What being blessed really means. January 29, 2023. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Matthew 5:1-12

I missed you all last Sunday. I missed you because last weekend I, along with Father David and the lay leaders of the church, were in Richmond at our Vestry Retreat. That time away was especially sweet because, due to Covid, we haven’t been able to gather like that since January of 2020. As you may know, the Vestry Retreat Weekend is a mix of work and play. There’s time for prayer and spiritual reflection along with visioning for the church in the next year. And then there’s the fun with icebreakers, free time, and a type of charades game. It was definitely a laugh to see Fr. David impersonate Marilyn Monroe! But on the first night, though, one of the things we did was talk about how our faith was ultimately about good news. Each one of us reflected upon what that good news was to us and how we experienced it at Church of Our Saviour. It was quite a moving experience as one by one we shared what our faith meant to us on a personal level. Obviously, there was no right or wrong answer. Every reflection was beautiful. One person talked about the good news was simply that God exists and that that God is good. Another shared how he had grown up in a faith community where God was all about judgment but now, as an adult, he heard a different message. The message of a loving and accepting God. And not only that but also how he really felt that love and acceptance at COOS - that no one was there to judge. Then one woman talked about how, when she first came to our church, it wasn’t God that she was looking for but a wholesome community for her family. At first, she didn’t particularly believe in Christ but over the years of hearing the good news and experiencing it she came to believe. And that has made all the difference.

 At its heart Christianity is all about hearing, knowing, experiencing, and sharing good news. In fact the word “gospel” itself, if you trace it back to the original Greek, literally means “good news.” Yet our gospel reading - the good news according to Matthew - may sound, at best, more like mixed news. Jesus does say blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers. That’s all well and good. And likely we can get on board with that. But blessed are the poor in spirit? Blessed are those who mourn? Blessed are the persecuted? Really? That's quite a stretch.

 Especially because we often think of blessings as gifts or even prizes that God doles out to us. A loving family, close friends, good health, a satisfying job, a luxurious vacation, a roof over our heads - we call these blessings, and they are. But if blessings are only things in our lives that address our needs or make us happy then what is Jesus talking about? Being poor in spirit or grieving over a lost loved one or experiencing ridicule, harassment, and maybe even violence doesn't sound like such a good thing. Let alone a blessing.

 So maybe it would do us well to expand our notion of what being blessed really means. When we look at the word for “blessed” in our reading from the gospel of Matthew we see that it comes from the Greek word, “makarios,” which is commonly translated as blessed and sometimes even happy. But there’s also another way to understand this word and that is with our English word “flourishing.”^[1] Flourishing, as in, marked by vigorous and healthy growth. So if blessing is more than just good gifts from God that we can point to and name, if blessing also includes deep, rich growth in our lives then maybe Jesus is onto something. Because like it or not, when you reflect on the times when you grew the most, was it really when you were sitting on a beach soaking in the sun? Or has deep wisdom and healthy growth been more hard earned through some degree of toil and struggle? Probably so. Which is why Jesus calls us here to the lifelong task of attuning ourselves to what blessing truly is and how often it is found in the last place we’d willingly look for it. Flourishing, he says, are the poor in spirit. Flourishing are those who mourn. Flourishing are the persecuted - along with the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers. The blessings of which Jesus speaks here are not prizes that God gives out to certain people in certain situations. Rather they are invitations into a way of being in the world that results in true and full flourishing.

 Yet, I don’t know about you, but when I experience hard times in my life, times where I feel empty, vulnerable or exposed my first impulse is to retreat, to pull in, and put up all of my defenses. But there is another way - a better way. Jesus invites us to resist that impulse during such times of trial. Instead of pulling in, to trust God in all of our vulnerabilities, in all of the unknowns and allow God to open us up in new ways - ways that give us new wisdom about what really matters in this world, ways that increase our compassion for others, ways that deepen our connection to the God of love. Ways that bless and help us to flourish. 

 Although our reading ends on that note, that we are to rejoice and be glad in this good news, that’s not where Jesus ends. He goes on, “You are the salt of the earth” and, “You are the light of the world.” The flourishing that God desires in our lives is not to be ours alone. As salt and light we are to spread this flourishing out into the world through witness, deed, and invitation to the same. Our reading from the prophet Micah puts it this way, that when all is said and done this is what God wants from us, that we do justice, and we love kindness, and we walk humbly with our God. For when we do, all of us will flourish.

 That is the good news which we reflected upon last weekend at the Vestry Retreat. Each of us used different words, nonetheless, we were all touching upon, in one way or another, the same thing. That life is richer, more meaningful, and true when we know God’s love and presence in our lives. It is my hope - really, it is my prayer that each one of you knows that good news deep within your souls. Because when we do then, no matter what life holds, whether we are meek or mourning, pure of heart or persecuted, we will be blessed and flourish. 

 

   

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^[1] Jonathan Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary

Allowing God to name us. January 15, 2023. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Isaiah 49:1-7; John 1:29-42

If you’ve been around this parish for more than a day, you’ve probably noticed we have a lot of Davids walking around. We even have multiple Father Davids. There’s Fr. David Wayland, who is often referred to as David the Tall. That would make me David the Short, although I prefer the traditional ecclesiastical title, David the Less. And that’s not to mention David the father of Dahlia, Phineas, and Truman. We have David the Teacher, David the Tenor, David the Pilot, David the Artist. There’s David the Mountain Biker, one of our star acolytes, and David the Lively, who sits in the back at the 9 o’clock service, beaming with smiles and exuberance. It can be hard to distinguish them all in conversation. Poor Mo. Kathleen often has to speak in mouthfuls: “I was late to my meeting with David Stoddart because David Sturges called, and then on my way over from Lucia House I ran into David Walther, and . . .” Well, you get the point.  

I love our name. It’s Hebrew, and it means “beloved.” And I say all of this because names have been on my mind a good bit as I have pondered the readings for today. Isaiah says in our first lesson, The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. I am pretty certain that when the Bible speaks of God naming people, it means more than God dictating what legal name will appear on someone’s birth certificate. In Scripture, names often reveal a person’s essence, the truth of who they really are. One of the epic moments of revelation occurs when God reveals God’s name to Moses at the burning bush: the great, unpronounceable I AM. And many significant moments of naming happen throughout the Bible, most of them initiated by God. We see an example of that in our Gospel this morning, when Jesus, God’s Son, looks at Simon with his no doubt penetrating gaze and says, “You may be called Simon, but I name you Cephas, Peter, Rocky,” seeing something in him that Peter probably didn’t yet see in himself. 

We might try to distance ourselves from all of this by thinking that such divine naming applies only to a few special people, to a handful of prophets and saints, but not to us. That, however, would not be true. It’s not like God just loves a few special people, and no one else matters to her. Quite the opposite. There’s a passage from the second chapter of Revelation that speaks to this. Urging people to persevere in faith, the writer quotes God as saying, To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it (Rev. 2:17). It can be hard to understand the symbolism in the Book of Revelation, but this particular image is striking: God will us a new name which only we and God will know. In other words, through God, each of us will finally know the fullness of who we  are. As Paul writes in First Corinthians: Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Cor. 13:12). God has already named each one of us: we are just in the process of discovering what that name is.

The challenge is that we like to name ourselves. And by that I mean we like to determine and establish our own identity. Each one of us has a story we tell ourselves, filled with successes and failures, gifts and flaws: I excel at math; I stink at soccer; I make great chili; I procrastinate too much at work; I get angry at my kids too often; I’m a successful businessman; I’m a lousy golfer; I really hate my haircut; and so on and so forth, a continuous chattering stream of analysis and commentary that goes on in our heads which we think of as “our selves.” And these things matter to some extent: they are a part of our human experience. But they don’t ultimately define us. All these qualities about ourselves that we like or detest do not name us. Part of growing spiritually and living more fully in Christ is letting go of our constant and sometimes frantic efforts to establish some kind of identity of our own and instead letting our true identity emerge over time – allowing God to name us. 

That is not the work of a week or a year, of course, but a life-long process. And certainly worship, prayer, acts of love and service are all essential parts of that process. But it is also crucial that we have a light touch with ourselves. Our failures that loom so large and our successes that seem so important don’t matter that much. Peter denied Jesus three times, and he had moments of cowardice and failures in leadership after the resurrection. But he proved over time to be a rock, to have a core of courage and strength that led him in the end to be crucified for Christ. His failures did not define him: Jesus named him correctly. On the other extreme, Paul was a super successful Pharisee, a man who, by all outward appearances, perfectly observed the demands of the Law. But that success meant nothing. In Philippians, he writes: Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him (Phil. 3:7-9a), Be found in him. Paul let go of his old self and found his true identity in Christ. And in doing so, he unleashed limitless reserves of love, joy, and peace.

I realize I cannot offer some easy three-step or twenty-step program to find our true identity in God. But I can say this: if we are feeling weighed down or crushed by our failures and flaws, we can relax and let go of that. Not only are we forgiven, but there is far more to us than those failures and flaws. And if we find ourselves clinging to our successes and constantly trying to boost our egos with more successes, we can relax and let go of that. We are of infinite value even when we are not perfect or fail to succeed at all. There is far more to us than our achievements. We are God’s beloved, each one of us called by God, each one of us named by God. It is the adventure of a lifetime to find who we really are in Christ until we receive that white stone with our true name on it, a name God already knows and is waiting patiently for us to discover.

A stand-in for all of us. January 8, 2023. The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Matthew 2:1-12

1, 362 miles. That’s roughly how far it is from Iran to Israel. Why that’s relevant is because we believe that the wise men, which we hear about in our reading from the gospel of Matthew, likely came from modern day Iran. We don’t know much about those wise men - how many there were, tradition says three, but that’s not spelled out in the story. Nor if they were all men, although given the time and culture, that’s likely. The only thing we know is that in the original scripture written in Greek they are referred to only as “magi” which was a class of priest-astrologers from an ancient Persian religion called Zoroastrian. Hence, it is thought that their travel originated somewhere in the region of what we know of today as Iran. Roughly 1,362 miles away. And, as you know, they didn’t have the luxury of hopping on a plane, making the trip in a few short hours. No. And sadly, even in our modern day given the political realities of the region, that’s still not an option. The only way the Magi could get from their home to the land of Israel was to travel all 1,362 miles by foot. That’s like leaving this building, figuring out which way is southwest, then hedging in that direction all through Virginia, passing through a corner of North Carolina, traversing the entire length of Tennessee, crossing Mississippi, entering into Texas, reaching Dallas, and then deciding to walk an extra 100 miles for good measure. It is quite a journey and if you are lucky enough to log about 25 miles a day you could go that distance in about a month and a half.

 I know all this because of the wonderful world of GPS that can plot out distance, show me terrain, warn me of obstacles, and provide me with an estimated time of arrival. There’s no guesswork, no ambiguity. I love it. The journey is clearly laid out and plans can be made accordingly. But obviously, the Magi had no such technology at their fingertips which may have been a blessing in disguise because it kept them open to the conditions on the ground. Instead of already having a set idea in their minds about where they were going, who exactly they would find, what it all would look like, they had to remain flexible and open, and exercise the ability to readjust their expectations. For surely when they arrived in Jerusalem they must have expected their journey to be over. They had followed the star which signaled the birth of the King of the Jews. Where else would that king be but in Jerusalem? Yet this is where things took an unexpected turn. First of all, when they inquired about the newborn king no one knew what they were talking about. It took a while until King Herod, after consulting with the Jewish leaders, informed the Magi that the Messiah was to be born not in Jerusalem, but in a backwater town called Bethlehem. Who would have thought? We take it for granted that the Magi took this news in stride, but it really is quite remarkable. They do something that is, indeed, very wise and yet often something we find very difficult to do - they let go of their own expectations and trust that the one whom they seek may actually be found in a way and in a place that they wouldn’t necessarily expect. So they make their way to Bethlehem where they find what to all appearances looks to be like a regular child born to a peasant mother in a humble home. Shockingly, they aren’t disappointed. They don’t complain that this isn’t what they expected. Rather they take it in and are overwhelmed with joy - a joy that comes from encountering the holy and the divine even, or maybe especially, in the unexpected. 

 We celebrate this encounter as the Epiphany - when God in Christ is revealed to the Magi, who really serve as a stand-in for all of us.  For Jesus came into the world not for a certain, select group of people, but for us all. And just as it was then, so it is now. God’s desire for us is always to know the light of Christ’s presence in our lives. Now often we may think of such epiphanies as big “Aha!” moments in our lives. Perhaps you can recall a particular time where you experienced deep peace in the midst of a crisis or an inner knowing when nothing at the time was knowable or maybe a release that came from forgiving someone who had terribly hurt you. Those spiritual experiences are special and should be treasured. However, if epiphanies are that remarkable and also that rare - something that happens just a handful of times in our lives, if we’re lucky - then honestly there’s not much to celebrate today on this Epiphany Sunday.

 But thank God that is not the case. Because the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ that we celebrate didn’t just happen when the Magi arrived at Jesus’ home. Rather the entire journey, all 1, 362 miles of it, was epiphanal. Observing the star at its rising, making the long trip to Jerusalem, continuing on to Bethlehem, seeing the child in his humble surroundings, offering him gifts, then traveling back home by another way - with each step the Magi took along that journey they encountered the light of Christ. God was present and being revealed.

 As we begin a new calendar year most of us probably have plans about how we’d like this year to go. And, if we’re lucky, some of those plans will go off without a hitch. But eventually, as we journey into this new year we will encounter the unexpected. But as people of faith our lives are not to be about clinging to neatly laid out plans, counting on some kind of spiritual GPS to provide us with all of the details of our route. Rather following Jesus means that we journey on a path where few things are certain - which means that flexibility and openness are absolutely necessary. Necessary so that we are able to readjust or sometimes even let go of our expectations. Trusting that the one we seek and, more importantly, the one who seeks us is found in ways and places that we may have never expected. Because epiphanies don’t just happen when we arrive at our planned destinations. They are appearing throughout the journey - often in the most unexpected times and places. So where might one of God’s epiphanies be happening for you? Where in your life are you on a journey that is calling you to be more open and flexible? Where are things not going completely as planned or where you are discovering that you have no control at all? Likely it is there that the light of Christ is shining. Can you pause for a moment, look up from your circumstances, and observe the light of God’s star, God’s presence, in the midst of all of it? Because it’s there. Epiphanies are happening all the time. Be open. Be flexible. Behold.