Freedom to love. June 26, 2022. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Galatians 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62

‘Tis the season to celebrate freedom. Last Sunday, June 19th, was Juneteenth, the day our nation commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people. And next Sunday will mark the eve of our country’s independence day. In the midst of these celebrations we hear a lot about freedom - often defined as the ability to do or say whatever you want. However, the reality is that freedom has its limits. Our freedoms are always in tension with the freedom of the people around us.

Take, for example, the coming celebration of the 4th of July. The freedom to blast-off massive amounts of fireworks can be severely limited by local governments due to the noise and the risk of fire. So even on the day when we celebrate freedom, our freedom to create giant explosions is balanced by our neighbors' freedom to live in an explosion free environment. Freedom isn't just the ability to do whatever we want without regard to anyone else. There’s more to it than that - or at least there should be.

It is “for freedom Christ has set us free.” That’s how the apostle Paul puts it in our reading from the book of Galatians. But lest there be any misunderstanding, he’s quick to make clear what he means by that. For in Christ we are indeed set free, but this freedom is not a license for self-indulgence. We are not set free to live lives that are centered on ourselves. Because, ironically, that’s not freedom. It’s a false idea of freedom. It’s actually, as Paul puts it, a way of submitting ourselves to a yoke of slavery. Because a life that revolves around the self - what I want, when I want it, how I want it - is a life that is chained to the fickle and insatiable master of the ego. That part of ourselves that is insecure and full of fear and anxiety and, when given free rein, can drive us in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others.

We see this in our gospel reading. Jesus and the disciples are heading towards Jerusalem and as they travel some go ahead to the next village to set up accommodations for their rest. But it turns out that the villagers, for unknown reasons, refuse to roll out the welcome mat. Ok, that’s not cool. And that’s certainly not following the cultural norms of hospitality. I’m sure it was an inconvenience or maybe even a hardship that the group was forced to walk further than they originally desired. It would be natural to be frustrated or angry about it. However, the disciples James and John take it to a whole new level. They respond as if the village’s lack of hospitality is a capital offense. Why? Because their egos are involved. Somehow this slight offends them in a very significant way which they feel deserves just recourse, driving their next comment, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" To which Jesus responds by turning to them and rebuking them. We don’t know what he said, but I can imagine it was along the lines of, “What part of loving your neighbor includes calling down fire upon them?” Then following the rebuke, Jesus models how to not to submit to the ego’s yoke of slavery by simply letting it go and moving on, both literally and figuratively.

It is for freedom Christ has set us free. We are set free from the bonds of self so that we might know the true freedom that is experienced when we take our minds, our focus, our passions off of ourselves and invest all that energy into love. Loving our neighbors as ourselves. Because the purpose of your life and mine comes down to this: to continually grow in the capacity to love. The more we love the more free we become. And we grow in this freedom to love by opening ourselves up to the source of love which is God. And God’s Spirit, if we let her, always desires to bear the fruit of love in our lives. 

Several weeks ago in the wake of the most publicized recent gun violence, I heard on the radio one of the mothers from the Sandy Hook tragedy being interviewed. Her name was Scarlett Lewis. And one thing she said particularly resonated with me. She said, “There are only two kinds of people in the world. Good people and good people in pain.” I was struck by how someone who has lost so much due to the violent act of another could extend that much grace and compassion towards the perpetrator. No one would blame Ms. Lewis if she was full of bitterness and hate. But it seems that she’s not. Instead of being chained to that darkness she has opened herself up to know the freedom of extending love and charity to her enemy. I don’t know if she’s a Christian or if she would use this language, but to me her life looks like the work of the Spirit. And that is the kind of  freedom that Christ intends for us all.

Ms. Lewis’ story is particularly remarkable and serves as a beacon for us. Yet as I preach this I am keenly aware of how challenging it can be to live in the freedom of love even in the regular  struggles of life. So I take some solace in the apostle Paul who just before our reading begins in Galatians, is in a rage against his rival missionaries. What’s got him so distressed is that these other preachers have come to town, sought out the new believers and told them if they want to be legit they really need to be circumcised. Now for various reasons Paul is strongly, and I mean strongly opposed. So much so that in a fit rage he writes, “Why don’t those troublemakers, obsessed as they are about cutting, go all the way and castrate themselves?” (5:12, The Message)

I love it - telling these preachers to cut theirs off while at the same time extolling the fruit of the Spirit like gentleness and self-control. It’s so human, isn’t it? And I identify with the inner push and pull. How in some situations we can be our best selves, our Christ selves, and experience the freedom that comes with loving generously while in other situations not so much,  we react harshly and lash out.

The freedom that comes from life in the Spirit doesn’t just happen. We lose it at times, we mess up, we allow ourselves to submit to the bonds of a self-centered life. Yes, that is all true. And yet what is more true, more real, and our greatest hope is that God’s Spirit lives within us. And that Spirit is all about love. Indeed, that Spirit is love and she is always seeking to flow in and through our lives. To manifest herself with the fruit of love so that not only are we blessed and set free, but are a blessing of freedom to others. This is the freedom - the freedom to love - that we were created to experience and to celebrate not just once or twice but all year long. For it is for freedom that Christ has set us free! 

 

 

 

In the midst of it all. June 19, 2022. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

 1 Kings 19:1-15a; Luke 8:26-39

There’s an old story of a king who lacked peace of mind. He worried and fretted constantly until he finally got tired of it. He wanted to find peace. So being a visual person, he commissioned the three greatest painters in his realm to paint a picture of peace. They did, and then brought their paintings to the king. The first painting showed a lake at sunset: the water was perfectly calm, the light shimmered gracefully on the face of it, lovely trees surrounded it. It was beautiful, free from any hint of conflict. The second painting showed a meadow in springtime, very bucolic, with flowers and sheep and a stream gently running through it. A tranquil, beguiling scene. Then the third one arrived. It was a painting of a storm at night, done in livid shades of black and blue and grey. Harsh streaks of lightning rent the sky, rain poured down violently, the whole picture emanated discord and strife. The king frowned at it, and was just about to turn to the artist and ask him if this was some kind of bad joke, when he noticed it. Very small, so small you could hardly see it, cradled in a rocky crevice, was a nest, and in the nest was a bird ― asleep. And when he saw that, the story goes, the king finally discovered the peace he sought. You can get a sense of this from the picture I have included in your bulletin, a picture inspired by that story. Right there in the center, in the midst of the storm and tumult, barely visible, you can see a bird at rest in its nest.

One naturally thinks of Jesus asleep in the boat while the storm raged all around him, but this is a theme found throughout Scripture: we see it in the readings we heard today. Elijah has been involved in terrible violence: he has slaughtered the prophets of Baal and now Jezebel wants to kill him. He is running for his life in the wilderness. He comes to Mt. Horeb, and while there he endures a terrible windstorm, an earthquake, and a fire. Elijah does not find God in the violence, whether natural or man-made. But then there is the sound of sheer silence. And in that silence Elijah encounters the living God. We see a similar dynamic in the Gospel. This poor man is possessed by a legion of demons, who torment him constantly. He thrashes around so horribly that he has to be shackled and constrained; Mark’s version tells us that he howled continually. It’s frightening to think about, just as it’s frightening to imagine a herd of pigs plunging into a lake and drowning. But the climax of the story, the God  moment, does not come in the agony and destruction. It comes when the townspeople find this man sitting at the feet of Jesus, calm and in his right mind.

Over and over again in the Bible, while storms rage and conflicts swirl, there is a mysterious something at the center of it all which is quiet and undisturbed. It is always there: we do not create it and we cannot destroy it. In “Burnt Norton,” the first of his great Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot calls it “the still point of the turning world.” Its presence in the Bible might change the way we think, but its presence within us can definitely change the way we live.

 

And make no mistake: it is there. Jesus calls it the kingdom of God and says that that kingdom is within us. Paul calls it the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding (Phil. 4:7), given to us as a gift. And can there be any greater gift than that, anything more important for us to realize and accept? I mean, have you seen the news recently? Or forget about the news. Have you gotten out of bed recently? Have you lived at all? To be alive is to struggle. Desires, passions, fears, and anxieties so often seethe inside us while the world around us boils with conflicts, violence, and all manner of turmoil. If there is an unshakeable calm in the midst of it all, an all-powerful peace that we can access and share in, then we need to know that. To experience that mysterious something really would be salvation.

And we can experience it. In fact, it is ours to live and to share. I feel moved by this Gospel. Those townspeople come and find this demoniac calm and in his right mind. It makes me think of the prodigal son. The great pivotal moment in that story took place when the prodigal son, as Luke puts it, came to himself (Luke 15:17). That’s such a great expression: he came to himself. After losing himself in carousing and debauchery, he wakes up and finds himself in his right mind. To come to ourselves, to be in our right minds, is to be united with God in the depths of our soul. Jesus offers us the way to do that: he shows us what it looks like, he removes all the obstacles that prevent us from experiencing it, and he gives us his Spirit. We are one with Christ and one with God. And in that place where we are connected, the center of our souls, there is only wholeness. Our Christ self is never afraid and never shaken; our Christ self is always calm and always free: free from distress and free to love. Life will often be turbulent, and storms will frequently erupt within us and around us. But at the core of who we are is God’s endless love and God’s perfect peace — always.

Following Jesus means living in our right mind and knowing this. One of the great benefits of gathering for Eucharistic worship is that in doing so, we come to ourselves and remember who we really are. One of the great benefits of praying is that it connects us with God and our truest selves. Let this picture be a visible reminder for you. No matter how tumultuous our lives may be, the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ, the peace of God dwells firmly and unshakably at the core of our being, just as that bird lies at the center of the storm. We can tap into this all the time, and we should. When we receive Holy Communion, we are nourishing this reality. When we pray, we are connecting with this reality. When we feel frightened or anxious or angry or lost, God is there within us — fearless and calm, inviting us to come to ourselves and return to our right mind. The more we remember this, the more we practice doing this, the more we will actually live in the kingdom of God and know that peace of God which surpasses all understanding.

Ultimately rational. June 12, 2022. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

 

John 16:12-15

No offense, but you’re a bit of a weirdo. If it makes you feel any better, so am I. Actually we all are. You know why? It’s because, as Christians, we believe this “weird” thing about God. It’s something that none of the other world religions believe. And that is that God is one and yet - this is where Christianity differs from all others - this one God exists in three equally divine “persons,” whom we most commonly call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the Trinity. We may not think about it very much on a day to day basis, but it’s at the core of our faith and really at the core of who we are. It’s so essential that it’s the only church doctrine that has a Sunday dedicated to it each year. Welcome to Trinity Sunday.

Funny thing, though, as fundamental as the Trinity is to our faith its is one of the most difficult things to explain. Come on, how can God be three persons and still one God? Well, many preachers this morning will try to answer that question with various analogies, metaphors and even some visual aids, I’m sure. But for better or for worse, that's your call, I'm not going to even try. Partly because I think the impulse to explain God is rooted in a desire to control. For when we can explain something, at least to our satisfaction, there's a sense of mastery of it. We’ve figured it out and can move on. But in addition to that another reason I’m not going to try is because Jesus didn’t.

In our reading from the gospel of John, he refers to himself in relation to the Spirit and to the Father, but clearly he’s not interested in parsing out all the theological implications. Instead, what Jesus seems most concerned about as he is saying goodbye to his friends on the night before he knows he will be killed is offering hope. Hope not found in a Trinitarian doctrine, but in a Trinitarian God. One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bound together in an interdependent, indivisible relationship. What Jesus reveals without any real explanation is that God is ultimately relational. 

So even if we can’t understand a three in one triune God being relational is something that we do get, right? Because who we are, the ways that we understand our own identities, and the experiences that bring the deepest meaning and joy in our lives often depend on interaction, on relationship. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God - a God who is not one solitary being  alone, but a God whose three persons are forever in relationship with one another. And as those who are made in the image of such a relational God it makes sense then that whether we are extroverts or introverts, social butterflies or monastic hermits, we cannot survive - or at least thrive - living in isolation. We certainly learned this during the worst of the pandemic: we need each other.

Which is a wonderful thing, but it can also be terrifying. I mean it would be much easier, or at least much safer, if we didn’t need each other. Because my guess is that for most of us the source of our deepest pains and vulnerabilities comes from relationships. Nonetheless there is hope in the revelation that God is fundamentally relational too. Because that means that our vulnerability, our need for connection, for the meaning-making of relationship, is not a mark of weakness, but rather a mark of divinity, a reassurance that we are, indeed, made in the image of God. And that ultimately God is the One who can meet our deepest need for connection, for meaning, for relationship.

Because our Trinitarian God is not a closed relationship. God is not something or someone that we observe from the outside once a year. On the contrary, the love that exists between Father, Son, and Spirit cannot be contained. It is always spilling out and flowing beyond the three persons. As we hear Jesus say in another part of John’s gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life.” It is this love that God has for us, for the world, that is always being poured out into our lives, inviting us to join in - always reaching out, connecting us, enfolding us so that we might have the abundance of life in relationship with God and with each other.

On this Trinity Sunday we get to live the richness and the abundance of this life of relationship as we celebrate our graduating seniors and welcome a whole cadre of newcomers into the life of the parish, in addition to partaking in our first meal together since the pandemic shut down. It has been over two years since we’ve had anything like a parish picnic. And even though the weather is far from ideal (it’s been raining and storming all morning) there is still much to celebrate and much to enjoy. The Holy Trinity invites us to delight in the gift of love, the gift of people, the gift of communion together now and always - even if that might mean one weirdo with another.    

 

 

 

Rivers of living water. June 5, 2022. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Acts 2:1-21; John 7:37-39a

Day of Pentecost

Of course I want to talk about the Holy Spirit today, but I want to begin in a place that might not seem obvious, namely the University of Virginia, with a particular focus on the work of Dr. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and former director of the Division of Perceptual Studies in the medical school. Much of Dr. Greyson’s work over the years has explored a deep mystery: What is consciousness? And is consciousness produced by the brain? In an interview he did several years ago, Dr. Greyson said:

All the evidence suggests that the brain is indeed involved in thinking, perception and memory, but it doesn’t necessarily suggest the brain causes  those thoughts or memories. As you listen to me speak, there’s electric activity in the temporal lobe of your brain, but does that mean your brain or your temporal lobe is producing the sound of my voice? Not at all — all the studies showing brain areas associated with different mental functions only show correlation, not causation.

He then goes on to say this:

The materialist view of the world fails to deal with how the brain can produce a thought or feeling or indeed anything that the mind does. And yet despite having no idea how it could work, most neuroscientists continue to maintain this 19th century materialist view that the brain, in some miraculous way we don’t understand, produces consciousness. And they discount or ignore the evidence that consciousness in extreme circumstances can function very well without our brain.

That’s fascinating stuff, but while Dr. Greyson’s methods and studies are modern, the idea that there is a consciousness greater than our brains, a consciousness we somehow tap into, is not new at all. We can look back a hundred years to Carl Jung and his work on the collective unconscious. Or we can go further back to the 19th century and the work of William James, the founder of modern psychology, who believed the brain served as a filter or conduit to a greater consciousness. Or we can jump back thousands of years to Plato, or go back centuries before that to the Upanishads in India. Down through the ages and around the world, there has been a strong sense of a greater reality that we somehow touch or participate in. Call it consciousness, call it mind, call it soul, call it spirit, call it God, call it what you will. The evidence keeps pointing us towards it.

And studies of stroke survivors, head trauma victims, and those who have had near death experiences indicate that when people do touch this greater consciousness, the results are remarkable, and include profound feelings of bliss, peace, and unconditional love. But we don’t need scientific studies to tell us this. We can just read the New Testament. Today’s lesson from Acts describes a wondrous event, when a group of Jesus’ friends and followers experience something so powerful that onlookers think they’re drunk. But they’re not drunk. Whatever this greater consciousness is, they have tapped right into it, even to the point of speaking in languages not their own. As Luke puts it, they are filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the presence, the consciousness, of God that pervades all of creation, the entire universe. It is obviously far greater than anything our brains are capable of understanding or encompassing. But here’s the amazing witness of the early Church, and of believers down through the ages: when we see in Jesus Christ the face of God, when we grasp, when we really get it,  that his life, death, and resurrection truly reveal the nature of God to us, then we directly experience the Spirit. That can happen in dramatic ways or it can unfold slowly. But the Bible is clear: believing in Jesus unlocks our brains, opens our hearts, and expands our souls so that we are actually connecting to the Spirit of God and realizing our oneness with that Spirit.

And when that Spirit flows through us, something infinitely greater than we are is moving. As Jesus says in the Gospel today, Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water. Rivers of living water! That infinite and unending stream of water is the Holy Spirit. And to follow Jesus means to live in her power and feel the flow of her love and goodness in our lives. I cannot emphasize this enough: Jesus did not come to replace one dry moralistic code with another: he came so that we could actually experience God and live in deep communion with God’s Spirit. Everything pales in comparison to that. So great, so monumental, is the contrast between just following religious rules and having the Holy Spirit, the very consciousness of God, flowing like rivers of living water through us, that the early church had one word for it: salvation. And the metaphors used to describe that salvation are awesome: It’s like waking up; it’s like being born again; it’s like finding out who we really are; it’s like being dead and coming back to life.

There is nothing magical about any of this: the Spirit is utterly real, which is why so many spiritual traditions and so many scientific studies point us towards this greater consciousness, whether they use religious language to describe it or not. What matters for me as a priest in this parish is that we allow ourselves to experience the Spirit. In the coming weeks I am going to explore what that means in my midweek messages, but here’s what I want to leave you with today: there is far more to us than we even begin to imagine. Our spirits are deeply connected to God’s Spirit. Jesus wants us to know that like he knew that in his earthly life. And he wants us to feel the love, joy, and power of that Spirit as we live our lives in this world. All the hoopla of Pentecost Sunday points us to what is true every Sunday, indeed what is true every day: to follow Christ is to live in the Spirit. In the coming days, do this: imagine that Spirit flowing through you like rivers of living water. In the coming days, pray this: flow through me Spirit, and fill me with your love, your joy, your power. Let yourself receive the gift that God gives to us every moment.