Now Now Now

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

“The hour has come.” May I speak in the name of the Living God who holds all our times in Her hand. Amen.

The last sand is falling through the hour glass. Two Greeks have come to see Jesus in the gospel this morning (showing us that the world beyond Israel is being drawn in) but the time of public preaching and teaching is over. There is no more time for parables that confuse, console and give cause to ponder. No time for miracles and healings to woo and win people to a deeper awareness that something eternal, something transformative and life giving, something of God is breaking in here. There is finally, after all he’s done and tried to do, no more time.

“The hour has come from the Son of Man to be glorified.” Over and over in John’s gospel we have heard the phrase: my hour has not yet come. And now, at last, it has. We know something about this in our own lives. Our daughter is a high school senior. The college acceptance letters have arrived. By fall for her—not to mention her brother, dad and me—the hour will have come.

A seminary classmate described waking up one morning after 10 years of infertility treatment to the quiet conviction: It is enough. “I never looked back,” she said. She’s now the mother of two adopted children. Her hour had come. Sometimes we seem to have a choice and sometimes we’re dragged kicking and screaming to the brink of a new world.

The hour has come for Jesus too. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” (v. 24).” He is talking about himself. In a few days the events of holy week will unfold. Jesus will die on a cross. He could have avoided it—could have headed for the hills, could have called on his disciples, called on the crowd itching for a king, called on angels to save him. But he didn’t. Jesus came not to be saved but to save. He saw a purpose in his dying that was worth the cost. “What should I say—‘Father save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

He will let the full weight of our fear, envy, political expedience and sin fall on him. Not in weakness but in power. Not to glorify victimization but to stand by choice with those who have no choice—the victims of domestic violence, rape and child abuse, the victims of poisoned wells, burned huts and bodily degradation in Darfur, the victims of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, of flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota, of economic chaos. I could go on.

This is what God is about. This is what God calls us to. “Whoever serves me must follow me.” It’s what he’s been saying all along. “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Greater love has no one than this than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” “I am among you as one who serves.” No wonder the disciples fled on Good Friday. All of us—if we’re honest— hear our mother’s calling about now. Love to Lord, can’t, gotta go!

God is intimately connected to the suffering of the world. It’s a very maternal image. The great preacher Jim Forbes said God was like his mother calling at dinner time: Are all the children in? Nobody is forgotten. No one is outside the arena of God’s concern and care. It’s a lovely image of God this Women’s History Month. This is no impassible, unmovable God, untouched by human suffering. In the cross God takes the pain of the world and writes it on the palms of his outstretched hands. God loves God’s children enough to die for them—what mother can’t understand that? Or father either.

The suffering cry out in pain but the cry comes first from God. We are such sensitive beings made in the divine image—imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God’s! We are sensitive to suffering and we are created in the image of God. Imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God's! We yearn to love and be loved, to see and be seen, imagine the yearning relatedness in the heart of God! God loves us, wants to be in relationship with us, overturning all our expectations, overthrowing all that gets in the way.

“The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, in the 2nd century. What does it mean to be fully alive? It means to know you matter to God and to the world, to be connected to God and to others in a way life-giving, life changing and free. The divine love will sacrifice whatever is necessary to clothe our nakedness with dignity, to awaken us to the immensity of our worth in God’s eyes, to a love than which nothing greater can be conceived, a love that will cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, a love that will make the first last and the last first, that will make us fully human, fully alive at last whatever the cost. Fear not! “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” Now. Now. Now. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.”

The cross has been used to glorify victimhood—especially in women. It’s been used to oppress and control. My friend from seminary had an alcoholic father who used to beat her mother, break up the furniture and come after them. “He’s going to kill us!” she’d scream at her mother, “Why don’t you get us out of here?” and her mother would reply that it was her cross to bear. No. No. No. No. No. This is a criminal distortion that grieves the heart of God. The goal of the cross is not victimhood and suffering—the goal is salvation and joy—human beings fully human, fully alive. To say otherwise is like saying the goal of pregnancy is labor and delivery instead of the baby. Labor and delivery may well be involved but the goal, in both, is new life. Now. Now. Now.

If women are in the image of God, as Genesis tells us, then women’s experience is part of God’s experience and has its truth to tell. Women’s experience doesn’t separate power and compassion. Women’s lived experience involves openness to the ones loved, a vulnerability to their experience and solidarity with their well being. Women give birth—in pain and in power—in love, undivided. We sacrifice our lives, time, money and no small amount of sanity to bring others to autonomy and fullness. Women’s power brings forth and stirs up. It fosters life in all its dimensions in a movement of spirit that builds, mends, struggles with and against, celebrates and laments. It is the power of love to transform and connect that changes people and changes the world by entering into suffering, entering into the crucified history of the world with healing and liberating power.

Women with children at the breast, at the knee, at the door heading out into the world know the immediacy of love, the urgency of NOW. God is connecting with us NOW through Jesus Christ. “The whole world has gone after him,” said the religious leaders after Palm Sunday in dismay. Little did they know! How will Jesus transcend the boundaries of time and space? How will he make the leap from 1st century Palestine to 21st century America? He will do it by being lifted up. The cross lifts Jesus beyond the boundaries of life and death, time and space: he is utterly unbound. “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.” He is the grain whose planting has birthed such fruit.

We’re called to do something with our life—as Jesus did with his. “Those who want to serve me must follow me.” We’re called to die, to give ourselves to God and one another sacrificially, in ways that make a difference, in ways that bring life. If you want to know if your suffering is of God ask yourself: does this bring LIFE. Becoming fully alive is not pain free but it is life giving. So many people are looking for faith, for spiritual fulfillment, but aren’t finding it. Maybe they, maybe we, are looking at it the wrong way. We’re looking to gain something we think we don’t have. Maybe we should be looking to lose something that’s already ours—things we “hate” to use Jesus’ phrase, that keep us from the love, mercy and healing of God in Christ, that keep us from trusting in the One who loves us enough to die for us and rise again. What on earth can compare to what’s to be gained in Jesus Christ? The hour has come my friends. What have we got to lose?

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Healing

By The Rev. Christian Carroll, Priest Associate

This morning we’re doing something a little bit out of the ordinary. We’re directly tying the topic of the sermon to the theme of the adult forum following the 10:30 service. The topic is “healing”. The topic came to be healing because the wardens and the sabbatical committee proposed that during our rector’s sabbatical we link some of what we’re doing and thinking about with Bernie’s activities while he is away. Healing is one of his interests and he will be teaching and preaching about healing throughout his travels hence we focus on healing today.

I take as my starting point those many times in the New Testament when Jesus talks about healing or heals someone of a malady. Here are just a few. In Matthew we read that, “… Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness” and later he says “… As you go proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons”.

In Mark we hear that Jesus “appointed the twelve whom he also named apostles to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons”.

And in Luke we see Jesus in the synagogue on the Sabbath. “When he stood up to read, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

So, it is safe to say that Jesus understood his life to be about proclaiming the kingdom of God, freeing and healing people and telling his closest followers to do the same.

But problems can creep in for us modern folks as we take up the disciples’ commission to cure, caste out, and cleanse.

Healing gets complicated. It gets complicated when we begin to take a closer look and see that we have some questions. For instance, Is there a difference between healing and curing? What is healing prayer? What does it do? What’s a healing ministry all about? Can anybody be a “healer” or do you need to be trained? What’s happening when a person goes over to the prayer desk and kneels down in front of another person who lays their hands on them and prays? What if I don’t get the healing I ask for? Does it mean there’s something wrong with me? Is the healer not good enough? What does it mean if some people are healed right away and some people have to keep coming back? What does it mean if it looks like someone is healed but whatever the problem is returns?

In addition to questions like these there are suspicions about healing. Take for instance healings we see on religious TV programs. Someone comes before the healer. The healer prays over them and the person throws down his cane and walks away restored. When I was growing up I watched Oral Roberts on TV.

Some of you might remember him. He was a famous “faith healer” and things like that happened.

That wowed me and I had no problem believing that it could really happen. The man was praying. He was helping people. That made sense to me. That was until I caught on to what my older siblings and cousins thought about it. It wasn’t cool to believe that things like that could be real. “It’s all an act”, they said. “Those people are fakes”. “They plant those people in the audience.” “They’re all in cahoots.”

Besides the views of my suspicious and cynical siblings there came a more sophisticated language of doubt and suspicion. “It isn’t scientific”, “It’s irrational to believe that can happen.” Then there’s also the idea that what we think of as healing is a mere matter of suggestion. It goes like this. I put the notion in your head that you can be better and you become better. I put the notion in your head that when I touch you, you are going to fall on the floor filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and you fall on the floor.

There is a lot about healing to occupy us in study and conversation. I think I read the better part of six books in preparing this sermon. One way or another they all suggested answers to the questions I’ve posed.

And frankly I overwhelmed myself. I invite you to read the books. I can provide a bibliography if you’re interested. But you have a great opportunity today. You can to go downstairs after the service, get some food and coffee and join the adult forum in the parish hall. I really encourage you to do that.

It’s an opportunity to talk to people in this congregation who are committed to a healing ministry. The people who offer healing prayers during our Sunday and Wednesday worship are going to be there talking about their stories and experiences.

But I’m not going to talk about the ideas or answers in the books.

I have another meditation on healing I’d like to put before you this morning. And it begins with this – after all my reading and thinking, about healing, healing ministry, healing prayer and the laying on of hands, after all my reading, prayer and study of the Scripture readings for today everything seemed reducible to ten words. From my personal experience and study I want to tell you what I know about healing – in ten words.

“You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.”

When all is said and done that’s it, “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.”

That message is surely in today’s Scripture readings. Here what the spirit is saying to the church. It’s right there. The naughty, impatient, fearful followers of Moses complain and complain and the God of their understanding sends poisonous serpents among them, people are bitten and die. They admit their wrongdoing and beg Moses to pray to God to take away the serpents. So Moses prays and the Lord tells him to do something, “make a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses makes a serpent of bronze, puts it on the pole and when anyone is bitten they look at the serpent of bronze and they live.

God continues to love and provide for the people in the wilderness. They discover it over and over again. When they turn away from trusting God and when fear finally drives them back to God, God is there to provide.

It’s right there in this morning’s gospel. John depicts Jesus alluding to today’s Hebrew Scripture in his conversation with Nicodemus. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”. The gospel says that for us to have life, eternal life, we must open to this man Jesus, we must look to this man Jesus and come to believe that Jesus lifted high up on the cross, Jesus lifted up to the Father bears us our true life.

As the Israelites had to look at the serpent on the pole for life, Jesus tells Nicodemus the simple truth that he, Jesus, is the way. Jesus tells Nicodemus that his is our true life. He is the light in darkness but in our humanity we sometimes turn away from the light to live in darkness. But the light is always there for us. The light is always there for us to come to. You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.

In twelve step programs of recovery they say that the program offered for recovery is a simple program for complicated people. Jesus’ life is a simple truth that we complicated people have trouble understanding and accepting. Jesus’ lifting brings eternal life to us. His life and death and resurrection mark the culmination of God’s persistent re-creation of the plan for humanity - to be at peace, to walk in love, to share that peace, to share that love and to share hope with each other when we falter.

To shine the light of our faith in God’s love and in the saving life giving work of Jesus Christ into the lives of our faltering brothers and sisters is our purpose. And living in that purpose we are healers one of another.

You are loved by God more than tongue can tell. The message is there. Sometimes we take in the message. Sometimes we’re not there to hear it. There’s stuff that gets in the way. And under the weight of that stuff we sometimes buckle and we are brought to an aching desire for relief from our stuff, for soothing, for clarity, and it is then that we call out for the restoration of something. Some sense of rightness, some sense of wholeness, some hunger that makes us look outside ourselves for the truth of who we are meant to be. I think that is the movement toward what we call healing. Let me show you what I mean.

I’d really like to – I’d really like to ask you for a show of hands on the question of who believes “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.” But I won’t. I don’t want you to give a quick answer. It is too important a question.

I want you to think about the power of those ten words. They can restore and they can be very, very hard for us to hear – to take in – to be changed by, to be healed by. Hard for many of us just to hear – let alone believe.

I thought about asking you to engage in a little experiment. I thought about asking you to look at the person sitting next to you or near you and to say to them: “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.” I decided not to do that because I don’t want you distracted by your reactions. Instead I want us to look at some of the ways we might react and see if our reactions have anything to say to us about healing or if healing has anything to say to us about our reactions.

I can think of a lot of possible reactions if you did actually turn to each other and speak those words. Some of us would put a smile on our faces and go along and do it. Maybe with a voice inside our heads that says this is so stupid, this is so manipulative, I resent this. Maybe you’d have trouble maintaining eye contact with the person you say it to. Or maybe you’d be able to manage a little eye contact and then uncomfortably look away. Maybe a look of resignation or embarrassment appears on your face that says, “OK let’s just get this over with” and then you’d mumble to each other “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell”.

But then again maybe you’d feel a sense of release, a sense of freedom, an exciting opportunity to open toward another person. For some people it may feel really good to be able to tell you “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell”.

Maybe you’d say it and a smile would form on your face that comes from a deep, peaceful place. Maybe you’d feel a childlike sense of freedom. Maybe you’d feel all of these things all at once. A cascade of pent up embarrassments or joys about your ability to love and be loved, to heal and be healed.

If you think about what your reactions might have been, you might identify a place inside you that wishes your reactions were different. Maybe we’d see things inside us that we want to be changed. Or maybe you’d identify something that has changed over time and you want it to keep growing. Those reactions – they all have something to do with healing.

Anything that has to do with our discomfort in ourselves or with others is about a place that hasn’t basked in the light. And anything, anything at all that has to do with our being comfortable in our own skin needs to be shared. Any gift that you know in your soul has been given to you by God needs to be shared.

Healing is taking and giving the love of God. It is about opening dark and troubled places to the love of God in the faith that you are loved by God. Healing is about opening your lighted, peaceful places to others because you know they are loved by God.

Let me ask you, “have you ever had a moment when you saw someone just suffering so and you felt impelled in your guts to just touch them ever so gently? You are so moved – so moved – inside the body that you want to reach out of yourself – out of yourself and lay your hand on them. And if you let yourself do it - as that hand gets closer to its destination something rises up in you and you know it’s not you that’s reaching out. You know that you are seeing with God’s eyes. You know it is time to open. You know this is the charity of the heart of Christ moving in and through you.

Have you ever felt so happy for someone that you’re warmed by a deep, deep sense of peace as you look at their joy? That’s something bigger than this heart at work.

Listen to these words of John Shelby Spong as he expresses who Jesus is and what the life he lived and offered to us can do in and through us.

“The Christian story is a story of One who seemed infinitely to transcend his barriers, even the barrier of death: His ability to be open was uncompromised; he lived out a freedom and a wholeness; his capacity for love revealed that he had received an infinite amount of love, a love that continued to flow even as his life was being destroyed. As he died, he lived. This life, this love, tested that ultimate barrier of death and men are convinced he prevailed, generating power that other lives have met in age after age setting them free to live, to press the limits of their potential, to become persons they never dreamed they could be”. [1]

My brothers and sisters, in believing the realness of that Christ, in knowing that Christ, in allowing yourselves to live within the power of Christ’s love, in allowing yourselves to be a servant of that power, the healing love of God starts moving in us and out from us.

That’s what I know today. You are loved by God more than tongue can tell and the power of that love can knock your socks off.

[1] John Shelby Spong, Christpower. (Richmond: Hall Publishing, 1975) 11.

© 2009 The Rev. Christian Carroll

In God We Trust

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. May I speak in the Name of the Living God. Amen.”

Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and said to the people, “I got good news and I got bad news. The good news is I got him down to 10. The bad news is adultery is still on the list.”

I did my seminary field work in a synagogue—with Kevin Coffey, a priest from the diocese some of you may know. That’s how we met. Our theology professor was very active in interfaith dialogue and wanted to pioneer a placement with his friend Rabbi Block at Brotherhood Synagogue. My bishop who was also very involved with the dialogue, leapt at the chance to have me participate. So just as Mary heads off to St. George’s on Sunday mornings...we headed off to shul on Friday nights.

Our first experience was, appropriately, a bris—a circumcision of a baby boy on the 8th day—whose grandfathers winced as they held his legs. The child made barely a sound and he seemed to enjoy sucking on the linen dipped in sacramental wine shared with him for the occasion. We cast our sins into the E. River on Tashlich on the first day of Rosh Hashona. We atoned on Yom Kippur. We remembered the dead. And we stood Friday after Friday at the opening words: Hear O Israel the Lord thy God, the Lord is One and learned not to write in shul—no matter how marvelous the rabbi’s sermon. (oops!) Later a Jewish seminary student began doing his field work at Episcopal Church. Each of us learning about the other’s liturgy and customs by living through them with the congregation. All in an effort to deepen interfaith understanding in students who would one day lead and influence congregations themselves.

It changed my life. Judaism came alive, not just as an historic tradition for which I already had an appreciation, but as a living one. I began to see the world through Jewish eyes. And the world certainly looked different. I noticed, for example, for the first time that Christmas—a Christian holiday—was also a federal holiday. I felt like a man at a women’s meeting—I’d never experienced myself as part of the power structure that way before. But perhaps the thing that changed most for me was my understanding of the “law.”

Christians have an almost snooty understanding of law. We like to think of ourselves as “spiritual,” and by contrast, paint the Jews as “legalistic.” We’re the “spirit of the law” they’re the “letter of the law.” Now it’s true that Jesus was highly critical of the legalistic Pharisees of his day. But we do a great disservice to the Jewish people to tar the whole for the abuses of the few. You want to see legalistic, try to change anything liturgical in the Episcopal Church. As the retired Bishop of Ohio once put it: contrary to popular Episcopal practice, Jesus’ 7 last words from the cross were not: We’ve never done it that way before. I confess I had this almost unconscious sense that in contrast to us, the Jews were locked into a literal “letter of the law,” a narrow, overly defined, legalistic minefield, hemmed in on every side. What I found was a literal delight in the law of the Lord far richer and more spirited than anything I’d ever known before or experienced since.

It came home to me on a lovely feast called “Simchat Torah” a festival of rejoicing over the giving of the law. It literally means: the joy of the Torah. It celebrates the completion and the beginning of the reading of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch, the Law of Moses. The night the day began (the Jewish day begins at sunset) the sacred scrolls were taken from the sanctuary--covered in different colored velvet vestments and silver--and carried in procession downstairs where a band was striking up the music. This was no stately Episcopal procession! We were dancing and singing and clapping on our way. I was stunned when the rabbi handed me the torah he was carrying wrapped in blue velvet as we danced together down the stairs. (Drop one of these and the congregation is in mourning for something like 40 years – “long time” – no pressure).

The centuries fell away as the Rabbi’s son made like a bull to charge the Torah and the Rabbi lifted it high. We were spinning and dancing to this wonderful eastern music. I could imagine the firelight, the earth underfoot – Jesus taking part in such a feast with great zest. It was ancient and marvelous, created during the exile 500 BC, and like nothing I’d been a part of before. Everyone took turns – young and old alike – whirling the Torahs across the dance floor like a bride, clapping and stomping our feet to the music, spinning and dancing getting hot and thirsty. The youngest and frailest circled by others lest the sacred Torah slip and fall to the floor.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never danced with Scripture before. And I haven’t since. Once you do you can certainly never look at it again as a burden. “The Law of the LORD is perfect and revives the soul,” sang the psalm this morning, (Ps 19:7a). Yes, indeed. “The statutes of the LORD are just and rejoice the heart”(19:8a). There was great rejoicing. “More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold,* sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb” (19:10). It’s all true. The stained glass window across from me in the seminary chapel of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments never looked the same again.

The Ten Commandments we heard this morning are a succinct statement from our talkative God about how we should live as God’s people. They’re called the 10 words and are shorthand for the entire Torah. They tell us what God values, what matters to this righteous God who delivered the people of Israel simply because he “heard their cry.” And who would not then leave them flailing about in the dark. “The testimony of the LORD is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent” (Ps 19:7b). “The commandment of the LORD is clear and gives light to the eyes” (19:8b). “In keeping them there is great reward”(19:11b). The Jews received the testimony of the LORD in the spirit in which it was given—with gratitude and rejoicing, as God’s gift to God’s people for the right ordering of their lives; their duty to God and their neighbor.

The Ten Commandments did not come about as an abstract set of rules upon which all reasonable people ought to agree. They were not formulated to make society flow more smoothly. They are part of the story of Israel’s deliverance, given to the people of Israel as their response to what God has done. They’re the ethical demands God places on the people God has saved. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” Because I delivered you; therefore you are mine. As a sign of being mine you will live in this way. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD and animal sacrifice stopped the 10 Commandments remained setting the people of God apart and ordering their way of life.

But everyone didn’t live happily ever after. The problem is what it always was. These commandments — while so clear — are hard to obey. In fact, in much of the New Testament the law serves to show just how far short of the will of God we fall, underscoring the need we have for Jesus. We want to remain faithful to God in this covenant relationship but we can’t. The sacred space between us needs to be cleansed from the accumulated debris of sin and broken promises. When we cannot do it, God does it himself in Jesus Christ.

The cleansing of the temple we see today in the gospel is the visceral enactment of the “jealous” love of God for God’s people — a love that seeks to overturn and drive out all that rivals the place of God in our worship, our work, our community and our hearts. It’s not just the so-called religious arena that God claims. The Temple was the physical icon of the legal, social, and religious infrastructure of the people. When Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers he laid claim to all that seeks to get in the way in every area of our lives, every area, though it’s true we often have particular difficulty where money is concerned. That’s why we write on our money: In God we trust because around money we have such a hard time doing just that.

We’re in the midst of a huge economic downturn. Leaders are caught in the terrible quandary of facing laying people off to keep businesses afloat. It’s agonizing. We write: In God we Trust on our money. But I wonder. Any self-respecting space alien landing here looking for our god would bypass our little churches and head straight for the Short Hills Mall. Who is this god whose devotees require acres and acres of parking? “In God we trust,” we write. Is it true? Or only what we wish were true? Money cannot bear the weight of our lives. It cannot give us meaning, self-worth or, finally, security. But God CAN, God DOES. In GOD we trust. We come here to remember that, to remind ourselves, to remind each other.

Imagine what our lives might be like if this “information” became “revelation” Imagine what it would be like to live our lives trusting God, obeying God. For one thing we’d discover that our circumstances don’t determine our attitude. The economy is uncertain, getting and keeping a job is in jeopardy, so is our ability to pay for college, to fund our retirement. But God is not uncertain. God is not in jeopardy. Our collective circumstances may not look so good — unless we compare them to most of the world’s population — but we believe in God who, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “can make a way out of no way.” We need trust in the miracle of God’s abundance. This is the God of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. This is the God of Easter. We need to do what we can and trust God for the rest. We need to take responsibility where we can—and cast our worry, our care on God. We often do the reverse. We cast our responsibility and keep our care. We need to do what we can and cast our care on God.

Each of us has sphere of influence—whether it’s the home, the classroom, the board room, at the store or on the street. We have good news to bring to these troubled times. We can begin by putting our mouths where our money is: In God we trust. There IS no distinction between secular and sacred, between religion and politics, between Wall Street and Main Street, between you and me, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, rich and poor. We are called to be good stewards of our money, our allegiances and our lives because they all belong to God. It’s God’s world and in God’s eyes it doesn’t look the way it does on our maps with lines dividing “us” from “them” around the globe. As Margaret Mead said, “We have searched the whole world and found only one human race.” You and I are called to witness to that reality in as many ways as there are people here in all the dimensions of our lives. Let’s put our mouths and our lives where our money is: In God we trust.

Lent is about coming to terms with a God who will brook no rivals, “whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above or in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth,” a God willing to be crucified to set us free, to make us new, to make us His. Doesn’t that make you want to dance for joy?

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Nobody Special

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

Take my lips and speak through them. Take our ears and hear through them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for Thee. May I speak in the name of the Living God. Amen.

Abraham got God’s attention not by being a saint but by being someone who allowed God to make him somebody when he was nobody special to begin with. That’s why he’s so remarkable. God said: I’m going to make you the father of many nations and Abraham who was 100 years old and whose beloved wife Sarah had been infertile for decades said: I believe you. He didn’t tiptoe around cautiously asking a lot of skeptical questions. He didn’t say: Look, Lord, by any account that ship has sailed. How could a couple “with one foot in the grave have another foot in the maternity ward” (in Buechner’s lovely phrase). What he said instead was: Count me in and he set out to claim not knowing where he was going for however long it took. Abraham and Sarah embraced what God was doing—not trying to do it themselves (as if!) but trusting-God-to-do-what God had promised. “Hoping against hope,” wrote St. Paul, Abraham “believed he’d become the father of many nations,” Sarah, that she would “give rise to nations.” That God could “give life to the dead and call into existence the things that are not” and on that faith, that turning point, the door to the future swung open.

When I was a student at The General Theological Seminary in NYC they took us to worship services in different traditions to expose us to different ways of approaching God. We went to an Orthodox Jewish service. I remember being shepherded with other women to a back staircase where we watched the proceedings below from the balcony. We went to a Syrian Orthodox service with its incense, bells and vestments. We met the Archbishop I remember kissing his ring. And we went to a store front Pentecostal church in Harlem where we sat in a low ceiling rectangular room, in rows of metal folding chairs. I remember the women in white who assisted those who were slain by the Spirit and I remember the preacher.

The service had already been going a while when we got there and it continued after we left. This young man wasn’t the regular minister but he’d been invited up by him. He stood up there in his new brown suit and started out saying all the right things but it all just lay flat. And I thought, well this sure isn’t what I was expecting. What a disappointment. He was flailing around up there. He knew it and we knew it. Suddenly he turned away and stopped, seemed somehow suspended in some kind of inner debate.

Then he turned back. “I haven’t allllways been a preacher.” The change was palpable. (There were a couple of “Amens”). “In fact, I’d never have been seen around people like you.” (“Yes,” people could relate to that.) “I did drugs.” Congregation paused to consider this a minute. “I have the needle marks in my arms.” (Mmmm mmm) “And I did all the nasty, ugly things you think of when you think of people doing drugs.” (There was silence as our collective minds considered what disgusting things these might be.) “I haven’t alllways been a preacher.” (Where was this going we wondered together? This is sin, not salvation. So many of us thinking it it was almost audible: Who did this guy think he was to be standing up there, in church, with a microphone in his hand?)

“I haven’t alllways been a preacher. What do I do when I see the people who used to know me? They see me in my suit. And I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, ‘Who do you think you are being a preacher? We remember you when you were lower than the low.’ What do I do? Do I cross the street?!” (hmmm hmmm) “No, I don’t. I hold my head up and I walk on by because I am not ashamed of Christ!” (“Amen!”) “I am not ashaaamed of Christ!” he said, slapping his heel against the floor for emphasis. “I am not ashamed that Christ has set me free. I am not ashamed that he has washed me clean. I thank him. I thank him every day. I am not standing up here because I’M good. I am standing up here because HE’S good. I am not ashamed of Christ.”

The place went wild. Tears were streaming down our faces. We were in the presence of God. We were eye witnesses to the gospel, like all those people centuries before. And we were ashamed. Not of him but of ourselves. Ashamed of having judged this man for doing things we told ourselves we’d never do, for doing things we’d never admit if we had—for fear of encountering others as judgmental as ourselves. We had found him wanting but God had found him worthy. It still has the power to wound me when I think on it—to wound and to make whole. Like Abraham, he had gotten God’s attention not by being a saint but by being someone who allowed God to make him somebody when he was nobody. There is hope for us yet.

This is why Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him because he knows that until we do we can’t follow him. Not really. Not until we, like Abraham and Sarah and the Pentecostal preacher, deny that our salvation depends on us, deny that our sins and shortcomings are a deal breaker, deny ourselves center stage. Until we do that we don’t really follow because we’re too busy leading. “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus says to Peter and to us when we have lost our place, setting our minds “not on divine things but human things” making us not rocks of faith on which to build but rocks in Jesus’ way. Even the disciples had problems with this. We are not alone.

If we want the new life Jesus died and rose to give us we must take up our cross—sacrifice our pride in going it alone, sacrifice our fear of being seen as vulnerable and foolish and in need of saving—as though Jesus were just the icing on the cake for us, an extra dose of self-help, as if Good Friday and Easter were optional extras. Each of us has some “deal breaker” defect, at least in our own minds. What’s yours, I wonder? What is the impossible thing that God just won’t be able to get past with you? What is the secret you’re afraid will be revealed? Of what are you ashamed?

Friends, we don’t need to be ashamed of Christ, ashamed of what he’s done for us, ashamed we needed him to do it. We’re frightened, broken, guilty and ashamed and God loves us. We love God but strangely we try to do without God. Odd, isn’t it? Not so much because of arrogance maybe as because we don’t even think of asking for help. We feel we should be able to do whatever it is on our own. Because most of the church’s writing on sin has come from these incredible power-house men like St. Paul and St. Augustine—for whom bullying pride and arrogance were the real temptations—we’re all on alert for these rearing their ugly heads with the sometimes odd result of people trying to repent of pride and arrogance who wouldn’t know self-assertion if it came up and hit them in the face.

Since it’s Women’s History Month I feel I should point out that girls and women are more apt to sin—an archery term which means “to miss the mark”—by erasing themselves rather than overly asserting themselves. I think of the cartoon where Donald Duck gets in a fight with the cartoonist who just erases Donald when he gets annoying. You see this big yellow pencil eraser going back and forth, back and forth. Until nothing’s left but the talking mouth which then, too, goes. We don’t need a cartoonist we’ll erase ourselves so our hurt, or anger or point of view won’t disturb the status quo and then we simmer with rage and resentment and try to work our will through manipulation. It’s not that men can’t sin the exact same way and that women can’t be prideful. It’s just that it’s worth it to spend some time checking our assumptions as to where the sin is.

Having said all that, maybe this erasure problem is an inverse sin of pride after all. Maybe I don’t want to see myself—or heaven forbid for others to see me—in need of God. I suspect I’m not alone in this. As the Bishop pointed out in his Lenten letter we’re all about independence in this culture. We want to gain salvation the old fashioned way (to a coin a phrase) we want to earn it. The pain of seeing ourselves complete—without excuses—is so great. But I am because you are. Because you see me I exist. To the extent that I will not let you see me, I do not exist. We bring one another into being. Nothing human is alien to us. Nothing human is alien to us. We want to see ourselves through rose colored glasses—maybe we hope others will see us that way—because maybe we’re afraid we’re not that beloved after all.

Everybody has a reason why they think God can’t use them. Abraham was too old and Sarah laughed out loud; Moses protested that he didn’t speak well; Isaiah that he was “a man of unclean lips;” Jeremiah that he was “only a youth;” Mary that she had “no husband.” Every one of them said: I cannot do it. I am not enough. And every one of them was right! They were not enough. But God is enough and God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that are not” can make ANY of us equal to ANY task to which God calls us. We are saved by grace through faith and we are transformed the same way: not by our own efforts but trusting and embracing the love of God at work in us. Abraham and Sarah were 100 years old when Sarah gave birth to a son, Isaac which means: he laughs. They are the parents of many nations: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Moses our insecure speaker is remembered for his words: Let my people go. The young Jeremiah faced down the principalities and powers of his day. The forgiven Isaiah saw the throne of God. The virgin, Mary, gave birth to God’s own Son.

What are you and I called to do that we’re OBVIOUSLY ill-equipped for? What are you and I called to do that everyone can see we’ll need God to accomplish? What cross will be your resurrection? What do you need to lay down so that God can raise you up? What impossible life is being born in you? Nothing we’ve done or can do will ever be able to separate us from the love of God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that are not” and on that faith, that turning point, the door to our future swings open.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

God's Beloved

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

O God you call us on journeys whose ending we cannot see, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Good morning, Saints! It is wonderful to be with you for the 14 weeks of Father Poppe’s sabbatical. Fr. Poppe’s on his way to Africa, London and Europe—poor thing!—but we who stay home are on a journey, too. Proust says, “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” We’re on a sabbatical journey, a Lenten journey and, for the month of March, a women’s history month journey—a journey that can help us see the truths that can heal us, the patterns that hurt us, the assumptions that limit us. Unlike Bernie, we’re hoping to lose some baggage on this trip, you know what I mean? To see ourselves as God sees us, to look at things we think we know—ourselves, God, each other—and discover things we never imagined, to see them with new eyes.

To go on this journey we have to believe there’s more to life than what we’ve found: more joy, more purpose, passion and peace. Like Jesus in the gospel for this morning we have to be willing to leave Nazareth for the waters of new birth, to step out in faith in spite of all the reasons not to. Their name is legion and I’m sure Jesus knew them: My mother needs me. My work needs me. It’s selfish! It’s risky. I know who I AM here. What makes me think God wants something different for me now? Change is scary. What will it mean? What will it cost? And yet—it might answer this nameless yearning; it might energize me beyond my knowing, it might make a difference to the world.

Jesus bursts on the scene in Mark’s gospel with no advance warning, no introduction, no birth narratives, no stories of growing up, for all we know he’s just a carpenter from Galilee come down with everyone else to this crazy prophet John baptizing in the Jordan. John was a kind of performance artist, as all the prophets were—enacting the story of repentance, the story of being new birth. It was the enactment of a distance closing—the huge distance between guilt and forgiveness, brokenness and wholeness, being lost and being found. Jesus, not in need of forgiveness, goes anyway leaving—literally—home and mother, job and identity—on the river bank with his clothing. He steps out into the water and discovers a distance has been closed for him too.

The heavens were torn apart. The Greek word means “split open.” The membrane between heaven and earth, between God and Jesus split open—it’s very much a birth image—and the Spirit descends like a dove into him (says the Greek) and from within heaven comes a voice: You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased. They were words that would have been familiar. The first part from Psalm 2:7 for the king’s coronation—“You are my Son, this day I have begotten you,” or, in the words of the Message: Today is your birthday. The second: “With you I am well pleased,” is an echo of Jesus’ beloved Isaiah, one of the Servant Songs: Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect in whom my soul delights! The suffering servant by whose wounds we are healed.

He sees himself with new eyes. It’s a shattering insight, an experience that divides life into “before” and “after.” The Spirit drives him out into the wilderness, the place of no illusions and no resources of our own. There is no one to impress, appease or distract; no place to hide from angels, wild beasts, Satan, and God all of whom see us more clearly than we see ourselves. We’re alone with God, alone with ourselves. The temptation is to run away, head back home and try to carry on as before. There is the temptation to take control from God: Yes, Lord, I know you rent the heavens and came down but I got it from here! I’m good to go. Gotcha covered. There is always the temptation NOT to be who you ARE because the devil knows that once we discover who we are then we are well on the way to discovering what we can DO, which is to make a difference in this world beyond our wildest dreams.

Satan aids and abets our “going it alone.” Some of you know I was an interim at St. Mark’s, WO, several years ago. It was a wilderness experience—poor, black, urban, mission: which one of those words did I know anything about? “We can do this,” I said rolling up my sleeves as they watched. “Busy, busy, busy,” they said. It was like trying to turn a battleship. Eventually I got tired—just like they’d gotten tired, 35 people rolling around like marbles in a shoebox in a landmark church that sat 400. Eventually I got it. I’d never met a circumstance—not at work, not like this—that I couldn’t woo and win by sheer force of personality. And when we all got to the end of our collective strength we finally realized: We don’t have anything but God. What a funny thing to say: if we had God who could have more? The place might close. It might stay open. We couldn’t control it. We were thrown back on God. It was total surrender. And I have to tell you our spirits caught fire, my preaching caught fire. In practical ways and spiritual ways we asked and received, we sought and found, we knocked and doors were opened—file cabinets, computers and a secretary materialized, 3 Sunday School teachers, energy and hope. I left a new person.

A new clergy couple came—wonderful spirit filled people. Eventually, still, the church closed. Being faithful doesn’t make things always turn out the way we want them to: Father, take this cup away from me; being faithful means discovering that the worst thing is never the last thing. The worst thing is never the last thing. It’s never the end of the story. Like Jesus, we came out of that wilderness with good news and were sent forth to proclaim it. God loves us. If we really want to experience that we have to stop trying to change ourselves, and others and our circumstances by our own efforts, on our own terms, under our own power. We need let go of who we’re trying to be so that God can free us to be who we are.

We need to change our minds. That’s the first sermon Jesus ever gave. I have it on my desk, in slightly different translation than we heard this morning: After John’s arrest JESUS came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God and saying, “The time has come at last—the KINGDOM of God has arrived. You must CHANGE YOUR MIND (all caps) and believe the Good News.” (Mark 1:14-15) If we want to live the life Jesus lived and died and rose to give us we have to change our minds, change our lives, not by our own heroic efforts but by absolute surrender to the absolute love of God. “Yeah, yeah,” we say. “Jesus loves me this I know.” Tell me something I don’t know.” But the problem is we DON’T know. We know it as an idea, a concept, but far less as a living, breathing, certain, sustaining, transforming, alive, empowering REALITY.

No less a prophet, priest and teacher than S. Africa’s first black Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said he gives only one sermon everywhere he goes: God loves you. Full stop. I was listening to an old 1999 interview between Father Tutu (as he prefers to be called) and Bill Moyers who asked him: What is the worst thing about Apartheid? “When it makes you doubt that you are a child of God,” he said. “When you are subjected to treatment that begins to work in here (taps his forehead) and you begin to say, maybe they are right. Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes. And so when they call you a non-European, a non-this you may think it is not working on you, but in fact it is corrosive of your self- image. You end up wondering whether you are actually as human as those others.” He started preaching, “God didn't make a mistake creating you black. Celebrate who you are. God loves you.” (From The Moyers Files: Bill Moyers talks with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, April 27, 1999 www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives/tutu_ts.html)

Girls and women have a similar problem. Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history,” wrote Myra Sadker (1943-1995) who pioneered much of the research documenting gender bias in America's schools, “she learns she is worth less.” “From grade school through graduate school, from inner city to rural towns, Sadker uncovered not only blatant gender discrimination in textbooks and sports funding, but also subtle patterns of inequities that shaped the lives of girls and boys.” (http://www.sadker.org/) I was shocked to learn on the National Women’s History Projecth website that only 3% of educational materials deal with women’s contributions. How can we know what we’re capable of when we have no idea who we are? (http://www.nwhp.org/)

The Congressional Resolution Designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month” first passed in 1987 speaks of the historic contributions to the growth of our Nation in countless recorded and unrecorded ways by American women of every race, class and ethnic background women’s critical economic, cultural and social roles in every sphere of life. It tells of women constituting a significant portion of the labor force working inside and outside of the home, women’s unique role as the majority of the volunteer labor force of the Nation, the role of women in the establishment of early charitable, philanthropic and cultural institutions, women’s leadership in every progressive social change movement; women’s leadership in securing not only their own right of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, the industrial labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other movements, especially the peace movement which create a more fair and just society for all; the Resolution concludes that “whereas despite these contributions, the role of American women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued, in the literature, teaching and study of American history therefore be it resolved that march be set aside as Women’s History Month… the Congress and President calling upon the people of the United States to observe these months appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities.”

When women’s history is taught the self esteem of girls and women goes up and their vision of what is possible expands. The respect of boys and men goes up. Achievement by girls and women increases. And violence against women decreases. We need to know who we are. “You are my beloved daughter. With you I am well pleased.” What might happen if we changed our minds and believed this good news? If our self talk weren’t about our “fat thighs” and how sensitive, dumb and emotional we are and instead was: God loves me. I am God’s beloved. God is pleased with me.

Like the narrator sang last weekend in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: You are what you feel. What we think may be wrong but if we believe it it’s true for us. Our beliefs change our reality. If we want to change our LIVES we have to change our THINKING and to change our thinking we have to be aware of it. I saw a therapist on television who said he told his patients to put a rubber band on their wrist for a week and snap it every time they said or thought something negative about themselves. Red wrists at the end of 7 days show us a lot about our thinking. I told this story to my kids and for days when they heard me say something negative about myself they’d say: Snap! Most of us wouldn’t be friends with people who talked to us the way we talk to ourselves.

God says: You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased. God is not in heaven slapping the divine forehead saying to Jesus, “Oh, no! There goes Anne being Anne again!” God is not in a state of shock and surprise that we are the way God made us. We are not a disappointment to God. God made us black, white, gay, straight, lesbian, male and female. God made us who we are as we are for a purpose. Want to know your purpose? You need to learn who you are. If we want something to be useful we first need to see what it is. What are its given characteristics: is it a dahlia or a donkey an orange or an automobile. I wasn’t created to be a Carmelite nun under a vow of silence, you know? Much as my family and friends would like it from time to time. I’m a TALKER. That’s what was always on my report card: “Talks too much in class.” Oh well, now I talk for God. God doesn’t seem to mind. God made me fired up and ready to go. I’m learning to accept I’m more your crashing ocean deep than your still silent pond. I’m learning more how to surf the waves of my enthusiasm rather than let it send me cart wheeling onto the beach in a heap. Point is: I’m not a mistake. You are not a mistake. You are not a disappointment to God. God loves you: Full stop. No disclaimers.

Jesus believed God loved him—fully, utterly, completely. Everything else he accomplished flowed from that. Jesus found his identity in God. Jesus found his strength in God. When John was arrested he came out of the wilderness preaching what he had discovered. That God’s love makes all things possible. It was enough to sustain Jesus to the cross and beyond. It is enough to sustain us. “Change your mind” Jesus calls to us “and believe the one that can make all the difference if only you will let it in: You are God’s beloved. With you God is well pleased.”

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven