On Dancing and Identity…

Tags

Christ, church, covenant, disciples, dreamy, everyday, identity, life, moments, mundance, ordinary, romantic, wedding

Photo credit:  https://apracitcalwedding.com/first-dance-wedding-songs/

This week I was visiting a parishioner at a retirement facility.   I was waiting in the lobby to meet the parishioner when I suddenly realized they were playing Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade on the speakers.  I was catapulted to another time and place as I listened.  You see, Moonlight Serenade was the first song my husband and I danced to when we were married.  It had been the same song his grandparents had danced to when they were married 55 years earlier.  Not long after we started dancing, they joined us on the dance floor.  I remember catching a glimpse of them together as I danced with my husband, hoping we could enjoy such longevity and happiness in marriage.

Of course, little of our everyday lives are that dreamy.  We spend much of our marriage tending to the “stuff” of life – juggling work and family time; shuttling children to school, activities, and parties; tending to household duties; and trying to squeeze in sleep now and then.  There are certainly great moments – watching my husband engage our children, listening intently as he passionately talks about his vocation, and laughing heartily as he jokes about things only we get.  We are piecing together a life full of wonderful memories and chapters, but that life is also full of the mundane, everyday, ordinary stuff too.

I think that is why I was so grateful to hear that song this week.  That song reminded me of my identity – a moment in which I covenanted to live in a certain way with a certain person.  Though our dance together was just one part of that day, the song is a tangible reminder of identity.

After my visit and quick note to my husband about “our song,” I found myself wondering what other markers of identity we experience.  In the Episcopal Church, I would argue the sacraments are our biggest ones – the weekly celebration of Holy Eucharist, and the periodic celebration of Baptism.  In fact, Church is all about helping us define our identity as disciples of Christ – reminding us who and whose we are.  But I wonder, in your mundane, everyday, ordinary lives, what moments or events remind you of that identity?  What are those moments that halt you in your steps in a lobby and make you feel affirmed, rooted, loved, and empowered?

Sermon – Luke 2.1-20, CE, YC, December 24, 2015

Tags

agricultural, celebrate, Christmas, civic, extraordinary, family, gift, God, holiness, Jesus, Joseph, life, Mary, ordinary, Sermon, shepherds

In many ways, the story that we tell tonight is rather ordinary.  As the story begins, the government is doing what the government does – finding ways to tax the people.  And so the people without influence are herded – herded back to their hometowns to be registered so that the Emperor can be certain he is getting all he is owed.  But anytime you move masses of people, you get overcrowding.  That is what happens in Bethlehem this night.  Though Joseph’s extended family is expecting him, they run out of space.  Though the story says there is no room in the inn, the more likely scenario is that the family guest room was already full.[i]  So Joseph and his pregnant fiancé get the leftovers – the area of the home meant for the animals.  We’ve had those moments – when your delinquent uncle or your slacker friend shows up unexpected.  You grab a pillow and a blanket and offer space on the couch – or the floor if the couch is already taken.  This is just an ordinary night of making the space work.

Of course, no woman would want to give birth under these conditions, but that is the funny thing about birth – births happen all the time, whether people are ready or not.  Though every time a baby is born we marvel at the miracle of life, births are really much more commonplace that we give them credit for being.  Just like any other birth, Mary finds a place to lay the baby, and just like any other mother, Mary finds a way to swaddle the baby so that he can ease off to sleep.  And so in the messiness of managing civic life and familial life, here our story has us working through the ordinary mess of reproductive life.

And in case we were to get too excited about our story, God decides to reveal the occurrences of that night to even more ordinary people.  Enter the shepherds.  These are ordinary men, doing the necessary work of shepherding.  In fact, these men are so ordinary, they are almost invisible to the outside world.  They are not busy heading to their home town to be counted because according to the day, they are not worth counting.[ii]  They are the migrant workers that do the work no one else wants to do.  So while everyone is sleeping, or eating, or enjoying the warmth of a fire, the shepherds are out tending their flocks, focused on the ordinariness of agricultural life.

Of course, the story becomes interesting when we hear about all of the extraordinary parts of this story.  Yes, there is the same greedy government, the same crowded family, the same new parents, and the same business of farm life.  But something extraordinary breaks into the ordinary this night.  In the midst of everyday lives, God breaks in through the ordinary and proclaims good news of great joy.  The Messiah has been born – the long awaited Savior who will change everything.  In fact, the angels are so blown away by this extraordinary moment in time that they break into song, praising God.  That is what we do when faced with the extraordinary.  We praise God for God’s goodness and mercy and grace.  God takes on human flesh for us, and the angels do the only thing they can – they praise God in gratitude.

The shepherds’ initial reaction to the same news is quite ordinary – they go and talk to the family.  They tell Mary and Joseph what they saw.  Again, the scene is quite ordinary – a travel-worn family making due in rustic quarters having a conversation with equally worn shepherds.  No one is out of place in this scene – everyone is equally ordinary.  And yet, the extraordinary lights up the room.  So extraordinary is the night that the shepherds leave, glorifying and praising God.  They echo the response of the angels, expressing their overwhelming gratitude in the only way they know how – praising and thanking God.  Mary too knows how extraordinary this night is.  She treasures this extraordinary moment in her heart, left pondering what new thing God is doing.

That is what we love about this story:  the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the extraordinary.  The ordinary part we know intimately.  We too find ourselves living ordinary lives.  We work, we play, we laugh, we cry.  We pay our taxes, we deal with family, we go through labor pains.  We come to church, we pray together, we read scripture together, and we feast on the holy meal.  With the exception of a few fun vacations, nights out on the town, or the wedding of a friend, our lives are relatively ordinary.  I am pretty sure most of us have not witnessed a heavenly host bringing us good tidings of great joy.

We do not get the extraordinary most days:  except, of course, when we do.  Even in our ordinary lives, God breaks in with the extraordinary.  Just a couple of weeks ago a parishioner was telling me about how our conversations at church had finally worn him down.  When he ran into a homeless person on his walk in the City, he decided to finally give him some money – a practice that he never endorses.  Something about his experience with God was softening his resolve and he was able, in a moment of clarity, to see the humanity of the man.  Or the other week, I was talking to a teacher about the profound things her children sometimes say.  They sometimes say things that stop her in her tracks and make her reevaluate her way of being.  Or a few months ago I was talking to another person of faith about her prayer life.  She confessed rather sheepishly that sometimes in her prayers, especially when she makes room to listen to God, hears a response back.  She felt like she could not really explain the phenomenon well, but she knew the voice must be from God because the words rang so true and were nothing she would have come to on her own.

That is what happens in our ordinary lives – God breaks through again and again, overwhelming us with the extraordinary.  Those moments are gifts that we celebrate an honor, because they are just that – gifts.  That is the same reason we celebrate tonight.  We honor the gift that God gives us in Christ Jesus.  For all intents and purposes, Jesus is just another baby born under ordinary circumstances.  But we know that he is so much more:  God Incarnate, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Tonight is about honoring the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary.  Tonight is about claiming the joy that can only come from extraordinary acts of God.  But tonight is also about claiming the joy of a community that invites us to praise – to glorify God as we go our own ways this night.  We are blessed over and over.  In the trials and tribulations of ordinary life, we are so blessed by our extraordinary God and the community of faith that gathers with us.  In fact, the extraordinary nature of God hallows our ordinary lives, making them anything but ordinary.  Tonight, I invite you to embrace the extraordinary in our midst, to honor the holiness of the ordinary, and to find ways to share that extraordinary in our ordinary lives tomorrow.  Amen.

[i] Richard Swanson, “Commentary on Luke 2:[1-7] 8-20,” December 25, 2013, as found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1880 on December 22, 2015.

[ii] Michael S. Bennett, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, vol. 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 118.

Sermon – Matthew 4.12-23, E3, YA, January 26, 2014

Tags

call, extraordinary, fishers of people, God, immediately, Jesus, ministry, ordinary, relationship, transformative

The first time I sensed a call to ordained ministry was in my last year of college.  The sense of call was strong and I felt like I could hear God’s word to me as clear as a bell.  And so what did I do?  I ran the other way…for a long time.  I remember thinking, “Oh, no.  I can’t do that.  How about I choose how I will serve God?”  And so off I went to my first my position after college.  When that was done, I knew the position was not quite the right fit, so I tried something a little closer to what felt like my call.  And of course, within a year or two, that did not quite feel right either.  And so I began to try to figure out how else God might be calling me.  Around and around I went with this game until finally someone just said straight out, “I think you ought to become an Episcopal priest.”  Even with that direct, irrefutable statement from a live person, I still could not say yes.  I took another whole year in discernment before I was finally ready to say yes to God. 

Needless to say, my response to God’s call was nothing like the response of the disciples in today’s Gospel.  Matthew says that Peter and Andrew immediately left their nets and followed Jesus.  Immediately they left.  The Message translation of this verse says, “They didn’t ask questions, but simply dropped their nets and followed.”  I do not know about you, but the idea of following Jesus immediately, and especially following Jesus without asking any questions seems ludicrous to me.  That act of leaving immediately is equally shocking in Jesus’ day too.  The disciples follow Jesus without qualification or questions.  They leave behind their entire profession, which is quite likely a lucrative business at the time.  All of this without any assurances that they will be provided for or have the ability to improve their financial standing by following Jesus.  Finally, following Jesus immediately means leaving behind families.[i]  This last shocker is perhaps the most unsettling because this is all happening in a time when family connections are “a primary source both of identity and honor,” and at a time when caring for one’s parents is “rooted both in cultural custom and in biblical law.”[ii]  This call narrative is as shocking then as the narrative is shocking now.

In our Adult Forum series last week, we talked about discerning God’s call in our lives.  We opened by reading this text from Isaiah 42, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.  He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”[iii]  Our class then reread the Isaiah passage, inserting our names in the passage.  So we heard statements like, “Kurt will bring forth justice to the nations,” or “I have put my spirit upon Barbara.”  We realized two things once we put our own names into the passage.  One, when we hear the words, “called to ministry,” we often think of clergy, missionaries, or people from scripture – not everyday people from Long Island.  Second, many of us do not think of ourselves as being called to a ministry.  We may volunteer at church or help out others, but we rarely use “call” language to describe what we do with our time, especially if our secular work does not feel particularly tied to our sacred beliefs.  But then we read the Catechism in the back of the Prayer Book.  The first persons listed as being ministers of the Church are lay persons, and according to the Catechism, the ministry of the laity, “…is to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.”[iv]  So not only were we grappling with the idea of being ministers, we were grappling with the idea that those call stories are not just for someone else – we have a call story too.

Once we come around to the idea that we are all called by God, the big question then becomes, can we imagine responding to God’s call immediately like the disciples do with Jesus today?  Do we hear God’s invitation into ministry or a new vocation and immediately drop our nets, without question or delay?  Perhaps a better place to begin is to look back at Matthew’s text and see exactly what Jesus calls those first disciples to do.  Jesus says to follow him and he will make them fishers of people.  I have always read that invitation and basically translated the invitation as Jesus is going to teach them to be evangelists, converting others to Christ.  But as I read this week, I stumbled across a new interpretation of that phrase.  One scholar suggests that inviting the disciples to be fishers of people is an invitation to be in relationship – with Jesus, with each other, and with all the various people they will meet over the next few years, or perhaps even over the rest of their lives. 

If being fishers of people means being in relationship, what does that actually look like?  Exploring Jesus’ relationship with his disciples gives us some clues.  Being fishers of people means “bearing each other’s burdens, caring for each other and especially the vulnerable, holding onto each other through thick and thin, always with the hope and promise of God’s abundant grace.”[v]  Why would Jesus call people into relationship in this way?  Because by calling ordinary people in the midst of their ordinary lives into relationship with the ordinary people all around them, extraordinary things happen. 

So what does that look like here at St. Margaret’s?  In some ways many of us are already fishers of people.  We care for one another in this community, visit one another especially in crisis or illness.  But we also are in relationship with our neighbors – the staff at the local high school who connects us with those in need; our interfaith brothers and sisters as we make sandwiches together for the hungry; the people we meet, both at local ministries, but even our AHRC neighbors as we grow vegetables together.  And the invitation to be fishers of people keeps finding new manifestations here.  Our Outreach Committee is exploring a relationship with a community in Haiti – one facilitated by our relationship with another local parish here in Nassau County.  Though I know many of us are hesitant about international service, imagine what our dropping our nets without question and following Jesus might look like in that relationship.  Meanwhile, as we consider the possibility of a pilgrimage, we consider the ways that we will forge new relationships – with God, with one another, and certainly with people we have never met before.  Even something as simple as our new sponsorship of a Plainview Little League team this year has the potential for being a place to be fishers of people – where we can meet local parents while taking in a game and rooting for our team. 

These very real invitations into new relationships are scary or perhaps seem frivolous to us now.  But the power of Jesus’ invitation to be fishers of people is transformative.  First, accepting the invitation to be fishers of people transforms us.  When we enter into relationships with others, those interactions change us forever.  They help us see God in new ways, they help us reshape our worldview, and they help us to better understand our calling – that ministry that we all have.  Being fishers of people transforms not just us, but also transforms those with whom we are in relationship.  For many years, the staff at AHRC saw St. Margaret’s as distant, if not even inhospitable neighbors.  But now, the staff knows our names, sees new hope in our relationship, and perhaps even sees the love of Jesus through us.  Finally, being fishers of people transforms not just us and those with whom we are in relationship; being fishers of people transforms the kingdom of God here and now.  Our relationships have an impact way beyond the relationships themselves.  Others see the quality of our relationships and they see something intriguing, something inviting, and something inclusive.  Through those relationships, we invite others in, and the kingdom of earth begins to look a lot more like the kingdom of God.  You may not be able to drop your nets immediately today to follow Jesus.  But if you cannot drop them today, know that Jesus’ invitation to follow him is waiting for you and that God will empower you to say yes when you are ready.  Amen.

---

[i] Troy A. Miller, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. A., Vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 289.

[ii] Judith Jones, “Commentary on Matthew 4.12-23,” as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx? commentary_id=1972 on January 23, 2014.

[iii] Isaiah 42.1-3 

[iv] BCP, 855.

[v] David Lose, “Fishers of People,” as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3018 on January 23, 2014.

Homily – Advent Lessons and Carols, December 1, 2013

Tags

Advent, Christmas, different, Episcopal Church, Lessons and Carols, music, ordinary, quiet

My first experience of Advent in the Episcopal Church was a bit of a let-down.  In the United Methodist Churches where I grew up in, Advent was a time to sing all our favorite Christmas songs, preparing us for the great feast of Christmas.  It was sort of like turning on the local Christmas radio station throughout Advent, but only with the religious songs.  I loved the experience, and looked forward to December all year long.  So when I encountered Advent in the Episcopal Church for the first time, you can imagine my surprise and disappointment.  Not only were we not singing Christmas songs, the songs we were singing felt drab and disappointing.  Everything about the season felt quiet and reserved – nothing like the boisterous build-up I was used to for Christmas.  I found myself thoroughly confused – wondering if the Episcopal Church had not received the Christmas memo.

But slowly, as the Church usually does, the Episcopal Church won me over.  As my adult life became more frenetic, the quiet of Advent became like a precious gift.  Instead of putting me in the stable on December 1^st, the Church reminded me of the journey toward the stable – of prophecies and promises, of visitations and expectations, of hopes and dreams.  And believe it or not, slowly over the years, I found that there were actually Advent songs that I liked, and eventually came to love, cherish, and anticipate every year.  Many of my favorites we hear today:  O Come, O Come Emmanuel; The Angel Gabriel; and Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.  Not only are the words beautiful, but the music reaches something deep inside of me and invites me into a rich, reflective reverence as I block out all that beckons me into a break-neck pace of life.  I find that the music calms my spirit and invites me into contemplation and quiet before our God.

And so today, on this first Sunday in Advent, the Church gives us the gift of Advent Lessons and Carols.  Leading up to this day, many of you have asked me, on this day of joint worship, as we head into our Annual Meeting, why we would not have Holy Eucharist.  The strict answer is that the liturgy of Advent Lessons and Carols does not recommend Holy Eucharist.  But the better answer for me is that by having a service so outside our normal pattern, we are marking the differentness of this season of Advent.  By starting out the season with a service so out of the ordinary, we proclaim that Advent is not ordinary.  Our behavior during Advent will not be ordinary – at least not the ordinary of the secular world this time of the year.  As we claim this season of Advent is as quiet oasis during in an otherwise frenzied time, we shake up our senses so much that we cannot help but to set our intentions for these four weeks on a different way of being throughout this season.

I invite you today to drink in the gift of Lessons and Carols.  I invite you too soak in the differentness of this day, letting the service awaken your senses to what is to come.  I invite you to listen to the lessons, many of which you will hear again throughout Advent, remembering why the birth of the Christ Child is so momentous.  I invite you to meditate on the music of this day, letting the words speak new truth to you, and allowing the melodies to calm and renew you.  Advent is the Church’s gift to you, and our service of Lesson and Carols reminds us of the availability of that gift.  Drink from the rich, deep pools of refreshment waiting for you today.  Amen.