Episcopal 101

Each one of us at Messiah has a different reason to be Episcopalian- and each reason is equally valid. In Confessional churches, people expend much energy trying to agree on one clear set of answers to life’s questions. Not so with most Episcopalians. Most of us wouldn’t want to be in a denomination that states it has all the answers, or where people are not allowed to disagree. We value our right to disagree, our diversity of understanding about God and faith and remain in the same Communion. How is this possible?

The Adult Education Committee invites you to the Episcopal 101series that will take place in the Upper Room at 9:00a.m. This series provides an introduction to the hallmarks of the Episcopal Church that includes the Anglican approach to theology, known as the “three-legged stool” of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. We will explore our history, the Book of Common Prayer, the sacraments, worship, and church structure and governance. In the context of this learning we will reflect on Church of Messiah history and our understanding of God’s calling in our time. This series will help you understand and validate why you are in this faith journey with these folks called “Episcopalians.”

June 30th Introduction to the Episcopal Church/Anglican Communion with Abel Lopez
July 14th BCP & Worship, Including the Sacraments with Abel Lopez
July 21st Church Structure and Governance with Jim White
July 28th Messiah History & Activism with Biff Baker
August 4th Messiah Today with Dee Tucker and Abel Lopez

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost -- A Sermon by the Rev. Ellen Hill

This morning’s lessons are principally about sin and forgiveness and yet in beginning to write this sermon I kept returning again and again in my mind to the thing I really wanted to talk about which is the woman in this morning’s Gospel.  We don’t know who she was because she’s unnamed but her story was remembered and told by Matthew, Mark and Luke.  In this morning’s version we’re told that she was known to have been a sinner, in other words, not the kind of person with whom one would willingly associate. But otherwise, in all three gospels the story line is basically the same. 
 
An uninvited woman comes into a house where Jesus is having dinner and proceeds to anoint him thereby honoring him and acknowledging his uniqueness.  It’s an act which also foreshadows the fate that will befall him on that cross which lies ahead.  Both Mark and Matthew claim that Jesus said these words about her and what she did that night, “And truly I say to you, wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” Yet Luke’s version of her story is the only one which has made it into the three year cycle of lectionary readings we use in the Episcopal Church as the basis for our sermons.  I’m sure that the reason Luke’s version made it into Cycle C is because her story is coupled with two lessons about sin and forgiveness.

I love this woman!  But I don’t want to talk about her sin this morning or even about her absolution by Jesus.  What I want to talk about is her spontaneity;  about her impulsive, inappropriate gesture. You know, the kind of thing you might expect from an emotional, overly dramatic woman.  How often have you heard words like those used to describe an action like the one this woman took on that night so long ago?  And that’s probably because the attributes we tend to prize are things like reason, tradition, correctness, prudence, appropriateness and why we don’t honor, and certainly don’t seek to emulate, actions which express our raw emotions or which might give a hint of the loss of self-control or non traditional behavior.

But what are the characteristics of true religious discipleship?  How would we describe the kind of discipleship which Jesus actually exemplified?   Well we’d probably have to begin with qualities like sensitivity, the love of beauty, raw emotion that’s expressed and not repressed, alertness to detail, awareness of nuances, intuition and genuine expression of feeling. You see what we’re talking about isn’t rationality or tradition.  What we’re talking about is feeling because it’s only from feeling that the truest gifts of Christian discipleship are expressed.  What this woman did served as a vehicle to express her faith and her profound love for this man Jesus. For it’s only when we allow ourselves to feel the ineffable stirring of our raw emotions within ourselves and then summon up the courage to express them, through spontaneous acts of feeling as she did, that the power of our faith is most eloquently expressed.  It’s through such impulsive actions, as those of this unnamed woman in anointing Jesus and washing his feet with her tears and then drying them with her hair that we get closest to the kind of relatedness that Jesus called us to express in his name. 

But actions like this woman’s are so very rare in the normal pattern of our lives.  Oh it’s not that we never express ourselves. Even the shyest among us is quick to make it known when we’re hurt or when we want to complain or feel that things aren’t right. But how often do we stop and use those same strong emotions to express our own personal feelings on those occasions when tears form in the corner of our eyes because we’ve been profoundly moved by something someone has said or done, or when we’re overcome with feelings of love or pride over the actions of someone whose life has touched ours, or when we feel so thankful and overwhelmed by the love which has been expressed or the time someone has taken on our behalf. 

When was the last time you really expressed any of those kind of feelings?  Told the people closest to you that you loved them or how much your ability to function was tied to your relationship with them or how very much they had affected your life in a positive way.  We don’t take the time because it just isn’t the kind of thing you do. You don’t act emotionally or behave impulsively if you want people to think well of you. I often think of those words about life and love and being that Thornton Wilder put into Emily’s mouth in his classic play Our Town.  Just after she has died and is looking back at earth Emily says,  “It goes so fast.  We don’t have time to look at one another. Oh Earth, you are too wonderful for anyone to realize you.”  Well this wonderful role model we have in this morning’s Gospel, this unnamed woman who certainly wasn’t a pillar of her community, this woman who horrified the Pharisee who was Jesus’ host did take time to look at the One whose life had touched hers and she showed him how profoundly his ministry and presence had moved her. 

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the woman who wrote so much about death and dying remarked that those who cry the loudest at death are the persons who have never really lived.  The observers who cautiously stood on the sidelines never taking the risks which might have made them vulnerable or open to criticism or ridicule because they were expressing deep feelings or emotion.  The deepest sorrows don’t really come to us in death.  They come to us in our dying while we are living through our refusal to participate fully in what our life is really all about. For the only way to live fully is to live passionately and vulnerably which means risking being made fun of, being criticized, being rejected or being opposed.  Yet it’s only through expressing what’s deep within us that you and I can ever get close to the kind of discipleship that Jesus demonstrated throughout his life and ministry. 

When I was working as a Chaplain in a hospital cancer unit day after day I was dealing with people who were facing their own death or the death of a loved one.  I was new at this whole business of ministry and I desperately wanted to be good.  You know what I mean, to do and to say the right thing.  Because with people who are at this critical place in their life journey you certainly don’t want to say the wrong thing and frankly a good deal of the time it’s very hard to have any sense of certainty as to what the right thing to say really is.  Oh I was well prepared.  I’d read the books on pastoral counseling.  I’d been taught by one of the greatest authorities on pastoral counseling in the world.  But the only thing that really worked very well was to put all of the notes and books and advice away and just move our of that deep, emotional, impulsive gut place that we women are always accused of having when we behave in ways that aren’t rational, efficient, prudent and all the rest of those linear thinking kinds of descriptions that our culture tells us make for success in life. 

I think I realized that I was on the right track when I began acting normally and started sitting on the bed with people and stretching out my hand on their bed, laying it there making it available for holding.  I can’t tell you how many people, how many rough and tough brusque men reached out and grabbed that hand.  Do you know that people tend to stand on the edges of the hospital rooms of people who are dying?  It’s almost as if they’re afraid that they’re going to catch something.  Whenever I entered a hospital room I was never sure what the individual’s reaction would be. But only once did I get thrown out of a room by a man who was so enraged at God because he was dying that the very sight of a chaplain made him furious.  All of the other times I moved out of my place of emotion and feeling and love it was right.   A lot of the time I never even said a word.  Sometimes it was just holding onto someone or absorbing their tears on my shoulder.  Yet, at other times it was risking, risking the kind of anger that did make that man yell at me to leave his room.  

One experience I will never forget happened on a rainy summer afternoon.  I was sitting with an elderly woman when I heard a scream coming from the room across the hall.  I knew that the room belonged to a strong and vivacious woman attorney who was involved in a long and violent battle with lung cancer.  She and I had spent a good bit of time together over that summer as she had been hospitalized repeatedly for one crisis or another. Our relationship was based upon a strict set of ground rules. The very first day I walked into her room she announced that although she had been confirmed as an Episcopalian she’d given all that up sometime ago.  She was an ardent feminist and a powerful woman in her community.  It was fine, she told me, if I wanted to talk to her as long as I understood that God, the church and any of that stuff was not to be part of our conversations. 

We had some incredibly interesting conversations that summer.  We talked a lot about her dying.  She knew that she was dying and the only part we didn’t talk about was whether God or whatever was up there or out there had anything to do with the whole process.  One day I walked by her door while she was eating lunch and she barked, “Ellen, come in here.  I want to talk to you!  Do you realize how ridiculous our whole health care system in this country has become?  Do you have any idea what it’s costing for me to die?”  Then she launched into a cost analysis of what that days tests, radiation and treatment must have cost according to her best estimate.   

But on that afternoon I when I heard her scream I knew that something was very different because it wasn’t like Joyce to scream.  The Head Nurse and I collided in the doorway of her room and it soon became very clear that Joyce might indeed be dying.  As I began to move away from the bed to give the nurse more room Joyce reached out and grabbed my hand,  “Don’t leave me!”  she gasped, as she fought for breath.  Before long the orderlies were there and we were racing down the hall to the elevators and the intensive care unit.  Bed, IV’s, the nurse and me all running alongside the bed with me still holding Joyce’s hand.  
As we waited for the elevator and Joyce fought for life, I looked down at her remembering all of her threats, “Don’t you dare talk to me about God” and I said, “Joyce, I think you’re really dying this time and I’m gonna pray” “Do it!” she said.  So I prayed as the elevator carried us up to the intensive care unit with it’s machines and wires and tubes.  I prayed all the way into the room and when I finished with what was virtually her last breath I heard an incredibly strong AMEN.

Well Joyce didn’t die that afternoon.  It was three weeks later that I gave the homily at her funeral service at St. James Episcopal Church in South Pasadena.  I told that congregation of her family and her friends  that there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Joyce was,  in the words of our Burial Service, even in her own mind, a sheep of God’s own fold, a lamb of God’s flock, a sinner of God’s own redeeming and that God had received her into the arms of God’s mercy and into the blessed rest of everlasting peace in the glorious company of the saints in light.

As for me, I’ll be forever grateful that I took the risk to act out of that deep emotional place within me and announced my intention to pray for both of us on that scary afternoon.  So in some small way, on that afternoon, I know that I honored the memory of her, who so many centuries before had done that thing which, ever since, has been told by Christians far and wide in memory of her.  Amen

Great American Hot Dog Feast

Sunday July 2 after the 10:15 and Noon services

"The Heartbreak of God," a Sermon by Jim Lee

In his poem “To A Waterfowl,” 19th century poet William Cullen Bryant wonders how this single bird knows to find its way in flight across large distances. So much on which to land, who teaches the bird to know where to go? In typical Romantic poetic vision, Bryant offers the following:

There is a power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, --
The desert and illimitable air, --
Lone wandering, but not lost.

This solitary animal wending its way across this vast expanse of sky looking down on water and land is a picture perfect image of the divine in nature, of nature unfolding and revealing God to God’s creation. Last week, my family did what my older daughter likes to call “Beach Church,” a trip to Crystal Cove, where the two girls looked for shells and stones amidst the crash of the waves of the Pacific, the pungent smell of seaweed washed ashore, the cry of gulls as some power’s care teaches their way along the pathless coast. At Beach Church, as in Bryant’s poem, it is easy to marvel at God’s handiwork, at the blessing of the created world, the miracle of this symbiotic relationship of this biome. A visit to the ocean restores the soul, because it is easy to imagine God’s finger carving out this part of the world, for all its exquisite beauty.

But then there are those places where it is very very difficult, impossible sometimes, to find God and God’s power at work. You and I have been there at some point in our lives and I suspect that you and I will be at those moments again. Luke writes about these places in this morning’s Gospel lesson, this time the place being the village of Nain where the world has collapsed for a woman. A widow, her only son now dead, is alone in the world, and she and others are preparing to say their final goodbyes. What could possibly be worse for this widow than this? No saccharine words of comfort can help; “our deepest condolences,” or even worse, “God’s called him home” can only intensify her sense of loss and misery. There are few things worse in the human story than for a parent to have to bury a child, and it doesn’t matter how old your son or daughter is, because when it happens it is as if the very fabric of existence is torn. It is hard, impossible perhaps, to see God’s handiwork in this scene. We are very far from Beach Church. And just as it is easy to find God in the immensity of the world’s beauty, it is equally difficult to find God in the diversity of experience that leads us to despair. When the minds and bodies of our loved ones break down, when we are at our wit’s end, when our own bodies betray us, when our toil and suffering seem to be all for nothing to the point where we simply are too exhausted and drained to care anymore: when, not if, but when we are at the razor’s edge of the intolerable, we yearn for God’s comfort and yet it doesn’t seem to come, we look for solace, just a cool towel, but refreshment doesn’t arrive, there doesn’t seem at all to be some divine plan or purpose, no power guiding. But just the terrible sense that there might not be light at the end of the tunnel, no final line that gives our suffering meaning. This morning’s Gospel points to a woman whose loss is unbearable, a loss that points to the one thing that you and I struggle with everyday, because it lurks around every corner of our lives: the haunting sense of hopelessness and the meaninglessness of life’s circumstances.

It is in this scene of abject despair that Jesus sees the woman. The Greek word that is translated as compassion in our translation is more literally rendered as “his innards were disturbed” or his “womb was moved.” Something in Jesus was profoundly moved by this scene of woman losing her son. Another translation of this verse puts Jesus’ response as raw as possible: “his heart broke.” Jesus’ heart broke because he knew that for this widow her son was her entire family, that she is now terribly alone in this world that no longer looks beautiful at all but terribly cruel. Jesus’ heart broke because he also knew that a widow in 1st century Palestine, without the support of husband or son, would be cast to the very margins of social life, without any recourse to sustain herself economically. Jesus’ heart broke because even if he could do something for this woman to heal her deepest wound, her heart broken by grief, his own heart breaking open to comfort hers, there are thousands and thousands of mothers for whom help won’t come. Even as he raises this son back and gives him back to his mother, there are still so many other widows who will still bury their sons and daughters, and fend alone in their world. Jesus’ heart breaks because O God, there are so many broken hearts, broken spirits, that leave us breathless, exhausted, wondering, where God is your power?

I don’t claim to know the full mystery of what unfolded next, but I do know this: first, Jesus touches the funeral bier that carries the young man’s body, and in doing so Jesus makes himself ritually unclean. Jesus does not recoil from the dirty elements of human existence but soils himself with the parts of our lives that are just messy, ugly, that seem to bear no mark of the divine and the beautiful. Jesus is with you and me in our most soiled moments. Second, Jesus gives this man back to his mother. Somehow, in this miracle, what she has lost, she has regained, what was taken away from her has been in some miraculous way given back to her. Somehow, something happened where this woman’s despair was assuaged, her heart healed, her life in some way restored. And I think the key to her son being given back to her is in part how her community responds: something happened and changed in this village of Nain, perhaps the people decided that they’d had enough of leaving poor widows alone and decided instead to bear burdens together, to be with her so that somehow, in some way, her son was given back to her. Maybe that’s what God’s power of healing looks like. Maybe God doesn’t come from above to fix it all. Maybe God understands that some things can’t be fixed, and that God comes to us, broken hearted bleeding with our broken hearts, and along the way our shared brokenness takes healing and restoration in a new way. Poet Christian Wiman puts it this way: “I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.” Wiman also speaks of God’s power and presence in this grittier way in a poem titled “Every Riven Thing”:

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

Sisters and brothers, we are far from Beach Church and William Cullen Bryant, and we are far from that church where God fixes up the messy parts of our life for us, a prosperity theology. We are called to be a Gospel people in a broken world, to have our faith take new form when life breaks us down. God calls us to a more gritty, difficult faith where we sit with and dwell in the messiest, ugliest parts of our lives and work together to bring restoration to mothers who lose their sons, to bring liberation to widows and the orphans and the poor and marginalized into the center of God’s table, and where we gather with no guarantee but the guarantee that Jesus’ heart breaks when ours do, and that somehow the miracle is that that is just enough that we in and as a community find reason and purpose to be together, wounded but healed, to gather around this table to be nourished enough to restore ourselves and those around us in God’s fragile world. And in those places where God seems so very far apart, let us commit ourselves to giving sons and daughters back to their mothers, faith back to all of our broken hearts, and God back to every part of God’s creation.