Sermon: On Fire in Shalom

3 Advent, December 13, 2009

Think of them as anecdotes shared around a family dinner table. This is how great Uncles Zephaniah and Isaiah used to tell the story. This is how Uncle Luke and Uncle Paul told it.

Stir up your power, O God. And stir us up too. Stir up your power working in us! The problem with the collect is that we sound so helpless. Yes, by ourselves we can do little. God is our renewable resource. Yet God saves us to help assist a wider salvation. It may be one of our greatest failings and easiest outs to assume that we are sorely hindered. That’s the point John the Baptist is making to the crowd that has come from Jerusalem into the wilderness to see what he’s about.

Sermon: The Bread of Fidelity

If we take Genesis seriously, we remember that God had a relationship with the flora and fauna before we were created. They have seniority in creation.

Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009

Joel 2:21-27, Psalm 126, 1 Timothy 2:1-7, Matthew 6:25-33
Reading ecology has changed my ways of seeing and hearing. I love the lessons for Thanksgiving. This year, we’re using a refined lectionary, and I’m hearing different dimensions of meaning. Of course, it’s always about what we call redemption, the restoration of creation and its community. Scripture tells us that is God’s hope for the world in Jesus.

At this time of year, harvest time, as we celebrate the plenitude of our lives, we are asked to take stock of our resources. What have we sown? What are we putting up into storerooms? What are we plowing under? Who’s invited? What’s served?

Sermon: Twas Blind But Now

21 Pentecost, Proper 25, October 25, 2009

Let’s begin by looking at the premise of the collect for today. Then we’ll use it as a lens, to view the lessons. In it, the church prays for the action of grace to increase within and among us. We ask for spiritual growth, in the exercise of faith, hope, and love. Translate faith as trust. It’s not so much about tenets of belief as about the willingness to risk godly living. And translate charity as altruistic love, born of compassion. To make the translations helps us to understand what we are requesting.

Although these godly virtues are gifts, we are asking for their increase, not for their own merit, but as means to an end. We request their growth in us, so that we may obtain what God promises. The implication is that, somehow, their exercise effectively contributes to their fulfillment. As we grow in these graces, they assist our godly aim. It means that trust, hope, and love, besides being spiritual graces, are also spiritual powers.

Will Dickens In Memoriam

All Saints Day, 2009

Homily by The Rector

Life is an awesome gift, with its inherent and inescapable freedom and responsibility. No one can relieve us of the privilege and gravity of our lives. We can love each other, care for each other, offer guidance and support to each other. But each of us must make something of our lives, and we remain answerable for our choices. Life is an awesome gift.

Will Dickens’ departure from us is a grievous loss. We are still shocked and stunned. We had no indication that he was in distress. As often as the questions return, we will never know what he was feeling or exactly what happened. Neither will we know if there might have been anything any of us might have done differently that might have changed the outcome. We must let the questions go as readily as they come.

What we do know and can say is that Will was a joy and delight to us. His life, besides being a gift to him, was also a gift to us. While we wish we could have had him with us longer, we are grateful for the time he was with us. We thank heaven for his indelible selfhood, for his boisterous company, for his signature grin.

Life is not easy, nor is it altogether benign. Terrible things happen. Sorrow abounds. Despair is a ready resort. Evil is real. We bear the collective load of human error all the time. It can get us down.

Sermon: Your Money Or Your Life!

Do you remember the old westerns on TV, when the highwayman would ride out of the brush to waylay the stagecoach? He’d point his six shooter at the driver and threaten, “Your money or your life!” He probably wanted only the money. What he really meant was, “if you don’t give me the money, I may have to shoot you to get it.” In a way, Jesus is answering the young man who waylays him with the same question, although meant differently. He’s posing real options. “In a forced choice, which is more important to you, your wealth or your life?” We’ll come back to that question.

Sermon: Youth Group Preaches on St. Francis Day

Are animals as important to God as human beings? St. Francis seemed to think so. He seemed to think that every piece of God’s creation was important and should be treated as sacred, beloved of God.

Francis treated sick and homeless people as his equals. There is a story of Francis giving away his coat to a very sick man on the side of a road and then giving the man a hug.

Francis treated animals as though they were his equals. There is a story of a mule, seeking shelter from the cold, wandering into the old house where Francis and the first Franciscan brothers were staying. Rather than kick out the mule, Francis told the brothers it was time for them to leave and find a new home, that their house now belonged to that mule.

A couple of Fridays ago, our Youth Group got together here to play games and eat pizza. In preparation for this service, we also took some time to reflect on the question of whether animals are as important to God as human beings, asking ourselves: Is an animal’s life as important as the life of a human being?

What do you think?

It’s a hard question. And as you can probably imagine, one in which not everyone can agree. The Youth Group kids do not all agree, as you’ll see.

Sermon: Becoming a Warrior for Peace

What is it about boys and guns?

It is a good question and very hard to answer. And of course we could broaden the question to ask: “What is it about boys and swords and rockets and missiles and bombs and fists and teeth?” And we could broaden it further to ask: “What is it about people—boys and girls and men and women—and the warrior impulse, the feeling that the use of force can be and often is heroic and good?

Here’s the way I’ve often answered that question: I cannot fully explain why little boys are enthralled by guns and other warrior implements. But many boys just are enthralled by guns and many girls are as well. Indeed I would argue that most people possess a love of war somewhere inside.

I grew up in the hippy-dippy Jimmy Carter seventies and my mom tried to keep all manner of toy guns and swords and soldiers and so forth away from me and my brother. But it was no use—since we could turn virtually anything, including, of course, our fingers, into imaginary guns.

One friend of mine, similarly deprived by his peace-loving parents of toy guns, used to use his cat as an imaginary sawed-off shotgun. And he would pick up the back-legs of his tall, skinny, weimaraner-like dog and imagine the dog was a Gatling gun.

As I got older, I grew to love playing tackle football. My mother officially forbade me from playing—in particular, she never allowed me to join an organized tackle football team where I might wear padding and a helmet. But I played tackle football every chance I got anyway, with friends, wherever we might find a bit of grass, and without helmets and without pads.

One of the greatest thrills of my adolescence was the feeling I got from tackling a good friend during a good game of tackle football—timing it just right and feeling his body crumple under my body.

As the psychologist Carl Jung argued, there is a warrior in all of us…

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Sermon: Lamb Without Blemish

The Word Is The Energy Of Creation Itself

Last week’s lessons connected Jesus’ understanding of the messianic role with the role of the prophet. This week’s lessons continue the theme. Presumably, the disciples are familiar with the often inhospitable reception of the prophets by the people. But they have a difficult time with what Jesus says about the likely reception of his own work and its connection with the so-called prophet’s reward, even when he spells it out for them.

This week we’re given a passage from Jeremiah. There is a plot against the prophet’s life. Someone must consider him dangerous. He must be doing something right. The word of the Lord that he has spoken must have found its mark. The enemies of God’s word want to silence the inconvenient truth by eliminating the inconvenient truth-teller.

But recollect the passage in Isaiah about God’s word. We typically recite it in Advent:

So is my word that goes forth from my mouth;

it will not return to me empty,

but it will accomplish that which I have purposed,

and prosper in that for which I send it.

Isaiah 55:11

Sermon: Taste and See

Did you know that the names Adam and Eve mean soil and life?

For several years now, I’ve been reading about the slow food movement. First I read Barbara Kingsolver’s food journal. It chronicles a year of sustainable living on the family farm in Kentucky. They undertook an experiment to live as locavores, eating locally while thinking globally. They grew and raised, harvested and slaughtered, canned and prepared their food. Whatever else they needed, they traded with neighbors. They behaved as stewards of earth’s bounty, learning what sustainable eating entails. She changed a familiar phrase to title the journal, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, implying that their effort transformed their awareness. They became more connected to the land, to plant and animal life, to their bodies and each other, to neighbors and community, to the history and food culture of the region. It was an integrative experience. To term it a miracle is to recognize and celebrate not only the slow food they ate, but also these gifts, received as grace.

Then I read the collaborative journal of the founders of the Findhorn commune, established in the sixties in a trailer park on Moray Firth by the North Sea, by utopians with C of E roots, inspired by the mystical practices of east and west. They planted a garden, to eat well and inexpensively (The Findhorn Garden). As they grew their food, they cultivated their souls with daily periods of meditation, during which they began to feel a deepening connection with the landscape, the soil, the plants, and the creatures inhabiting their local environment. To their surprise and delight, they developed an intensely joyful collaboration with their plot of creation, which yielded profuse and abundant results. Findhorn became a kind of Eden, a sign of the potential of human cooperation with the biosphere.

Sermon: Fed By God

Sung antiphon:
The bread we break, alleluia, is our sharing of the Body of Christ.

Today we find ourselves in the middle of the five so-called ‘Bread Sundays’, working our way through John, Chapter Six and various other accounts of God feeding God’s people. Last Sunday, Tom Jackson placed the assigned readings for Bread Sundays in the context of our life of worship and fellowship — “All we ever seem to do is eat! What’s up with all this talk of bread and manna and food?” — and affirmed the reason: “We who are many are one body because we all share one bread, one cup.”

Two weeks ago Irene Lawrence set the tone for our five-week consideration of John Six, and she showed us how in the synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — there are six accounts of the feeding of various multitudes, as well as stories of the Last Supper, with what we refer to as ‘the words of institution’: “This is my body. This is my blood.” But in John, it’s all one — the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus’ description of himself as the Bread of Life. From John’s perspective, Jesus feeding the multitude and proclaiming himself as the Bread of Life are words of institution.

Sermon: We who are many are one body . . .

Until recently, I prided myself on being a “first adopter,” the kind of fellow who quickly found ways to use new technology for my own purposes. Starting with e-mail and moving on through to web sites to blogs, I was always among the first on the block to figure out how to use the “world wide web.” I ran out of inventiveness when the latest wave of “social networking sites” came into vogue. I couldn’t see why anyone would be interested in following my life on Facebook or Twitter. My life isn’t that interesting, I thought. Who would care if I went to a movie or shopping? I was genuinely stumped. I started to feel old.

Sermon: Measuring Up

I do believe the touchstone for our reconciliation with all that we are entrusted with, all that we have the potential to be, can be found here, here within these walls.   Here, in our weekly or more rehearsals of those huge words of our faith that call us to be so much more than we think we can possibly be. Here we are called, again and again.  Here where the little plant pots of our souls are nourished and cared for, even though so much is incomprehensible mystery.   This is not the only touchstone available to us, but it is a reliable presence in our lives.  Open every Sunday of every year, and blessed with free parking!

Sermon: Jesus and America on the 4th of July

A Texas journalist, Bill Bishop, recently chronicled the tendency of Americans—particularly over the past 30 years—to organize ourselves geographically on the basis of political opinion, aesthetic taste, educational philosophy, religious belief, and other specific personal preferences. The title of Bishop’s book is: The Big Sort. And the subtitle is: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

Bishop is not merely talking about “red” and “blue” states here. He’s talking about how individual neighborhoods are becoming distinctly homogenous places packed with people who mostly think the same things in the same ways…

Bishop quotes marketing analyst, J. Walker Smith, who states, “(Americans are) finding communities that fit their values—where they don’t have to live with neighbors or community groups that might force them to compromise their principles or their tastes.”

This is a very telling line, in my opinion, and gets at a truth that I personally see all around me—and within me—every day. Just to give one local example, think of how different life is, how little cross-pollination there is, between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, between Atherton and the eastern parts of Redwood City. I’m even struck by how different Mountain View is from Menlo Park…

Yes, we are talking about the “E” word here—evangelism. Evangelism. But not in the sense of trying to convince people to think like us, but in the sense of reaching out to people different from us in the hopes of building community—having communion—with them.

After all, when Jesus orders the disciples to go out into the various villages of Galilee to preach repentance—that is, literally, “to turn back” toward God—he does not tell them what to say or how to say it. He simply orders them to do their best to get along with whomever they come across. And even if they are roundly rejected, the disciples are not to do anything more divisive than shake the dirt off of their feet. And I can think of much more… expressive ways to respond to rejection.

- Jamie McElroy

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Working Wonders

There are two central claims made in the passage from Wisdom. God did not make death. God made us for incorruption. Volumes have been written in theological argument about them. Do we agree? Most of us come to our own conclusion. We frame for ourselves a working hypothesis.

When the news reported that Steve Jobs would be back at his desk soon, after a liver transplant, they showed a clip from an earlier commencement address at Stanford, after his first bout with life-threatening disease. In it he said that death was nature’s change agent. And St. Francis referred to Sister Death, implying that death is an integral part of life and the life cycle. So what are we to do with the claim that God did not make death? Placing the passage back in context helps.

Tempest and Whirlwind

For about a decade, our family sailed a 38’ cruiser on San Francisco Bay. The boat was responsive for its type. The bay is rated as one of the most challenging, as bay sailing goes. There were times when we would have our children and their friends out there, when the wind and waves would suddenly change. At those times I’d wonder about my judgment, while working hard to be a responsible first mate, in order to get us safely back to the marina. I remember once being overtaken by dense fog, and realizing that we were in the middle of a shipping lane. I remember waking suddenly in the middle of the night to realize that our anchor had lost its hold and that we were being pulled out on the tide. I remember a man overboard in an instant, his face receding fast in the swells. We got him back aboard, but it put a damper on the outing. And that was just inside the bay.

“Everything is waiting for you”

We stand so often at the threshold of presence: real, authentic presence. And here is our invitation to enter.  Here are the flames that dance above our heads.  Here is the breath of the wind blowing on our faces. And here is the conversation: the conversation that needs no translation.  The conversation with our life, with the truth of whom we really are and all that surrounds us, is waiting for us to join in.  We can decide it’s all too hard, and return to our stories and our lists.  Or we can dare in this season of fire and wind to rise up, like Lazarus, and walk towards the light.

Teens Preach: Loving Truth & Action

Next Sunday, when the Bishop visits St. Bede’s, four members of our Youth Group will go through the rite we call “Confirmation.” They will vow to follow the teachings of Christ and to participate in the life of the church. Then they will kneel before the Bishop, and the Bishop will lay hands on them and bless them.

Over the course of this past year, the kids preparing for confirmation have discussed many different aspects of what it means to be a Christian. During all those Confirmation classes, there have been a lot of words and a lot of speech. And I hope that some of all that word and speech was fruitful.

But I think what was and is most important about what these kids have done over the course of year in their preparations for confirmation is that they have truthfully and actively engaged with the question of what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, what it means to be a Christian.

I have heard stories—particularly from some of our young adults—about how and why they came to be confirmed that served as cautionary tales for me, as someone leading a confirmation class. Two different people have told me that their parents made a kind of Faustian deal with them: “If you get confirmed,” their parents told them, “then you don’t have to come to church.”

Talk about word and speech trumping truth and action.

So, during our first confirmation class in September, we discussed how confirmation was about taking the reigns of one’s faith for one’s self. We discussed how their parents had made certain vows when they were babies to raise them in a church community. And that now, if they wished to dedicate themselves to living as Christians on into adulthood and throughout their lives, they could make those same vows for themselves.

But we also discussed the fact that there was and is no rush, that if they were not sure they wanted to commit themselves to the Christian life, they could wait; that what is most important is that they do what they truly and actively believe is right for themselves as they stand before God.

Learning about their beliefs and their various ways of wrestling with the major questions of faith has been a wonderful experience for me. These teenagers have taught me that being a Christian and committing to the Christian life is not about assenting to a set of edicts that may or may not ring true in one’s heart.

It is about being honest and loving before God, struggling mightily to live out our lives in the way God has lovingly called us to live it—which may or may not involve practicing the Christian faith and attending church services.

- Jamie McElroy

[Click below for the complete sermon, including Youth Group reflections.]

Easter Sermon 3: Faith vs. Belief

Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus would appear, in all his glory, once and for all, as then we could stop worrying the edges of our faith, and just get on with living it?

But Jesus isn’t going to appear, at least not in that way. If he did, we would have no choice but to believe. As Jayber Crow, in Wendell Berry’s novel of the same name, says, “He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves.  Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then.  From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.”

So, we are given the choice:  we can choose to try to believe, or we can choose not to bother. If we choose to make the effort, perhaps the first question should be, what should we believe?It’s certainly would seem to be the easier question to answer, because we have the creeds.  We recite the Nicene Creed almost every Sunday.  That’s what we believe, isn’t it? A nice tidy list, that keeps everyone agreed and looking in the right direction?  Not quite, I suspect.  Hasn’t each one of us, at least at one time or another, had trouble with the creeds?  And, more sadly, how many people have found those words to be such a stumbling block that they have walked away from our doors.

While not intending to be too heretical, I think it’s interesting to consider that for the first three hundred years of Christianity, there were many Christians who would have struggled with being made to affirm that particular set of tenets…

The Nicene Creed was created to bring into line all the varying Christian theologies, and to make clear which ones were not acceptable, or heretical…

But do we believe what we are told to believe?  Not usually. However, being told can be comforting. Beliefs bring groups together.  At least you know what you should believe, even if you don’t yet. And where is faith in all of this? In an interesting article by the French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul, called “Belief and Faith”(1983), he differentiates between the two in, I think, very helpful ways.  He writes: “Belief provides answers to people’s questions while faith never does….Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe…For belief things are simple:  God is almighty.”  On the other hand, faith will never provide answers, faith listens and waits.

- Jane McDougle

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Easter Sermon 2: Believing Thomas

It really irritates me, making St. Thomas go through 2,000 years being called ‘Doubting Thomas’. He deserves more credit than that.

Can you imagine the depression Thomas must have felt when Jesus was crucified? Jesus was dead for Thomas — he had been sealed in the tomb along with the hope and generosity of spirit within which they had lived for those three years. And then it was all over and there wasn’t even a body left as proof of their loss. Those years with Jesus meant far too much to Thomas for him to be tricked by some ghostly figment of his brothers’ and sisters’ imagination. He wasn’t about to buy some imposter — some false Jesus look alike. Would you?

Considering his situation, Thomas’s protestations over the Lord’s resurrection —  “unless I see…I will not believe” — speak not so much from doubt as from a profound desire to believe…

William Temple wrote of Thomas: “Such vigour of disbelief plainly represents a strong urge to believe.”  It’s that Shakespearean sense of “Methinks, [Thomas,] thou protesteth too much.”

To be fair, Thomas really ought to be remembered as ‘Believing Thomas’ since he so profoundly desired to believe. And in the end, he did believe.

I think it was also William Temple who first said, “We are Easter people,” and we are. We are Easter people and as such we embrace resurrection.

Now, I use the word ‘embrace’ deliberately. Some folks, good and committed Christians, seem at times a bit embarrassed in admitting to belief in resurrection. Such people, in their heart of hearts, want to believe, but when it comes to making things work in their ‘head of heads’, well, therein lies the rub.

Yet belief, you see, is so much more than mental assent. In biblical terms, belief, or credo, implies giving one’s heart to something, more than just the mind. We don’t believe by getting our heads around the faith but by getting our hearts around these things.

- Joseph Lane

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Easter Sermon 1: Proclaiming Easter Today

What are we doing here, as others go about their weekend on this fine spring day? What does what we are doing here mean, not only to us, but to those who aren’t celebrating in our terms? What does it mean in its farthest reaching sense, for the world that Christ came to save? It is incumbent upon us to decode this story, this good news. We must make our claim in such an accessible way that others can apprehend it as a gift, freely offered, an invitation fully extended, of extraordinary applicability to real life. Otherwise, the gospel will remain like the sacred mushroom of a peculiar equatorial tribe, an odd looking fungus on the forest floor, its medicinal properties untapped for human health.

Simone Weil has a particular credibility as a witness to the resurrection because she was a lover of God in Christ and yet not a Christian. Weil maintains that the will has no power to bring about salvation. What saves us is our desire for God, our love of God. God is our original vocation, or calling, the first gift for those who believe, as we say. So we encourage others to trust the deepest longings of their heart and soul. They are not vestiges of some childish naivete. They are aboriginal sparks of inspiration, to be cherished and cultivated, to be appreciated as they transform each life that holds them sacred.

- Kitty Lehman

[Click below for the complete sermon.]