: Christ is risen to new life – and so are we.

The Miracle of Resurrection. 4/1/18 The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Mark 16:1-8

Don’t you think it’s funny that Easter falls on April Fools’ Day this year?   Is God trying to tell us something?  April Fools’ is all about playing practical jokes - like giving someone an oreo cookie and watching them discover that the creamy sugary filling has been replaced by awful tasting toothpaste.  Or setting someone up to find a winning lottery ticket and then telling them that it’s actually a fake.  Or giving an excited child a bunch of small, foil-covered, Easter eggs that are really grapes instead of chocolate.  The laugh comes when expectations are turned on its head - and surprise! - what is expected is not what turns out to be really true.

Expecting one thing only to be surprised by another is at the heart of the Easter story this morning.  We read from the gospel of Mark that very early in the morning three of Jesus faithful followers, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, go to the tomb where Jesus’ body has been laid after dying on the cross.  We know they are devastated.   Not only do they grieve the loss of someone they loved, but their whole has been destroyed.  Jesus was supposed to be God’s long awaited Messiah, but his death shattered that possibility.  Nonetheless, in a small attempt to make one thing right in a world that had gone hopelessly wrong the women go to the tomb so that they might properly anoint Jesus’ dead body.  

But in the wake of their shock and grief it’s clear that they haven’t thought this whole thing through.  There’s one big problem which dawns on them as they walk to the tomb.  They ask one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”  But upon their arrival Mark’s gospel tells us that when the women looked up they saw that the stone had already been rolled away.  Now in the original Greek this phrase, “looked up,” can also mean looked again.  And perhaps by using this particular word the gospel is suggesting that at first the women came upon the tomb and saw what they expected to see, the stone blocking the entrance, but then they looked again, or did a double take, and realized that, no, the stone had actually been rolled away.  

This was just the beginning of expecting one thing only to be surprised by another.  So upon seeing that truly the stone had been rolled away the women enter the tomb.  And what do they expect upon entering?  To see Jesus’ body, his dead body.   But no, they are surprised again, this time by a young man dressed in white who proceeds to give them very unexpected news, “[Jesus] has been raised; he is not here...go, tell his disciples...that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” 

That’s a lot to take in and we hear in this gospel account that in the moment it was nearly impossible for these women to do so.  But for us who have had considerably more time to get used to the idea, let us ponder these words.  There’s really two parts to the Easter message this morning, the first being that Jesus is risen!  He is no longer dead but alive!  And as great as that news is it’s really no surprise, is it?  Isn’t it what we expected to hear today?  But what about the second part?  The part about seeing Jesus in Galilee.  You know, Galilee was the hometown of most of Jesus’ followers.  They are being sent back to the known and the familiar, the routine and the ordinary with the promise that that is where they will see the resurrected Christ.  Because it is in the everyday world that Jesus’ resurrection life intersects with and transforms lives - not only back then, but now. 

Our everyday, ordinary, imperfect lives hold the miracle of resurrection.  Is that what you expect?  Sometimes it’s hard for us to see.  So often we look at lives our through the lens of our preconceived ideas and we see what we expect to see.  If we have already decided that something or someone is bad, or hopeless, or unchangeable - guess what, that is what we are going to see.  It’s just like the women who expected to see the stone blocking their way to the tomb, it was only when they looked again that they discovered that contrary to expectations the stone had already been rolled away.  Because Jesus is risen, because He is alive we are being called this morning to let go of expectations and judgements that can narrow our vision, and to look again and see Jesus, see resurrection, see Love in all its blazing glory.    

Consider your own life and look again…. Have you ever felt unwanted or unacceptable or unloved and then someone reaches out to you?  That is resurrection.  Have you ever had a new insight into your life or a new way of seeing the world or new understanding of another person?  That’s resurrection too.  Perhaps you can recall a time when you offered or received forgiveness and a relationship was restored.  That’s resurrection - that’s new life.  Our stories of seeing Jesus, of knowing God’s love, of experiencing resurrection are as unique and individual as each and every one of us.  Still it is also true that not every one of our stories has a happy or resurrection type ending to it, at least one that’s obvious to our eyes no matter how many times we try to look again and see.  But even then there is good news.  Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing in in anyone’s story, in anyone’s life.^[1]  Our God of power and love resurrects not only Jesus’ life, but each one of our lives and completes the story.  

So on this April Fools’ Day is God trying to tell us something?  Indeed, I believe God is.  Resurrection is the ultimate practical joke.  It may seem that death and darkness will have its way in this world, but the laugh comes when expectations are turned on its head, and we are surprised as we look again and see that that expectation is not what turns out to be true.  It is on this Easter day that we get to join with God in having the best and last laugh as we celebrate the greatest punchline that the world has ever known Alleluia! Christ is Risen.  The Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia!  

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^[1] “Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing” is a quote attributed to Frederick Buechner.

Made for Eternal Life 3/31/18 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

The Great Vigil of Easter

13.8 billion years ago, in an explosion of light and unimaginable energy, the universe as we know it came into existence. About 9.3 billion years later, some of the raw elements from that big bang coalesced to form the planet Earth. Within a billion years of that event, the first single-celled life forms emerged. It took a long time, but some 200 million years ago the earliest mammals began walking the earth. Over the ages, life evolved and developed until the homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago. Our ancient ancestors went through some remarkable changes, intellectually, socially, and spiritually, and it was roughly 3,800 years ago when a man named Abram left his home in Haran and eventually settled in a land called Canaan. His descendants, the people of Israel, escaped slavery in Egypt roughly 600 years or so later and entered into a covenant with the LORD whose name they would not even pronounce. They reached a high point some three thousand years ago when David was crowned king, but they faltered in the years after that, struggling in their political life and foundering in their relationship with God. Prophets arose, and for centuries they admonished, chastised, encouraged, and pleaded until finally, in kairos, the fullness of time, Jesus of Nazareth was born — almost 2,000 years after God called Abraham, and billions of years after the Holy One said, Let there be light.

Tonight we built our fire and sat in the darkness illumined by candle flames while we let our minds stretch back into the depths of time. It is an amazing story, and we heard just tiny snippets of it, but enough to remind us that it is all connected, all part of a greater narrative. And because we are people of faith, we recognize that it is a meaning-full story, the work of a God whose love, patience, and sheer persistence stagger the imagination. And both the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature make it plain that this God is all about life. From the very beginning, God intended life. And from the very beginning, God intended us: beings who could consciously share with God in the joy of being alive and being part of this amazing story. And more than just share in it, but love it, and love each other, and love God, whose love is the beginning and the end of everything. And the story makes equally clear that God will not let anything ultimately prevent us from experiencing the fullness of life and love which God intends for us, a point driven home in all our readings tonight, a truth so beautifully expressed in Paul’s letter to the Romans when he writes: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38-39).

The resurrection of Jesus we celebrate tonight is not some kind of miraculous aberration, a dramatic departure from the big plan: it has been the plan all along. As surely as God was going to live and die as one of us to shatter any sense of separation, so surely that God was going to overcome death itself. Jesus confirms what the prophets of Israel had long begun to believe and trust in: that God’s love is forever, and we are made for eternal life. If I may borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward resurrection.

And it’s still bending. The divine energy that led inexorably to the Incarnation and the Resurrection has not faded. The love which powered the story through to the empty tomb has not diminished. Did you listen to those readings?  God does not grow tired. The story we heard tonight goes on, and the evolving, forward-thrusting nature of that story is reflected in the poignant interchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in our Gospel. When she finally realizes it’s him, she reaches out to hold him — but he won’t let her. That was appropriate earlier in the story, during his earthly ministry, but now the plot has expanded. Jesus is no longer just the loving Lord who is available to those who are physically close enough to see and touch him: he is now the Risen Christ, whose love will now be available to everyone everywhere every moment through His Spirit, who is the Holy Spirit of God.

So our task is not to linger at the empty tomb. The story moves on, and so do we. And Paul reminds us tonight of our joyful mission: We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; the death he died, he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6:9-11). The essence of sin is separation from God, but we are not separate. The Spirit of the Risen Christ lives in us now and forever. Not even death can separate us from God. So our job is to live accordingly, to live like we actually believe that. So think with me here. What crippling fear could we let go of, like the fear of failure or the fear of death? We share in the risen life of Jesus: we don’t need to be afraid of these things. Or what crushing burdens could we let go of, like the burden of having to prove ourselves or make ourselves look perfect? We are living the resurrection from the dead: we don’t need to carry those burdens. Or how could we let love flow through us more freely and more generously? We don’t need to be stingy: we can take risks and give ourselves away, because we have the Spirit of the Risen Lord in us, who never grows weary and who never gives up. Can you think of one new way you will consider yourself alive to God in Christ, one new way that you will let the Resurrection of Jesus actually change your life? Surely each one of us can do that. And why not?

We are about to celebrate the mysteries of the Holy Eucharist, the very presence of the Risen Christ among us and within us. And then we’ll go into the Parish Hall and drink our champagne or sparkling cider and celebrate. And then tomorrow, we will carry on the celebration — as resurrection people. Because the Great Story keeps going, and we’re part of it. So be part of it — and live like the joy has already begun, and the best is yet to be.