Making the right mistakes

Dear People of Christ Church,

As you know, next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, but there is some partying to be done before then. We're doing both jazz Mardi Gras (Friday, 6pm, Steve Taddeo concert) and taking up the traditional English practice of eating pancakes before Lent, using up the indulgent eggs and butter before the Lenten fast. On Sunday, we also celebrate and offer our thanks to Bishop Shaw, who retires this year, along with our partner congregation, St Peter's Ugandan Anglican, who will join us for worship.

Ash Wednesday morning, we begin with ashes at the train station. This year, we're partnering with Chaplains on the Way, which I particularly appreciate since, as a mostly-homeless ministry, the street is their church. I wonder about how many people, who, for whatever reason, don't feel comfortable coming into a church, and how powerful a witness it is to leave our comfort zone of having people come to us. Will someone have a more "deep" experience in coming to church? As a priest I'd probably hope so, but I also shouldn't make assumptions about what happens between an individual and God, no matter where they're standing. I heard a quote about meditation once that said that you could open the window, but you couldn't make the breeze come in. That probably applies here-when fewer and fewer people having traditional church backgrounds, we need to throw open as many windows as we can.

It's not an easy question, though-how far can you go from tradition before you've lost the center of what you're committed to in the first place? What are we inviting people toward if we compromise too far? How much do we ask of people who come to have a child baptized? Do they have to come for a few weeks, months, a year? Do they have to officially join the parish by making a financial pledge? What about receiving communion? It's the practice in our diocese in many places, including Christ Church, to offer communion to everyone, whether or not they're baptized. The prayer book and church canons say baptism should come first. Here, again it trying to open the windows.

Adherence to tradition is one of those places where we strive for faithfulness, not necessarily the 100% always-and-everywhere-iron-clad rule. Faithfulness, it seems to me, is deciding which side you're going to err on.   Will we be devoted to orthodoxy or openness? What's at stake on both sides? There are a lot of times when I defer to tradition-the Nicene Creed, for example-but here, I think there is actually something to say for asking what Jesus would do. His first goal, most often, was to get people to the table. Once you're there, you can talk more, debate, pick sides. As the parable in Luke 14 tells it, when the nice, qualified guests wouldn't come for the feast, the host told his servant quite unequivocally: "Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame." When he does that and there's still space, he goes out to make everybody else come in. Would it have been a better party if the well-educated and polite people had come? It's completely possible. Would they have appreciated the expensive wine more? Maybe. But that's not what God's table is about.

I do appreciate, though, that it's a discussion to be had. It's not an uncontroversial stance, it's not an "of course!" moment. And once-if-this gets settled, there will be something else to struggle with. As we grow into the church we're called to be, we are trying to follow a Jesus who's always just a little ahead, taking us a little further than we thought we could go.

Blessings,
Sara+
   
PS: For a more general intro to Lent piece about Ashes to Go, see my editorial in the Waltham News Tribune today! 

Seeing and not seeing

Dear People of Christ Church,

Last Sunday in my sermon, I was thinking with you about how in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was trying to bring his listeners somewhere.  He wasn't just teaching, he was preaching.  Our selection was not the nice and warm parts we associate with the Sermon on the Mount-instead of blessing, we heard him use shocking language about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes that cause us to sin: more maniacal dictator than savior.   In doing the work of interpretation, we can hear that Jesus is offering a sermon, not an instruction manual for sound living. These wild words speak to imagination, not obedience.  Jesus is telling the people to imagine, really imagine, to know that it's possible to be free from sin.  It's not as simple as plucking out an eye, it's not even as simple as declaring that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. Instead, it's possible by God's grace, in resurrection and love.  As Christians we learn that is a reality beyond sin and brokenness.  Whatever shame or violence or hatred we are stuck in, there is a way out.

Jesus uses shocking language because his listeners, like us, need a little prod to pay attention.  I recently came across a wonderful book review of Alexandra Horowicz's On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. Realizing how city living had dulled her senses, Horowicz took eleven different walks around her neighborhood, trying to share the perspective of her companions-various "experts" from her dog, to her toddler, to a geologist and a font specialist. Her walk with a blind acquaintance is one of the most evocative.

Some of our obliviousness is a survival strategy; if my mind judged the new burger special at Wendy's to be as important as whether or not a car was turning into the street in front of me, I wouldn't live very long. I want to listen to the person in front of me talking about her family, not the sound of traffic outside, and I would be a bad priest if I didn't were putting my attention elsewhere. The problem comes when we get cagey in our selection; where our ignor-ance is willful or inflicts pain, where we don't see because we just don't want to deal.

Horowicz writes,
Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.  By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

This awareness of our unawareness has particular theological significance.  I wonder about what would have happened between Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis if they could have seen each other more clearly, untethered by racism or anger; protesters and police in the Ukraine; or Pussy Riot and Vladimir Putin in Russia. On a personal and global scale, we need a wider lens.  

This Sunday, we welcome Allison Reynolds- Berry, a community organizer from REACH to tell us about their "Say Hi" campaign (read more below). Small actions like knowing our neighbors and actually seeing each other make for a safer, and stronger, community.   Violence at home is an isolating experience, but when people are connected to each other, it can be easier to leave an abusive situation.   How can we see our neighbors, our near ones, more clearly? How can we see the work of God around us more profoundly? Where are we not looking, and what can we see?  

Blessings,
Sara+

God's mission, our church

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, as I was talking with you in my sermon on Sunday, I'm still thinking about the interplay of church as organization and church as people. The buzzword in church circles is "missional"-the focus is on how we are living the mission of God, not on how we organize ourselves or how we provide a service (we are not like manicurists or exterminators, for example, though we do emphasize service to the world). It's hard not to fall into a consumerist way of relating. Our contemporary culture just uses that language; it's convenient. Who is our market? How can we promote our message to resonate with them? How are we meeting the needs of our funders? What balance of challenge and inspiration, happy music and solemn music, will please our patrons?

We do need to be accountable, and the opinions of those who gather do matter, but we are the church because God has a mission in the world, not because we want to strengthen our organization or please ourselves. The sacraments are food for our souls and we come because we are hungry, but we also believe that feeding that particular hunger makes us attuned to other kinds of hunger in the world. We are healed at the altar and reminded of our deep worthiness as children of God so we can go out in the world and join in God's work of healing others. That's mission-that's church as body, not church as service provider. We want a strong organization to serve the mission, but the organization is not the mission.

Understanding ourselves as a gathered body instead of a corporation frees us in a really particular way. This is what Simon and Andrew learned when they started fishing for people-it's God's mission, not theirs, and they're free to succeed or fail, as long as they're listening.   The question for us is how to listen. Listen to our city, to where we are called to be in ministry. Listen to each other, to how we can help each other hear the call of God in our lives. When you coach your kid's sport's team, that's part of God's call for you. When you stand on the Common for the peace vigil, that's part of God's call for you.  When you watch your grandkids after school, it's God's call.We don't just live out our call as Christians within these four walls.

I wrote two weeks ago about the small group model we are considering for Lent education, beginning on Tuesday, March 11. It's beginning to be a bit more fleshed out, and we've settled on reading the book The Restoration Project by Christopher Martin, whom I met at a conference last year. Martin uses the restoration of Leonardo DaVinci's painting, the Last Supper, as a metaphor for how we can be restored to the image of God, and how our parishes can be home bases for transformation of the self as well as the world. The theological model he uses is based on the steps of humility set out by St Benedict in his Rule of Life. Christopher is a priest and a father of two, so at the same time as the method is steeped in Christian tradition and monasticism, it's also very practical and tied to the life of ordinary people living now.  The hope in beginning these smaller groups is to be able to support one another in all the different ways we live out our callings as Christians, as well as to know each other on a deeper level.

As she has generously done for the last two years, Erin Jensen will coordinate children's education with a mix of Godly Play and other projects. Everyone is welcome to come for dinner at 6pm, and then the first education portion for children and adults will be from 6:40 to 7:30, with our simple meditative Eucharist at 7:30. What's different this year is that there will be a second group that will convene with the same content after the service, so if you can't make it as early as 6 you can still participate, joining at the Eucharist at 7:30 or just the group beginning at 8. If there is interest, there would also be a daytime group, so please let us know if that works better for you. Contact Anna Jones with questions. If the groups are successful, they may continue beyond Lent, but we'll start for five weeks to begin with. Sign up for a copy of the book here. 

thanks and peace,
Sara+

Leaning into the Gospel

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, I'm mulling over all things episcopal: episcopal in the sense of "Episcopal," as in, our church, and "episcopal," in the sense of "related to things relating to bishops." (Greek episcopos=overseer=bishop). The slate of bishop candidates in our diocese was released in January, and during February, candidates who join the slate by petition (those who have gathered the correct mix of clergy and lay delegate signatures across our diocese) are being background checked and will be announced in March.  It won't just be those five from the nominating committee! This week also saw the release of the bishops' slate in the suffragan (assisting) election in Maryland.   All the candidates were women, which was at the same time entirely troubling and entirely great.

I recently read Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, a corporate manifesto for professional women to focus harder on their careers and reject the things that (she sees) hold them back. Sandberg's point is that, too often, women undermine themselves in subtle ways, and before they know it, have lost the opportunities that would have been available to them had they only "leaned in" further to their work. We don't ask for raises, we don't speak up, we let our spouses get away with leaving too much childcare to us. Sandberg's book has been well-criticized by many different corners, first and foremost because she is talking to such a narrow segment of the population, a relatively un-diversified group of people who are already leaps and bounds more privileged than most Americans, nevermind women or men on a global scale.  What's more troubling about the book is that there's nothing about all the structural inequality that leads women to get stuck in their careers, or never to start them at all.  If you couldn't go to college because you got a part time job at CVS to take care of your family, there's not a lot of room for "leaning" anywhere before you fall over.  

Since I read the book, I've been thinking a lot about how it does and doesn't translate in the Christian life.   The Gospel doesn't measure our worth by our salaries or the size of our office, so why should we chase after those things?  Well,  our Gospel for this Sunday does say something about not hiding your light under a bushel, and I think that can go for our secular work as well as for our faith in God. 

But Maryland, oh, Maryland.  If I was a little disappointed to see just one woman on the slate in Massachusetts, it was so much worse to see all those women on the list.  This is the definition of a double bind: in a circumstance in which the outcome you want (women bishops) is sure, why would you not want to have it be certain? Because it just points to how stuck we already are, that either there is an assumption that a woman would never get elected unless running against only women, or that just being female is a job requirement. This is the structural change that Sheryl Sandberg doesn't get and that we in the church don't do a great job with either. 

The charge in baptism is to "respect the dignity of every human being," which includes working for inclusion of all people's skills, on every level, at all times.  We need men and women toget her in our sacraments, men and women together in the choir, men and women on the altar guild, menand women and all those in between who don't identify with either, to listen for God's call in their lives.  That, as the Prophet Isaiah says in our reading for this Sunday, the fast that God chooses. That is God's desire for the church.  What can we do here at Christ Church to share ministry more effectively?  Where are you called to stop hiding your light?  

Blessings,
Sara+ 

PS: See a piece on my blog that this is based on & some conversation about it on the church website Episcopal Cafe.