![]() by Lay Preacher, Charlie Houghton Dear Lord, please help my words find a home in the hearts of those listening. Help me to be a light of your hope. Amen “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all – Emily Dickenson Ever since middle school, whenever I hear the word hope, this is the first thing that comes to mind. An amazing English teacher who inspired a love of poetry in a class of eighth graders – no mean feat that – left me with a lasting love of poetry and especially Emily Dickenson. And this poem in particular has been a lasting favorite. It makes hope seem a bit magical, though, and magical is not what I need right now. Why do I not need magical? Because we seem to be living in a world on fire. Politics in America has become completely toxic, with legislators unwilling to embrace the idea of compromise. Even common courtesy is absent these days, where name calling and a complete lack of respect seem to be more prevalent. Climate change is creating weather conditions never seen before – storms are worse and more frequent, and we have been plagued with flooding and wild fires as well as longer and more virulent hurricane and tornado seasons. Gun violence, as we noted at the beginning of our service this morning, is terrifying. Our children are not safe in schools, shopping malls are fair game, and even political candidates are feeling a little less safe. Richard Rohr and John Feister can help us to understand that difficult times are not forever, nor do we need to feel alone and hopeless. Instead they remark, “Darkness is sacred ground. The God who calls us into darkness will also sustain us and lead us through it. ‘God . . . brings the dead to life and calls into being what does not yet exist’ (Romans 4:17). Resurrection is the one and only pattern.” Difficult times are largely what the book of Lamentations is all about. To set this first reading into some context, it was written to express the grief and pain of the people of Jerusalem after the fall of the great city at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BCE, a fall that the author attributes to Jerusalem’s sinfulness. Certainly this reading from Lamentations begins in a very painful vein, but then in verses 21-23 we hear, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” The author reminds us that even in the midst of our most difficult times – what John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul” – God is always with us, and God’s love will sustain us if we let it. Then suddenly, this whole idea of hope in the face of painful and difficult times became very personal. Our daughter called at 6:30 one evening to tell us she was at the Emergency Room in Greenfield with her son who was having chest pain and shortness of breath. We got there as soon as we could, but there was no news. X-rays had been taken and we were waiting for the cardio thoracic surgeon to tell us what was happening. It turned out he had a spontaneous pneumothorax, or simply put, a collapsed lung with no apparent cause. They had been at the ER since about 2:30 in the afternoon and it wasn’t until 11:00 that night that the decision was made to move him to Springfield where he would be near the thoracic surgeon in the event she was needed. It wasn’t until eight days later, after a chest tube, a second lung collapse, surgery, a lung that remained inflated and where it belonged, and discharge, that I finally took a deep breath. In those eight days, while I spent most of my time at the hospital, I had a lot of time to reflect on hope in the midst of pain and anxiety; a lot of time to pray. And a lot of time to internalize Lamentations - “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope…” I felt the prayers coming from friends who knew about the situation. And I felt God’s love and mercy. In the midst of this I prayed a simple prayer that I had cobbled together some time ago, and still change when my needs change. I call it a prayer for hope in difficult times. It goes like this: “Heavenly Father and mother of us all, in times of difficulty and uncertainty, I turn to You for hope. For you are the source of all hope and the light that shines in the darkness. I ask that you fill my heart with hope, Lord, and help me trust in Your plan, even, or maybe especially, when I cannot see the way. Please help me do as you would have me do, going beyond my fear to bring light to others I pass in my days. I ask this through you, God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen” Sometimes, though, our hopes are not realized in our time. Does this mean that they will never be realized? Or does it simply mean that God’s time is very different from our human times? Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on this very concern. “Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.” Theologian and climate activist Sallie McFague suggests that the most difficult task facing us in these challenging times is having and maintaining hope. Despite the facts that look more than a little daunting – our lack of will to live sustainably and justly, greed appearing more important than planet health, the difficulty of persuading others to join the movement toward a healthy planet – the greater issue according to McFague is our lack of hope. She points out that part of the problem seems to be that we don’t understand where our hope should reside, that is, not in ourselves and our abilities, but in the power of God’s love found in the Holy Spirit and our willingness to cooperate with the spirit. She goes on to describe a faith-filled hope that should ground our engagement with this complicated and frightening world. “As we consider the basis for our hope, let us recall who God is. We must and can change our ways, live justly and sustainably on our planet, because of God, not because of ourselves. The hope we have lies in the radical transcendence of God…. God’s transcendence—God’s power of creative, redeeming, and sustaining love—is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the milieu, the source, of power and love in which our world, our fragile, deteriorating world, exists. The world is not left to fend for itself, nor is God “in addition” to anything, everything. Rather, God is the life, love, truth, goodness, and beauty that empower the universe and shine out from it….” And finally, look around at our service today. Our very young and talented pianist, Anderson Weng; our own families with their beautiful children. We often refer to them as the future of our church, but make no mistake, they are the hope of our world. So with a God like ours, a God who consistently inserts God’s self into the fray for us, a God who gives us every possible opportunity to succeed at being our best selves, how can we possibly lack hope? Amen ![]() By Rev. Jimmy Pickett We have a choice to make – as a people, as a community, as a nation. That choice is played out in this morning’s Lessons from Scripture. I’m not talking about a choice about party alliance, or political issues or ideologies, I’m taking about the choice between violence and mercy, between hatred and grace. In our Gospel from Mark this morning, we hear of the martyrdom of John the Baptist under the corruption of King Herod. A birthday party that sounds like an episode of Game of Thrones stands in stark contrast to the abundant Grace and blessing upon blessing that we hear in the Letter to the Ephesians and the joyful dancing that comes when God’s people gather together to bring the Ark of the Covenant, the footstool of God, into the Holy City of Bethlehem. Although, there are a few short words that come just after King David is dancing with joy – “she despised him in her heart”. In our Gospel we hear of grudges, and scandal, and greed leading to a gross display of power and disregard for the dignity of another human being – the head of John the Baptist on a platter. This morning, I wear this orange stole, a symbol of lament that is inspired by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence, because there are too many stories in our world today that sound too close to this scene. There are too many innocent victims in the world because anger and fear are allowed to have the upper hand while mercy and justice are seen as weakness. Just yesterday, two people were killed and two others critically injured at a political rally in Pennsylvania. We have a choice. Will we let hatred for the other win the day or will we lean on the Beloved and allow the way of non-violence to show the world the Mystery of Grace revealed in the God we follow? Elsewhere in the Gospels, when talk of division comes up among the disciples about who is the greatest, Jesus immediately stops that debate and calls them to instead love and serve each other during the Last Supper as Luke tells us. And then in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword when he tries to protect Jesus. As Christians, we are called to live in a new way of loving our enemies – the freely given gift of the Grace of God working in our hearts can uproot the hatred, the grudges, the grief, and the fear that leads to spiritual and sometimes even physical violence. Hatred hurts the one who is hated, the one who hates, and the whole of society. Grace and Mercy heal wounds, bind up and build up relationships, and cause communities and Creation to flourish. As Episcopalians, we have two Great Sacraments that help us to feel in our hearts and hands the Grace of God which passes all understanding. In our Baptism, the words of Ephesians ring as we are signed, sealed, and delivered by the Grace freely bestowed by the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. We also have the Baptismal Covenant to help guide us as we live into our calling – “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?” (even the ones I really don’t want to) I will, with God’s help. In the Eucharist, we are caught up in the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, who descends to hold us by the hand, to nourish and strengthen us in our calling to be the Body of Christ, loving and healing, in the world around us. Grace is freely offered; all we are called to do is lift up our heart and then go in peace to love and serve our neighbors in Jesus’ name. May God mercifully receive our prayer and give us the Grace and power to beat our swords into plows and our spears into pruning hooks, that the Good Fruits of the Gospel of Love Incarnate may grow in the soil of this land. ![]() By The Rev. Ted Thornton From the Gospel of Mark Chapter 6: verses three and four: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.” How do you respond when someone close to you abruptly changes course and you either aren’t sure or you just plain don’t like what you see? When your son or daughter says to you one day, “Mom or Dad, I want to spend my life working at vocation A,” when what you’ve wished for in that person you gave birth to and raised all those years is that they will work at vocation B, how do you respond? When your grown son or daughter chooses a life partner very different from the one you were expecting and invites him or her to dinner, how do you respond? When your son or daughter says one day, “Mom or Dad, I’m gay,” or, ”I don’t identify with my birth gender,” how do you respond? It*s easy to assume we’re living through an era when identities of all kinds are in flux. Advertisers call it “rebranding.” More and more companies and individuals are “rebranding” themselves: leaving behind old identities and putting on new ones. But, has it ever been otherwise? I grew up in a small town in Delaware. When I was ordained, some people who remembered me from my college summers working as a carpenter’s helper building homes throughout town shook their heads in astonishment. I had been a full partner in a rough bunch of guys on that construction crew. Some of my buddies on that crew remembered me cussing with the best of them when I made mistakes or when I hit my thumb with my hammer. And, some fellow sailors in the Navy who knew me well and with whom I shared some questionable off-base escapades were struck dumb when at the end of my four year enlistment they watched me head off to divinity school (“Divinity school? You? Really?”). Some years later in Jerusalem, I studied with Hebrew University Professor Shmuel Safrai, considered by many the world’s leading expert on Jerusalem’s Second Temple period during which Jesus lived. He argued that Jesus wasn’t just a carpenter. He was also a very highly trained rabbi who worked closely with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (the language of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, composed in the third century BCE). In fact, he had memorized huge portions of the Bible: his Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament.” He either studied in person with prominent rabbis such as Hillel or was deeply influenced by them. He was trained to adjudicate Jewish law in civil disputes. Expertise in that alone was and still is among orthodox Jews a skill that requires years of training. So, how do we square Jesus the rough and ready carpenter with Jesus the rabbi? This is the problem confounding the Nazarenes, the folks who watched Jesus grow up. The general fact is that rabbis in Jesus time often did work in more than one vocation, so apart from how he’s received in his hometown of Nazareth, it wasn’t a big deal. Saint Paul, also a rabbi and an expert in rabbinical scholarship and reasoning, earned his living making tents. There are only two passages in the New Testament that explicitly refer to the Jesus’ his neighbors thought they knew as Jesus the carpenter: today’s (Mark 6:3) and Matthew 13:55. The Greek word in both cases is τέκτων (tektone), a word better translated as “master builder,” not just a carpenter, but a person skilled in many of the building trades, especially limestone, of which there has always been an abundance in Palestine compared to wood which has been quite scarce since Greco-Roman times when whole forests were cut down to build Greek and Roman mercantile and naval vessels. In Jesus’ case, his hands were rough and calloused with labor and his mind was quick with Jewish law and philosophy. But, our problem today begins and ends with the fact that Jesus is no longer a “good ol’ boy” from Nazareth. His neighbors don’t like what they’re now seeing and hearing. And so, we are drawn into the vehemence and the violence with which Jesus’ Nazaene neighbors respond to his new life as a rabbi. Vehemence and violence! There are two passages that shed a poor light on Jesus’ Nazarene neighbors: Luke 4:14-30, where in verse 29, the townspeople drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff. And, John 1:46, where we hear Nathanael saying to Philip, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was a tough town in a hardscrabble region. The problem of how we should respond to radical change in the personal life of someone we have known and loved cuts to the heart of one of the most vexing aspects of our human nature. Aristotle said human beings are political animals. He regarded politics as even more important than ethics, the realm of individual behavior and standards. His focus was on society, especially the rules by which communities govern themselves. Contemporary historian Keith Michael Baker defines politics more broadly as “making claims...the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole.” Baker’s definition tracks closer to the kinds of politics Aristotle advocated for our individual lives. He taught the “golden mean.” The golden mean is the goal we should aim for in our dealings with others, the “happy medium,” many call it. Happy? Sometimes, it’s a pretty unhappy medium, isn’t it? Compromise? How many know the meaning of that word anymore in our society? What claims are Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth trying to assert upon him? What claims do you and I make upon others, especially those close to us? Are these claims all fair? Do they aim for Aristotle’s golden mean? What happens when they don’t? In our personal lives? In our lives as a nation? We like to speak of these claims using the softer word: “expectations” when the harder but more truthful word is “claims.” The golden mean is a value that has been sought for millennia across a variety of world religions. Confucius called it chun yung (“the middle way”). The Buddha also taught the middle way using the Sanskrit term madhyama-pratipad. Muhammad used the Arabic word iqtisad advocating moderation in all things. The ancient Greeks carved the inscription μηδὲν ἄγαν- meden agan - “Nothing in excess” - on the lintel of their Temple of Apollo at Delphi, right next to the more familiar one: “Know thyself!” (Greek: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnōthi seauton) Striking the golden mean, the middle way is often very hard. Giving one another time to adjust to change is among the best ways to begin. But, ‘fact is, as we all know, relationships can be permanently broken. And, where repair is possible, it can take a long time. One way to begin is to examine ourselves for signs of narcissism and nostalgia. Narcissus is the dandy of Greek myth who falls in love with his reflection in a pond and thereby becomes stuck, unable to grow, unable to live in genuine community with others, so self-absorbed he’s unable even to acknowledge the existence of others. Narcissism may be an obstacle to our ability to accept change in ourselves and others. Narcissism begins when we become frozen in our attitudes toward ourselves and others, when, like Peter Pan, we think it’s possible to make time stand still, to live in an eternal childish past, stuck in our ways and wishing everyone around us would do the same. Paul knew the challenges of people having trouble living together in harmony. In First Corinthians 14:20, he writes to his divisive congregation in Corinth, "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature." Narcissism and its cousin nostalgia are signals that part of us is still locked in childhood, that we are resisting changes somewhere in our lives where change may be necessary and more healthful. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is one of the best fictional depictions of Paul’s notion of “infants in evil.” A nineteenth century Polish rabbi named Simcha Bunim offered this aid to his followers: write “The world was created for me” on one piece of paper and keep it in one of your pockets. Then, put a different piece of paper in the opposite pocket, with “I am but dust and ashes” written on it. This, he proposed, is a necessary tension. There are other guidelines we could put in our pockets. What would you put in yours? For example, I could write on pieces of paper things to remind me of my human condition: “I am capable of kindness” on one piece of paper and put it in one pocket, then I could write, “I am capable of cruelty” on another and put it in the opposite pocket. Muslims like to put it this way: Everyone walks through life accompanied by two angels: one angel sits on the right shoulder and records all good deeds, while the other sits on the left shoulder and records all bad deeds. In one pocket we might write “Be open to change.” In the other pocket, we might write “Don’t be too open minded.” That latter saying reminds me of something Arthur McKinstry, Bishop of Delaware in my early childhood used to say, “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” Notice that none of this is about striking a balance. Balance is not the right word here: it’s tension, not balance, isn’t it? We deceive ourselves when we think of the golden mean, the middle way, compromise as a balancing act. We live our lives in tension most of the time, not balance. That’s why life is hard and faith and prayer are so important. Another way to read Paul in that passage from First Corinthians is that once we grow up and leave our childhood behind, we realize that you and I were made to love the world, sometimes even when it hurts; the world was not made to love us. That’s the meaning of sacrificial love. That’s the meaning of the cross. I think in the end, the best way to tolerate the discomfort of tension in our lives is to strive for inclusivity. This doesn’t mean sacrificing our core values, but it does mean giving space where possible for others to live out theirs. In her opening remarks at General Convention in Louisville the other day, House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris perhaps said it better than most: “Inclusivity,” she said, “is the sacred work of recognizing the image of God in every person. It means honoring the beautiful diversity of the human family.” And, as Bishop Michael has been telling us over and over again, that’s the center of Jesus’ “m.o.” In which areas of your life will you strive to become more inclusive in the coming weeks and months? Amen. |
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