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Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:06:01 -0500

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:51:45 -0400

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:50:46 -0400

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:50:03 -0400

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:49:35 -0400

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:49:03 -0400

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Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:48:26 -0400

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Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:19:55 -0400

Roof work begins!

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:19:19 -0400

Roof work begins!

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Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:48:32 -0400

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Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:24:36 -0400

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Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:23:42 -0400

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Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:22:21 -0400

Homily for Pentecost 16 - September 20, 2009

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:30:00 -0400

“A Capable Wife, Perhaps. A Capable Christ, that’s Something Else.”

Andrew, who can’t be here today, glanced at today’s readings and announced that he would have loved for his inaugural read as lay reader to begin with that odd first line from our Proverbs reading: “A capable wife who can find?!” To which I say, it’s a good thing I have complete control over who reads and what they read!

But speaking of Proverbs, and speaking of Andrew, this reading reminded me of something he and I found in his mother’s possessions a few months ago. As many of you know, Andrew’s mom died about ten years ago, and his dad one year ago. So, sometime last winter we were going through his parents’ stuff to decide what to keep and what to throw away, when we came across a card his dad had given his mom early in their marriage. It was one of those cards you don’t see much anymore, with a lot of pages, each of which had a vintage sixties illustration of a curvy June-Cleaver-ish woman in different guises, and it said something like:

“To my wife – also known as (turn page): my cook, my maid, my nurse, my laundress, my love kitten (that’s the censored version), my barmaid, my psychotherapist, and my masseuse …” And the worst part of all: there was no punch line!

Proverbs 31 is a passage you rarely heard read in church (the Episcopal Church, anyway) - and I can’t say I regret that, seeing as how it seems to set forth this impossible standard for women. People over the years have tried to get around that criticism of it by claiming that it’s meant to be understood allegorically – that is, this isn’t really a woman at all, but an allegory for Israel (or, if you’re Christian, an allegory for the Church), with the husband here being a metaphor for God. Or, another way around that criticism has been to say that, for its time, this was a fairly progressive view on what women could do. After all, this woman owns land, she works outside the home, and, for a woman in 400 BC, has quite a bit of control over her life.

But, important as those issues are, what really interested me about this passage was the way it and our reading from the Gospel of Mark play against each other, offering two very different visions for a life well lived.

Proverbs is one of three books that is supposed to have been written by King Solomon – again, David’s son and the third king of Israel in about 900 BC. In fact, it probably wasn’t written by Solomon, but had a variety of authors and only came into its present form much later - like in maybe 400 BC. But the tradition attributes it to Solomon, and in the Jewish tradition, you’ll sometimes hear that the three books of the Bible that Solomon is supposed to have written embody the three different phases of his life.
First there’s the Song of Solomon, which is a book of love poems, written in his youth, when he was full of passion and vigor and quite the ladies man. (Remember, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines!) Then there’s Proverbs, a book of sayings on how to live your life prudently and wisely, which he wrote in his more responsible adult years. Finally, there’s the book of Ecclesiastes, which is a book of sayings about the futility of life and the mirage of our control over things (perhaps the best-known verses from that book coming from chapter 3: “There is a time for every season, a time to be born a time to die a time to plant a time to pluck up”). And that book one was written in his old age when he was perhaps a little more realistic about his ambitions and power over things.

Anyway, Proverbs is the work of the a man who is on top of things professionally and personally, and you can see how its can-do spirit is reflected in our passage today. Here’s this industrious woman of Proverbs 31 in perfect control of her life, and who makes everyone – her husband, her kids, her community, and herself – happy by all her hard effort, thus generally putting forth this idea that there’s nothing in life you can’t fix by working hard and exerting a little control.

In the meantime, in the Gospel reading for today, we get a very different view of things. Mark’s Gospel is structured so that the first half, which we’ve been reading from until about last week, is the “successful” half – Jesus and the disciples perform miracles, win arguments against the religious authorities, they gather a huge following of people, and everything just seems to get better and better - until it doesn’t. And starting with last week’s text, about midway through the Gospel, there’s this abrupt transition where things begin to fall apart.

Jesus starts off the second half of the Gospel with three predictions of his death – we read the first last week and the second this week - and in each one the disciples ignore or argue with him in response. From there, the Gospel just continues its descent. The disciples continue to bicker with Jesus, and with each other. They try to perform miracles and it doesn’t work (that came just before our reading for today). People who had been following them start to fall away. The religious authorities begin to gain the upper hand. And it eventually winds up with Jesus’ death and burial. In fact, it’s important to point out that Mark’s Gospel doesn’t have a resurrection account; it ends with the women at the tomb.

I guess the upshot here is that, much as everyone around him and especially his disciples might have liked him to be, not even Jesus could pull off being the Proverbs 31 woman. It’s as if he wants to show us that no human being can exert that kind of control over circumstances, nor should they even want to - because (as he’ll show in his own life) the good life leads down the path of failure, vulnerability and imperfection.

What a nice message to start off the fall, a time when committments increase - along with the pressure to be the perfect mother or father, husband or wife, daughter or son, teacher, student, contractor, priest, or - what did it say on that card? - a cook, nurse, laundress, barmaid, psychotherapist, or masseuse. Whatever roles you play out in the world, the message from Mark’s Gospel is: you don’t have to do it like the woman in Proverbs 31. And to that I say a hearty Amen!

Homily for Pentecost 14 - September 6, 2009

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:00:00 -0400

When God Argues With a Woman

My research for today’s sermon jogged a not too pleasant memory of a job interview several years ago at a large church in London. Thinking back on it, it almost had a reality-show air about it: we started out as a large group and, over the course of a few days, were subjected to various challenges (singing auditions, multiple interviews, social engagements), until the final day, when a mysterious hand shoved a letter under my bedroom door offering me the job.

Later that day, as I was about to catch my train to the airport, the male priest who would have been my immediate supervisor approached me and said that, although he liked me as a person (talk about an inauspicious beginning!), he wouldn’t be able to receive Communion from me because he doesn’t believe women should be priests.

My decision suddenly became very easy.

I bring that up because early in the week I came across a sermon of his about the Syro-Phoenician woman in today’s Gospel story, and since this is maybe the most significant story in the Gospels about women and their power to teach, lead and persuade, I was naturally curious to see what he had to say about it. No disrespect to his preaching and character in general - but I’m afraid it wasn’t much. Which is a shame, because this story has meant a lot not only to women in the church today, who still have more struggles than you would think, but also to women in the early church, many of whom were leaders of congregations before the church grew more established and, with that, male in its leadership.

In this passage, Jesus is off in non-Jewish territory for the first time in his ministry, and it’s interesting briefly to look back at the scene right before this one, which we read in last week’s Gospel reading. There Jesus had criticized the Jewish religious leaders for focusing on outward acts and rituals to the neglect of more pressing human needs around them. Then, for the first time, he turns around and goes out into unfamiliar, non-Jewish territory, meets this non-Jewish woman, and reverts himself into the very prejudices and customs that he just decried by calling this woman a dog.

It’s a harsh insult coming from Jesus’ lips, and so it comes as no surprise that there have been many attempts over the years to mollify it. Maybe the earliest attempt comes right from the Gospel writer Mark, who assures us in our passage that Jesus was worn out from helping people and just needed some time alone - and thus his impatience. Another attempt comes from the Gospel writer Matthew, whose version of this story was written a few years later and is slightly different. Unlike in Mark’s Gospel, where the woman approaches Jesus reverently and discreetly, Matthew has her approach him screaming and waving her arms, thus basically blaming her hysteria for Jesus’ short fuse. Still another attempt to mollify Jesus’ remarks comes from commentators, who attempt to argue that the sort of dog Jesus was referring to was a cute lap dog (sort of like Lucy, our faithful canine attendee). So by that reading, Jesus isn’t really insulting her at all but is actually paying her a compliment!

But all these attempts aside, you just don’t call someone a dog if you’re trying to be nice. And besides, what’s amazing about this story is not so much that part of the exchange, but what comes next. She comes right back at him, not only unfazed by the insult but far more gracious and savvy in her reply than he was to her: Even the dogs eat the crumbs from under the master’s table, she says. And that’s when something seems to loosen up within him, and he changes his mind about her and her request.

There are a lot of stories in the Gospels with meaningful exchanges between Jesus and women, but this is the only one where a woman makes him think about something differently. In fact, this is the only passage in the Gospels where anyone - man or woman - seems to teach Jesus something new. A colleague of mine said that, in a Bible study he led on this passage, an older male parishioner groaned “Even God can’t win an argument with a woman!”

And so you can see why this became such an important text to early women leaders in the church, who, it seems, used it to argue to a growing male priesthood that they were just as capable to lead. And why it’s still an important passage to women today.

All that said, it’s one thing to talk about women in the developed world who struggle to be heard but at least are moving in the right direction; it’s another thing to talk about women who, because of economic or social conditions, aren’t heard at all. For some months now I’ve been following the work of the journalist Nicholas Kristof, who writes for the Times on women’s issues (and just came out with a new book on the subject). I was reminded in a recent piece of his that women account for at least seventy percent of the world’s poor. Even more shocking, he pointed out that between 60 - 107 million women are missing - completely unaccounted for. They may have disappeared to slavery, or sex-trafficking. Maybe they died due to poor medical care, death in childbirth, honor killings and bride-burnings (the figures on that are staggering), or sex-selective abortion. (To put this figure in some perspective, Kristof pointed out that these figures account for more deaths than all the casualties of all the wars in the 20th century combined.)

In other words, there are millions of women who struggle to live much less be heard. And perhaps the Syro-Phoenician woman in our story gives us an occasion to think about them, and all the world would gain if we could hear from them. After all, if women can win arguments with God, then they must have some pretty important things to say. It’s our work as Christians to make sure they can be heard.

Homily for Pentecost 13 - August 30, 2009

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Not Everything Has to Be Chaste

For every book that made it into our Bible, there’s probably at least one other book out there that didn’t made it in - sometimes we know of these because they were found squirreled away for centuries in desert caves; sometimes we know of them because they’re mentioned in some other work of literature, maybe even the Bible; and sometimes we’ll never know of them because they were destroyed or just haven’t been found. But I bring this up because two of our readings today come from books that narrowly escaped that same fate.

The first is the letter of James, and I’m not going to say much about this one since we’ll be with it for several weeks now. But just briefly, the inclusion of this letter was questioned by the early church and then later by the 16th century Reformers on the grounds that it was too focused on human works rather than God’s grace.

The other book narrowly included in our Bible is one that we only read from only once in our three year cycle of readings - the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon was written either by or for King Solomon, who, as we learned from our Old Testament readings this summer, was King David’s fifth son and his successor to the throne of Israel. Solomon either wrote or oversaw the writing of some of the books of our Old Testament that we call the Wisdom Literature - namely Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon.

The first two - Ecclesiastes and Proverbs - are very typical of Wisdom literature in that they contain clever advice for living and playful aphorisms. The Song of Solomon is slightly different, consisting of an assortment of love songs between a young man and a young woman that may originally have been used as wedding songs in early Israel or songs for entertainment over dinners or fancy, festive events.

Today’s passage is part of the longest of those love songs, in which a young woman reminisces about her lover’s spring visit, longs to have him back, and eventually finds him again. It’s a very - how shall I say - romantic book, and you have to read it for yourself to get the idea. In fact, the Puritans didn’t let their kids read it until they turned eighteen!

But getting back to the controversy surrounding this book, when it came time for the Jews and the Christians to decide what they would officially include as sacred Scripture - the Jews in the 1st century AD and the Christians about 200 years after that - leaders in both traditions took a hard look at the Song of Solomon and disputed over its inclusion. On the one hand, it was supposed to have been written either by or for Solomon, a King of Israel. So you couldn’t dismiss it outright for that reason. One the other hand, it’s an erotic love song between a young unmarried man and woman, and there’s nothing else quite like it in Sacred Scriptures.

So what they decided in the end was to include it on the condition that it be interpreted as an allegory - for Jews, and allegory about the relationship between God and Israel; and for the Christians, an allegory about the relationship between Christ and the Church, or Christ and the human soul, or, later in the tradition when the cult of Mary became popular, Mary and the soul.

I guess all this reminded me of something I read a few years ago - I think it was from a novel by Marilynne Robinson, but I’m not totally sure. If I’m remembering the scene correctly, though, the lapsed son of a Presbyterian minister tells his sister that one of his main grievances against Christianity is that it’s such a sad religion (I think that was also an argument against it by one of the early modern philosophers). We’ve all heard a lot of criticisms of Christianity, but somehow that one has really stuck with me - a sad religion.

From our treatment of the Song of Songs over the years, you almost have to agree. Not that there isn’t a beauty in those allegorical readings of it - there is. But still, here we have a song about passionate romantic love, about summer in all its fullness and flower, about basically the effortless happiness of being young and alive, and yet we can’t accept it unless it’s allegory for something else - something more chaste and intellectual.

Maybe a lesson in all this is that accepting Joy should be as much (for some, maybe more) a call of the Christian life as accepting sorrow. And maybe our work as Christians, particularly in these waning weeks of summer, is to just enjoy the beautiful world God has given us.

Homily for Pentecost 12 - August 23, 2009

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

“Know When (Not) to Walk Away”

A rule of thumb I try to observe when deciding what text to preach on is to go with the weirdest text. And today, that distinction definitely goes to our passage from the Gospel of John.

In fact, I’ve been ignoring my rule of thumb for the past few weeks because we’ve been with this very strange discourse, in which Jesus talks about eating his flesh and his blood, since the end of July. To the extent that these might not seem too strange to us, it’s that they come filtered down through centuries of Eucharistic theology – years of people explaining that Jesus, when he talked in such macabre terms about consuming his flesh and blood, was actually referring to this wafer and this wine.

But, of course, the people hearing these words for the first time didn’t have that whole history behind them; and in today’s passage, which closes out the discourse, we get some of their very perplexed and even offended responses.

Before I say a few words about those, though, let me quickly summarize the context and some of the content of the speech as a whole for those of you who haven’t been here to hear it.

This speech, called the “Bread of Life Discourse,” is immediately preceded by the Feeding of the Five Thousand – a miracle familiar from all four Gospels, where Jesus multiplies five loaves of bread and two fish to feed a throng of people. In John’s version of it, Jesus gets in a boat and goes to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to get away after he’s performed the miracle, only to be pursued by that same throng of people he’d just fed. So once they catch up with him, he figures out pretty quickly that they’re after more bread, and this provokes his speech to them about spiritual bread.

The speech itself is about a chapter long and is very disjointed, possibly because the Gospel writer John patched together random sayings of Jesus’ that had been handed down to him, or possibly because people just didn’t remember it very well and John reconstructed it as best he could. Of course, it could also be that this was exactly how the speech sounded, and Jesus was just having one of those days! But the gist of it is that, by eating his flesh and drinking his blood, they will not only be sated now but will gain eternal life. And since any summary of it is going to make it sound far saner than it actually was, let me just revisit some of the highlights:

“I am the bread of life … that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

There’s some grumbling at this point, in response to which he ramps it up: ”Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”

As you can see, it’s strange stuff. In fact, several decades after this was written, people began accusing Christians of cannibalism based on this and similar sayings of Jesus’. So it was not only strange, but dangerous.

But anyway, and as I said earlier, in today’s passage, we get those initial responses from the people who were there. And it seems that everyone is offended and / or incomprehending. Some of them then walk away – in fact, many in that throng that followed him across the lake leave.

But Peter and a few others decide to stay, and I love Peter’s rather tepid response when Jesus asks him if he’d like to leave, too: “Lord, to whom can we go?”

This could be any moment in life when a commitment to something or someone - a religion, a person, a vocation - seems irrational, and two of the possible responses to moments like those are here in this text: You can throw up your hands and walk away, like many of those people did; or you can stick it out and either trust that it will make sense at some point, or just give up on your need for everything to make sense.

We do this in our personal relationships all the time, where we can’t explain at every (or any) step along the way why we’re with this person, why we belong to and stay with that family – choice may once have had something to do with it, but no longer. Sometimes someone we’re committed to may even strike us as completely dysfunctional or insane, much like Jesus did Peter in our text, but still, we soldier on despite our annoyance and incomprehension.

And it pays off. After all, what ultimately came of this speech (as we now know, centuries on) is a profound and beautiful ritual that has nourished and brought people closer to each other and to God for centuries - and all because Peter was content to stick around even in the absence of clarity and conviction. Sometimes just not walking away is all that’s asked of us for now, and, as with Peter in ways he couldn’t possibly comprehend at the time, the fruits of our commitment will one day follow.

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Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:20:35 -0400

Homily for Pentecost 10 - August 9

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:19:00 -0400

Well, I guess no one told the people who choose our readings that I just got married, because these are not the sort of texts you should have to think about on the second half of your honeymoon. I’m talking, of course, especially about our Old Testament passage, where David’s son Absalom gets caught by his hair in a tree and is left there dangling between earth and heaven. Andrew suggested I use it as a metaphor for marriage, but I didn’t think that would be a good idea - at least not yet.

At any rate, whether or not it fits the occasion - and I’d like to think not - this is too good a story to pass over.

The Old Testament story of David and Absalom is one of those stories you probably know about even if you haven’t read it in the Bible: a classic story about the conflicts between fathers, sons, and brothers, it has made its way into literature, poetry, even pop music over the centuries since it was written. Absalom, whose name means “Father of Peace” (an ironic name, as we’ll soon see), was King David’s third son, and third in line for succession to the throne - or actually, the second, since at some point in the narrative the second son mysteriously disappears. The oldest son Amnon soon jeopardizes his claim to the throne when he rapes their sister Tamar - in fact, loses that claim, because the angry Absalom invites all his brothers over for a lavish banquet at his home where, in a perversion of hospitality, he slaughters Amnon.

As (now) next in line to David’s throne, Absalom may well have become king had he just had the patience to wait. But he doesn’t. After a brief banishment from Jerusalem, he returns, fakes a reconciliation with his father David (and I’ll say more about David’s role in this in a minute), and then tries to usurp his father’s throne by seizing the nearby town of Hebron in exact imitation of his father (and a fascinating story in its own right).

So it’s not hard to see why his name “Father of Peace” is such a misnomer. In fact, he’s very much at the center of the downward spiral of David’s family into violence and bloodshed.

Aside from being violent, Absalom’s other downfall is his vanity. His Father David, as you might recall from previous weeks, was ruddy and handsome, traits that get passed on to Absalom, for better or worse. The Bible says of him: “In all Israel there is none to be praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.” I rather like how the poet Dryden described him many centuries later: “And paradise was opened in his face.”

His vanity not only stems from his physical beauty, but his imposing stature, as well. According to an old rabbinic tradition, Absalom was so large you could fit a full-grown man in the cavity of his nose (don’t ask me who came up with that one!). His beauty and heft probably inspire Absalom at one point to erect a cairn-like monument to himself to honor his greatness.

All of which gives some helpful background on today’s passage, and particularly his strange manner of death. Today’s story lands us right in the final battle between David and Absalom, the Battle of the Ephraim Woods. As Absalom rides along on his mule through the Forest of Ephraim, he is ensnared in an oak tree by his long thick tresses, turning his beauty, of which he’s so proud, into the thing that destroys him. As he’s hanging there, the story describes him as being “caught between heaven and earth,” a fitting punishment for someone who strove after too much and couldn’t be content with what he had.

Further, his donkey, which in the Bible was a symbol of his kingship and rank (think of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the donkey), moves right on from beneath him, just like the kingdom itself. (I heard this described more mundanely as a lesson in the way the world moves without us, even as we thought ourselves so important in and in control of it.) And finally - though they discreetly removed this part from our reading today - David’s general Joab and all his men kill Absalom as he’s hanging there, throw him in a pit and bury him beneath a heap of rocks, mocking the monument of rocks he had built for himself so many years earlier.

This story and manner of death is clearly meant as a cautionary tale about the consequences of vanity and wanting too much. It’s also a lesson in respecting those who come before, and, with that, recognizing that the wheel of generations turns at its own pace, not ours.

But the most powerful part of this story to me lies not so much in Absalom’s actions, but in King David’s response to them. We didn’t see this so much because we haven’t read the whole story, but David was enamored of Absalom, and even as Absalom causes him so much grief, he demands that the boy Absalom not be hurt (“Deal gently for my sake with the boy Absalom,” he says several times). Then, when he learns Absalom has been killed, David responds not by composing a Psalm, like he did when his friend Jonathan and Saul dies; not by performing a prescribed ritual in the temple, like he does when one of his infant sons dies; this time, he just breaks down and talks gibberish - an unmistakably genuine, unscripted expression of grief.

David was a proto-Christ to the early Christians - in fact, Jesus came from the line of David - and here we really see why they understood him in that way. This David calls to mind the Jesus who told stories about prodigal sons and lost sheep, or who himself loved his wayward disciples even after they turned on him; who loved the masses even as they cried out for his death.

This grace we see in the older King David becomes the backbone of the Christian tradition, reminding us not only of the kind of love God has for us, but of the self-giving, even irrational love we ought to show others, as well - starting with our own sons, brothers, fathers, daughters. Even (very well) our spouses.

vestry minutes - august 2, 09

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Present: Troy, Nancy, Greg, Dale, Vicki, Lithgow, Edie, Howie & Paul

Absent: Astrid, Larry

I. Intro & Prayer - Paul

II. Approval of June minutes. Lithgow made a motion to approve, seconded by Howie, approved by all.

III. Reports

Warden’s Report: August 9 - reception for Astrid and Andrew following service. Sign in/out sheet for church tables, etc. discussed. Edie will make a sign-up sheet.

Music Report: Greg out of town 9/13 - 9/20. Will arrange coverage for an organist. He’s away on 10/4, as well, and will pay for an organist himself for that day.

Finance Report: Grant approved by diocese for $2400, the full amount we asked for. It’s to be used for computer, software, accountant. Volunteers to replace Edie: Angelo, Dale, and Paul Stasaitis.

The Diocesan Investment Trust was also discussed, and will be researched on the diocesan website.