Tag Archives: St. Paul’s

The Uncomfortable Confusion of Advent

Sermon preached Dec. 8, 2013 at the Iona School for ministry, The Episcopal Diocese of Texas

A senior student in priesthood studies, I began this Advent 2 sermon – a practicum given before the dean, faculty and students, after standing in silence in the pulpit for the first few minutes.

Interesting, isn’t it – what happens when we wait, especially when we’re not quite sure what’s coming next. Depending on your perception of what was happening the last couple of minutes, whether you figured out what I was doing, or you were somewhat confused, each of you were probably at least a little uncomfortable. You may have thought “Oh no, she’s living out one of those Iona School nightmares: she’s hit the homiletic wall and it is Deer in the Headlights Time”. Now I’m not going to say that will never happen to me, but at least that wasn’t what happened today.

Today I want to invite you to explore with me this feeling of uncomfortable confusion. It’s a feeling that doesn’t set well with us here at the beginning of the second week of Advent. As the rest of the world rushes and hurries into a premature Christmas season, this is the time when we who follow a liturgical progression through our walk of faith intentionally turn down a different path. We pace ourselves, working from the very first day of Advent to be quiet, reflective, peaceful, waiting an entire month to complete lighting one wreath. Putting our trees up late and leaving them up while all the others are back in boxes the day after Christmas or turning brown on the curb. It would drive most people up a wall to wait that long, but to us this annual slow intention is very familiar, very comforting.

            Yet our readings this Advent are far from quiet and comforting. The Gospel of Matthew gives us John the Baptist. John, an imposing figure to say the least. The colorful details of his location, clothing and diet form an image of a wild and wooly prophet: Living in the wilderness, dressed in a shaggy camel’s coat with a big, thick leather belt cinched at his waist. He’s lean to the point of that startling kind of gauntness from a diet of honey and bugs. 

No exactly kind of guy who inspires comfortable thoughts of "peace" and "quiet."

No exactly kind of guy who inspires comfortable thoughts of “peace” and “quiet.”

His speech isn’t any more comforting than this appearance. His simple but startling call to Repent!, and his warning that this foreign kingdom is right on our doorstep cuts across the layered practices of Jewish religious life, disturbing the comfortable, dependable structures of written law, tearing his way through the hedges of the Mishnah to proclaim the arrival of Salvation through the Messiah. “Comfort” and “peace” are not the words that come to mind when picturing an encounter with John the Baptist.

            Yet people from all over were flocking to him, drawn to his message, his proclamation of the advent – the coming – of the Lord. We have this idyllic, pastoral scene of people streaming in toward the River Jordan, and John taking them each in turn, one after another, drawing up in his arms soul after soul washed clean of sin in the waters of baptism. But just as we’re settling into that lovely idea, the peace of this image is quickly broken as the John the Baptist confronts the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to be baptized, with one of the most venomous direct condemnations by a prophet recorded in Scripture: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” 

Walken into that uncomfortable part of Scripture right. about. now.

uncomfortableHow dare you presume to think you’re going to get a free pass on what the Lord requires of you – just try slip by without true repentance. He’s ready now to wipe you out. I may be using water to baptize you, but he’s going to use the Holy Spirit and fire. He will clear this place out, keeping the good for himself, and burning up the bad.

            Not really much room in there for a peaceful Advent. In fact, as we slip into our familiar, cozy practices of preparation and gentle anticipation, few of the rest of our Advent lectionary readings to this point have been comforting or comfortable. Instead they include calls to action, end-time Kingdom visions, fervent, unsettling warnings to stay awake and alert, and to be prepared for the triumphant, unexpected, thief-in-the-night return of Jesus, who brings not a quiet peace, but a peace forged in God’s unexpected justice and mercy, handed out with a love like nothing the world has seen or can understand.

C.S. Lewis filled several notebooks with writings on grief after the death of his wife. Those notebooks were published as the short book, “A Grief Observed.” In it, Lewis is struggling to come to terms with her loss, and finds himself worrying over the accuracy of the photos that he has left of her. He fears that along with the photos, his memories of her, his perception of how he experienced her, are all he has left to define her image – and he is scared that never again will he know a fully real and accurate version of who she was.

            His experience of time spent moving through this very uncomfortable grief, transforms his view of his attempts at understanding God, and who he is in relationship to the Divine.“My idea of God is not a divine idea,” he writes. “It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. God is the great iconoclast.” Lewis goes on to say that the very act of God shattering his own image is one of the marks of the presence of God, with the Incarnation as the supreme example that leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.

            As we continue to move through Advent, I encourage you not to be afraid to feel uncomfortable with your thoughts on where God is in your life, and who you are in relationship to him. I encourage you not to be afraid to sit with those who are also experiencing discomfort. 05262012_Mind-Spirit_Are-you-comfortable-being-uncomfortable-IMAGE_Shepherd1-300x206This is a season to take courage to look deep into ourselves. This is a time to face and acknowledge the selfish, hateful, sinful things we may find there, and with God’s grace to pull them out by the root, making straight the path for God’s continued entrance into our lives, and the lives of those we serve. This is the time to sit with the uncomfortable grief over what has been or is being taken away from us, so that we can rediscover that God is not only about taking away. In Advent we discover again that God always gives and is giving to us a new life, and a new purpose. He is always about the work of building his Kingdom through us.

Writer Martyn Jones says that in his grief C.S. Lewis’ theology, collapses but is raised again to show the signs of its wounds. I believe it is the collapse that we fear, yet it is in those shattering experiences that we encounter the presence of the Divine Healer, who is always working out his purpose in us. The times in our ministry where we walk with the grieving can be among the hardest work we do – to sit in pastoral care with the uncomfortable, to see up close and personal, and perhaps reflected in ourselves, the fears of the people sitting in our pews and walking our streets, whom we love and serve as ministers of God’s Church. ChangeIsUncomfortable

Advent is the time to take a deep breath and to come to terms with the uncomfortable reality that the Jesus whose body was broken for the sake of the world, this same Passover sacrificed for us, is also the peace-bringer we are quietly seeking. We are called to preach and to teach that a Resurrected, Scarred Savior heals shattered lives. In the course of our ministries there will be times when we will ask the people trusted to our care to enter peacefully into that uncomfortable space of God’s taking away, and God’s restoration. Whether we minister through tragedy or well-being, as clergy we are called to live an active peace, a peace centered in the unsettling confusion of waiting with God’s people for his purpose to be revealed and fulfilled.

Be aware this Advent of becoming too quiet too soon. Of being unprepared by settling too quickly and easily into spiritual practices that fail to offer the gift of discomfort . Peace does not begin with us. It is not of our own making, but comes through the working out of God’s uncomfortable justice. This Advent season we do not start with peace, but daily we are arriving at a peace that will be completed on that silent and holy night, when Emmanuel, God With Us, will shatter the world’s idea of a Savior. Amen.

 

Building the Safety Net

It was getting late on Sunday afternoon and I was sitting alone in my church office after services, catching up on various administrative details while thinking about the week ahead, and musing on the week  behind me. As a bi-vocational minister serving a rural church 50 miles from where I live and work a full-time weekday job, quiet time in the church office is rare. In my senior year of studies for priesthood, I’d been at my new church for four weeks. Most of my time in the office to this point had been about unpacking, organizing, planning, and figuring out what I’d forgotten to put in the car on the other end of the drive between church and home.

In neglecting our personal time for non-essential ministry tasks, we weaken our own support system, and endanger the one we are called to build for our children.

In neglecting personal time for non-essential ministry tasks, we weaken our support system, and endanger the one we are called to build for our families.

That Sunday, I’d meant to get out of the office early to go home and enjoy the rest of the day off with my family. But as was getting to be usual for me, it was nearly 5 p.m. and I was still trying to wrap things up. Hearing a soft tapping on the glass doors in the hall adjoining my office, I poked my head out and saw a petite woman who looked to be in her 30s standing outside. Walking to the door, I noticed an old minivan in the church parking lot loaded with belongings strapped to the roof, a man sitting in the front passenger seat. The woman’s story wasn’t unusual. At first, it sounded like most other stories pastors hear from folks who come asking for help. They were traveling through on their way out of state, and needed money for gas and food, she said. Not really keen about giving out cash, and not having a gas card on hand, I loaded her arms with food from the church Pop-Top Pantry, a dry goods feeding ministry for walk-in traffic.

Ready to send her on her way with prayer and encouragement, the conversation took an unusual turn at the door. She’d stopped at our church – one of a number in our small town – because the name, St. Paul’s, called to her, she said, thanking me for the food. “My father was a priest,” she added.

That casual addition to the conversation caught my attention. Her father had died, was all she would say further about him. But she’d been raised in the faith, she said. We shared a hug as she left. “Peace be yours,” she said, unprompted, voicing a traditional Church greeting embodying God’s healing love in exchanged words of reconciliation. As we parted, I invited her to stop by the church again on her next journey through the area. As she got back into her van and left, I had doubts I would ever see her again.

Back at my desk in the church office, I sat thinking. What if her story were true? But how could it be? How does a priest’s daughter end up so desperately low as to go begging at random church doors for money? Not that clergy families are insulated from the turmoil and tragedies of life, but I just couldn’t fathom how it could have come about. Surely there was some safety net somewhere that should have kept this from happening. It frightened me to think of my own two children, and my new, busy bi-vocational life. I have no idea what happened in her family, but I could see the future of what might happen to mine if I allowed my new ministry, as much as I loved it, to completely consume all my extra time.

The complete story of who the woman was and what had brought her to my door would remain a mystery. Maybe God would bring us together again, but it was sufficient for now that he had done it today – a visit I was sure was anything but random, for either of us. Thinking of my own daughter at home 50 miles distant as I whittled away a free afternoon on non-essential paperwork and ministry self-analysis, I suddenly visualized a weakening in the portion of her safety net I was responsible for building. God had blessed me with two wonderful children, one already in college and one preparing to enter high school. In the midst of establishing a new clergy presence in this small rural congregation, I was on the cusp of forgetting that my call to motherhood had not ended because God has added a call to priesthood. In fact, my family was his gift to me, and spending time with them was a loving, supportive place to experience his restoration and joy. I closed my laptop, packed it and my papers up, grabbed my keys and headed out the door. The long ride home provided lots of time to think. There was no guarantee that my husband and I would be able to save either of our children from the kinds of decisions or circumstances in adulthood that could veer their lives off-course like the woman at my church door. But it was a virtual guarantee that if we didn’t keep family and personal time a priority, then all of our lives, and by extension our ministry, would suffer in the long run. No minister stays healthy for long if our lives at home, the foundation of our safety net, born in relationship with God and one another, are unraveling through neglect.

The best we can do for the children God places in our care is to continue as godly parents building their spiritual safety net, loving one another and our children within the holy covenant of the relationship between our family and our Creator. This model of family calls us to teach our children by word and example the image of the Body of Christ as his Church: holding each other up, guiding younger members, supporting older ones, offering accountability with love, encouragement in times of need, relying on God as our ultimate safety net. May God bless that woman in need at my door on a late Sunday afternoon as her words of peace blessed me, speaking into my need – to many a busy minister’s need – to recall that reconciliation begins at home.

Life Beyond the Door/St. Paul’s sermon Oct. 20

Robert Coney, 76, a free man, holding his wife's hand outside the Angelina County Jail in Lufkin, Texas/Photo:The Lufkin Daily News

Robert Coney, 76, holding a family member’s hand, walking out of the Angelina County Jail in Lufkin, Texas in 2004./Photo: The Lufkin Daily News

In 1962, Robert Coney was a young, African-American male traveling through East Texas when he was caught up in a nightmare. The victim of a case of mistaken identity, Robert was arrested and charged with robbing a grocery store, and convicted to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He had not been allowed to speak to an attorney until the day he appeared before a judge, a guilty plea forced out of him by crushing two of his fingers between the iron bars of a jail cell. In 1976, a judge looking at the case set aside Robert’s conviction. But for reasons still unclear, that decision was never communicated to the right people in order to set him free. And Robert, sitting in prison, never knew he had in fact been freed – at least on paper. In 2004, another judge going through old files came across Robert’s case and found the error and evidence of a wrongful conviction, and immediately set in motion having the case overturned. A young journalist covering the crime beat at the time, I was there the day Robert Coney, 76, walked out of prison and into the arms of his family. The story made national news. How could it not? A black man in the South set free after serving more than 40 years of a life sentence for which he was wrongfully convicted, was compelling news, to say the least. I couldn’t help thinking of him that evening and the next day, and for several days after. The question that lingered was this: if you’ve spent a lifetime without hope, how do you live into that justice when it finally arrives at your door? I had this image in my head of Robert Coney waking up that first free morning at home, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, waiting for some imaginary steel door to slide open and a voice of authority to order him about the business we all take for granted, like showering and eating breakfast. Robert’s story came to mind this week as I read the Gospel lesson from Luke 18:1-8, about the persistent widow and the judge with no respect for God nor man who finally granted her justice because she didn’t give up. How much more, Jesus says in this Parable to his disciples, does our Eternal Judge, the God who loves us, desire to give justice quickly to his chosen who cry to him day and night? Will we be persistent in the Faith, praying to our Heavenly Father and placing all our trust in him in the midst of an unjust world? Or will the Son of Man return to find us without faith? Like Robert, we may feel hopeless. We may have suffered injustice in our life and feel there is no way out. We may know others who have. But unlike Robert, we do not have to miss out on the story of our own freedom. We will go out of here today with a message of freedom and hope for ourselves and for others. The message is this: Jesus Christ died and rose again for our sins and we are forgiven and reunited with God in that act of redemption. We are free. Even as we wait for justice, we are free. We have a hope in us that carries us forward, safe in knowing we have a God who loves us and gives us strength. As others search for their justice, they are already free in Christ Jesus. But like Robert, they may not know it. It is our work as Christians to tell them the decision has already been made. They are free, and they can begin to live their lives knowing the hope of God that is in them. So when God’s justice arrives at their door, they will be able to live into it. We as the Church are called to go to our own doorway and to step out of it into the world, without waiting for someone to come by and open it. Without waiting for someone to tell us we can go and serve. We are free. It is time to start living our freedom. It is time to start living God’s justice in the world. Amen.

Let’s go exploring

On Dec. 31, 1995, the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip made its final appearance in print. That day, a little blond boy named Calvin and his real-when-Calvin-was-around stuffed tiger named Hobbes jumped off the predictable page of weekly-installments and into the magical world of our unformed imagination:

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Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

A stuffed tiger with fierce love for the boy who never gives up believing in him, Hobbes was my generation’s Velveteen Rabbit. Unlike the rabbit, Hobbes never quite got to become real, but he was real enough to be witness to Calvin’s fearless love of adventure and sharp-edged commentary on social justice.

This week Calvin and Hobbes came through again for me. A child of the ’80s, I rediscovered this strip during my own final appearance of sorts, going into my last Sunday of two years’ service as a bi-vocational deacon to my home parish of 13 years. After a month off, I will take up my new assignment – leading as head of congregation in a new church while continuing my remaining studies for priesthood. As a bi-vocational minister, I will continue to work my day job at a non-profit child advocacy center, commuting an hour to the church I will be serving, a small rural parish deep in the tall pines of national forest country. Like a good Calvin and Hobbes strip, the last few weeks of my home parish departure were a mixture of excitement, fear, humor and wonder. I’d never left a ministry before, so I wasn’t sure what my exit was supposed to look like.

By Sunday evening, after two final worship services and Rally Day festivities, I was on the couch staring at a blank TV screen, completely spent after an exhausting week of goodbyes and last moments mixed with the strain of disentangling oneself from a hundred pastoral relationships.

I’d like to say I received some great revelation from the Holy Spirit in my hour of need. But after sitting numbly for awhile, what came to me was something I’d seen a few days before. It was the first panel inset from the last Calvin and Hobbes strip, as the two pals are heading out, wooden sled in tow, into the woods covered in a night’s untouched snowfall. “Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new!” Hobbes says. “A new year … a fresh, clean start!” Calvin says, arms thrown open wide. “It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on,” Hobbes says, as the strip moves forward. “A day full of possibilities. It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy,” Calvin says, as they hop on the sled and launch down a snowy hill. “Let’s go exploring!”

I’m not sure if God often works through comic strips. But in that moment, I stopped feeling sad and realized I had a gift to receive if only I would throw open my arms to embrace it – an opportunity at a fresh, clean start forging new ground in bi-vocational ministry in Deep East Texas – together with a congregation, a big white sheet of paper to write our new ministry on. I’m excited about the possibilities of where God will lead us.  Maybe that wasn’t a great revelation, but it was what I needed to make my exit. And that’s pretty great.