Practicing Resurrection - Fr. Hamer

Trinity Episcopal Church
Easter Sunday 2013
John 20: 1-18

Call: God is good!

Response: All the time!

Call: All the time.

 Response: God is good!

          Welcome to you on this Easter Sunday morning – the day of Resurrection. And isn’t this one of those wonderful, beautiful spring mornings when you can just sense and smell and almost touch the feeling of spring in the air. Bulbs are starting to pop through the ground, the snowdrops have been out for a couple of weeks. It feels like new life is all around us just ready to burst forth – reasserting the power of life after the cold and dreary winter we have endured. And this beautiful spring weather feels all the more beautiful and welcome in part because it is such a change from the winter.

          Now imagine taking that almost euphoric feeling and placing it in your soul – as Pastor George Chien shared with us last night the words of the poet Lucille Clifton:

The green of Jesus

is breaking the ground

and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus

is opening the house and

the dance of Jesus music

has hold of the air and

the world is turning

in the body of Jesus and

the future is possible

That must be a little bit like what Mary felt as she stood weeping by the tomb then first recognized Jesus on that first Easter morning. For three days she and Jesus’ disciples had endured first the arrest, then the torture and finally the execution of their dear friend and teacher, Jesus. Even though Jesus had described the type of death he would undergo and assured them he would return, those words were just a blur now, lost in the tumultuous events that followed. So distraught was she that she didn’t even recognize Jesus when he first spoke to her by the tomb – she thought he was the gardener. It was only when he called her by name that she recognized him and her spirit soared. She then ran to tell the other disciples, who had already returned to their homes, convinced that it was all over. . . But it was only the beginning.

This is what Easter is supposed to feel like – a celebration of new life, new beginnings, new possibilities in life that could only be imagined before. But just as spring is somewhat sweeter because it follows winter, so resurrection can only be fully appreciated if we understand it as lowering the curtain on a former way of life and simultaneously raising the curtain as another life begins. It has been said accurately that there can be no Easter without Good Friday. Similarly, in order for us to embrace Resurrection life, we must understand that it I rooted in the events of Holy Week.

And so I want to suggest that as we consider what it means to Practice Resurrection, not just today but making the practice of Resurrection a regular part of our lives going forward – really making a difference in the way we live and relate to God and the world. I want to suggest that there are three steps of which we need to be mindful, and they parallel the steps we have taken through Lent, into Holy Week and now into Eastertide. These steps are Removal, Replanting and Receiving.

          First, removal. The obvious here is that Jesus had to die before he could be resurrected. He had to be removed from this life in order to defeat the power of death. But do you notice this is a similar theme through God’s salvation history? Abraham was called away from his family, his social and financial security, to a place he knew nothing of. He had to do that in order to create a great nation. Now half of the world – all Christians, Muslims and Jews looks to him as their spiritual father. Jacob fled his family with nothing but his clothes with no assurance of ever returning and his only possession was his father’s blessing. Jacob’s son Joseph was kidnapped and sold away from his own family and sent to an alien, hostile Egypt, where, in furtherance of God’s mission and with God’s grace, he became the savior of the known world. Yet another example is the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt – the only story from the Hebrew Bible that is required to be a part of the Easter Vigil lessons.

There they were – trapped between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea, and they are screaming at Moses, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die? We could have stayed slaves in Egypt, where at least we were fed and housed.” But God had a better plan for them – and God opened the Red Sea before them and led them into their future. This experience of removal is frequently a way God chooses to work.

          Jesus’ work in the world on God’s behalf was completed. It was time for the next chapter.

          In our own practice of Resurrection, we, too, have to begin with looking at the life we are living and countenance those aspects of our lives that are inadequate to supporting Resurrection Life. Supposedly this was work we have been doing throughout Lent – weeding out that which is not useful in order to make room for that which is useful. Just like cleaning out our homes, we know this is a job that is never really done. So if you didn’t get to complete it to your satisfaction before today, or even if you never started, that’s okay. It’s never too late to begin. The point here is that we want to free ourselves from being hostage to old ways that keep us prisoners in order that we can be free to embrace the new thing that God wants to do in our lives.

The second aspect of Practicing Resurrection is to be open to being replanted in a better place. For Jesus, this transplantation was literal – he literally ceased his earthly life and was rejoined with God in heaven.

Again, look at the stories from the Hebrew Bible, the stories of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph and the Israelites, and we see that it is part of God’s pattern to nudge God’s children from a lesser way of life to a fuller, more purposeful and productive way of being. In all four cases, people were uprooted and sent off to unknown places, and in each case, God’s mission was advanced through these human instruments in ways none of them ever could have imagined.

And this was true for the disciples as well. At first, all they could experience was the apparent reality of Jesus’ death.  On the other hand, Jesus’ departure allowed the disciples to become closer to God, to become the apostles that Jesus’ intended for them to be. Instead of following Jesus around, the Lord would before long send his Holy Spirit who would guide them along new pathways leading to new horizons. That is far more pervasive than what Jesus could do by himself in a mortal body. Now they would hear from the Lord in ways that transcend language. Instead of hanging around Jerusalem and Galilee, they would begin to spread out over what was the known world, spreading the Good News to places where Jesus never ventured.

Another good example of removal and replanting in the New Testament is St. Paul – he was struck blind for a period of time in order that he might leave his former life of being a persecutor of the Gospel to becoming its most prolific writer and champion.

And so it is a necessary part of our own practice of Resurrection to be willing to go to places – either literally or figuratively – that may be unfamiliar or even unknown.

And this leads us to the third aspect of practicing Resurrection, and that is being open to receiving strength and power from God. More than being open to it, we have to trust that God will fulfill God’s promises. What is it that we receive? Well Jesus promised the disciples back in chapters 16 to 18 in the Gospel of John that they were to wait for the sending of the Holy Spirit, who would give them the wisdom, the power, the courage and the perseverance to continue Jesus work following his ascension. Throughout Lent and this past Holy Week, we have heard time and again of how God has led God’s people from places of slavery, misery and emptiness into  new, unexpected and previously unimaginable place of freedom, purpose and glory. Over the coming weeks of the Easter season we will hear and experience other stories of how the resurrected Christ entered into the lives of his followers. The message of this morning is that the promise is renewed once again, there for us if we will only see it, believe in it and claim it.

All of us here today are beginning our celebration of the Resurrection in the right way --  we are here in a faithful, worshipping community, the gathered Body of Christ in the 21^st Century, contributing our own witness to the truth of the Christian promise. But we sell that promise short if we understand this day of Easter as the culmination of the story and not the opening scene of a new story – in the words of St. Paul, the invitation, once again, to allow God in to do a new thing in our lives, and through us, to bring the world even just a little closer to the Kingdom of God. Amen.

 Please pray with me: Lord, as Easter dawns, help me to welcome the morning with a fervent hope and to savor the joy of the risen Lord. Give me holy boldness and apostolic zeal to embrace my mission as Your disciple, as I join You in making all things new. Alleluia.

Betrayal and Hope: Sermon Preached by The Rev. Donald Hamer for Asylum Hill Good Friday Ecumenical Service

Asylum Hill Christian Community

Good Friday, 2013

The Passion According to St. John

John 18: 1-11

          The Kidron Valley that Jesus crossed with his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane is only a few hundred yards wide. It stretches between the east wall of the Old City of Jerusalem – that part of Jerusalem which is now primarily Palestinian – and the steep hills of the Mount of Olives.  Four years ago last night, on Maundy Thursday in Jerusalem, my wife and I had the thrill of processing with a group of pilgrims from St. George’s Episcopal Cathedral in Jerusalem across that same valley, retracing the footsteps of Jesus and his disciples up to that beautiful garden on the hillside, with the cypress trees rustling in the warm breeze and the moon lighting our way. It was an awesome experience that will forever frame the way I experience Maundy Thursday.

          That night was not so peaceful for Jesus. The Passion Gospel of John begins with the words, “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out . . .” The words that Jesus had just spoken are the closing words of his farewell discourse to his friends in Chapter 17. For most of that discourse, Jesus is talking to them, preparing them for his departure from them. But the closing words are not addressed to them: these words are a farewell prayer to God. Jesus concludes with the following words: Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”  It is a powerful prayer, in which Jesus acknowledges his oneness with the father, and then takes that relationship as the model for his own intimate relationship with us.

          So isn’t it ironic then that in John’s Gospel the very next verses following Jesus’ impassioned prayer are the very opposite of that for which Jesus so fervently prayed: Jesus prayed that the whole world might be at one with itself and one with God; the figure of Judas serves to remind us of the sad human reality that we can always be vulnerable to betrayal – even at the hands of those to whom we are closest.

          And so in Judas we come to grips with the reality of evil in the world. Judas has no ulterior motives, he doesn’t even ultimately profit by his betrayal. He chose evil over good. Judas is a stark reminder to us of our own propensity to, time and again, choose evil over good. It is part of life in this fragile and imperfect world. Over this past year we have revisited evil time and again, whether it be in the mass shootings that happen with all-too-increasing frequency, the almost daily violence that permeates our cities and towns, our failure to take a moral stand as a nation about the role of violene in our society, or our failures to deal in a meaningful way with the continuing injustices of racism, poverty, inequality of educational opportunity or lack of adequate health care.  Jesus continues to call us “that we all may be one,” and we continue to betray him.

          On a personal and an institutional level, this has been the work of a Holy Lent for us. To examine our own lives, to examine the lives of our own communities of faith, and to recognize where we fall short of that dream of God that we all may be one as Jesus and his father our one. And that process culminates in this hour, when we all gather here together, with one voice out of many, acknowledging individually and collectively our failures in our journey to be Jesus’ faithful apostles.

          Judas is a story of failure, but it is only the beginning of the story. We begin this gathering today remembering Judas and his betrayal, and for the next several hours we will together walk and pray and sing and praise God as we remember the events that followed that betrayal. May it be a time for acknowledging the reality of our human failures, claiming God’s forgiveness, and looking forward in hope through the power of the Resurrection. AMEN.

Hearing a New Thing in a Time of the Gun

March 17, 2013
Trinity Church, Hartford
Fifth Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8

The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick

“Hearing a New Thing in a Time of the Gun”

Through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah God tells the people “I am about to do a new thing”. God then asks: “Do you not perceive it?” How can we hear that question today as we struggle to find our way through massive social and religious challenges to established ways of doing things and the prevailing ideologies that justify them? As we begin the process here at Trinity of trying to think about new ways of doing God’s mission in the world, established ways will be under question in a world of swift and varied changes, as today’s collect puts it.

In the midst of these changes it is quite natural for us to try, as best we can, to hang on to old certitudes, customary habits, well-tested, habitual patterns of living and ways of thinking that have served us well in the past as a buffer against unsettling and destabilizing changes. This tendency to rely on old truisms is an inevitable part of being human. No one likes to ride the sea of uncertainty with no helm, rudder, or sense of direction.

And yet, we also know that too much stability, too much certainty, can be imprisoning and stifle our creativity. It can make us less open to hearing and responding to new things. Some vulnerability to change is necessary if we are to allow new things to find entry into our lives. We know that clinging too tightly to the past runs the risk of being buried in the past, just as too much change too quickly can unhinge us entirely and set us adrift with no further shore in sight.

How startling then to read Paul’s words in this morning’s epistle: for Christ’s sake, he cries, I have suffered the loss of all things; and yet I regard them as rubbish. We are tempted to ask, can Paul really mean this? ALL lost things are now regarded as rubbish? Surely the accumulation of things through hard work and diligence is a testimony to our worth? If he had been a twenty-first century American, he would have known that the only way to tell whether someone is a ‘winner’ is by the amount of ‘stuff’ he has acquired. As a bumper sticker once put it, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” To accept the loss of these things and to call them rubbish makes no sense whatsoever in a society built on the right, even the moral imperative, to engage in unlimited accumulation and profligate consumption of ‘stuff’ as the measures of what it means to be successful and powerful, as having ‘made it’.

But if we are going to ‘think outside the box’ and be truly open to new ways of doing things, as Don’s sermon last week urged us to do, in the context of trying to discern God’s mission for the world, then let’s be willing to reconsider some old but now outdated assumptions about what we as a faith community can do in the wake of continuing gun violence. The Washington National Cathedral has called this weekend Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath Weekend. If we are to honor its intent we must be willing to drill down to the basic assumptions on which we have built much of our present practices and policies regarding lethal weapons.

If we live from the philosophy of accumulation we are inevitably driven into its corollary: the philosophy of fear; if we’ve accumulated a vast pile of goods, we will necessarily fear losing what we’ve acquired. And this fear will lead us to protect what we have from those who, in our fervid imaginations, are threatening to take it all away. This is the philosophy that enshrines the almost sacred worship of our right to possess personal weapons to defend ourselves against the threat of others. The second amendment’s original rationale was perhaps understandable in a time when the defense of a small community without the protection of a national army was provided by a militia composed of citizens who were primarily farmers or merchants.

But might we be bold enough to hear a new thing? To imagine that the original rationale for the second amendment might no longer be serviceable? Might we be at a point in our history when we might ask if the right to possess arms has outlived its usefulness? Is the right to possess guns a right which ought to be repealed if God is really to do a new thing in our corporate lives in this country. Can we perceive a new thing being started in a society in which the legal protection ostensibly provided by the ownership of guns might give way to a more fundamental and overriding right for all people to be safe from gun violence? Has the second amendment become a fetish, an idol, whose time has passed because gun violence on such a massive scale is a fundamental denial of our basic human right to live without fear? Paul says that we cannot become righteous through bondage to legal principles or by avoiding suffering, but only through our willingness to share in Christ’s sufferings, and in the sufferings of those who have been the victims of gun violence. Legal principles from an earlier age may well need to be re-examined in light of the vast violence carried out by means of lethal weapons throughout our country. Are we ready to at least open ourselves to the possibility that a new thing is beginning to happen in our collective lives? Repealing the 2^nd amendment would not mean the abolition of guns. But it would put guns in the same category as automobiles: we have no constitutional right to cars but we allow them even while we subject the ownership and use of cars to stringent regulation on both the cars and their drivers and owners.

There are of course many reasons why people want to exercise the right to bear arms. One is simply because they enjoy being able to shoot a gun at an inanimate target. Others, though I suspect they are a small minority, claim that they need to shoot animals in order to get food to eat. But the primary justification given by many Americans for the right to own guns is fear: fear of losing the goods that they’ve acquired; fear that their accumulated stuff and even their lives might be taken away by others who are envious of what they have. This includes the ever pervasive fear that our even our freely elected government is out to get us, that they are coming for us in our homes with their black helicopters and assault weapons. And so in a vicious cycle of ever escalating fear of others, we seek to arm everyone so that the fear we have of others is shared equally among us all and the mutuality of fear is our bond with each other. But surely true life, the kind of mutual life God intends for our well-being and flourishing, cannot be found in a mutuality of fear and defensiveness. A philosophy built on fear and the need for the lethal protection of the gun is a philosophy at odds with God’s intention for what it means to live in love, and just may be a philosophy that we can allow to fade away, to abandon as rubbish because it is built on the irrational and the dangerous belief that only by threatening others or defending ourselves with guns against the imagined threat they pose to us can we live meaningful lives.

No life based on the new thing God is doing for us can be built on this kind of fear. Living out of a pervasive fear of others destroys the very foundations of living out of love for others, a love that we know only because God, in Jesus, refused to be afraid and allowed himself to die at our hands because he knew that new life can arise even out of death at the hands of others, and not from destroying those who might threaten to take our lives.

 Now there are many sensible steps that can be taken to limit the danger posed by unlimited accumulation of guns. We’ll talk more about these in the education hour following this service. At this point we need only to consider the possibility that living by the philosophy of the gun is living the old life, living in a way that has not yet been opened up to living by God’s grace, not by the protection of armed self-defense. Now there may be times and places when self-defense is morally appropriate. But this appropriateness should not be used to justify a culture in which everyone is armed because everyone fears everyone else. If a world of completely reciprocal and interlocking fear is the world we are in, then, in Paul’s words, it is truly rubbish and we should be well rid of it and not count it as loss.

But in the wake of Sandy Hook there are signs of new thing that God is doing. God is opening up to us a way of thinking about life that is not built on the primacy of fear and protectiveness, but on love and the delights of living in and among different people with different gifts dedicated to a common life together. To perceive this new thing will be difficult. Our culture is saturated by images on TV, video games and films in which people right wrongs by ‘blowing away’ the ‘bad guys’ with deadly weapons. This resort to violence is a long-established pattern of response to our fear which has become ingrained in our culture. It is a pattern that depends, in the words of the collect, on our unruly wills and affections becoming attached to taking our protection into our own hands because we fear everyone else.

But a new thing, a new way of thinking, a new perception of life together is still possible if we are only prepared to live without fear because we live by God’s grace. To embrace the suffering of others and to live in hope and in vulnerability to others is the polar opposite of fending off the threat of suffering by taking human life ourselves at the end of the barrel of a gun. Until we can give up our reliance upon weapons and our passionate but perverse devotion to the sacred right to own guns, we cannot begin to bring the healing power of love and mercy to a broken world whose brokenness the philosophy of the gun only perpetuates. Instead we need to embrace Paul’s words that there is nothing, neither principalities or powers, nor life, nor death, nor the instruments of death, that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Lent 4: Becoming Ambassadors for Christ

Trinity Episcopal Church

Lent 4 – Year C

March 10, 2013

 Sermon Preached by The Rev. Don Hamer, Rector

Joshua 5:9-12            2 Cor. 5:16-21            Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

     This morning we continue our Lenten journey of looking for God in unfamiliar places or in unfamiliar circumstances.      To summarize where we have been during these past several weeks, on the first Sunday of Lent Pastor George followed Jesus on his trip into the wilderness and shared with us the need to be vulnerable in the wilderness as a pathway toward understanding our reliance on God. Then on the Second Sunday in Lent we explored questions about the very nature of God, and how we can come to know God through the example of Jesus himself. Then last Sunday Fr. Frank Kirkpatrick challenged us to avoid the wilderness of the temptation of the Garden of Eden – the temptation of relying solely on ourselves, thinking that we are responsible for our own fortunes and hold our own destiny in our hands. See what you miss when you don’t show up here for a few weeks?

     Which brings us to today, where in our Old Testament reading from Joshua we see the Israelites – for the first time in decades – eating from the land they inhabit and not the manna God had provided from Heaven while they were wandering in the wilderness. This reading, as it turns out, reinforces the point Fran was making last week, and it tells us something about human nature and our relationship to God: For forty years, the Israelites wandered through the wilderness and survived on the manna – they didn’t always like it, and they complained that it was boring, but they survived. When you think about it, after forty years, they got to depend on that manna, boring or not. And even though they now had food to eat from the produce of the land, that must have been pretty scary to know that the guaranteed nourishment they had come to depend on was stopping. But what happened? They became accustomed to depending on the fruit of their own labors for food, and before long, they forgot about the manna. Now working hard to produce food is not a bad thing, right? But what happened over time – they forgot that it was God who had gotten them through that wilderness time, and they fell into the exact sin that Frank warned against last week – forgetting God and thinking they alone controlled their destiny.

And it wasn’t long before they were turning to other gods and not the One God who brought them out of the wilderness. Nineteen chapters following the one we read this morning, Joshua is challenging his followers to decide which God they will worship – the one their father’s worshipped, or the gods of the land in which they have settled.

     It is easy for us to do the same thing. When you think about it, that’s one of the morals of the story of the Prodigal Son we just heard from the Gospel of Luke: The Son had all he needed while he was living with his father, but he got bored with life on the farm and wanted to go to the big City, where he could make it on his own. Well, that didn’t work out so well for him, did it? And before you know it, here he is, a Jew, feeding pigs, who are ritually impure for Jews. It takes him hitting the bottom before he realized how good he had it back home, and he decides to throw himself on his father’s mercy, say he’s sorry, and return. And when he returns to his father, he has still squandered his inheritance, but he is in a far better –and a far wiser – place back in his father’s house.

     Like humans, churches can also forget about their dependence on God and begin to look inward – and in the process, sometimes forget or lose sight of the reality that it is God’s mission we are supposed to be furthering and not our own.  That is why a central focus of the Episcopal Diocese right now is on mission discernment – trying to strip away the accretions of decades of focusing on the preservation of the institutional church as we had come to know it rather than focusing on furthering God’s mission and bringing the weight of the church to further that mission. We began, as Episcopal author the late Verna Dozier observed, to conflate the mission of the institution with the mission of God, and convinced ourselves they were one and the same.

     Now we find ourselves in the 21^st century realizing that we have some work to do rediscovering that Dream of God. With the evidence all around us, we are finally – and in many instances, belatedly, and often (to our shame) because of financial circumstances  --  coming to the realization that the institutions we humans have set up to glorify God as often as not are monuments to our own visions but necessarily reflective of God’s Dream. This is part of the hard work to which the Vestry and I are inviting the congregation over the next several years – discerning who we are as children of God, discerning where God is already at work in the world around us, and discerning what gifts we have at our disposal to contribute to that work.

     But wait a minute – this sounds a little scary, doesn’t it? Rethinking the familiar for the unfamiliar? Risking that which we know for the unknown? But this is the wilderness to which we are called beginning now, during this season of Lent, so that we may more faithfully live out the commission given us by the resurrected Christ come Eastertide. For this is what St. Paul is saying when he writes in this morning’s passage from Second Corinthians: If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation . . . entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. . . This, my friends, is an awesome responsibility, not one to be taken lightly.

     As I said, we Episcopalians are not alone on this journey. Not only is this going on in our own diocese, it is going on in virtually every major denomination at some level or another. Just last evening, Boo Morton and I were the guests of our neighbors down the street at Grace Lutheran Church. They were holding a pot luck supper to which they had invited a guest speaker from the New England Synod. And guess what the topic was? How Grace can become a more missional church, more responsive to God’s appeal to bring God’s kingdom closer. Boo and I were not the only guests in attendance. Pastor John Marschhausen of Immanuel Lutheran downtown, and Pastor Tom Beveridge from Christ Church Cathedral were on hand as well. Because we can all be assured that part of the conversation going forward is how the various denominations, and the various churches within the Christian denominations, can work together in support of God’s mission rather than in competition with one another.

     And so Pastor Jane challenged the members of Grace last evening to consider really looking at their congregation and their congregational life. She invited them into a process that may take them 2 – 5 years to complete, and she acknowledged that the process may lead them through some wilderness times and perhaps to some conclusions that will make some people uncomfortable. And she reminded us that Jesus didn’t come to make us comfortable – Jesus came to bring God’s reign to earth. As St. Paul reminds us, part and parcel of our Christianity is not being afraid to do that next new thing that Jesus sets before us, and embracing that mission almost always means going through uncharted territory.

     Pastor Jane left us with three criteria which can serve as touchpoints for us as we individually and collectively reflect on how we as the institutional church can be more faithful to further God’s mission in our own time. They are not easy criteria, and they are not the only criteria. But as I said two weeks ago, Jesus seldom gave easy or comfortable answers to questions about further God’s kingdom. So here are three criteria which were put out there last evening:

     --You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when the pain of remaining the way you are is greater than the pain of risking a change.

     --You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when you are more concerned about the people who have not yet been to your church than you are about the ones who were thee before and left. And the third criterion is

     --You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when you would be willing to let the congregation – note that I didn’t say “church” but I said “congregation” – you would be willing to let the congregation as you know it die if  that would lead the way to bringing the reign of God closer.

              As we continue this Lenten journey through the wilderness of stepping back and discerning who we are and who we are in relationship to God, I invite you to ponder these questions, along with the questions of who we understand God to be and what it is we understand about God. I invite you to engage these questions not into a journey of hopelessness and despair, but in the full knowledge that this is EXACTLY what St. Paul invites us to do in the process of being ambassadors of the risen Christ whose resurrection we will celebrate at Easter. AMEN.

Lent 3: Sorting Out Our Temptations: From the Trivial to the Serious

Third Sunday in Lent, C

March 3, 2013

“Sorting Out Our Temptations from the Trivial to the Serious”

The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick

In this morning’s scripture readings we continue with the theme of temptation, or as Paul puts it in his epistle to the Corinthians referring to Jesus, the test. And of course we will once again in the Lord’s prayer ask God not to lead us into temptation or put us to the test.

            Now what is this thing called temptation or the test to which the biblical passages are pointing? Clearly it implies a desire for something that we are forbidden to have or to ask for, or at least something that is not good for us, something that obstructs our journey toward the truth of God’s intentions for us. Lent is traditionally a time of restraint: avoiding the temptations for things we normally take pleasure in even when we know they are not good for us. Or the temptation is to challenge God to do something that in our fallible human wisdom we think is the right thing to do, as the man told the gardener in Jesus’ parable regarding the fig tree: ‘cut it down’, only to be cautioned that the time was not yet right for that to happen. 

            Now there are various kinds and degrees of temptation. Many of them, unfortunately, are of what I would call the trivial kind, the kind that can be turned into a laundry list of avoidances that are not all that hard. These are the temptations which we know we have the ability, if not always the will power, to avoid because they are not essential to our fundamental well-being. I don’t need that extra helping of salt, or ice-cream, or cookies, in order to have a satisfying meal. I don’t need another dinner out this month. I don’t need that extra item of clothing. We could list almost ad infinitum the items of temptation we could do without and still live a meaningful and satisfying life. In a highly consumerized culture the list of needless temptations is quite long. But so often we think we have fully captured the notion of temptation when we have completed this check list of things we could do without, even if only for the period of Lent. But it is putting Jesus to the test to ask him to help us avoid them. 

            These were not the kind of temptations that Jesus faced nor do they come close to the deeper kind of temptations we face in our lives today and whose true danger is often hidden from us by our rationalizations of them. In the midst of desperate hunger after 40 days with no food Jesus refused the test of the devil’s temptation to turn stones into bread. Jesus was also given the opportunity to rule over all the kingdoms of the world and then to hurl himself down onto the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem in the sure knowledge that God’s angels will protect him. The only thing Jesus has to do to get these powers is to worship the Devil rather than God. But Jesus rebuffs the Devil and says simply, “do not put the Lord your God to the test”. Jesus’s demand reminds us of what we say on our own behalf in the Lord’s prayer: save us from the time of trial, do not put us to the test, or in the traditional version, lead us not into temptation. Realistically, of course, our temptations are not on the scale of Jesus’: we are not usually tempted to worship Satan in order to rule over all the kingdoms of the earth, or to throw ourselves off a cliff in the expectation that God’s angels will carry us safely to the ground. Our temptations are usually more mundane but they do reveal something of our most basic human weaknesses, weaknesses which if we succumb to them will truly lead us into dangerous temptations, especially when we use our weaknesses to put Jesus to the test.

One of the most basic temptations arising from our human frailty is the temptation to expect God to solve even the most trivial problems we think we have, to turn God into a problem solver who will magically resolve any mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Now it is not wrong in itself to expect God’s saving power in all the moments of our life when our very well-being and core identity as children of God is threatened. But this does not mean expecting God to ensure us a seat on an airplane when we are flying stand-by; or to ensure a parking space close to the building we are visiting, or that the UConn basketball teams will secure a victory every time out on the court. Expecting God to grant us these things is the temptation that leads us to reducing God’s power to that of a magician who can re-arrange or alter the trivial and mundane affairs of our lives. And when we give in to that temptation we demean and dishonor the majesty of God. God is not a magic wand we can wave over our everyday trials and tribulations and have them disappear on command. God does not impose these trials on us nor does he spontaneously remove them from us simply by our invoking his name or entering into a bargaining relationship: Lord, if you do this for me, I’ll go to church more often. The Gospel does not suggest that God caused the Tower of Siloam to fall on those who were no more guilty of sin than those who escaped the tower’s fall. We can’t bargain with God to escape the consequences of our sin and it is a fatal temptation to test God by requesting that he exempt us from all dangers and bad things that befall all human beings.

The other serious temptations we often succumb to are those in which we think we can attain a power over others that will keep them away from us so that we don’t have to bear their burdens: this is the temptation to trust in the power of politics, for example, when we seek to pass laws that protect us from those ‘others’ who are different from us and for whom we don’t want to provide aid out of our tax dollars. A related temptation is that of attaining the power that comes with inordinate wealth, a wealth that promises to buy us out of having to care for those less well-off than we are; and there is also, I would suggest, the temptation to believe in the power of the gun which we are tempted to believe will keep potential intruders or those with evil intent from threatening us and our family. This is the temptation to believe that the more danger we can pose to others the less danger they pose to us, at least in theory. But if we keep going down the road of arming good guys with more guns than the bad guys, a road on which we threaten to take an eye for an eye, then eventually the whole world will be blind. Being tempted to possess wealth, political power, and the protection of the gun are all temptations that lead us to believe we can secure our own safety by building bullet proof barriers around ourselves and keeping others away from us: that we can determine what is good and right based on our fear of being encumbered by the needs of others, our fear that living in vulnerability to violence, deprivation, disaster, and accident is the greatest danger of all, a fear that must be overcome only by arming ourselves to the teeth with power, wealth, and an unlimited arsenal of weapons.

But this is to recapitulate the sin of the Garden of Eden: rather than trusting in God’s power, Adam and Eve trusted in their own ability to know good and evil but the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil was the one thing forbidden to them and yet from which they were tempted to eat: they were tempted to become their own gods and in their act of defiance they cut off their dependence on God and the human race has suffered ever since. This is the ultimate temptation: to rely on our prideful creations to save us and to bring us fulfillment as if God has ceased to exist. But what Jesus knew was that the temptations of Satan could not reach the spiritual heart of reality which is the trust that if we live by God’s power there is nothing to fear. 

God may not be tempted into magically resolving our frustrations or sufferings: but the one thing on which we can absolutely rely is that God will always be present with us no matter how deep our suffering. God does not cause suffering but he is never absent from the one who is suffering, to be everywhere available to us as a compassionate parent to hold us up, to strengthen us in the midst of our turmoil and despair. Throwing ourselves into the arms of God’s love is not a temptation but a necessity without which we cannot live as God intends us to live. God will not protect us from all forms of being tested: they are common, as Paul says, to everyone. But the one thing God promises is that you will never be tested beyond your strength, and that with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

            The trivial temptations mock God: the serious temptations mock the human nature God intended for us to live in. We were made for God and for each other: any temptation to believe that we made ourselves for ourselves and that we can live without God and each other is a final and destructive temptation. Let us pray that we never fall into it, and by God’s grace we never will.

Fr. Don's Sermon Lent 2

Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Lent 2 – Year C
February 24, 2013
Phil 3:17 – 4:1; Luke 13:31-35

How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you . . .       

     Last week’s Gospel passage from Luke found Jesus wandering in the wilderness after his baptism for 40 days, led there by the Holy Spirit. Pastor George preached movingly about what it means to be in the wilderness – bodily, spiritually, mentally --  how frightening that can be – going from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the comfortable to the uncomfortable, from having a stable foundation under us to having no foundation under us or at least not knowing where it is. And what we saw was that Jesus was able to emerge stronger from that wilderness experience and all of the temptations that were set before him because he knew that God was with him through the power of the Holy Spirit; George shared his own experiences of that strengthening. And Jesus’ responses to the devil weren’t just Scripture memory verses that Jesus was picking at random – they were passages that spoke to Jesus about the very nature of God and, beyond that, the nature of God in the world, and how we mediate that relationship with God and creation. Jesus allowed himself to trust that God was present in the situation, and that trust got him through it.

     This week we skip ahead a number of chapters to Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem, and this time he is speaking with a group of Pharisees, who – ironically, because they are usually out to get him – who are warning Jesus that Herod is looking to kill him. And as Jesus tries to explain his mission to them, he uses a really curious image to describe it: He uses the image of a hen protecting her young.

     This tells us a lot about how Jesus understood his own mission among us, and how Jesus was trying to convey God’s mission in the world. Jesus is telling them how often he has wanted to intervene in their divisiveness, in their injustice, in their self-centeredness, but they would not listen. The same city that killed the prophets of old would not listen to Jesus, either. Instead, they kept on doing what they were doing, with the result that Jesus was now going to leave without completing his mission of bringing all of God’s children together. Because they were not willing to let Jesus in, God’s

mission was going to have to wait for another day long down the road.

     Jesus image of himself in the role of a mother hen is an important one. You know, it is known among farmers that when sensing a predator, a mother hen can so position herself on her nest that she can completely cover the eggs underneath. The predator may in fact kill her, but the eggs will be safe. There is a story of firefighters who, after putting out a forest fire, returned to the scene to find the burned carcass of a hen on the ground. When they picked it up, lo and behold, they discovered several chicks very much alive under the protection of their dead mother.

     Jesus is telling us in this passage that’s the kind of love that God has for us.      Our God is a God of endless love for us. That is the kind of God that our God is, and we can trust that. Furthermore, the nature of this love is to bring all of God’s children – all of them – together as one.

     In my studies at Hartford Seminary  (which, God willing, will finally conclude this fall), and from my vantage point as your pastor over these past nine years, I have become acutely aware that while we all led here by God, we bring to our community of faith a wonderful diversity over our understanding of who God is and how God operates in creation. The diversity of backgrounds which so richly defines who we are is also reflected in a variety of ways of knowing God. In the kick-off to our Wednesday Evening Lenten series this past week, Sr. Joan Chittister highlighted the different ways that Christians often look at God. There are many reasons why this is so:

1)    Our cultural understandings and traditions have a great deal of impact on how we approach Scripture and, therefore, how we understand God.

1. In many cultural traditions, there is a strong focus on the cross and Jesus’ passion and death; while in other traditions, there is a focus on Jesus resurrection and new life. It is NOT an either/or situation – either it is THIS, OR it is THAT. No – it is in the best Anglican tradition a BOTH / AND – it is just a matter of emphasis. The understandings with which we are raised have a strong influence in developing the whole context in which we understand God.

2)  Our life experiences also have an impact: Positive – or negative – experiences during our childhood can have a huge impact on whether we are even open to believing in God, never mindloving God or trusting God.

1. Whether we are raised rich or poor,  have a good education or don’t complete our education, can make a difference in how we understand God and our relationship with God.
2. If you have plenty of money, the prosperity Gospel sounds really good – God will surely increase your coffers if you do the right thing. If we are financially needy, the abundance of God means something else to us.
3. If profound misfortune or tragedy has not struck us and we haven’t personally struggled on the margins of society, that reality can give us a certain perception of God being on our side. The corollary, of course, is that God is NOT on the side of those who do not share our good fortune. If our life has been marked by violence, tragedy, and loss, we may still have a strong faith in God but our understanding of God will be of one who all-too-often offers us a bitter pill to swallow as part of our relationship. It is easy to think, in these circumstances, that it is God’s will that we be miserable.

     Chittister points out that each one of us has our own perception of God, and it is that perception that serves as the foundation – often subtly, often without our even being aware of it – for the way in which we understand and engage the world.

1)    Do we believe God to be male or female? How do we envision God? How do we understand the passage in Genesis that teaches that human beings were “made in God’s image – male and female?”

2)  Do we believe in a God who is primarily a law-giver, with rules to be obeyed and harsh penalties for breaking them?

3)  Do we believe in a God whose primary characteristic is to love?

4)  Do we believe in a God who is actively engaged in the operation of the world? If we do, what are the parameters of God’s engagement? If my child is killed in a car accident, do we believe that God caused that? If I contract cancer, do I believe that is God’s active will? Or could it be that it is just the nature of this mortal life, and we understand that God will carry us through it somehow and in some way.

5)   Looking at this same question another way, if I’m the quarterback in the super bowl and throw a key touchdown that wins the game, do I believe that happened because God willed it? If I do believe that, am I also to believe that God was rooting against the other team? What if the other quarterback was praying also? Did he not pray hard enough? Was God tune him out?

6)  If we believe that events like the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy are somehow reflections of God’s judgment for a sinful society, or that the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school were God’s judgment against a society that has “taken God out of the schools” – if we believe this, are we to believe that God is less concerned with gun violence in our cities when innocent people are killed, or less concerned with racism, poverty, economic injustice, or corporate corruption on Wall Street than with activities that have something to do with sex?

     There are some who would give easy answers to these questions, but my purpose this morning is not to give easy answers; it is to articulate some of  the questions and to plant them in your heart. Did you ever notice in the New Testament Jesus as often as not answers questions put to him NOT with answers but with different or re-framed questions. That’s how we grow in our faith, by engaging the questions. And as we continue to grow into our Christian faith as a community of brothers and sisters who look to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we need to first be aware that each of us has a slightly different understanding of God and how we relate to God. There are some congregations where such an acknowledgement would be considered heresy and cause for defensiveness and alarm, perhaps resulting in people fleeing to a more theologically pure community. But I believe that it is the nature of our charisms in this particular community of faith that we see this acknowledgement not as a threat to theological purity, but as an opportunity to learn from one another and to grow with one another as together we engage the difficult questions. Indeed, before we can faithfully engage in discerning where God is leading us as a congregation, we have to first know how to recognize God and the places in our church and in our community where God is actively engaged.

     And Jesus in this morning’s Gospel gives us a great starting point. The primary sign that we are to look for is places where God is gathering us together – like a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Each and every day, that is Jesus’ primary desire for us – that we gather together in his name, with Christ at the center of our lives. Jesus assures us this morning that we will always know his presence when we approach life in the name of the Lord. AMEN.

Marie Alford-Harkey's Sermon, February 3, 2013

Epiphany 4C
February 3, 2013
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.

It’s striking in today’s gospel reading that in the space of 7 verses of scripture, the narrative takes us from “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” to “they led him to the brow of the hill … so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”

The hometown crowd moves from adoration to vilification in what seems to be a matter of minutes because Jesus has the audacity to tell them that he’s not doing his miracles among them, but rather in places all around his hometown of Nazareth.  And he points out that he’s in good company as Elijah and Elisha did miracles outside their own communities.

Being a prophet has never been a guarantee of popularity. This is true for Jeremiah, too. In Jeremiah’s call story, we hear God tell Jeremiah not to be afraid because God will be there to deliver him. We can infer that if Jeremiah is going to need deliverance, his mission isn’t going to be easy or fun 

God tells Jeremiah that he’ll be appointed over nations “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” Even though the end result is planting and building, Jeremiah’s message is largely one of disruption of the current order. It’s not an easy message to give or to hear.

Speaking out against the established order, going to the margins of society, even in God’s name, is dangerous. Prophets get killed. Even though Jesus manages to elude the crowd that wants to hurl him off the cliff, in this story, we know what happens later. His prophetic critique of existing social and religious structures leads directly to his death.   

But here’s a scary truth: we are all called to be prophets – speaking God’s truth as it is revealed in our own lives. Being a prophet - as Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus show us - requires courage. And as Paul tells us, it also requires compassion.

I’m learning a lot about courage and compassion right now. Because of Kim Litsey’s sermon on the Sunday after the Newtown shootings, I’ve been reading a book by Brené Brown called, “The Gifts of Imperfection.” Brown is a researcher who dedicated the first part of her career to studying difficult emotions like shame, fear, and vulnerability. In 2007 she had what we might, in this season, call an epiphany.

She realized from her years of research that all people struggle with shame and fear and doubt. But she also saw hundreds of stories of people who were living inspiring lives.

Brown, an Episcopalian, came to call these people “wholehearted” people, after the line in our prayer of confession that confesses, “We have not loved you with our whole hearts.” She began to identify the characteristics of these people and what she discovered was that they exemplified both courage and compassion in their lives.

These traits are required of we prophets as well.

Courage, according to Brown’s definition, isn’t about heroic acts. Rather, it requires that we “speak our minds by telling what’s in our heart.” This reason it is courageous to speak our truth from our heart is because it makes us vulnerable, and vulnerability is a difficult emotion that most humans would rather avoid. 

I’ve been working on having this kind of courage in conversations with my family in the wake of the Newtown shootings.

I know I’m not the only one in this congregation who was devastated by this event. Perhaps, as it did for me, this shooting called up other incidents and situations for you.

I grew up in a home and a family and a culture where owning a gun was and is seen as a hallmark of courage. The idea that everyone should own a gun and know how to shoot with accuracy and skill was a given. It was accepted as fact that if you knew how to shoot a gun, you were safer, and you would be better able to protect your family and those you loved.

My father taught me to shoot when I was 14. From an early age, he had instilled in me a respect and fear for the destructive power of the weapons that he owned. He was and is a model gun owner – responsible and diligent with his guns. He even taught gun safety classes. When he asked me if I wanted to learn to shoot, I was eager.

I learned to shoot handguns and shotguns, and I was proud of my skill.

Over the years, after I moved away from the South and my family, my opinion about guns began to change. I was a teacher in a high school when the Columbine shooting happened in 1999. Because that shooting was so close to my own life, it solidified once and for all my position for strong gun control laws and against owning a gun myself.

The first time I intimated to my Dad that I might not be against gun control laws, he took it badly. I imagine it felt like a betrayal of how he had raised me. Talking to my father about these issues has never gotten any easier.

Anytime I choose to engage in a conversation with my Dad about gun control, it requires the courage to speak my mind by telling what’s in my heart. It makes me feel vulnerable to disagree so thoroughly with someone I love so much. My Dad and remind each other frequently that our differing opinions will never change how we feels about each other, and I know that’s true. But it doesn’t make disagreeing with him any easier. 

These discussions with my Dad help me to practice prophetic compassion. As Brown says in her book and as we’ve all probably heard, the Latin roots of the word compassion mean “to suffer with.” But human beings, quite naturally, seek to protect ourselves from suffering.

This is certainly true when I discuss guns with my family. When my Dad emailed me, six days after the Newtown shootings, he put forth his opinion about gun safety, and he allowed me to put forth mine. And then he very kindly asked me if I wanted to continue the discussion. I said no.

My family of origin’s influence on me is still strong, and it hurts me when I realize that no matter what concessions I make, or how much I work to see their side of an issue, we will never agree on these issues.  So sometimes practicing compassion means that we agree to back away from a confrontation. 

But that’s not the only way to practice compassion. Brown says that practicing compassion also means practicing setting boundaries and holding people accountable. It’s much easier to shame, blame, and demonize those who disagree with us than it is to figure out how to hold one another accountable. But shaming and blaming without determining accountability and consequences just leads to a lot of self-righteous yelling and finger pointing. 

We can imagine a different way. If we were able to hold ourselves, our communities, and our policymakers compassionately accountable for our complicity in the violence of our society, what solutions might we then be able to dream up?

We as Christians cannot lose the hope that something can be done. 

The reading from 1 Corinthians speaks to this hope, both for prophets and for those who hear them. Far from the Hallmark card sappy sentiment that this passage has come to represent, 1 Corinthians 13 calls us to courageous, compassionate love. Coming just after the passage about all the different gifts of the body of Christ, this treatise on love deftly subverts our attempts to exercise those gifts for our own gain.

Paul reminds us that no gift is perfect in this world, that none of us is a perfect prophet or and none of us has complete knowledge. So a prophet must have love. Grounded in God’s love, we modern-day prophets can learn to practice our craft with compassion and courage.

A true prophet’s words reject polemical rhetoric and call us to find the way of truth and healing in a complex world where we only see dimly. May we find ways to both issue and answer that call. Amen?

Celebrating the life of Marianne Mallory

Celebrating the Life and Ministry of Marianne Brooks Mallory
January 30, 2013
Fr. Don Hamer  

            I want to begin by welcoming on behalf of the congregation Marianne’s niece, Susan Guinn, and her husband, Eddie, who drove up from South Carolina on Sunday morning to represent the rest of Marianne’s extended family who are unable to be with us in Hartford today. Susan has shared with me several times the family’s understanding of how important this congregation was to Marianne and how central its  ministry was in her life.

            And yet, as involved in the life and ministry of Trinity as Marianne was, she was such a private person – I’m told that runs in the family – that even those who knew her best didn’t know a whole lot about her. For almost all of us, knowing the story of Marianne’s life is much like what we know about the life of Jesus: We know he was born, and we know some of what he did at the end of his life, but we don’t know a whole lot about those mystery years in between.

            What I have learned in the past week helps me to understand the woman whom I have only known for about 9 years.

• She was born on June 30, 1933 in Idaho.
• As a high school student she attended the Westminster School for Girls in Atlanta.
• Marianne earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Georgia State University in 1955. Her niece, Susan, quite a few year’s Marianne’s junior, remembers “aunt” Marianne as being a beautiful young woman who always engaged the younger children with games and neat toys – she was a fun aunt.
• Following college, Marianne went to work at an orphanage, somewhere out west of the Hudson.
• Sometime in 1962, I learned this morning, she moved to Connecticut and in 1969 she moved to Hartford and joined Trinity Church. Within the space of a few years, she fell in love with and married the much beloved sexton of Trinity, Jesse Mallory on Sunday, April 29 1972 during a Sunday service. They lived happily together until Jesse died of cancer in October 1984; one week later, she had to travel to South Carolina to bury her beloved mother who died suddenly and unexpectedly. A lot of pain and loss in a one week period.
• Marianne worked in the early days of electronic data entry as a key punch operator for the Aetna, at which I am told she excelled, and when those skills were no longer needed in the business world, she joined the business office for Williams Chevrolet in West Hartford.
• Marianne’s ministries at Trinity have been many and varied. She has served as Directress of the Altar Guild, and she continued to serve Altar Guild at the 8 a.m. service right up to the time of her death. She was the Directress of the Guild of the Christ Child and an active member of the newly-created Trinity Chapter of the Daughters of the King. She was a minister of communion and a worship leader, and served at the morning weekday Eucharists before that service was discontinued several years ago. She has served as the Monday office volunteer for as long as anyone can remember, and she stuffed 200 bulletin inserts into 200 service leaflets each and every week.
• She was also an active member of the Parkville Senior Center and the 33’er club – the latter of which was a club consisting of people born in 1933 which Marianne found out about by responding to an advertisement in Yankee magazine. Perhaps more than any other activity, Marianne so looked forward to those bi-annual trips to various destinations with the members of that group – the most recent trip being only months ago. Her hobbies included being a pen pal – which was the primary mode of communication for the 33’er club – collecting souvenir spoons, travelling to places she had never seen before and gathering picture postcards at those places, and attending plays at the Hartford Stage Company.
• But nothing defined Marianne’s passion for ministry more than her love for children – perhaps pre-visioned by her work at an orphanage right out of college. One of her first ministries at Trinity was as the nursery attendant – another position she held for more than 40 years until the time of her death. And on weekdays she devoted herself to nurturing young people as a tutor for children on Asylum Hill both at West Middle School and as a part of the Connectikids after school program. Each year, she sponsored a child through the Christian Children’s Fund.

I rehearse what may sound like a laundry list of the things that Marianne has done because they serve as a window through which we can begin to more fully appreciate who she was. Like an attorney who doesn’t have a lot of direct eyewitness evidence, we can develop a case for an appreciation of who Marianne Mallory was by the circumstantial evidence of what she did. And the word that keeps coming to the top of my list is, “faithful.”

Marianne Mallory was a faithful person. She was a faithful wife, a faithful parishioner, a faithful minister of God’s mission in the world. She believed to her core what the writer of 1 John writes in the passage we just heard: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God and that is what we are. . . Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him. Marianne didn’t just believe that – she lived it.

This church was her second family. She virtually never missed a Trinity event, be it a worship service, an adult forum, an Adult education program, a Lenten soup supper, a Brotherhood of St. Andrew breakfast. She knew the importance of Christian community and lived it fully. To a generation of children, Marianne was the first face of Trinity Church that they remember. Even though she never had biological children of her own Marianne’s love and nurture of God’s children in the neighborhood and  in the parish was reflective of her wider understanding of each and every person as being a brother or sister in Jesus Christ, a beloved, valued and unique child of God.

            Through whatever pain or loss she suffered in her life—a life somewhat ironically lived both in the midst of community and at the same time in considerable solitude – Marianne was faithful to her God and to her fellow human beings. Like Job, she had the faith to live life to the full even to the very end, owning as her own the words of Job when he said, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side. . . Marianne was not afraid of death – she understood it as part of life, and she was comfortable in the knowledge that she would one day join her creator. In the meantime, right to the very end of her life, she understood her ministry to keep on keeping on, doing what she could when she could do it, to further God’s mission through the church that she loved with the people she loved.

And so as we celebrate Marianne’s life this morning, her gift to us is her example of faithfulness to appointed service, serving as a reflection of God’s love for each and every one of God’s children. May her memory live on as we strive to follow her faithful example. Amen.

Fr. Don's Sermon, January 27, 2013 - Recovery Sunday

Trinity Episcopal Church
Epiphany 3 – Year C - Recovery Sunday
January 27, 2013

Who can tell how often he offends?
cleanse me from my secret faults.
Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins;
let them not get dominion over me;
then shall I be whole and sound,
and innocent of a great offense.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my
heart be acceptable in your sight,
O LORD, my strength and my redeemer.
--Psalm 19, vv. 12-14

           For several years, the shorthand description of Trinity used on public documents has been “A Place of Welcome, Hope and Healing.” Since before I arrived here 9 years ago, Trinity has played host to seven different twelve –step programs for persons whose lives have been impacted by substance addiction: Four Alcoholics Anonymous programs, two Narcotics Anonymous programs, and one Al-Anon program. The oldest of these groups – the Thursday night Alcoholics Anonymous program, has been meeting at Trinity Church for more than forty years. The Saturday morning AA group is reputed to be the largest “military veterans” group in the state.

            Despite the number of groups meeting at Trinity and the longevity of many of them, the groups themselves exist more as non-stipendiary tenants in our building than as vital members of what makes Trinity a community. And as St. Paul writes in his 1^st letter to the Corinthians we heard this morning, that makes us something less than the whole Body of Christ. There are a number of reasons for this. Among them:

1. The anonymous nature of the groups which is so important limits opportunity for congregational interaction with members. (A number of members of the congregation in fact are members of some of the groups, and some are quite open about that.)
2. The groups meet at times during the week when the “worshipping” congregation by and large is not present on the campus.
3. A third factor I have come to believe is our very human penchant to place people we don’t know very well into little silos based upon one single characteristic. While none of us would probably ever admit to this, or perhaps even be aware of it,  I suspect that many members of the regular worshipping congregation think of folks who participate in the twelve-step programs as living in little silos of addiction, as though they have no other aspects of their lives other than dealing with the addiction. And of course, they are multi-faceted people with many aspects to their lives. As unfortunate as this erroneous assumption may be, the flip side of that coin is perhaps even scarier: That the rank-and-file Sunday attendees – those of us in the congregation each Sunday – are mentally, physically and spiritually “whole;” that we have no concerns regarding addiction or other aspects of our being that I like to call “holes in the soul.” Of course, both notions are as ridiculous as they are simplistic.

The Episcopal Church has been on the cutting edge of recovery ministries both at the local and national level in the United States for many years. There are Anglican roots of the twelve-step movement which arose out of the Oxford Group – in turn a spin-off group from the Oxford Movement of the late-19^th century in the Anglican Church. Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and his co-founder Dr. Bob Smith were moved by the ministry of The Rev. Sam Shoemaker, Rector of Calvary (Episcopal) Mission Church in New York City as they developed the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and Shoemaker was named an Honorary Founding Member at the second national convention of Alcoholics Anonymous.[1]

            The Episcopal Church has also been a leader among other denominations in calling for an affirmative response by the churches to the scourge of addictions. Beginning with the 66^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1979, and subsequently in 1982, 1985, 1988, 1991, 2003 and 2009, the Episcopal Church has reaffirmed its commitment to education and ministry with those whose lives are touched by addiction.[2] These resolutions have encouraged local dioceses to develop commissions on substance abuse, to develop diocesan-wide policies on alcohol use in church settings, to promote education programs with respect to substance abuse and to encourage annual “Recovery Sundays” in local churches such as the one we are celebrating today. This is the third such annual “Recovery Sunday” in the Diocese of Connecticut, and the first time we are formally honoring it here at Trinity.

            Why is it so important that we set aside this day to focus on our important ministry to and with persons struggling with addiction? Because as is so often true in life, all of us have something to learn from the struggles of others, and as is also so often the case, I believe that what we will learn is that together we share more in common than what makes us different.

Let’s start with our baptismal covenant. It bears noting also that the baptismal covenant as set forth in the Episcopal Baptismal liturgy provides that members of the church will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving their neighbor as themselves, and that they will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.[3]

            So how come some people with addictions themselves or in their family don’t flock to the church for support? There are a number of reasons why many concerned with their own or a loved-one’s addiction do not turn to the church. Frequently guilt and shame prevents addicts from seeing the Church as a source of help. Moralizing sermons on the evils of drinking, gambling, pornography, etc. raise the addict’s feelings of guilt. Some may have spoken to their clergy about their problem and discovered little empathy, understanding, or skill in these matters. Others have “prayed the knees out of their pants” as one alcoholic lamented and appeared to receive no answers. Sincere repentance and strong resolve failed to prevent relapse.[4]

            Another major factor why folks with addictions avoid church is identified by The Rev. Thomas Keating in his book, Divine Therapy: Spirituality and Addiction. Keating is a Cistercian monk who is considered the father of modern Centering Prayer, and in his most recent book he explores the connection between the 12 steps and classical Christian spirituality. Keating observes that many people do not think to seek out the church for assistance precisely because they see the church and the God of their childhood as part of the problem. “Because trust is so important (in a relationship with God and the Church), our spiritual journey may be blocked if we carry negative attitudes toward God from early childhood. If we are afraid of God or see God as an angry father figure, a suspicious policeman, or a harsh judge, it will be hard to develop enthusiasm, or even an interest, in the journey.”[5] So all of these factors militate against members of twelve-step groups perceiving the church to be a source of support and nurture in their struggle with addiction.

            So how is all of this central to what Trinity is about as a place of welcome, hope and healing? How is all of this central to what Trinity is about as a congregation? Thomas Keating powerfully connects the need that persons suffering with addictions face in particular with the need that everyone faces in general as a result of our imperfect human condition. In a chapter of his book, entitled, “Exploring The Human Condition” he notes that one of the great benefits Alcoholics Anonymous offers to its members is the gift of hope, noting that without hope, fear or discouragement turns in on itself, making it almost impossible to enter recovery.

            Then he makes this important statement: “It might also be helpful for the sponsor (of the AA member) to be aware that recovery is not something limited to people with an addiction. This misplaced energy is the heritage that we all carry with us as human beings. It is in our genes, you might say. Theologically, some people call it Original Sin. Scriptural people will simply call it the Fall, referring to Adam and Eve’s . . . losing the experience of what true happiness is, which is intimacy with God. . .Everybody has this original disease, the lack of intimacy with God. It is not a sin because it is nobody’s fault. It is just the way we come into life and develop our self- identity.”[6] Keating is clear throughout his book that the spiritual practices that are encouraged through following the twelve steps are indeed practices that can benefit everyone.

            Reading and reflecting on Keating’s book Divine Therapy opened my eyes to the mysteries of centering prayer and the universal utility of the Twelve Steps as a response – and a resource – to the human condition in general. In speaking with brothers and sisters who have been long-time members of 12-step programs, it is obvious that for many of them, the twelve steps have become part of the fabric of their lives. And I think that is exactly what God is calling each of us to in our relationship with God – to make that relationship with God part of the fabric of our lives.

            It probably says something about my very incarnate spirituality that these words of Keating finally helped me to understand centering prayer in a way that I did not from Keating’s earlier book,  Intimacy with God. After completion of Intimacy, I was left with a somewhat vacuous sense of centering prayer, as though it is some kind of out-of-body, other-worldly experience.

            But studying the 12 steps has helped me to understand centering prayer as the ultimate way of potentiating our humanity – emptying ourselves of our finite, temporal baggage in order to “rest in the presence of God” and, with God’s grace, become most fully the people God intends and desires for us to become. As Keating observes, “creation is an ongoing and continuous act.” This speaks to the notion that as children of God we are constantly in the process of becoming until the day we die – our evolution is never complete in this lifetime. It strikes me that is exactly what the process of recovery is – which is why persons who have struggled with addiction seldom call themselves “recovered” but always “recovering.” And while I would not agree with the statement “we are all addicts” – I think that demeans those who struggle so valiantly with addictions of whatever sort – the fact remains that the twelve steps, as Keating observes, are important spiritual resources not only for those struggling with what are generally considered “addictions” but for every person seeking to become authentically the person God has created him or her to be and desires for them to become. Each of us, like Job, can become most fully human when we trust our lives to the grace-filled power of the Almighty.

            In a few moments we will pray a litany that is patterned after the twelve steps. It speaks to the need that each of us has for wholeness and healing in our lives.   On this Recovery Sunday 2013, I invite the congregation to join me in renewing our commitment to our brothers and sisters who participate in our twelve-step programs here at Trinity. I invite us to go beyond simply opening our doors to their meetings and thinking of them as tenants of Huntington Hall. I invite you to begin seeing yourselves on a similar journey of wholeness and healing, recognizing that all of us have holes in the soul; all of us are in equal need of God’s mercy and grace; and all of us share in the prayer attributed to St. Augustine, Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Amen.

Fr. Don's Sermon, January 13, 2013

Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford

Baptism of Our Lord 2013

January 13, 2013 

In the 1970s one of the most popular television shows was one called All in the Family. Starring Carroll O’Connor as the principal character, Archie Bunker,  and Jean Stapleton as his wife, Edith, the series lasted 8 seasons, and was considered groundbreaking in television for bringing to the situation comedy format such real life and controversial issues as  racism, women’s liberation, the Vietnam war and breast cancer. A working-class World War II veteran, Archie was an outspoken bigot, seemingly prejudiced against everyone who was not a U.S.-born, politically conservative, heterosexual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, and dismissive of anyone not in agreement with his view of the world. He longed for simpler times, when people sharing his viewpoint were in the majority and were in charge. Despite his bigotry, he was portrayed in the show as someone who was basically loveable and decent, motivated more out of a heartfelt desire to maintain the world as he knew it and understood it rather than out of hatred or prejudice. People for the most part either loved him or hated him.

I guess one of the reasons I have been thinking about that program this week is because of its focus on family, and in particular on Archie Bunker’s understanding of what it means to be “family.” What it means to be “family” is of particular importance on this Sunday when we welcome two new members into the household of God in the sacrament of Baptism. And being baptized into God’s household is particularly noteworthy when it takes place on this particular Sunday in which we commemorate the baptism of our own Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

         Baptism and Eucharist are the only two sacraments we honor in the Episcopal Church because they are the two sacraments that Jesus actually participated in during his lifetime. When you think of it, why did Jesus even have to be baptized? He was born without sin, and he was already the Son of God. Why would he submit himself to baptism by John the Baptizer?

In this season of Epiphany when we reflect upon the ways in which Jesus was made known not only to the Jewish world but to the entire known world, gentile and Jew, it is significant that the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus as the second such event. In the Gospel account of Luke which we heard this morning, Luke tells us that after Jesus had been baptized and everyone else had been baptized that the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

         God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to become one of us in the person of Jesus. And Jesus so loved us that he submitted himself to be baptized not because he needed to, but because he chose to – he wanted to – as a sign that he belonged to God and that he belonged to us and that we – through our own baptisms – become brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and in that relationship, adopted children of God.

         And so today we welcome Aaliyah Brielle Crystal Downer and Sarah Paw Doh as sisters of our own, as sisters of Jesus Christ, as children of the God who created the heavens and the earth. Created in God’s own image, they are beautiful and loved. Just as Joseph and Mary welcomed their first child when Jesus was born on Christmas, Andrew and Clare Downer, parents of Aaliyah, and K Taw Doh and Lah Ku Paw, parents of Sarah, were overjoyed when they welcomed their first born into the world and became a nuclear family. The first pebble was tossed into the pond creating a ripple of what will become a lifetime of relationships  – the relationship between father and daughter, between mother and daughter, and the three of them together – as family, expanding the circle of relationship of husband and wife. Today they bring these young children into a new circle of relationship with their brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.

         What are some of the hallmarks of this relationship?  Isaiah writes that the one who created you, the one who formed you – that God has redeemed you, reclaimed you from the world and claimed you as one of God’s own. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. . . Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. . . Jesus, the Light of the World, has come as one of us, and this is his promise to Aaliyah and to Sarah and to each and every one of us. In Baptism, we become a part of that promise. As we heard in the Gospel of John last week, Jesus is the light, and the darkness can never overcome it.

         Here’s another aspect of this baptism. Remember when Jesus shocked all of his Jewish contemporaries when he engaged in conversation with the Samaritan woman? Samaritans were regarded as heretics and outcasts by most contemporary Jews. But in the Book of Acts we are told that when the Samaritans had accepted the Word of God, Peter and John were dispatched to them. They laid hands upon them, and they received the Holy Spirit.  Those who were previously unacceptable in the sight of Peter and John were now part of the extended family of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ. This morning, Aaliyah and Sarah will also receive the Holy Spirit: After the water is poured, I will sign them with the sign of the cross and pray the words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

         And this morning we will add our own assent and our own pledge to these newest members of Christ’s family. After the parents and Godparents have made their vows on behalf of their infant children, I will then ask the congregation, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these children in their life in Christ?” And we as a congregation will respond, “We will!” And following the anointing with chrism, we together pray: We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood. Share WITH US in His eternal priesthood. It is not just a throwaway line – it is a solemn obligation we take on when we welcome another in the name of Jesus Christ: It is a commitment we make to walk in love as Jesus loves us and gave himself for us – both an offering and a sacrifice to God.

         And so this morning we are reminded what it means to be family in the household of God and how different it is from Archie Bunker’s concept of family. In Archie Bunker’s world, you needed to believe, look and act like him, or you didn’t belong. Unlike Archie’s world, which was largely defined by whom he was not and who was on the outside, the household of God is defined by who we are as God created us, and who is on the INside.  St. Paul teaches us that in Jesus the Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free; that each and every one of us is equally beautiful and valuable in the household of God. And just as Archie’s insulated world inevitably was to grow larger, so we mortals continue to learn – in God’s continued speaking to us through the power of the Holy Spirit in revelation – we continue to learn what God did for us on that first Christmas, and how God continues to invite us – all of us, without distinction – to become full and active members of God’s household through the gift we received at our baptism. Jesus prayed to his father that we all may be one. That is what it means to be a member of God’s household – we are all one. Aaliyah and Sarah, welcome into the household of God.  AMEN.