God is greater than our hearts. April 25, 2021. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

1 John 3:16-24

And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and [God] knows everything.

If your heart has never condemned you, then you can go grab another cup of coffee or return to your crossword puzzle or take a little nap, because unfortunately I have nothing to offer you today. But if your heart has ever condemned you, if you’ve felt the sting of failure, if you’ve experienced the pain of hurting people you love, if you know what it feels like to fall short of being who you want to be, then stay with me as we unpack this message from the First Letter of John.

And like so much of the New Testament, this passage seeks to push us beyond our small and finite selves. We face many perils when we operate within the limited confines of our egos. We can live in denial, basically out of touch with reality; we can constantly be fearful and angry as we perceive the world around us to be inherently threatening. And for many people, there is the danger of being trapped in a vicious cycle of despair: we feel guilty and ashamed when we fail, which just sets us up to feel even worse the next time we fail. Our own hearts condemn us, and as anyone who has experienced this knows, it can feel very difficult to reassure our hearts and somehow get to a better place. And when we feel alone and isolated, it can be well-nigh impossible.

But we are never truly alone. The Holy Spirit within us connects us in the deepest possible way with God. And God is greater than our hearts. Let me repeat that: God is greater than our hearts. Just saying those words is liberating. The invitation here is to wake up and see ourselves as part of a larger reality, an abiding love that enfolds all our sins and miseries in compassion and mercy, taking the frayed and tangled threads of our lives and weaving them into something beautiful. My power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), the Lord says to Paul. Failure is not an unfortunate aberration: it is somehow a necessary part of the program. But we can’t see that while we are  imprisoned in our own hearts: only the all-embracing heart of Christ can make that clear and set us free.

This is not academic for me: I say this from hard experience. I am acutely aware of all the ways I fall short. I can write out an extensive list of my sins, my character flaws, and the ways I have hurt or disappointed people. And given my personality type, it would be very easy to fall into a pit of despair — and I have. What saves me is the love of Christ lifting me out of myself and helping me see that I am still connected, I am still part of what God is doing in this world. And that’s what I want: to be part of what God is doing, I want to love, I want to enjoy abundant life, I want to help others enjoy abundant life. And God knows this. As the reading says, God knows everything. And God can deal with my failures and shortcomings just fine. What matters is that I am with God and I choose love.

This is what it means to believe in Jesus: to trust that God loves the way Jesus loves and to live accordingly. We won’t be perfect and we don’t have to be. We just need to love as best we can. And when we fail, we remember the bigger picture, remember that God is happy to work through us as we are, then get up, smile, and keep on loving. The First Letter of Peter tells us love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8), and it’s true. God won’t let our hearts condemn us, because God knows that we want to love and we’re trying to love. And God will take even our weakest efforts and use them for good.

So the next time you fail, rather than deny it or beat yourself up about it, I encourage you to see it as an opportunity to experience God’s mercy and to grow in love. For that to happen, the primary thing we need is humility: the humility to acknowledge our weakness, the humility to receive forgiveness, the humility to grow. This is what Jesus means when he talks about poverty of spirit. The poor in spirit are blessed because they have surrendered the egotistical need to be perfect and are open enough and vulnerable enough to give themselves to God as they are. Maybe that’s why the wonderful mystic Julian of Norwich insists that sin is not only inevitable, but necessary. Maybe only failure can soften our hearts enough for us to realize that God is greater than our hearts, and to know, as Julian says, that in God all shall be well and all shall well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

COOS Sunday Worship April 25, 2021

 

COOS Sunday Worship

April 25, 2021

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Midweek message from Fr. David 4/21/21

Midweek message from Fr. David

April 21, 2021

COOS Sunday Worship 4/18/21

 

COOS Sunday Worship

April 18, 2021

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(can be printed out)

A new kind of life. April 18, 2021. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

 

Luke 24:36b-48

It was a Friday evening in April of 1993. My husband, Michael, and I had gone out to an early dinner and had plans to spend the rest of the evening at home in our teeny, tiny Seattle apartment. I don’t recall our dinner conversation, but I imagine that we had touched upon the future. Months earlier, I had been accepted into a Master of Divinity program in Connecticut which meant that our world would be radically changing that fall with a move across the country and all the exciting, unknown possibilities that would come along with that. But at the time life was much more mundane.

Upon arriving home after dinner, I was first to the door. I opened it, crossed the threshold and entered into the dark when all of sudden the lights came on and I saw a crowd of people jammed into our small place shouting at me. They were yelling, “Surprise!” I was completely dumbfounded. What was going on here? Surprise, for what? Well, it turned out that Michael had planned a party to celebrate my upcoming new life in divinity school. It was so kind and I treasure that memory. However, I found this experience of surprise to be so shocking that it took a good long while for this the unexpected reality of the evening to sink in.

“Startled and terrified,” is the way that Luke describes the disciples reaction when one moment they are talking amongst themselves and then the next Jesus is standing among them. If I was so thrown by an unexpected party, I can’t fathom how completely shocking it must have been for Jesus - dead Jesus, in their minds - to just show up as he did. “Startled and terrified” is probably an understatement!

Understandably, the disciples try to make sense of the situation. And the most rational explanation they can come up with is that they are seeing a ghost. But Jesus is having none of that. It’s of the utmost importance that they get that he’s with them not as a ghost, which if you believe in ghosts, is the spiritual presence of someone who is still dead, but that he’s there with them as someone who is alive. A new kind of alive. Here, he says, “Look at my hands and my feet...Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." It must have taken some time for this unexpected reality to sink in and Luke gives us a hint to the disciples’ inner lives as he explains that, “in their joy they [the disciples] were disbelieving and still wondering.” Which prompts Jesus to offer more proof of his bodily presence by eating some broiled fish.

Jesus is alive in body, but it’s a new kind of body and a new kind of life. One that we call resurrected. It’s a life and a body that is not bound by old ways, old understandings, and old experiences. What Jesus is literally embodying is a new future, a new creation, a new way of life - not just for himself alone, but for us all. Because Jesus lives after death that means that all the deaths, all the endings that we might experience in this life they are not The End. Ultimately, all that has been taken, broken, mistreated, wronged, lost or forgotten, will be restored. Death has lost its sting. Because Jesus lives we, and all of creation, can live resurrected lives too.

But letting this new reality of resurrection sink takes time - a lifetime really. It is the repentance of which Jesus speaks in the gospel of Luke. For repentance is all about the changing of one’s mind. And as we, with the disciples, open our minds to Jesus’ resurrection it is forgiveness that naturally flows - the restoring of relationships with God, with others, with the world. This is the new life we have in Christ full of exciting, unknown possibilities. And we are called to embody it in our own lives. To incarnate the good news in our very own flesh and bones. In the language of Jesus, we are to be “witnesses of these things.”

But how? How are we to witness and incarnate such lofty truths of resurrection life? Priest and author Henri Nouwen suggests that at the end of each day we ask ourselves these questions, “Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions,” Fr. Nouwen reflects and then continues, “I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.”

Incarnate, material, flesh and bones love really is the ultimate experience of and witness to the unexpected yet glorious reality of resurrection life. Instead of shouting, “Surprise!” what we get to proclaim with our words, our deeds, our very lives is something so much better, “Alleluia! Christ is Risen. The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia!” 

 

 

Midweek message from Fr. David 4/14/21

 

Midweek message from Fr. David

April 14, 2021

COOS Sunday Worship 4/11/21

 

COOS Sunday Worship

April 11, 2021

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Midweek message from Fr. David 4/7/21

 

Midweek message from Fr. David

April 7, 2021

Letting go. Easter 2021. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

John 20:1-18

My daughter Emma is finishing up her first year in college, and my son Aidan is about to graduate from college. I will spare you the usual bromides about how quickly time passes, etc., etc., and instead just note that my wife Lori Ann and I were married for several years before we had children. So we were very accustomed to a childless existence before Aidan was born. Having children turned out to be the best thing ever, but even as we began a whole new and wonderful chapter in life, there was still a sense of letting go, a bittersweet surrender of the life we had known and loved. And here we are, letting go again. It’s awesome watching our children become adults, and I’m excited to see what the next chapter holds. But there is still a loss: the old days of daily parenting our children while they live with us are giving way to something new, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to viewing the past with some nostalgia and longing. And all that is on my mind as we celebrate the resurrection.

The Gospel on this Easter Day proclaims with great joy that Jesus is risen, but it also contains one of the most poignant and painful verses in the entire Bible, when Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, Do not hold on to me. Mary was the most faithful of Jesus’ followers. She loved him dearly, and stayed at his side when everyone else deserted him. If the Gospels had been written in a less patriarchal time, she would no doubt have been acclaimed as the chief disciple and the greatest of the apostles.  She was there at the foot of the cross, and she was there at the tomb on that first Easter morning. So of course she is amazed to see Jesus alive and of course she wants to embrace him with love and fervor. But he won’t let her. Jesus is never needlessly cruel, so clearly there is a reason for this. The old way of knowing him and loving him has ended; a new chapter has begun. It will involve knowing the presence of Jesus through his indwelling Spirit. It will lead to a deeper experience of God’s love. But in order to move forward into that future, Mary has to let go of the past.

Someone once said that the big problem with the Good News of Jesus Christ isn’t that it’s good but that it’s new. The promise of resurrection is not the same old same old, repeated forever. The promise is new life, and new life means . . . new life. Paul tells the Corinthians, If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Cor. 5:17) No wonder people don’t recognize the risen Christ immediately: it is Jesus,  but he is manifesting new life. And in the same way, we will manifest something that is new and no doubt wonderful. The only requirement is to let go of the old: Do not hold on to me, Mary. Let go and reach out for new life.

And of course this is not just a message about life after physical death. To live as Easter people, children of the resurrection, is to embrace a life of ongoing growth and change. We let go of relating to our children as kids so that we can relate to them as adults; we let go of one job when we change to another; we let go of finding our identity in our work when we retire; we let go of our parents when they pass away; we go through the excruciating pain of letting go of our spouses when they die; we experience the ultimate letting go when we die ourselves. But it’s not just in the big life changes that we see this. We let go of prejudice and bigoted ideas so that we can know greater justice. We let go of anger and resentment so that we can offer forgiveness and experience peace. The Spirit will inevitably lead us to let go of false or inadequate notions of God so that we can embrace a fuller, richer understanding of the Divine Reality. In countless ways we are called to follow Jesus, not clinging to the status quo but always open to new life and open to God, and when need be, dying to the way things were. But only then can we comprehend what Paul means when he says, simply, We die, and see — we are alive. (2 Cor. 6:9)

We may resist seeing the life of faith as a continual process of dying and rising, but that is the way Jesus leads us forward: For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. And we lose our life by letting go when it’s time to let go. For all the joy of Easter, there is a gentle but urgent invitation to follow in the dying and rising of Christ with faith and without fear, trusting that it will lead us ultimately into the very heart of God. I actually like the way the Sufi mystic poet Rumi puts it:

            I died as a mineral and became a plant;

I died as a plant and rose to animal;

I died as an animal and I was a man.

Why should I fear? When was I ever less by dying?

In Christ, we are never less by dying. That’s true for us as individuals, and that’s true for us as a church. We will come out of this pandemic; hopefully we will be celebrating the resurrection together in this building next year — but we will not just return to the way things were. We will begin a new chapter, we will rise to new life. I don’t know exactly what that will look like: none of us does. But we don’t need to be afraid. We follow the crucified and risen Lord, who says, “Do not hold on to the old: I have something new to show you. Reach out and take it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

COOS Easter Sunday Worship 4/4/21

 

COOS Easter Sunday Worship

April 4, 2021

Order of Worship

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A new, unburied, resurrected life in Christ. April 3, 2021. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

 

The Great Vigil of Easter

Mark 16:1-8

There’s a story about a boy who one day asked his great-grandmother why she had so many wrinkles on her hands. “I’m old,” she told him and then she asked, “Do you know what happens when you get old?” “You die and they bury you in the ground,” he said. And then after a moment of thought added, “But that’s ok because God comes and unburies you.”

Really, what more is there to say? That’s the Easter story. We get buried by the circumstances of life and God comes and unburies us. Over and over, God comes to the tombs of our lives and raises us up. That is Easter. That is the power of God’s love. That is the good news we hear - or at least begin to hear - in our reading from the gospel of Mark.

Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome - some of Jesus’ most devoted disciples, who followed Jesus in Galilee, who watched Jesus be crucified and die, who discovered where his dead body was laid to rest - it is these women who, at the first moment they can, head back to the tomb with with spices, to grieve and honor their friend with proper burial rites. But they are worried about the stone, “who will roll [it] away?” they ask. Yet when they look up they see that the stone has already been moved. So without pause, they go inside the tomb to find out what’s going on. But these devoted, persistent, and brave disciples are not prepared for what they encounter - an empty space where their dead friend should be and instead a young man in white who tells them that Jesus has been raised and proceeds to give them instructions to spread the news. But what do they do? The gospel of Mark reads that, “terror and amazement seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” We are left with Mary, Mary and Salome buried in a tomb of grief, of fear, of awe, unable to say a word.

That is how Mark’s gospel ends - in the silence of burial. It’s an uncomfortable ending and rightly so because the experience of burial is never a pleasant one. But although that is how the gospel of Mark ends that isn’t the end of the story. We know from other gospels that the women don’t stay silent and buried forever. The very existence of Mark’s gospel reveal that God does come to them, rolls away the stone, unburies them so that they may proclaim the good news.

And in their story we find our story. For there are so many ways that our lives get buried before we experience our final burial - we can get buried in sorrow and grief, fear and anxiety, anger, guilt, hopelessness, regret, self-loathing, the things we’ve done and the things we’ve left undone. These become the stones that bury us in tombs of death whether it be physical, emotional or spiritual. And with the women, we may wonder, Who will roll away our stones? Who can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves?

It is on this day, especially, that that question is answered. Who will roll away our stones and do for us what we can not do for ourselves? God in Christ. For every stone that seals a tomb, for every burial we’ve known and experienced, there is always an Easter. Easter is not a one time event because God’s speciality is the bringing forth of new life from death. So it has been throughout our salvation history starting with the beginning of time when we were created out of nothing and made alive in God’s image, to the parting of the Red Sea when God leads the Isrealites into a new land and life, to the Valley of Dry Bones when God’s Spirit breathes life into dead skeletons, to the prophet Zephaniah who declares new joy and new life that is found in God’s mercy. These stories are Easter stories. And it doesn’t stop there. “God unburies you," says the boy. The young man at the tomb says, “He has been raised.” And the Church proclaims for all time, “Christ is risen!”

Tonight we are not only celebrating Easter, we are living Easter. We who have been buried for more than a year in a tomb of pandemic, a tomb of loss and isolation, a tomb of grief and death, we are experiencing new life. This Easter vigil proclaims that the stone of our tomb is being rolled away. God is leading us into a new, unburied, resurrected life in Christ. And not just we who are gathered, but all of God’s people near and far, present and past. For Christ’s resurrection life has no limits and knows no bounds.

And that boundlessness is in our very midst because we are joined in celebration by a cloud of witnesses, God’s beloved who have gone before us, including those who are buried in our cemetery. Many of whom we have known and loved. They are part of the company of heaven who with Angels and Archangels join with us in proclaiming the glory and the good news of God’s never-failing, never-ending life and love. They are just as much a part of this worshipping community as we are. They are among us, unburied and alive, with Christ and in Christ, just as we are unburied and alive, with Christ and in Christ. In the fullest sense, we are united in Holy Communion - together living into the new, unburied, resurrected life in Christ. This is Easter.

The very fact that we live means that we all experience death in both big and small ways, buried by the circumstances of life. But that’s ok because God comes and unburies us  - not just once, not just at an Easter vigil service. God comes and unburies us always and forever more.

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

 

 

 

 

 

Good Friday Sermon. 4/2/21 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Good Friday

My kingdom is not from this world. The crucifixion is a horrible story. It’s nauseating in its cruelty, but the sheer brutality of it highlights the great and abiding distinction between the empires of this world and the reign of God. Torturing and killing people is routine for the Romans, as it has been for human regimes down through the centuries to this very day. We take it for granted. So the words of Jesus should shake us up: If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the [religious leaders]. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here. The distinctive feature of the reign of God, what sets it apart from any human dominion, is non-violence.

Unbelievable though it may seem to us, Jesus refuses to defend himself. He will not resort to violence, nor will he let those who follow him resort to violence. In Matthew’s Gospel, when someone cuts off the ear of one of the people coming to arrest Jesus, Jesus says firmly, Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. It doesn’t matter that Jesus is innocent; it doesn’t matter that the whole affair is unjust. Jesus refuses to commit any violence at all. Not only does he refrain from physical violence: he won’t even indulge in verbal violence. He doesn’t lash out with his tongue, he doesn’t curse his persecutors. The words of Isaiah, describing the LORD’s suffering servant, resonate deeply: Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

And there is one more twist to this. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s account, Jesus is presented as an innocent victim who does not fight back. But John’s version, which we heard tonight, is more magisterial. As John describes it, Jesus is not a victim: he is in charge the whole time. He tells Pilate that he would have no power over him unless it had been granted to him from above. When he is crucified, there is no cry of dereliction from the cross. Jesus turns over the care of his mother to the beloved disciple, drinks sour wine in fulfillment of scripture, says it is finished, and gives up his spirit. Throughout it all, he is calm and in control. Do you understand? It’s not that he can’t resort to violence — he won’t resort to violence. Period.

The cross exposes us, people. It reveals the truth about us. And we are no different than the Romans. Violence is our way of life. Our sports are violent, our movies are violent, our video games are violent, our punishments are violent, our perceived solutions to many problems are violent, our thoughts are violent, our language is violent. Listen to the news. Listen to your own heart. You know this is true. And we can try to defend ourselves by arguing that this is just the way the world is, that only the mighty prevail, that we have a reason to be angry, that the use of force for the sake of goodness is always justified, that we are just being realistic — but the cross won’t let us get away with it. In the Kingdom of God, there is no violence. If we are truly going to follow Jesus, we have to take that seriously.

The ramifications of this are manifold, but tonight I will just focus on the most basic: awareness. All of us can observe the seeds of violence within ourselves: the anger, the resentment, the hatred, the fear that is there. And when we see this, we can do so without judgment. The cross exposes us but it doesn't condemn us. God always looks at us with love —and only love can bring about real change. We can’t fight fire with fire: we can’t violently suppress our violent thoughts and feelings. It won’t work: violence begets violence. The way forward begins with simple awareness, seeing ourselves as we are in the light of Christ, and allowing the Holy Spirit to do her slow work of healing and transformation. Over the years, I have found that this is the only way I can productively deal with my own violence, with the anger, fear, pain, and stress that I feel which often leads me to do and say things that are hurtful. And that’s the key: just seeing all the ways we hurt ourselves and hurt others by our own inner violence and by our complicity in the violence that saturates our society. The more we see it for what it is, the more we see ourselves and our world through the compassionate eyes of Christ, the more we will be like him, and the less we will be like the people who killed him.

It’s amazing, really. God uses the brutality of the cross to save us from ourselves. Yes, we can praise Jesus and worship God, but the most important thing we can do, what I am certain God wants us to do, is to let ourselves be saved. Tonight, look at the cross; look at the world; look at yourself — and see.