Baptism, the Spontaneous Outpouring of God's Love

Dear People of Christ Church,

I hope those of you who gathered for church on Sunday after the blizzard enjoyed our service in the parish hall as much as I did. When I got to church at 7:30, as I usually do, I discovered there was no heat; the church was 33 degrees and the boiler that heats the church sanctuary was silent. Our repair folks came out soon enough, but to move a space that large 30 degrees takes some time, so as people began arriving to help we got busy moving chairs. Sundays after large storms are never too full, so the 55 or so of us who gathered fit easily in two concentric circles in the hall. I put a small table at the center for an altar and preached with no pulpit and no text. I do that anyway at 8:30, but with a bigger crowd the energy was quite different.

I’ve preached in different ways over the years I’ve been at Christ Church—there are years in the pulpit and years out of the pulpit. I’ve sometimes used my manuscript as a text to read and other times more as an anchor I rarely look down at. Preaching feels more spontaneous and connected without that safety blanket—it’s just you and me and whatever the Holy Spirit allows me to remember about my planning—but can be hard. Our text for Sunday, though, was a perfect reading for not having everything written down in front of me.

There’s always something confusing about the baptism of Jesus, our Gospel for Sunday—we tend to think of baptism as a moral event, the necessity of which comes from our own human moral failures. Even if we might not take this argument all the way to the end, there’s a hierarchy implicit in baptizing that makes it seem like a flow of power from powerful to powerless. John named this, too—he wants to receive what *Jesus* has, and sees himself as powerless to give Jesus anything on his own. He doesn’t see how he has authority over Jesus in being able to perform the rite.

Liturgical stuff gets us in trouble like this all the time. We’re quick to superimpose the hierarchies on the world onto our faith. That’s what John was doing…remember how he made that comment about being even unworthy of tying the thong of Jesus’ sandal? He does it again here.

We ask the same question. If part of what happens in our baptism is a sinful person being formed in a moral community (which, make no mistake, it absolutely is), then why does Jesus “have” to do it? We’re obsessed with freedom and individual choice so there seems to be something at stake in whether it’s necessary. It might be necessary for us, but is it for Jesus?

That’s what was great about preaching this piece without a text. Jesus’ baptism was just about the love of God. That’s it. No hierarchy, no authority, no “you should be baptizing me, not me you.” Just love. The most simple thing. Anyone can do it.

The rite itself is just occasion for us all to get clear about God’s love in Christ. Anyone can be a Christian. There’s no esoteric secret knowledge required. You don’t even have to be sure about everything! Your doubts and questions get to come along. In baptism we take on God’s love. We receive the memories of thousands of years of God’s faithfulness, in Creation, in the calling of the people of Israel through slavery and exile and return, in the birth of God as human in Christ, Christ’s self-giving love and the resurrection. All of God’s love and faithfulness become ours in baptism. Jesus is baptized, and we can be baptized, and it could not be more simple. Just like preaching without a text… Sort of.

Blessings,

Sara+

Other Roads

Dear People of Christ Church,
Tomorrow is Epiphany (if you have a hankering for church, St Paul’s in Bedford is doing a noon service). One of my favorite lines in the Gospels is this short description of the Magi as they leave Bethlehem:

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

What is this other road? Did they always follow the instructions given in dreams? What are all the other roads we take or don’t take? Maybe they learned from a bad experience that you should always listen to that stuff? The Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken has always seemed a bit self-congratulatory to me—the narrator seems to boast that it’s “made all the difference” they took the road less traveled—but Matthew’s Gospel is so matter of fact about it that you wonder if there must be more to it.

Thinking about the alternate roads often becomes an exercise in nostalgia—thinking about what might have been if we’d done something else (or thinking about who we were when we made those decisions), we are easily blinded to the graces of what is. On the other hand, a la my annoyed interpretation of Frost, there can be a brittle defensiveness to being sure we did the right thing. But the magi are drama-free; they just know that Herod’s out to get them, and they keep going.

In addition to Magi’s attentiveness to their dreams, the other thing I also love is that they found the other road. We don’t have stories about them returning to Herod because they knew how to do things differently. They were attentive not just to their internal senses, but to what was around them. This is hard: often times we get absorbed into our own personal realities and don’t notice anything else. There’s also an opposite temptation, to be so externally focused we lose our bearings and can’t hear anything from our interior selves. They all are in conversation; it’s more of a double helix than two poles to balance.

Tomorrow, with the Magi we leave Bethlehem, all on our own roads. The light of the manger will be brought to all corners of the world in this season of Epiphany to the extent that we bring it with us. We’re celebrating Jesus’ baptism on Sunday, so we’re reminded of how we are one in Christ as members of one another and the church; in that same double helix way of interior and exterior, we travel together and apart.
What will you bring with you as you leave the manger? What will you leave behind?

Blessings,
Sara+

The Work of Christmas

Dear People of Christ Church,
Blessed Days of Christmas to you! I’m away from the office until January 2, but wanted to pass this on to you as you make your way through these twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. I’ve shared it before; it comes from the theologian Howard Thurman, published in his book, The Mood of Christmas and other Celebrations (1973).

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Please come on Sunday for Christmas Lessons and Carols at 10am (no 8:30 service). On Sunday, January 8, we’re back to our regular schedule with children’s education at the 10am service and our usual 8:30 spoken Eucharist as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus that kicks off Epiphany season!
Blessings,
Sara+

The Three Advents

Dear People of Christ Church,
Continued Advent blessings!

Every year we come to this season, and every year we need the Advent call to contemplation, wakefulness, and hope like the desert needs water. This year the Advent invitation to hope, in particular seems very timely. This is the one thing we are called to do in this season: to hope in preparation for the birth of Jesus, to hope in preparation for God’s presence in the world, and to hope for God’s presence in our own lives. One of my favorite explorations of Advent comes from the medieval monk Bernard of Clairvaux. He says there are actually three Advents. The first one is the one we know: the birth of God in the person of Jesus Christ, God taking on our human flesh. We spend these days counting down, lighting candles and eating chocolates, in preparation to be ready. The third Advent is the coming again of Christ, at the end of time: as we say in the Eucharistic prayer, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Those are visible, in-the-world Advents. But there’s an Advent that comes in between those two in our chronological time. The second Advent is is the Advent of Christ every day: in our hearts and in our world. God invites us to cultivate a space for Jesus every day, not just Christmas. Bernard tells us: “If you wish to meet God, go as far as your own heart.” Thomas Merton was a great interpreter of Bernard: he emphasizes that part of how we connect to this second Advent is in humility, to accept that we must receive all from Christ and not lean on our own power or ego.

One of the fruits of this kind of humble living, I think, is non-judgment. That’s one of the lesser-heard Biblical values we’re looking at in our Advent series. This week we read the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John. Trying to whip Jesus into their frenzy of condemnation, the scribes and Pharisees ask him what they should do to her. But he ignores them; writing in the sand he stays apart, silent. When they push him, he replies: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” One by one they leave, and she’s alone. I chose that particular story because that line is so memorable, but as we read it together I was most moved by Jesus’ solidarity with her. I pictured the woman, afraid for her life, fearful that there would be no one to take her part. She’s alone; the other adulterous participant is not named, and not anywhere present. She has no recourse for justice. Jesus takes her side. Not only will he not condemn, he does so in the face of significant pressure to do so.

This Advent, here’s my wish list: to live in hope with that woman, that Jesus might come to my side. To live in trust, with Thomas Merton, that God will give me the grace to embody Jesus’ solidarity in this fragile world. To find time for silence, to find God in my heart in today’s Advent, as well as tomorrow’s.

Blessings,
Sara+

Forgive Us Our Debts

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week my friends’ and my plot to get ourselves out of our offices—”two priests and a rabbi drinking coffee” resulted in another great conversation. Angel and David and I sat with one person who grew up Catholic and later converted to Judaism, one Christian new to Waltham in search of a church home, and one repeat customer who might call himself “spiritual but not religious.” Our word for the day: Hell.
Not usually one of my go-to spiritual concepts, but it was on my mind since it comes up in our Gospel for Sunday in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. In the story, Lazarus (not to be confused with the guy who was raised from the dead) rests on Abraham’s breast, finally at peace after a lifetime sitting outside the gate of a rich man’s home begging. That rich man has also died, but he has been sent to the lake of fire in Hades. A great chasm is fixed between the two; Lazarus couldn’t help even if he wanted to.
The chasm is not, however, new: it ruptured while the two were alive, when the rich man chose not to see Lazarus. God didn’t create it as punishment: it simply was. “Hades” in the story is a nod to Greek mythology, not Jesus talking about God’s plans for us in the afterlife. But it comes with a hard question: the rich man didn’t see Lazarus. What are we not seeing? Then, as now, what does it mean to be part of a world where it’s so easy not to see?
This parable follows the parable of the dishonest manager, which we heard last week. In that one, we sit across the table from the manager who asks us: how much do you owe?
How much do I owe? Good grief, how much. A lot. Nobody is comparing me to a poisonous candy. Nobody is going to shoot me if my car breaks down (no matter where my hands are, and especially not if they are up in the air).
Why think of this as a debt? Many others do not have this thing that I have. And I certainly did not earn my citizenship or my pale skin or my access to education. My debt is to God, through those who suffer in this world. My debt is to them, through God. Easy to forget those lines in the Lord’s Prayer that really in the original language are more correctly translated as “debts.” Forgive us our debts, God, as we forgive our debtors. We say “trespasses,” which makes it a lot harder to say that as a confession.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
Forgive us, God, all the things we don’t see, and give the grace and courage to open our eyes and hearts to your call.
Blessings,
Sara+

God the Potter

Dear People of Christ Church,
In the children’s sermon this past Sunday, we played with clay—our text was the passage from Jeremiah where the prophet talks about God as a potter, forming us. The scripture text gets a little dark—God tells Jeremiah the pot can be crushed, if the potter desires. It seems to come with a threat: God will “shape evil” against the people if God desires.
God might, but God doesn’t.
The Bible is a record of God’s doings in history, but it’s also a record of the people of God trying to understand their experience and God’s action in the world. Again and again, we might think that God will give up on us, or send calamity or trial or tempest. We feel like unsteady pieces of clay sometimes, going around and around the potter’s wheel. Will we be strong and perfect? Will we be weak and wobbly? Will we go astray and get flung off the wheel and into the corner? Will the potter just give up and get something better?
Here’s where the similarity to the potter ends.
I took a class once in pottery, learning the painstaking way a potter has to have just the right balance of gentle pressure. Too little support for the thin walls of a pot on a potter’s wheel, and the clay tears and falls down. Building the wall of the pot too thick doesn’t work, either—then you end up with a door stopper instead. Too little water on the pot as it spins will make it impossible to shape. Too much water will do the same. It’s a marvel any potter can make anything at all without throwing it all in the corner.
Again and again, though, God doesn’t throw the whole thing in the corner. As a not-even-second-rate potter, I gave up all the time and threw the clay back in the bin or, worse, in the trash. But God never does. This week we’ll hear the parable of the lost coin and the lost sheep. Leaving 99, the shepherd goes after the one who’s gone astray. Losing one coin, the woman turns her house upside down until she finds it—and then she throws a party! These are not the actions of a potter who’s going to give up on the clay.
This is the time of year of new beginnings. Even though it’s now been 13 years since I started a new academic year as a student, I still feel a sense of promise as the air begins to cool in the fall. This is the year, I tell myself, I’m really going to get organized. Whether I do or not, though, by now I’m beginning to learn: it doesn’t matter. I’ll do my best, imperfectly tending the garden of my life. Either way, fall will give into winter. Either way, winter will give into spring. Either way, God’s love will encircle us.
Blessings,
Sara+

Ascensiontide, Season for Uncertainty

Dear People of Christ Church,
In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the uncertainty of Ascensiontide. Not like “tide” like waves, but like time (—in the church we just stick “tide” as a suffix to whatever we want to extend past its traditional expiration date). The disciples experience Jesus as having been lifted away from them, literally into the sky. Renaissance paintings just show feet at the top of the canvas. However that spatial metaphor works or doesn’t, I said, in my sermon, there is something decidedly new in the disciples’ experience. Jesus was with them in the post resurrection experiences, and then he wasn’t. He stopped showing up with breakfast on the beach, stopped walking along with them pretending to be a stranger, stopped telling them not to be afraid. All of that just stopped. In our Gospel for Sunday we hear Jesus talking about sending the Holy Spirit, that he has to leave for it Spirit to show up. The Greek word is “advocate”—the Paraclete.

Easter season might be the liturgical season for joy, but if there were a liturgical season for uncertainty, ascensiontide would be it. In our lives, uncertainty doesn’t have a season. There is always plenty of it to go around, anytime. Just like you don’t need Lent to realize your distance from God, you don’t need a painting of the tips of Jesus’ feet to know ambiguity. The invitation to think about it in an intentional way comes from the disciples—this time of year we are trying to hang out with them for a while in this in-between space.

We’ve been doing a lot of that in Easter season, just hanging out with the disciples and seeing what’s going on. I think of that as one of the goals of preaching—to bring us all into the text and see what’s happening, listen in on those long-ago conversations and see what’s there for us. Taking the disciples up on their invitation can feel kind of like a strange choice to make, admittedly. It takes a certain willingness to suspend disbelief, not to know the answers ahead of time about what you’ll find, and just jump in. The past is the past, but through Scripture it’s a living past that touches the present in an unexpected way. We are in community with those disciples and with Jesus as we are in community with each other.

What are you finding in this season of uncertainty? Pentecost is coming up on Sunday and we turn toward the Holy Spirit, her rushing wind and tongues of fire. But we have a few more days of quiet. What have you heard here?

Blessings,
Sara+

We Are Worthy

Dear People of Christ Church,
I recently had some time to spend with my kindle, and found Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection. I’ve read a lot of her stuff before, but hadn’t spent much time with this one. Brown’s research started out being about shame—our fear of being unworthy of love and belonging. Since love and belonging are two of the most central human emotional and spiritual needs, shame feels profoundly dangerous to us, and we try to avoid it at all costs. What’s worse, we have a tendency to further isolate ourselves when we feel shame, by bringing in secrecy, silence, and judgment of others to insulate ourselves from the pain. This then spirals out again, which leads to further isolating, further judging, and further suppressing of our feelings. The good news is that we can do things differently—if instead of nurturing our shame we nurture ourselves and remember our inherent worthiness, that cycle is broken. Reaching out to others, reminding ourselves that we aren’t defined by our failures, that we are worthy of love no matter what—Brown calls the capability for that work “shame resilience.”

It’s striking to think about shame in this way as we head into Holy Week beginning with Palm Sunday on March 20. Though we often forget it, Scripture can be profoundly psychologically insightful. Unfortunately we often do profoundly un-psychologically insightful things with Scripture!

In thinking about the crucifixion, we sometimes say that Jesus took on our shame and sin, to offer it to God, to heal us. The liturgy for the Stations of the Cross is full of this. That’s true, but Jesus didn’t do that as though we had a dirty shirt on and he took it off of us and put it on his own body. Instead. Jesus’ transformation of our humanity comes from the inside; his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection (yes, all four) symbolize God’s insistent, constant presence with us. It’s true that Jesus’ peaceful response to the violence he faced saved us. That’s true. In a very literal way, yes, we are saved by the cross. But we’re not “more saved” because it was “more worse.” We just are saved. Because God loves us. We just are worthy. Again, because God loves us.

Much is made of the crucifixion as being a particularly grisly and fear-inducing method of enforcing capital punishment. Many people were put to death in the Roman Empire, some by crucifixion, but by no means all. Crucifixion was a warning sign—it served to instill fear. That was its purpose. Yes, it was also shameful. But to say that Jesus’ death was uniquely shameful I think misses the point. The point is that Jesus’ death was not uniquely shameful. It was a way an abusive regime kept its people in line. That’s part of what’s salvific about it—that God experienced, from the inside, the worst of humanity. And God’s love would not be defeated.

We are all worthy—shame doesn’t have the last word for Jesus or for us. I’m getting ahead of us and close to Easter—there is a ways to go—but the resurrection is always true, even in the depths of Lent.

Blessings,
Sara+

Deeply Seen by Jesus

Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m still mulling over the Gospel for Sunday, Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man. It’s an astonishing and tragic moment: he comes up to Jesus and bows down, offering deference and respect. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” We can imagine that maybe he’s expecting to be told he’s doing well; he says he has kept all the commandments. But something unanticipated happens—Jesus looks at him, and loves him. In that loving glance, Jesus sees him and knows him, and tells him what he’s missing: “You lack one thing. Go, sell all you own, and give the money to the poor. Then come, follow me.” The man was looking for approval, not grace. Certainly not this kind of love that will change his life. So he leaves. The text says, “He went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”

This, it seems to me, is as clear a picture of hell as we ever see in the New Testament. Never mind all that stuff about the eternal fire where the worm never dies we heard a few weeks ago. This is the real thing. All of the promises of God’s eternity so close he could touch it, and instead he turns his back. The psychological keenness of the Gospel story is so striking—he went away grieving. Giving in to his fear, he can’t listen to his sorrow. He walks away into hell, rejecting the invitation and love of Jesus.

There is a stained glass window at Grace Church in Medford, where my husband is the rector, that has a person with exactly the same expression as I imagine Jesus offering this young man. It’s full of compassion and love, a deep, knowing comfort. In this all-encompassing gaze, you are seen, deeply seen. All of your fears, all of your vulnerability, all of your joy and strength. And I imagine when this young man encountered Jesus looking at him like that, he just couldn’t manage it. It was too much. This is where the depth of this story really hits home—that glance. How often do I let my fear of vulnerability take over? How often do I rely on the safety of invisibility rather than the risk of transformation?

What would I do if I heard that call to sell everything I own and give it to the poor? Jesus is really clear here—it’s give the money. Not to a charitable organization that will “responsibly” dole out assistance. It’s about the cash, here, giving it up and giving it to those who don’t have any. Is this the call of the Gospel now? With every home improvement project and nice sweater I buy, am I walking step by step away from the promises of eternal life? Is it possible still to inch closer and closer, slowly, slowly, near to God’s dream of peace and justice, however often we become distracted and confused? How about you? Where are you encountering that love of Jesus, and how are you turning toward it?

Blessings,
Sara+

P.S. So—when I say I like the window—I really like the window. I sat opposite it when I was on sabbatical three years ago and sang in the choir at Grace, and started contemplating it as a tattoo. This fall I took the plunge—more about that process on my own blog.

Receiving Grace

Dear People of Christ Church,
As you read this I’ll be almost finished with my 900 mile drive south to Hot Springs, North Carolina, home of the Wild Goose Festival, a Thursday through Sunday extravaganza of God, peace, art, music, and muddy Christians. Hot Springs is in an area in Western North Carolina that is basically a rain forest, and with mostly tent campers, you get very comfortable with dirt. 2 years ago my family had a bit of an extra adventure when our elderly camping trailer and our not-quite-up-to-the-task Subaru were no match for the mountains. Four of us in the front of a tow truck driving 45 minutes into the mountains to retrieve our camper was an exploit we hope not to repeat, so this year we are staying in a much more portable tent.

The first time we were at Wild Goose we heard civil rights veteran Vincent Harding speak—all the more powerful now, since he died in 2014. I remember hearing him talk about the United States as an “emerging” democracy—we just aren’t all there yet, as a nation, but God is leading us on. Observing July 4 this past week in the wake of the Supreme Court’s equal marriage decision felt like our country emerged a little further, though there is still a distance to go. Fundamentally, though, our faith is about joy, not sorrow. The Gospel calls us to mourn and weep (I’ve forgotten how many of the psalms are laments, but it’s a lot), but also tell us joy comes in the morning and that we are already reconciled to God. Already.

The most incredible gift, the one that’s somewhat peculiarly difficult to receive, is the grace of Jesus—the already-forgiven places we are invited to live in. Over the last few weeks I’ve sung Amazing Grace more times than usual, mostly as a go-to hymn a lot of people just know. We sang it at the service for Charleston, we sang it because the hymn number was printed incorrectly in church two Sundays ago, and we sang it this past week at Church in the Garden when we were competing with ambulances and traffic. My favorite verse is the last one:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.

I love this image beyond time and space, as though we could begin singing and giving thanks for God now, but there’s no way we’ll ever finish. Even after ten thousand years, still the grace of God will catch us in joy, nudging us like a four year old who just needs their back scratched a little longer at bedtime. Just a little longer. Ten thousand years isn’t enough.

Where is grace finding you these summer days?

Blessings,
Sara+

PS: please come to church this Sunday as we continue summer worship at 9:30—the incomparable Rev. Anne Minton joins us!…
Stop by and say hi between 10-12 this Saturday, too, for Waltham History Day at Christ Church!

Belief, Trust, and Reciting the Creed

Dear People of Christ Church,
Continued happy Easter, everyone!
I had a great week off last week reconnecting with my family after a long and wonderful Holy Week. As I have said many times, I’m a big fan of the services of Holy Week not just because it’s “good” to go to church (which, sure, it is), but because participating in those liturgies helps me come near to God in a deeper way—beyond my over-active mind, beyond anxiety and distraction. To actually place your body on the ground in front of the cross and to hear the first bells of Easter at the Vigil is to be placed in the path of mystery: God simply dwells with you.
On Sunday, I had the pleasure of attending church with my kids at Church of Our Savior, Arlington, where one of my daughter’s classmates’ mothers is the rector. (Thanks to new parishioner and retired priest Dan Crowley for being here!) COS is a smaller space, with a round altar in the center of the church and the pews facing inward on either side. As an Episcopal Church, the liturgy was much the same, but when it came time for the Nicene Creed Rev. Malia introduced it in a new way. Not everyone, perhaps obviously is a huge fan of the recitation of the Creed. As a historical artifact, it’s a snapshot of the heresies and arguments of the early Church—not necessarily intended to be an inspirational invitation to a holy life. For every line of text, there’s a backstory of debate with proponents on all sides.
For many contemporary Christians the doctrine that Jesus was fully human and fully divine seems self-evident, but it was not so 1600 years ago. The docetics said that Jesus just seemed human. The Arians said that he was divine but still definitely subordinate to God the Father. The Orthodox theology of the Trinity as three in One and of one substance carried the day, and we still recite this explanation of our belief even now.
A trickier question is how do we believe when we say we believe. That’s between you and God. When I introduce the Creed at Christ Church, I say something like “Let us confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed:” my way of explaining that this is the tradition of the church and this is the articulation chosen through hundreds of years, but it’s not necessarily the most comprehensive. The deeper meaning of the words and ideas is a personal question. At COS, Rev. Malia invited the congregation to say the Creed as either We believe (the “real” words) [in one God, Jesus, Spirit, Church] or We trust [in one God, Jesus, Spirit, Church].
For an over-thinker with some trust issues, this was a fascinating shift. The Latin word credo which the word “creed” comes from means “to give your heart to.” That explanation has always resonated with me because there’s an intentionality to it. But the poetry of it also lends a certain abstraction. “Trust” has a deeper vulnerability at the center. How do I trust God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit? All the time? What does it mean to trust God in the Church? To proclaim our faith? What does it mean to join our faith with the church through time in these Creeds?

Blessings,
Sara+

Lifted on the Cross: Ministry, Suffering, and Forgiveness

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, I’ve been praying around sin—appropriate enough for Lent, of course—but in particular around criminal justice as well. The Tsarnaev trial, of course, is impossible to ignore, and on Tuesday I was also drawn into another case through a colleague in Georgia. Georgia was set to execute Kelly Gissendaner, prosecuted for her role in the murder of her husband. In her time in prison, her life was changed; she studied theology and began a correspondence with the theologian Jürgen Moltmann, ministered to her fellow prisoners and was, by all accounts, completely changed. Her story was a compelling one; Georgia hasn’t executed a woman in more than fifty years, and her story of conversion and compassion reminded me of everything we want to believe about human nature. We can change and we do change, even under difficult circumstances, even living through the consequences of the depth of our sin.

For our Tuesday night services, we’re using a Eucharistic prayer from the Church in Scotland which contains this line:
Lifted on the Cross, [Christ’s] suffering and forgiveness spanned the gulf our sins had made.
To which, of course, I would add—Christ’s ministry, and suffering, and forgiveness spanned the gulf of our sins. What I like so much about this phrasing is the visual metaphor—our sin separates us from God. We can sense that God is there, that there is hope and joy and forgiveness—but we can’t get there on our own. That gulf of sin is not intractable. God has already bridged it. But I need to acknowledge it as there, because without the awareness of sin, I slip into thinking that I’ve got everything figured out. Not because Jesus died as some blood sacrifice for my guilt, but because the crucifixion is a mirror of reality.
Twelve year old kids getting shot by police who are supposed to protect them, immediately seen as suspicious because of the color of their skin. Muslim women being harassed (and worse) for wearing headscarves. Synagogues defaced. The Charlie Hebdo massacre, girls kidnapped in Pakistan and Nigeria for going to school. The Marathon bombing. Human trafficking. The crucifixion happens every day.

When crucifixion happens, how does our society respond? Too often, we lash out with more violence. The death penalty is a prime example of this. The old Biblical injunction “an eye for an eye” gets quoted a lot, but in its initial context, that was intended to minimize punishment, not maximize (we might also recall that Jesus said some things that undid that logic). Kelly Gissendaner wasn’t executed, after all—after thousands of petitions and phone calls to the governor’s office, the prison said that the drugs for lethal injection looked “cloudy.” Maybe if all the petitions and phone calls hadn’t been made, she would have still been put to death; I don’t know. She’s alive, though, and for her, that is a blessing.

In Massachusetts, no one has been executed since 1947, though governors and legislatures have tried to bring back the death penalty a number of times. The Tsarnaev trial is a federal one, so even though our state doesn’t have the death penalty, federal prosecutors are asking for it and most of the defense, at this point, is around convincing jurors that mitigating circumstances make Tsernaev less culpable of his crime.

I’m not on the jury, so it doesn’t really matter whether I think Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty, not guilty, or somewhere in between. I do, though, think it matters what all of us think and do about the death penalty itself. I signed the petition for Kelly Gissendaner because I was moved by her story. I’m glad to know about her and I’m glad she’s not been executed. But the death penalty isn’t about how good or how bad the defendant is. The death penalty is about what kind of society we create. And that’s about all of us. If we promise to respect the dignity of every human being every time we baptize someone, that includes the possibility—even the certainty!—that those human beings will fail. We are always bound by those vows, no matter how we think we can justify breaking them.

Blessings,
Sara+

For an article about the Episcopal Church’s work on death penalty abolition see here and on the movement in general here.

The Ascension: Belief with Head and Heart

Dear People of Christ Church,
   
Today is Ascension Day, which you will be forgiven for not realizing as the Thursday 40 days after Easter. It's one of the odder days of observance in the Christian tradition-we'll hear that Scripture from the book of Acts that describes Jesus being lifted up and disappearing into the clouds. It's an important one-for brothers and sisters in Roman Catholic side of the Christian family, it's a holy day of obligation (which in some places can be moved to Sunday, but not, apparently, in Boston. 

We affirm the Ascension in the Nicene Creed-quite clearly, we declare that Jesus "ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father."   We say this every Sunday.  There's something about the literalism of the image-Jesus either did or did not levitate into the sky-that I find particularly difficult.  As a doctrine, it solves some intractable issues-how, for example, would Jesus have been buried, and what would we make of his divinity alongside his holy but also mortal and dead body-but in our children's sermon this Sunday I will graciously sidestep whether it actually happened that way.Ascension Day is one of those times that, as I believe God will be gentle with me, I also will be gentle with our tradition.   The truth is, I don't know. It seems implausible, but, then again, the whole marvelous story is implausible. 
  
As contemporary believers, we just can't go back to a spatially three tiered universe of heaven, hell, and us in between. We can haz science.  Why did Jesus go into the sky? Well, if you think that heaven is "up there," then that makes perfect sense.  But the Ascension is much more about Jesus coming "in here."
The resurrection appearances of Jesus were a marvel, but they were also quite localized to a particular band of followers; individually Simon and Peter and James and John might have wanted to keep that exclusive connection to themselves, but Jesus is pretty clear that their relationship with him is not only a personal affair. The ascension is about the transcendence of the risen Christ, about how humanity and divinity are joined in a universal and no longer only particular way.  St Gregory of Nazianzus (around 390) said that Christ's ascension is our ascension. Our humanity rose with Christ.  That doesn't depend on whether or not Jesus levitated.  It doesn't depend on how loudly I say the Creed or whether I am, occasionally, just too doubtful. That depends on so much more that I can't even wrap my brain around it, which, frankly, is a pretty good place for a person of faith to stand. More mystery, less judgment.  
Thanks be to God (and the long legacy of Anglicanism)  for that.
   
Blessings,
Sara+  

The wide and wonderful Anglican "maybe"

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week in our Episcopal Church class I was reminded, as always when I pay attention, how very grateful I am to be part of the Anglican Tradition.  Every church has something wonderful about it-the Lutherans have their focus on the grace of God, the evangelicals have their intimacy with Jesus, the Catholics have their long history and diversity, the Presbyterians their commitment to democratic governance...but it's our theological breadth and flexibility where I really find myself at home.

The number of times someone has asked a simple yes/no question and I've answered "maybe" reminds me of just committed we are to this diversity of belief.  "Do I have to cross myself?"  You can, but you don't have to. "Isn't the difference between the Roman Catholic and Episcopal belief about communion that one believes in transubstantiation and one doesn't?" Some actually believe in Jesus as really, bodily present, but for others it's more symbolic. But we do teach that it has a reality independent of our own experience.  Do you believe in the Bible literally? That's actually a pretty clear no. 

Sometimes all this ambiguity feels like maybe it's because we're not sure-we sometimes get accused of being a mushy middle, not committed to anything. It's not mushy at all, though-it's incredibly centered-centered on the freedom of your conscience, and also centered on our liturgical practice. One of my favorite Anglican quotes is (said to be) from Queen Elizabeth, who, during all the Catholic/Protestant controversies imperially declared "I do not desire windows into my subjects' souls." At the same time, in consolidating the practice of the church with worship in the English Language and independence from the Pope, an undeniable center still holds us together and links us to each other and across time.

A unified community coalesces around prayer, even if we differ on the particulars of that prayer.  This humility around doctrine, I think, also leads us into a constructive humility around our place in the world.  We don't have all the answers. This means that part of our work as Christians is the work of interpretation, of contemplating new learnings from science and psychology and philosophy and theology and how our tradition can be in conversation with them. From evolution to climate science to the plasticity of the human brain, we are always learning about this good creation God has given us, and there's always more exploration and curiosity to be had. I'll leave you with the prayer we say for the newly baptized, which I think captures this nicely:

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.

Amen!

Blessings,

Sara+