Pentecost

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.

When the day of Pentecost had come the disciples were all together in one place: attentively, watching and waiting for whatever it was that Jesus had said would happen to happen. Without warning seemingly out of nowhere came the sound of a roaring wind. It filled the entire house where they were sitting. Then the Holy Spirit swept through their ranks like wildfire. Suddenly they were all speaking at once about God’s deeds of power—and they were speaking in all the languages of the world.

Devout Jewish pilgrims from all over the world were staying in Jerusalem at the time. They came running at the sound, thunderstruck. Aren’t all of these who are talking Galileans? How can we hear them proclaiming God’s deeds of power each in our own mother tongue? What is going on here? How can this be?

It was a singular moment yet to a lesser degree we know this miracle of speaking and hearing in our own experience, times when someone seemingly ordinary says something to us that blows us away as, again, seemingly out of nowhere a connection is made, a freeing insight gained, healing happens. We hear a sermon or a song and think: It’s as if they’re speaking directly to me! And, indeed, the Holy Spirit does speak to us every day many times a day if only we will listen. Fifty years ago a friend is given a passage of scripture; he credits it with saving him from a nervous breakdown. A friend tells another friend: “you are loved, so loved” and she hears the voice of God. Someone in a grocery store smiles handing a woman back a dropped can of peas and hands her back her self-respect.

We’re here because, miraculously, over the course of our lives we’ve experienced “God’s deeds of power” spoken to us in a language we can understand, a language that calls to us like our mother tongue in a foreign land, irresistibly drawing us in love, by love, for love. Like the Jewish pilgrims before us we’ve gathered at the sound. People being people—both then and now—continue to draw varying conclusions about the evidence: “It’s God,” cries one. “You’re kidding yourself,” mocks another. “They’re drunk on cheap wine,” some sneered at the disciples.

Something happened in that movement of tongues and wind and fire because from that moment everything changed. In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “The followers became leaders, the listeners became preachers, the converts became missionaries, the healed became healers. The disciples became apostles, witnesses of the risen Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. Surprising things began to happen. They began to say things that sounded like him, and they began to do things they had never seen anyone but him do before.” (Gospel Medicine, Cambridge: MA; Cowley Publications, 1995, p. 77-78).

For one thing instead of denying he even knew Jesus Peter stepped up on Pentecost with boldness: Friends, we’re not drunk. It’s only 9 o’clock in the morning. But it is intoxicating—this mind blowing, heartwarming, life changing power of God that connects us to each other and the world in love and service. Listen up and get this story straight. This is just as the prophet Joel announced: God has poured out God’s Spirit “upon all flesh” upon all kinds of people, not just on prophets, priests and royalty, but on our sons and our daughters, on male and female slaves, on the lost the lonely and the left behind, our young see visions and our old dream dreams.

The Spirit of Truth is here to lead us into all truth: the truth about ourselves, the truth about Jesus Christ crucified and Risen, the truth about whose world this is and how we can help one another. God is calling us all in the language of passion and love—a language each of us can understand. It brings courage out of fear, life out of death, community out of chaos, saying: Step out in faith, I will meet you with power. If you want to walk on water you got to get out of the boat! “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

“When the day of Pentecost had come” the community consisted of 120 people. By the end of Peter’s sermon 3000 people were baptized. (O to preach like that!) “When the day of Pentecost had come” all Christ’s followers were all together in one place, by the time the sun had set they’d been blown out over the known world. Without the power of the Holy Spirit the disciples would have become life-less and scattered like Ezekiel’s dry bones BY it they came together bone upon bone into a living Body, the living, breathing, transforming Body of Christ. The Church was born. We’re still here.

With the events of this day the Easter season comes to an end. The Paschal candle which has burned in our midst since the Easter Vigil will be extinguished—the presence of Christ no longer signified by its presence in our midst but by his presence in US. With the Feast of Pentecost the flame of love that burned in Christ alone, now burns in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. It has the power to transform and transfigure us as it did the disciples if only we’ll allow it. It comes to warm and comfort us. It comes to guide us in places of risk and uncertainty—where life has broken us open and we are not in control. It comes to strengthen and empower us, to equip us with patience and courage we did not know we had, for struggles we could not have imagined, for glory yet to be revealed. When we find ourselves with speech beyond our reasoning, faith beyond measure, love beyond thought, we know the Spirit has caught hold of us.

It is, my friends, the greatest unharnessed power in the world. What might we do if we understood, believed in, experienced the power working in us through the Holy Spirit! If we opened ourselves to it, decided to work with it? It may come more like a whisper than the rush of a violent wind in our lives but by our baptism we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. We may speak with an eloquence that converts 3000 in a day or find ourselves unable to utter a word—even so, as the alternate reading for this morning asserts, the Holy Spirit is there interceding “with sighs too deep for words.” Receiving the Holy Spirit doesn’t make life easy for us. It aligns us with God’s plan for our lives. It isn’t that life gets easy, but that important things begin to happen. We become part of something great.

Wherever we find ourselves today God is at work in us. Maybe we are lying on the ground like dry bones. God asked Ezekiel, “Mortal can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the bones.” And Ezekiel prophesied. “Prophesy to the breath.” And Ezekiel prophesied and the Spirit of God came into those very dry bones and they lived. I’m struck—on this birthday of the church—by the power of community. The bones—and God—needed Ezekiel. The crowd needed Peter. We’re all in this together. The bones in the valley weren’t just disconnected they were “very dry.” But through Ezekiel the Spirit entered into that place of desolation and death and brought life. The disciples had been waiting and praying and praying and waiting but they didn’t give up. They encouraged one another and the breakthrough came as it always will because God is bigger than the wait or the confusion, or the risk or the fear or the uncertainty or the loss. The Holy Spirit is the greatest unharnessed power in the world.

Pentecost marks an end and a beginning—which seems fitting as our sabbatical time draws to a close. For one thing it marks the end of the disciple’s life with Christ as they had come to know it—just as it does for us. Like the disciples we’ve shared the last supper, endured the cross, rejoiced in the resurrection and encountered the Risen Christ in people we mistook for strangers and friends until the day he was taken up from us in the Ascension. We puzzled over his parables, washed each other’s feet, and pondered the meaning of his sacrifice. We shared insights and conversation, compassion and support. Like the disciples we laughed and cried and planned and prayed. We celebrated our beloved-ness, received the gifts each other had to give, kept an eye skinned for the Spirit. In short, we’ve been the Body of Christ.

It’s been a privilege to have served among you—beside you. Never have I had the pleasure of working with a team so caring and competent, spirited and supportive: from the wardens—Tom and Cheryl; to the clergy—Chris Carroll for her teaching and pastoral visits and Chris McCloud for support above and beyond the call of duty—liturgical, pastoral, personal (I could NOT have done this without you!); to Karen, parish administrator extraordinaire, to Mary our wonderful seminarian and her gift of Taize; John, our joyful and talented organist and the choir who not only processes in a reverential dance but sings when they get here; to Ulysses and the altar guild—gracious, collegial and kind, all; to Dan in charge of acolytes (and great help to me and Deacon Chris especially at Holy Week); to Roland and his healers; Nina and Kirk, masters of the gospel on the web; Clarence and newcomers, George in charge of readers (no small feat today) ; to Jane worker-of-wonders Cates in charge of our children; to Jane who covered our Confirmation Class; to the family service musicians; to ushers and greeters to all of you who “gather at the sound.” You have spoken to me for 14 weeks in a language I can understand. God is good, all the time. I thank God for you all. What a gift! What a blessing! What a parish!

Pentecost marks the beginning of a new Spirit in Christ. “I tell you the truth:” said Jesus, “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” Fourteen weeks ago the Holy Spirit blew Bernie to South Africa and me into your midst. Now the Holy Spirit is blowing Bernie home and us apart. In true Pentecost fashion you and Bernie are coming together in a new spirit because the community has not been just sitting here marking time. The Holy Spirit has been at work. Bernie’s been changed. You’ve been changed. I’ve been changed. How will God knit together these living bones into a new reality I wonder? It must be a new reality because there is no going backwards in Christ. God always moves forward, melting us, molding us, leading us on.

That first Sunday I quoted Marcel Proust: the real voyage of discovery lies not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes. I wonder with what new eyes you will see yourselves and Bernie as the future unfolds. One thing is for certain God will be speaking We only know that God will be with us all speaking the language of love and grace and transformation in a way each of us will be able to understand and that the power of the Holy Spirit—the power of the invisible God is constantly at work beneath the surface of things.

The Body hasn’t stopped growing or the wind blowing since. In fact, it blew mightily during the silence of our 10:30 Taize service two weeks ago. After the whir of the siren, after the barking of the dog into the silence there came the rush of a mighty wind and it shook the roof of the house, this house, where we were sitting. Did you hear it? What a marvelous sign. Pentecost wasn’t only “back then” it is here and now. Come to make all things new—even me and you. Thanks be to God.

Come, Holy Spirit, come!

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Memorial Day

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

“As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” May I speak in the name of the Living God. Amen.

The soldier had what looked like a quiver of them on his back: American flags on small dowels and he solemnly stood them upright one after another with military precision in front each headstone in what turned out to be rows and rows and rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. On this Memorial Day weekend we remember those who have given their lives in the service of their country; who like the disciples in the gospel this morning were sent into a world hostile to them and laid down their lives in the service of a mission larger than themselves.

Are there any in our midst who have served in our nations’ armed forces? Could you please stand. The most cursory student of history knows we owe you a debt of gratitude. On behalf of the rest of us, I’d like to give a special word of thanks to those of you who were willing to be sent—they aren’t called “orders” for nothing, are they? Are there any who supported a family member who served? I’m glad Michele Obama has made the support of military families one of her main concerns because Lord knows the families of our service men and women bear a great part of the unseen cost of our nation’s defense: long deployments, fear for loved ones, the sometimes dangerous transition to peacetime life after war, the reality of post traumatic stress. These things are better understood now though still difficult to deal with in the suck-it-up stoicism of military life. My dad dealt with a lot of it: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”

I grew up in the military. My dad was a naval captain and chaplain. Church wasn’t in parishes but on naval bases with military personnel. My dad served for 36 years: 20 active, 16 reserved. We knew about being “sent.” Some of the places my dad was sent were to the S. Pacific in WWII, to circumnavigate Africa when I was 4, to be the chaplain of a Marine infantry battalion in Vietnam when I was six in 1966-67—and where he earned the Bronze Star with Combat “V” for valor. As a family we were sent from Indiana to RI to MA to Virginia to Newfoundland—which necessitated breaking out a map—then back to RI where my folks retired and still live. My older brother was ROTC in college, serving 20 years in the marines: 12 active, 8 reserved retiring as a Lt Colonel. He was married for 20 years to a naval pilot. She flew C130s those big huge cargo planes.

We knew from military. I was never cut out for it myself, disagreed with my brother about it in college but at its best there is little like it. The military we knew was a community of dedication, commitment and self-offering that ran in illustrated parallel to the gospel in our house. We heard the gospel themes of costing love, danger, sacrifice and courage in the sea stories that riveted us. Countless evenings were spent regaled at the dining table or sitting at the feet of guests in the living room listening to stories in which our parents saw and taught us to see the great realities and truths of the gospel enacted in real time and with power.

Stories like the precious water from a canteen poured over a wounded comrade’s head in the Vietnamese jungle, “It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard,” wrote my dad in Vietnam, quoting Psalm 133, “on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.” Stories like the nun cutting the bloody boot off a wounded soldier told, “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars” who replied: “neither would I.” The family friend in the Coast Guard, commander of an 83 footer search and rescue boat that was one of the boats that responded to the destroyer the USS Turner that blew up off the coast of NY. Another boat returned first and was given quite a bit of press. Peter’s ship didn’t come in for 18 hours. He was credited with saving 49 members of the crew, the majority of those who were left, heroically pulling up alongside the burning ship and not giving the order to abandon ship until all the officers were accounted for as wounded or dead. To our parents these were signs of the power and presence of God alive and at work,” the God who seeks until he finds, the God who bears what cannot be borne for love of us.

We were raised on mission: “The mission of my letter.” “The mission of my phone call;” my dad literally talks like this. The gospel wasn’t long ago and far away it was unfolding right now in our lives with passion and purpose. It was our mission. Military people understand mission. We understand being a part of something larger than ourselves being under authority greater than our own. It was a military man who said to Jesus, “I am a man under authority with men under me. I say to one, “Go” and he goes, to another, “Come” and he comes, to another “do this” and he does it. Only say the word and my servant will be healed.” Jesus marveled at the man’s faith in Jesus’ power over demons and disease: “Never have I seen such faith,” said Jesus, “even in all Israel.”

We never understood comments like you can’t expect too much from church members—after all they’re volunteers. Volunteers? What are you talking about “volunteers”? We’ve been baptized, confirmed and commissioned. “You did not choose me but I chose you,” Jesus said in the gospel last week. “I appointed you to bear fruit, fruit that will last.” “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Go into all the world baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” says Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel. It’s not called the Great Suggestion. It’s called the Great Commission. “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Friends, we’re not volunteers. We are on a mission.

How might our lives be different, I wonder if we saw them this way? Not as the center of our universe but claimed by something larger—our God, our nation, this person in need whom I am in a position to help. Love claims us—God’s love, love that that makes the soul expand, love that causes us to forget ourselves, take risks we wouldn’t ordinarily take. Share our time, our money, our canteen and our lives. By all logic there ought to be less of us but instead there is more. We lose our lives and so find them. We die to ourselves and learn how to live at last. We find that all Jesus told us is true—not that it’s easy.

We don’t like to talk about war, about conflict, in polite company, certainly not in church. It’s another way we try to be more spiritual than God. But Jesus meets it head on in the gospel. “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” Guard them. Protect them. “Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth.” Jesus is telling the truth in this passage. There is no way we can look at the world with its genocide, murder, poverty and violence and say there is no evil here. There is no struggle going on here. There is nothing to fight against here. Read the gospels. Jesus came among us healing, preaching good news to the poor, forgiving sins, searching out the lost, the lonely and the left behind and he was opposed almost every step of the way. He came in love, by love, for love and he was challenged and resisted: Get behind me Satan. We said “No” to him and the life he offered on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday he fought back: “Yes.” Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jesus never raised a hand in anger but he was in every way a warrior. So were Buddha and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. They were spiritual warriors who faced off with Satan in the wilderness, temptation under the Bo tree, waged war with hunger strikes and peace marches. They fought to the death with a weapon called love. Love is not in the gospel sense, primarily an emotion. It is not a soft focused Hallmark card—ever. It is an act of will, an inclination of heart and mind and strength toward a purpose larger than us, a good greater than our own. When Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you,” when he stood his ground before Herod and Pilate, when he took a child and put him in the midst of them, when he “stretched out his arms on the hard wood of the cross” he was showing us what love looks like, the love to which he calls us, the love with which he sends us.

Christianity is not bland, boring, passive and inept—though we often make it seem so. God has enlisted us in a cause. We all signed on at our baptism: to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God; to renounce the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God; to renounce sinful desires that draw us from the love of God” and to “turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as our Savior; to put our whole trust in his grace and love; and to promise to follow and obey him as our Lord.” These are our marching orders. They are dynamic and powerful and life giving for ourselves, for one another and for our world. What life might be possible if we lived into them with soldier dedication? What seeds could such love plant?

This vestment used to have—if you can imagine it—gold orphreys, these bands were glittering gold: “I felt like target practice,” my dad said of wearing it in the Vietnamese jungle glinting in the sun. The local nuns replaced the gold with green velvet. God bless them. He loaned it to me when I was doing an interim at Holy Spirit, Verona, about 10 years ago. They had no green chasuble which I happened to tell my dad: “Oh, I’ve got one you can use, Annie.” “Great,” I say. He sends me this one. “How’s the chasuble, Honey?” “Uh, it’s great dad. But it’s camouflage. It’s practically brown.” “Well, that’s from the heat—hotter than hell in the jungle.”

Christ was with my dad when he sent him to celebrate the Eucharist on the front lines, on the hood of a jeep in the mud with the marines in Vietnam. Christ was with me when he sent me to Verona. Christ is with us now in all the places to which he sends us: to work, to school, to family, to growth personal and relational, to kindness, compassion and love. When he ascended into heaven it wasn’t the end of him being somewhere. It was the beginning of him being everywhere. “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Lead on O king eternal till sin’s fierce war shall cease and holiness shall whisper the sweet “amen” of peace, for not with swords loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums but deeds of love and mercy the heavenly kingdom comes.” (Hymn 555 v. 2)

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Door Alarmed 24 Hours a Day

By The Rev. Anne Bolloes-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

Browning wrote: God’s in his heaven all’s right with the world. Well, it’s true God’s in heaven but all is certainly not right with the world. Honestly. Here we are already dealing as best we can with the war in Iraq, terrorism and clawing our way out of an economic downturn—against a backdrop of global warming, natural disasters and genocide—only to find ourselves gripped by the threat of a flu pandemic: as my husband is fond of saying: if it’s not one thing it’s three others.

And how do we know given the news yesterday that the outbreak in Mexico is smaller than it first appeared, “whether a global illness monitoring system was sensitive enough to save lives, or so sensitive that it alerted the world to a virus no more dangerous than seasonal flu.” Is this a real danger or just one more thing blown out of proportion like: the Y2K bug, Mad Cow disease, Ebola, SARS and brain cancer from cell phones? It gets to be: “Door alarmed 24 hours a day” you know? And this is just the communal stuff not to mention the personal realities that break our hearts and try our souls day to day.

Frankly, I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’ve about made up my mind to turn down these seemingly endless invitations to live in fear. I’ve decided fear is its own kind of disease. I just can’t believe Jesus came and lived and died and rose so that we could be alarmed 24 hours a day.

Scripture tells us Jesus looked at the crowds tagging along after him, and had compassion on them for they were, “harassed and helpless” he said, “like sheep without a shepherd.” He could have been describing us. “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.” We are not sheep without a shepherd, though sometimes, forgetful, we act like it. The lessons every fourth Sunday of Easter come as a gift calling us to remember who we are and Whose we are. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

There’s no more beloved picture of Jesus than the good shepherd. It’s the oldest illustration of him—dates from around 200—a simple line drawing of a man carrying a sheep over his shoulders, found on the wall of the Roman catacombs—where the early Christians were buried. We still hold it before us 2000 years later in the words of the 23rd psalm said at every funeral. God as shepherd of his people is woven throughout the Old and New Testaments. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Jesus all speak of it. In their eyes, to see these weather beaten souls leaning on their staffs keeping watch over their scattered flock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through all kinds of weather, through all kinds of danger, willing to lay down their life for their sheep was to see the face of God. “The Lord is my shepherd,” sang David, “I shall not want.”

In those days sheep were plentiful and shepherds a common sight. The land in Palestine is rough and rocky better for pasture than for agriculture. Sheep were kept mostly for wool and stayed in the company of the shepherd for years who often named them for things that had happened to them or personalities they had. “Bossy” who was stubborn, “Peg” whose leg hadn’t been the same since she got it stuck in that crevice. “Pokey” who was always lagging behind; it’s humbling to think what nickname God has chosen for us…?

“He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters.”

Well, Jesus wants to make us lie down in green pastures, and to lead us beside still waters, to point us in the right direction. But we are full of our own ideas. Like Adam and Eve we forget to check in. We wander off, nose to the ground, intent on our own way. That’s what sheep do, by the way. They nibble and wander, nibble and wander without looking up, until finally they DO look up they find they’ve wandered acres away from where they started out—lost. Most of us can relate.

My second year of college I decided to take a break from church. I’d just transferred to Barnard and had decided to give it a rest for a while. After all, my dad’s a priest. My mother also has her master of divinity. You know 1010 WINS? All news all the time? Well in our family it was—all church all the time. Undoubtedly our kids would tell you the same thing. What can I say? It’s an occupational hazard. Anyway, I decided to give church a pass for a while. I nibbled and wandered like a sheep without a shepherd and got myself until I was thoroughly lost. I decided: maybe I better head back to the fold and get my bearings. I stopped in to Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC for evensong one Sunday afternoon and didn’t understand a word. The whole service was in Spanish! I had wandered so far that “home” had become a foreign language. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me. I was an English major then. I GOT it. God spoke to me in a language he knew I would understand. I recognized the voice. Long story short, it turned out all right in the end. I ended up changing my major to religion, went to service at the campus chapel where I met my husband and ended up up here. Believe me: no one is more surprised about it than me.

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.” God knows us. God knows my name and God knows yours. WE may be surprised by what happens to us, by the things we do, but God isn’t. God has a purpose and a plan and will “revive our souls” and guide us in right pathways for his Names’ sake”—for the sake of who God is. It’s not dependent on us. Whatever we do or fail to do…it’s all compost to God. God uses it all. Nothing is wasted. Though sometimes we resist his voice stubborn as mules, God still calls us, still leads us.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.” It was an actual place by the way, a desolate valley on the way to Jericho full of bandits. It is also the figurative valley we all know. The psalmist is honest, notice it doesn’t say IF I walk through the valley… but “though I walk” and walk we all will. But we will walk through the valley. We won’t take up residence there. We won’t be able to run from it. We won’t escape it. But neither will we lie down there. We will walk through. Evil may be lurking all around but I will not fear it because Thou art with me. Thy rod—used as a weapon against attacking beasts or bandits—and Thy staff, used to guide the sheep, “they comfort me.” Comfort means to console, it’s true. But back then, in a definition now called obsolete it means also to strengthen. Com-fort: with strength.

God the good shepherd comforts--consoles and strengthens the sheep. “You set a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.” I read a lovely thing once in a commentary that looked on “those that trouble me” in older translations “mine enemies” as being those things about ourselves that trouble us, those enemies in ourselves with which we struggle. God sets the table even in the presence of struggle. God nourishes us in times of trial; heals us “anointing our heads with oil.” Shepherds poured oil over the sheep’s head to keep out nose flies. The flies drive the sheep to distraction once they lay eggs up their noses—hideous thought but true. And a vivid example of what happens to us when we let fears and worries infest our heads—driving us to distraction and worry.

We’ve really got to be careful about what we allow to take root in our minds. Proverbs says, “As a man thinks, so is he.” Where the mind goes the man follows. Worry and fear can’t keep company with faith. We can have one or the other but not both at the same time. Perfect love casts out fear. “Fear not,” is one of the recurrent themes of scripture. Not that we won’t feel fear—but that we ought not to let fear stop us. We need to press through fear. God is calling us to stand in his power, power that he died and rose to give us, calling us to live in open rebellion against death. Isn’t that a great quote? “Faith is life lived in open rebellion against death.” (Jeffrey Studdert-Kennedy—distinguished Anglican priest, chaplain of British expeditionary force.)

We are surrounded by voices. The voices of people we love, the voices of strangers--televised voices, electronic voices, print voices-- voices of advertisers and marketers telling us who we want to be and how to buy it, voices that belittle or befriend us, voices inside of us shaping how we feel about ourselves and what we believe is possible for us. We have to make a decision about which voice we’ll listen to. God is calling us. We need to hear the voice of Scripture—the voice of God—saying: the Lord is my shepherd. Listen to what voices you may, sings the psalmist: the LORD is MY shepherd. We’re to claim it. To live in faith—in open rebellion against death—we need to respond to fear with the word of God. Say it out loud. Let it pour over your head like oil. The LORD is my shepherd. If you feel silly: Try it. If you feel afraid: try it. If you believe it: try it. If you don’t believe it: Pretend you do and see what happens. There is POWER in the word of God. We don’t have to live harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. We HAVE a shepherd. Willing to DIE for us—and rise again. Blessings abound. Claim them.

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I learned a couple of years ago that the word: to follow used here can also be translated “pursue.” Isn’t that great! Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me, run after me, all the days of my life. Lovely! Read over the psalm this week until you find a word or phrase that “lights up.” Let go of the rest and repeat that to yourself whenever you feel afraid. Let me close with poet and scholar Eugene Peterson of The Message who renders it this way:

GOD, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction. Even when the way goes through Death Valley, I’m not afraid when you walk at my side. Your trusty shepherd’s crook makes me feel secure. You serve me a six-course dinner right in front of my enemies. You revive my drooping head; my cup brims with blessing. Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of GOD for the rest of my life.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

The Fixed Point

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

“You are witnesses of these things.” May I speak in the name of the Living God. Amen.

Thirty years ago I heard a lecture by Timothy Leary. You remember him. Timothy Leary was famous in the 60s and 70s as a psychologist, a futurist, a proponent of psychedelic drug research. He advocated using LSD to expand consciousness and coined the phrase: turn on, tune in, drop out. He called himself a “stand up philosopher” and when I heard him he was trying to turn us on to his vision of expanding consciousness that would enable humankind to make scientific and social breakthroughs equipping us to live in space, in life spans far beyond our earthly ones.

It was the kind of philosophy created to elicit the response: far out man. Only he was dismayed by people’s lack of enthusiasm for it. “I tell people: You could live forever, man. And they say: But my whole life is centered on death.” It’s the only thing I remember from the lecture. I guess I tuned in and dropped out of the rest of what he said. “But my whole life is centered on death.” Was mine, I wondered? Death is the one certainty in the chaotic flux of life: its fixed point. “Death and taxes” goes the old joke. Death gives life urgency and poignancy. What happens if you it that away?

Leary was talking about avoiding death. Easter talks about Christ being raised from death. Both have implications we’re quick to gloss over. Considering this increases my compassion for the disciples this morning because I have to admit my first thought on hearing that they think Jesus is a ghost in the gospel this morning is: you’ve got to be kidding. It is Easter evening. The women came at the crack of dawn with their news of angels, an empty tomb and a risen Christ but the Eleven and the rest dismissed it as “an idle tale and they did not believe them.” By the end of the day things are looking up and they’re saying: The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon. Finally, just before our passage two travelers arrive from Emmaus telling of a stranger who had fallen in step with them along the way, setting their hearts on fire as he opened the scripture to them “and how he had made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

“As they were saying this,” our passage opens, “Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” And, frankly, what I’m looking for—or would be if I were hearing this for the first time—is a joyful reunion! You know when they fall down and worship him: forgiven, found and free, when everyone realizes it’s going to be all right. Peace be with you. As Deacon Chris pointed out in her Easter Vigil sermon that would be the satisfying thing to happen at this point in the story. But it doesn’t. Whatever assurance the disciples may have had evaporates. “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”

Understandably somewhat vexed Jesus asks, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Why are you so upset? Why do doubting questions flood your minds? Just as understandably vexed inside their terrified skins the disciples are thinking, well because you’re dead, Jesus. You were so thoroughly dead. Dead people stay dead. It’s one of life’s great certainties. I love the bible’s honesty. There’s no attempt to make the disciples better than they were or the moment more than it was. Confronted with the risen Christ in his inexpressible mystery —a human being beyond human whom even death couldn’t contain—they weren’t reassured: “they were startled and terrified.”

“Look at my hands,” says Jesus, “look at my feet—it’s really me. Touch me. A ghost doesn’t have muscle and bone like this. “As he said this he showed them his hands and his feet.” And the disciples know it’s true. They also know that flesh and blood doesn’t usually appear within locked doors. What are they seeing? They can’t believe what they were seeing. Maybe Leary is right: Our lives are centered on death: that fixed point, unable to see beyond it. It was all too much: it was too good to be true. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, [Jesus] said to them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.” Ghosts don’t eat.

Then he got down to business, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” And just as he had on the road to Emmaus he opened their minds to understand the scripture, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem.” This is just the beginning, says Jesus, the starting place. The world won’t come to you, you must go to the world. “You are witnesses of these things.”

“You are witnesses of these things.” Them? Us? Witnesses of the one who was crucified for living the way he did? Witnesses of the one who engendered love and hate in equal measure? Witnesses of the one who would not fight back—whose weapon of choice was love? Talk about startling and terrifying! The good news of repentance and forgiveness for ALL nations that Jesus died to give is to be entrusted to the Eleven and the rest? To people who thought the women’s words were an ‘idle tale,’ who thought the risen Christ was a ghost? The message of salvation is entrusted to these people? Is entrusted to us? We talk a lot about our faith in God but it is God’s faith in us that blows me away. We run when the going gets rough. We don’t believe others when they tell us about him. We think he’s a ghost when he shows us again and again he’s as real as the nail marks in his hands and feet. And he entrusts the proclamation of this to US? I don’t know! We cry. I’m not sure I believe in you! “That’s OK,” says God, “I believe in you!”

I don’t think the disciples resisted the resurrection because they didn’t understand what it meant, though of course that was part of it. I think they resisted it because on some deep disconcerting level it was beginning to dawn on them all-too-well what it meant. What if death is NOT the end? Not the final end we fear it is? Then one of the great known boundaries of life is gone. Not because we won’t go through it—as Timothy Leary was hoping—but because we will be expected to take it on knowing God holds the victory. Friends, death is a good “out,” you know. Something the world understands it’s reasonable to make decisions in terms of as in: I can’t stand in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, I can’t admit I’m a Christian in certain parts of Iraq, I can’t defy the unjust laws against women in Afghanistan: I could die.

The disciples see the Risen Lord and think: He’s not here to reassure us. He’s here to CALL us. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. Their minds are reeling with the implications. Did you see how fast the crowd turned against him? It could turn against US. Even if he DOES live he had to go through HELL first to be both literal and theological about it. O dear God if Jesus is really RAISED, really LIVES than all of life is turned upside down. Talk about a trip, a mind bending, mind altering, life changing trip! Timothy Leary was looking for expanded consciousness? Well, he was about 2 millennia too late. He wasn’t ahead of his time but behind it. Easter is the ultimate expansion of consciousness no psychedelic mind altering drugs needed. Not a mere continuation of life-as-we-know-it but an experience of the Kingdom of God breaking in through the crucified and risen Christ—transcending life and death, time and space in a way they won’t really understand until they’re caught up in it themselves through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Friends, if Christ is Risen reason for fear has been dealt a great blow. If Christ is Risen reason for inaction has been dealt a great blow. Possibilities for change and transformation through the forgiveness of sins the confronting of evil, the power of love breaks the heart open makes the mind reel. God wants to do something great with us – like change the world and transform lives. Christ comes to us and for us—and always also for others. Christ has paved the way for us and lays his claim upon us: You are witnesses of these things.

The stories of Easter, in their honesty and restraint, come as annual reminders of the END of the story. The “fixed point” of our lives is not death but Christ Crucified and Risen. We can’t stay locked in a room afraid of ghosts anymore. We don’t have to stay locked in our lives afraid of ghosts anymore: because he lives: he LIVES and in him and by him and through him so do we. We are to witness to that by the way we live our lives—by our courage, vulnerability and love. Death is not the end. Violence and oppression and injustice do not win. We are called to risk compassion and truth and solidarity: because he lives. In the resurrection death is diminished and LIFE itself, all caps, opens up in all its possibilities both here—and in some mysterious way yet to be revealed—beyond. We are witnesses of these things.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Easter Sunday: It's Not Too Late (Video)

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

(This sermon is also available in text.)

This video is in two parts.





© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Easter Sunday: It's Not Too Late (Text)

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

(This sermon is also available in video.)

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.” May I speak in the name of the Crucified and Risen Christ who leads us from darkness into his glorious light.” Amen.

Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene appears in virtually every story of our Lord’s resurrection, her name usually first among the women. She had been possessed by seven demons and Jesus had freed her. Seven. It was the number of completion either of perfection or of evil. To say that Mary had been possessed by seven demons is to say that she had been one very sick woman—beyond hope, beyond repair—a terror to herself and to her neighbors. I say this because we see the saints of God in stained glass and we forget the journey that they took to be where they are. Jesus had put her in her right mind, had freed her from the tomb of psychosis, depression and despair from which she could not escape. She was utterly devoted to him. By every account she was last at the cross and first at the grave. It wasn’t faith that led her there. It was love, love that could no more run away from him than he had run from her, he who had called her name: Mary, and led her into the light.

She had come, she didn’t know why, to anoint him to wrap him in spices as she’d wrapped him in love though what she could add to the 100 pounds of spices Nicodemus had already wrapped him in was difficult to say. Even for this it was too late. Still she came. She couldn’t keep away. She’d come while it was still dark—when the only people out were people you wouldn’t want to meet. The Passover had seemed interminable. She was impatient to be near him. How she thought she’d move the stone was anybody’s guess—a large disk rolled edgewise into place in a gutter at the mouth of the cave where Jesus lay. Her mind was on heavier matters: like how she was going to live without him.

The disciples had fled but she’d been there for the hammers and the nails and the blood. She was there when they crucified her Lord, was there when they laid him in the tomb. She was under no delusions as to what she would find there a face—that Face—marred beyond human semblance. The One who spoke and demons fled—her demons. The One who touched and lives were made whole. With him no storm was so big he couldn’t still it, no crowd so great that in his hands 5 loaves and 2 fish couldn’t feed it. Now it was all over. He was gone. Who would roll away the stone in her heart? That was the question—the lump in her throat? How was she going to live?

She arrives at the tomb to find it open. And expecting it about as much as we’d expect the open grave of our loved one only buried two days before she greets it with unmitigated horror. Oh NO!! Not this! More desecration! More violence! Someone has stolen him! She takes off running and returns running with Peter and the beloved disciple alongside. Peter goes into the tomb to find the linen wrapping lying there “still in its folds” says the Greek, as if he’d dematerialized out of them. His body is gone. The disciple “whom Jesus loved” goes in, too. We’re told he “saw and believed” but it could only have been but a glimmer of belief because we’re also told that they did not yet “understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead.” In any case, after all this urgent running we’re told simply that the men “go home.” Rather astonishing, but there it is.

Mary remains weeping at the tomb unable to leave the last place she saw him. Now she bends to look into the tomb but instead of linens lying there she sees is two angels where none were seen before. “Woman, why are you weeping?” They are angels but she seems strangely unaware of that. She is looking for her Lord—the one who made the lame walk and the wounded whole: “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” She turns to see a man in the garden whom she presumes to be the gardener. “Woman,” he asks, “why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” She is looking for her Lord—the one who made the deaf hear and the blind see: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will [come get him].”

He says her name: “Mary” and at the sound of it she turns. It’s an inner turning, a reorientation of mind. She’s already facing him. She is suddenly, in her right mind. He’s done it again! Suddenly astonished, she recognizes him: “Rabbouni!” Teacher! And she goes to lay hold of him. Jesus is risen and standing in front of her. She wants to lay hold of him. She wants to return to the way things were before. What else would she know? What else do we know? We are often looking behind us at the way it was before. “Do not cling to me. I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Once he does ascend we can cling all we like. God’s story moves forwards not backwards, always forward. “Go tell my brothers I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The risen Christ sends Mary to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ resurrection to the disciples. She is the apostle to the apostles—talk about astonishing—women couldn’t even be witnesses in a court of law and Jesus entrusts her with the most important testimony of all time: I have seen the Lord!

I love the way this story is told. Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus but he’s standing right there in front of her, right there! This is extraordinarily good news for you and me. Just because we are unaware doesn’t mean Jesus is not standing right there, right there in front of us. We think: it’s too late. It’s too late! We can’t see past the reason it’s too late. We can’t see past our tears, our shattered hopes our broken hearts. Easter tells us we have a God who doesn’t know the meaning of the words: too late, whose greatest work was done in and through the crucifixion not before it.

We’re weeping. We’re weeping at the door of the tomb…but he’s not in there…. Angels address us, messengers of God, messengers of grace and truth but we don’t hear them, not really. We don’t really know who sent them. Jesus meets us but we think he’s the gardener, our colleague, our partner, our little brother. We are lost in our grief, lost in ourselves. We’ve lost our bearings. We’re out of our minds. The mystery of the resurrection is all around us…talking to us, trying to reach us, asking us why we weep. What a lovely thing! God notices and cares that we are weeping. “Woman, why are you weeping?” ask the angels. “Woman, why are you weeping?” asked Jesus, “Whom do you seek?” “They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him.” They have taken away my life, my future, my hope and I do not know where to find it again.

It’s not too late. Whatever we’ve done or left undone. Whatever has happened to you and me: illness, divorce, the death of a loved one: It’s not too late. Someone may have stolen your childhood through abuse, neglect or simple misunderstanding but God’s got your future. That’s the message of Easter. That is the message. So don’t be afraid. Go to the tomb. Go to the last place you saw him. Go to the place where hope died, where faith was extinguished. Jesus is there. Unexpectedly. Impossibly. Jesus is there with angels of comfort and mercy asking why you weep and calling you by name, your name: your name, my name, a name we hear without guilt, without shame—in our right mind—a name formed in the mouth of God, a name formed in the heart of God, calling us until we recognize him, until we recognize ourselves, until we cry out with Mary: I have seen the Lord!

My Friends, it’s not too late. It is never too late.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
Thanks be to God.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Palm Sunday: Reckless Love (Text)

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

(This sermon is also available in video.)

“Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. May I speak in the name of the Living God.” Amen.

We tend to think of women in the ancient world as powerless, downtrodden and invisible. It’s true that many kinds of power were not available to women because of their sex. But the woman we see in the gospel this morning is anything but powerless. Like Jesus, she is dramatic—reckless with what is most precious, pouring out something of great value which cannot be replaced. Why? She sees Jesus, loves him—gets him, gets who he is and what he’s about to do. Her heart breaks before her alabaster jar does. In a gesture that cannot be explained in rational terms she gives all that she has away, pouring out her love her treasure on Jesus. And he says: you’ll be remembered for this.

The disciples are offended. What lunacy! In what kind of world does THIS make sense! Why has the ointment been wasted? Why wasn’t it used for the poor? It’s criminal! What a waste! Women are so emotional. They’re so sensitive. They’re so over the top. But Jesus understands passion. Jesus understands wildly expansive, expensive acts of love. Jesus understands the meaning of pouring out something infinitely precious in an act of love. It is what he is about to do.

The disciples don’t understand him either. He’s as reckless as SHE is! For gosh sakes everyone is beginning to follow you! You’re reaching the crowds! Did you hear those ‘Hosannas!’ today? It means ‘O save us,’ Jesus! They are waiting for you to ACT! Call on them and they’ll rise up! Don’t throw it all away! But Jesus wasn’t about overturning Rome. There’d only be a new ‘Rome’ to take its place. Oppressors like the poor we will always have with us. Jesus was about overthrowing everything that gets in the way of God but the time of curing surface symptoms was over. He was going after sin and death itself.

Jesus approaches the walled city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday the way he approaches the walled cities of our own hearts: Making a claim to be a king. Reminding the people of Zechariah’s prophesy: Lo, your king will come to you, lowly, riding on a donkey. It’s prophetic performance art and the crowd loves it—throwing their coats on this path and plucking palm branches to wave in the air. We’re all so glad he’s here! Victory is ours! Hosanna in the highest! We say it at every Eucharist: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

But the path doesn’t lead where we thought it would. He doesn’t do what we thought he’d do. What did he mean: this is my body? This is my blood over the bread and wine at supper? What did he mean letting Judas betray him like that, letting the guards take him, waiting for it to happen, really. This is NOT what we had in mind! What on earth is he doing? He doesn’t mean to break our enemies but to break our hearts, to break them open until we want to break open the alabaster jars that hold our treasure and pour it out in extravagant love in his name on the world God so loves. We didn’t sign on for this! What a reckless, crazy thing to do! No way! No way! We don’t want to die! We don’t want this God’s agenda! We don’t want transformation! We don’t want life at this price.

Crucify him! Crucify him! The light is hurting my eyes.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Palm Sunday: Reckless Love (Video)

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

(This sermon is also available in text.)



© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

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

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