Finding our Moral Footing

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, our Episcopal Church Class will take on “Contemporary Moral Issues,” and wow, there seem to be a lot of them swirling around. On Sunday in my sermon I mentioned how God had “shown up” in a powerful (and surprising to all of us, I think) way at a conference I attended in Portland, OR the week before. What was going to be a fun and creative time for a group of Millennial and Generation X clergy to hang out and talk shop became a revelatory witnessing about sexism in the church. Sexism is a moral issue.

On Sunday, I, along with many clergy across the country, will wear orange stoles to remember victims of gun violence. Why orange? It’s the color hunters wear for safety. The idea came about from friends of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15 year old high school student who was shot to death on the south side of Chicago a week after marching in President Obama's second inaugural parade in 2013.  June 2 is her birthday. Gun violence is a moral issue.

Today, Charlie Baker has announced that law enforcement will be permitted to be detain undocumented immigrants on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority. How we treat “the alien who resides with you…as  a citizen” (Leviticus 19:34) is a moral issue.

This week, the MA house and senate voted on bills to protect the right of public accommodations access for  transgendered persons. How we respect the dignity of every human being, of every gender identity, is a moral issue.

The Boston anti defamation league announced today that just halfway into the year, Massachusetts has already seen almost as many anti Semitic acts (56) as in all of last year (61). Such events were reported at 23 schools and colleges. How we treat those of other faiths is a moral issue.

All of these are moral issues, yet we live in a world that so often tramples the bodies of the oppressed and seduces us into the lie that who we are is determined by how much we have. In baptism we make all kinds of promises about how we’ll engage the world and each other. We study a Bible that’s full of stories of Jesus Christ going toward the margins of society and toward people in need. What happens next?

The “next” is our whole lives. The “next” is how we go, day by day, examining how we treat others and how we create communities of care, concern, and hospitality. We are also called into lives in which we “love our neighbors as ourselves”… sometimes the “love yourself” part of the equation is the one that comes out with the shorter stick. Sometimes we internalize the false stories of our broken-yet-precious world, and oppression turns inward. I came out of last week’s conversation about discrimination against women last week with some critical questions for the wider church. I came out with some critical questions for myself, too (and will hopefully have something on my own blog about it in the next few days).

What moral issues are you struggling with these days?
How can this Christian community help you to find your footing in responding to them?
What issues aren’t we seeing?

Blessings,
Sara+

Transformation

Dear People of Christ Church,
Thanks to everyone who turned out last Sunday to hear Bob Wocjik speak about families and the prison system. I was surprised to learn that it was the first time he'd given a presentation like that to a group--it was an excellent one. This week after church, we'll meet for our final book group conversation on Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's "The First Paul."

In very different ways, Bob and the authors of the book are emphasizing the same thing--transformation. Bob talked about how crime, like other professions, runs in families. Like father, like son--his uncle was his co-defendant in his trial, and it took a while of being away from his environment to imagine living differently. It took a while longer after that to realize that he could not just change himself, but also help change the world for the better in supporting the children of his fellow prisoners (as well as being faithful to his own kids).

Radical, personal change from what we have been to what we will be--what Borg and Crossan call "a spirit transplant." That's what the Christian life is about, and that's what Bob's experience testified to. We're accustomed to cynically dismissing the notion of change; we say that people can't change, or won't change, or can't be asked to change. But if Christ's death has any meaning, it must be that, as one person I know put it, "the future can be different from the past." That's the promise of the Gospel that Bob found in his faith, and that's what we're all looking for.

Rather than "justification" (or "salvation," or any of those other big religious words) being about something that happens in the future, Borg and Crossan talk about how it's about the ways we are changed in the here and now. The direction of that change is justice--justice on both a global and a personal scale. God's justice is what Borg and Crossan call "distributive"--not retributive, based on punishment or threat (act the right way or you go to hell), but equally given out to all, the Spirit freeing us to live new lives, and the forgiveness and love of God creating that new life in us--new life and the joy of freedom in Christ.

One of the ways this happens is baptism-as Paul wrote in the letter to the Galatians, "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (2:19-20). We are freed and liberated in baptism. Of course, we renew those vows every time we welcome someone new into the community, as we did on Sunday with little Joe Leonardo's baptism. We need to remember and reaffirm our promises--we slip so easily into our old habits and bondage. The people of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt and we're freed, too, from our own contemporary imprisonments. What do we get imprisoned by? Our desire for success, for material comfort, for power. Addiction, despair, hopelessness. For Bob, liberation happened to come when he was in prison. What gets you stuck? How does your faith help you to find freedom?
Blessings,
Sara+

God's Transforming Grace (From May 1)

This morning, we celebrated a funeral service for Dottie Wessell. Dottie donated the statue of St Francis here at Christ Church in memory of her son, who died when he was 30 after being infected with rabies when working in Africa. Dottie hadn’t been in regular attendance here for some time, but I met her 2 years ago when I was visiting someone at the former Waltham hospital, where she’d volunteered for 35 years. We exchanged greetings that day, but I only got a chance to start getting to know her in the last few months, as she was dying.

I always find funerals to be so moving (whether I knew the person or not) because there is a sameness in the way we all remember each other. Our grief almost becomes a sacrament of our love for the person we’ve lost—an outward sign of an invisible grace. This morning at her funeral, we heard several eulogies, people choking back tears remembering her. They spoke of her love for her children, and laughed as they remembered how she’d been stubborn and strong-willed, and not a little set in her ways.

The most moving remembrance, though, wasn’t given by her niece, or her daughter. It was given by a man whom she’d come to know only in the last few years of her life. Dan worked at Waltham hospital, and he and Dottie got to know each other. He was half her age, but they struck up an incredible and deep friendship. One day, Dottie showed Dan a picture of her son, Kevin, who had died. The similarity was eerie. Dottie told me that she felt that God had sent Dan to her, to be another son to her, since she had lost her beloved Kevin. As he spoke to the congregation this morning, Dan talked about how Dottie had wanted to see the magnolia blooming one last time. She didn’t make it out of bed to see, but he took pictures of her garden and showed them to her. Dan shared these positive memories, but he also told a story of a harder time. Dan is gay, and he spoke of how afraid he was of telling her. I think everyone in the church cried as he told the story of taking her out to dinner and mojitos, laughing as he tried to convince this 78 year old dyed in the wool Irish woman to try a Cuban cocktail. “She was always worried about what people would think—did she like younger men, or did I like older women!?” He said that when he told he was gay, she exclaimed, “Why would such a thing happen to such a wonderful young man?!”

Whatever prejudice Dottie had grown up with, she loved Dan, and so she came to love Dan’s partner, Mario, and love the life they built together. She came to see that being gay wasn’t a tragedy that befell him, but just part of who he was. He was still the same person who called her on the phone and could talk for hours. He was still the same person she’d come to love. When I went to visit Dottie, she showed me a framed picture of Dan and Mario and said that she hoped she’d be able to attend their wedding next fall.

Dottie will miss their wedding, but it is sure that she lives on in them, in that unconditional love she showed. I do believe that God sent her Dan to be a comfort in her lonely last days, but it wasn’t just comfort—it was transformation. It was the Holy Spirit, whirling in through each of their lives, bringing them life and joy. The Holy Spirit never leaves us the way we were—we are always transformed nearer and nearer into the image of God in which we were all created.

The preacher at the funeral this morning was the Rev. Marya DeCarlen, Dan and Mario’s priest from their church in Groveland. She talked about how at a time like this, our grief is a sacrament of our love for the person who has died—it is an outward sign of the invisible, inward grace of that relationship. We mourn because we love. Our sadness can be as much a gift as the ways we enjoyed each other in life. The Eucharist wasn’t the only way we knew God this morning. In hearing the story of Dan and Dottie’s unlikely friendship, we were all invited into the live-giving grace of God’s transforming love. Pray that we may each be as open to that grace as she was.