Sunday, May 14, 2017

God our Mother loves us more than our earthly mothers ever thought possible

Sermon delivered Sunday, May 14, 2017 (5th Sunday of Easter, Year A) at The Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist, Aptos, CA.

Sermon Text(s): John 14:1-14, Anselm of Canterbury’s “Jesus as a Mother”

Listen to audio of recent sermons on the St. John's website at 
http://www.st-john-aptos.org/how-we-worship/sermons

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Well, Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for several reasons.

For one thing, it’s Mother’s Day, but we’re overwhelmed with “Father” imagery for God in our Gospel passage. “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.” “Show us the Father.” “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Father, Father, Father, Father, Father. 13 uses of that word in this short Gospel passage, to be exact. Somewhat ironic on Mother’s Day.

But we really shouldn’t expect the scripture passages to have any relation at all to Mother’s Day, because even though lots of churches make a big deal about it, Mother’s Day is not actually a religious holiday on the liturgical calendar.

I say “Happy Mother’s Day” with mixed emotions because Mother’s Day was never intended to be the syrupy sweet worship of motherhood that the greeting card and flower industry have turned it into. It had its origins in women organizing for social justice in the 19th century. A woman named Ann Jarvis in West Virginia organized Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and lower infant mortality in the 1850s. In the 1860s these groups cared for wounded soldiers from both sides of the Civil War. Several years after the war, prominent American activist Julia Ward Howe gave a speech known as the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called upon women to help the world seek nonviolent solutions to conflict. Her words ring across history with much Gospel truth:

“Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

I’d be willing to bet none of you have ever found those words printed in any Mother’s Day cards!

And finally, I say “Happy Mother’s Day” somewhat cautiously, because I know that for so many, so very many, this day is not happy at all. For people whose mothers have recently died, for people who are estranged from their mothers, for people whose mothers abused them, for people who never knew their biological mother, for people who never had any positive mother figure in their lives, for women who deeply long to be mothers and yet are unable to conceive, for women who have experienced the loss and trauma of miscarriage… there are so many ways in which the secular, commercial Mother’s Day holiday, with the ways it pressures us to be happy about our relationships with our mothers and motherhood, brings so much pain to so many people.

And so my usual practice would be not to acknowledge Mother’s Day in worship, because it is, after all, not a liturgical holiday. But somehow, as a culture, we associate Mother’s Day with church. I read this week that in the United States, Mother’s Day is the third-highest church attendance day of the year, just behind Christmas and Easter. Going to church and then out to lunch with mom on Mother’s Day is something of a national ritual.

So, given that fact, and given the irony that the lectionary happened to serve up this passage with so much Father imagery in it today, I thought I’d take some time today to reflect theologically on motherhood and the divine feminine.

Although the official liturgies and writings of the church have used predominantly masculine imagery for God, our tradition is by no means void of the concept of God as a mother. The 20th century saw a renewal of interest in feminine images of God in the Christian tradition, but this concept was not a “new age” invention of the modern feminist movement. Although less prominent than the masculine imagery, feminine images for God have been used throughout Christian history.

Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom, is feminine, and whenever God’s wisdom is personified in the scriptures it is always portrayed as female, as in this passage from Proverbs, chapter 4 (Proverbs 4:5-6, 8-9):

“Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you…
Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.”

We don’t often hear passages like these with repeated use of the female pronoun used to describe God or an aspect of God, and for me, there is something incredibly powerful about them. I was raised hearing God referred to as “he,” and I never thought much about it. I knew it was a metaphor, and I never thought God was ACTUALLY a man because the male pronoun was used, but the first time I read a passage like this, I was surprised by how much it meant to me, how much more connected I felt to the scripture on a visceral level. Suddenly I realized that in my entire life, I’d never heard God referred to using the same pronoun I use to refer to myself. I also realized that that would have been a common experience for me if I were a man. With this revelation came a complete change of perspective on the importance of using gender-inclusive language for God, something I’d previously scoffed at as unnecessary.

But let’s move on to more specifically maternal images of God, not just feminine images, since it is Mother’s Day, after all, not just women’s day.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there are images of God as a mother teaching a child to walk, a nursing mother, a woman in labor. Jesus himself uses the image of a mother hen gathering her chicks to describe his desire to bring peace to the people of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34)

This scriptural passage might have influenced Anselm of Canterbury’s writings about “Jesus as a Mother,” the 11th century piece we heard in place of a psalm today:
“Jesus, as a mother, you gather us to you.
You are as gentle with us as a mother with her children.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds,
in sickness you nurse us and with pure milk you feed us.”

Like Anselm, Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English abbess, used the metaphor of Jesus as a mother. She compares Jesus’s suffering on the cross to the suffering of childbirth, and compares Jesus’s giving of his body to us in the Eucharist to a woman giving her body to her child in breastfeeding:

“The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself.”

Modern psychology has opened our eyes to the ways in which using parental imagery for God can be problematic, pointing out that using the terms “Father” or “Mother” can lead people to project all kinds of unresolved issues with their parents onto God. If someone’s father or mother was abusive, thinking of God as “Father” or “Mother” could make them see God as abusive as well. They may direct their anger at their parents toward God and find it difficult to have a relationship with God because of all the emotional baggage they have around the term “Father” or “Mother.”

These are certainly very real concerns. As my experience with hearing female pronouns used to refer to God illustrated, language is important and has real power in our lives. But I believe the intent of using parental imagery for God is not to elevate our own parents to divine status, not to confuse God with what our earthly parents were like, but to remind us that only God can meet the needs that we often look to our parents to fulfill. If our parents didn’t meet those needs, we are all the more aware of our need for God to meet them.

A Hindu woman in my hometown in South Carolina once shared with me why she thought of God primarily as Mother: “My mother died when I was very young,” she said, “so I needed God to be a mother to me.”

Even if we knew our parents and experienced them as loving and caring, they still fall short of what we yearn for on a deeper spiritual level. Our spiritual yearning – a yearning for unconditional love and acceptance – is not one that can be fulfilled by any human being, whether parent, friend, or spouse.

So on this Mother’s Day, no matter what your relationship with your mother or your children or your lack thereof, know that the God who made heaven and earth and all that is in them loves you more than your earthly Mother ever thought possible. She loves you with an everlasting love. She feeds you with her very body, binds up your wounds, and breathes new life into your soul. In our Mother’s house there are many rooms – there is room enough for all of us, and she gathers us in as a hen gathering her chicks. God is the Mother we can all celebrate with gratitude this day and every day. Amen.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Free to dance: Living abundantly

Sermon delivered Sunday, May 7, 2017 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A), at The Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist in Aptos, CA, on my first Sunday serving that congregation as rector. 

Sermon Text(s): John 10:1-10

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Jesus, in using the image of himself as a shepherd, says that he came to give the sheep “abundant life.” He doesn’t say he came just to protect them from the thief, just to keep them alive. He came to give them abundant life – lots of life, more than they already had.

The kind of “life” Jesus is talking about here is more than literal, physical life, more than a beating heart and breath in our lungs. He’s talking about emotional life – lightheartedness, joy, excitement, love, resilience, fulfillment. Jesus came to give us more than breath in our bodies; he came to give us joy in our souls, the kind of joy that is unshaken by the ups and downs of life, an abiding joy that lives deep down, that connects us to the Source of all that is, the Source that tells us, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I can’t think of a more perfect passage of scripture to begin our lives together as priest and people than this line from John’s Gospel about abundant life, because this is what the Church is all about: receiving and celebrating the abundant life that Jesus offers to us.

It’s sort of a personal mantra of mine that people should feel as comfortable in their church as they do in their own living rooms, and what I mean by that is that the church should be just as safe of a space for them as their private home is. It should be a place where they feel completely free to be themselves. Too often, the image people get of “the Church” is that it is a place of judgment, a place where they have to put on a certain face, keep up appearances, be presentable. But I take the view that, as the saying goes, the church is not a club for saints, but a hospital for sinners. It’s a place where we stand before the Almighty God to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” as our Collect for Purity says. It’s a place we come to lay bare the whole truth about ourselves and to reckon with what we find there. For some of us, it’s a lot easier to do that in front of God than in front of other people. But if you’ve ever been to a 12-Step meeting or a support group of any kind, you know that that kind of vulnerability and intimacy, the kind that leads to the healing of wounds and the ability to live your life to the fullest, is possible within the context of a gathering of flawed human beings. And I believe the Church should be about creating those kinds of spaces for people, spaces where people can experience the abundant life that is possible in Christ.

On Wednesday, I shared part of my spiritual journey with the Episcopal Church Women at the luncheon they held to welcome me, and I mentioned that although I was raised in church, I didn’t come to know Christ and commit to follow him until I was a teenager. In the first few years after that “conversion experience,” I listened to a lot of contemporary Christian music. One song I heard during that time, a song by Ginny Owens called “Free,” gave me an image of the kind of life that could be possible for me if I could truly embrace the gift of God’s grace. Nearly 20 years later, I’m still working on letting go enough to truly experience this kind of freedom, but I have tasted moments of it, and I deeply believe this is the kind of abundant life to which Jesus calls us. The song starts with a description of what the author’s life was like before she embraced God’s grace:

Turnin’ molehills into mountains
Makin’ big deals out of small ones
Bearing gifts as if they're burdens --
This is how it's been

Fear of coming out of my shell
Too many things I can't do too well
‘fraid I'll try real hard and I'll fail --
This is how it's been

‘Til the day you pounded on my heart's door,
And you shouted joyfully,
“You're not a slave anymore!
You're free to dance --
Forget about your two left feet!
And you're free to sing ---
Even joyful noise is music to me!
And free to love
'Cause I've given you my love and it's made you free…

Free from worry
Free from envy and denial
Free to live, free to give, free to smile!” [1]

This is what “abundant life” looks like to me: Singing and dancing with abandon because I know I am accepted as I am. Giving freely because I know I have more than enough to share. Radiating love to all around me, drawing from that internal well of joy, unshaken by the ups and downs of this world, that comes from knowing that Christ has given me his love and it’s made me free. I don’t claim to be a perfect picture of that in every moment, but it’s the image I hold in my mind of the kind of life that is possible if I allow God’s grace to work in me.

Because although the world operates out of a mentality of scarcity, hoarding things because we believe there is not enough to go around, the message of the Gospel is one of abundance. In God’s economy, the concept of “scarcity of resources” does not exist. The gift of God in Christ is more love, more grace, more mercy, more soul food than we can possibly consume on our own. In the face of such abundance, we are compelled to share – because as that grace continues to flow into us even after it has filled us up, it overflows out of us to everyone around us. There is so much grace available that we literally cannot keep it all to ourselves. As the psalmist says, “our cup is running over.”

What does this look like in practice? The image of the early church in our passage from Acts 2 this morning gives us an example:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”

That intangible, internal sense of abundance can be translated into an experience of external abundance as well. The church is meant to be a place where we all share what we have to make sure that the needs of all are met. To the extent that we do that, the church community itself becomes a sacrament – “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” as the Book of Common Prayer defines it (BCP 857). And as with all sacraments, both aspects must be there for it to be truly sacred – the outward sign is meaningless without the inward grace, and the inward grace is meaningless if it does not manifest in an outward sign.

So as we come together today as priest and people, I pray that our lives together will be sacramental: manifesting through outward and visible signs the inward and spiritual grace that we know through our relationship with Jesus Christ. I pray that our community will be known as one of abundance – abundant life, abundant gratitude, abundant compassion, abundant giving. Through our gratefulness for the abundance of God’s grace, I pray that we too, like the early church, will distribute our plenty to any among us who have need – and I hope we’ll sing and dance with abandon while we’re doing it.

[1] Ginny Owens, "Free," from the album Without Condition.  ℗ 1999 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Easter Message: The Resurrection was a radical transformation – and like all change, brought mixed emotions

Sermon delivered Sunday, April 16, 2017 (Easter Day) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA -- my last Sunday serving that congregation as long-term supply priest.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Our observance of Easter is the liturgical high point of the year, one of the most joyful moments in the life of the church. Christ is risen! Life has triumphed over death! On this day, churches all over the world, from small communities like ours to the biggest cathedrals, pull out all the stops to put on the biggest celebration of the year.

But the first Easter wasn’t so purely joyful. The day the women discovered the empty tomb and Jesus began appearing to his followers, there were many other emotions that were likely more prominent than joy for the disciples. The stories of the first resurrection appearances show the disciples grappling with grief and sorrow, bewilderment, disbelief, and fear.

The Gospel of Mark tells us that after the angels appeared to the women at the tomb telling them Jesus had been raised, they fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone, because they were terrified (Mark 16:8). John’s Gospel tells us that while Mary Magdelene was out weeping at the tomb, the disciples were gathered together in the upper room with the doors locked, out of fear (John 20:19) – presumably fear that they too would meet a similar fate as Jesus at the hands of the authorities. When they received the news that Jesus was alive... well, it seemed to them “an idle tale,” as the Gospel of Luke puts it (Luke 24:11). Even though they had seen Jesus raise dead people to life before – the daughter of the leader of the synagogue in Galilee (Mark 5:35-43), a widow’s son in the town of Nain (Luke 7:11-17), and Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus (John 11:1-44), somehow the concept that Jesus could be alive after they’d seen him so brutally murdered was incomprehensible to them.

And perhaps rightfully so, because what happened to Jesus wasn’t exactly like what happened to the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son, or Lazarus. The disciples didn’t see the miracle in person, as they had with the people Jesus raised. The disciples only discovered it after the fact, after he was risen and began appearing to them. No one actually SAW him rise, and as our beloved forefather Thomas reminds us, it’s not just we modern scientific types who like to see things for ourselves in order to believe them.

Not only were there no witnesses to the actual event itself, but Jesus’s Resurrection had changed him in some pretty incredible ways. Although he still retained the scars and marks of his crucifixion, which the disciples were able to physically touch, and he ate and drank with them to prove that he was an actual physical being, not a ghost or some kind of apparition, he also wasn’t exactly the same as he had been before.

Presumably, the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son, and Lazarus all looked exactly the same before and after their resurrections, but when Jesus appears after his Resurrection, he’s not always immediately recognizable. The people who have spent many years traveling with him day after day don’t recognize him! Mary Magdelene mistakes him for the gardener. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus walk and talk with him along a long journey, not knowing who he is until he breaks bread with them when they arrive at home. And if that weren’t enough change, apparently he could also enter locked rooms without recourse to the doors, and appear and disappear at will.

Clearly, what happened to Jesus changed him in a way that the resurrection of Lazarus, the widow’s son, and the synagogue leader’s daughter did not change them. Their resurrections were a restoration of life and health to their physical bodies, but Jesus’s Resurrection was a complete transformation of the physical body. Presumably, all three of the people Jesus raised from the dead went on to die again at the end of their natural lives, but after his Resurrection, Jesus remained alive forever. His Resurrection wasn’t a simple resuscitation, bringing life back to his physical body. It was a complete transformation into a different plane of existence, one in which the physical body is still very real but the properties of this world no longer apply.

All of this was confusing and strange and mystifying to the disciples on that first Easter, as it still is to us if we take the time to really reflect on what we’re commemorating this day. When we say “Christ is risen,” when we talk about the power of life to overcome death, we’re talking about much more than the flowers blooming again after being dormant all winter, or the way in which new life can emerge from decaying matter in the natural world. Those transformations are certainly a kind of resurrection, bringing life from death, but at the end of the day, no matter how much we use that imagery at Easter, filling our churches with flowers, ultimately that image is a woefully inadequate metaphor for Christ’s Resurrection, and indeed all imagery or metaphors fall short to describe it. Because nothing that we can see or touch or feel with our senses could possibly come close to the complete radical transformation that was the Resurrection. That first Easter was like nothing humanity had ever known or experienced, before or since.

And as we all know, any time we experience significant change in our lives, it can be disruptive and unsettling. I’ve been reading a lot about transition lately, as I prepare to leave St. Cuthbert’s and begin my new ministry at the church of St. John the Baptist in Aptos, and all the psychologists will tell you that even good change, even positive change, even something that you’re happy about, causes stress. As human beings, for some reason, even though change is a regular part of our lives – we live in a world that is constantly changing, and we inhabit bodies that are constantly changing – most of us experience change as distressing in some way.

But no change you or I have experienced in our lives could possibly compare to the disruption the disciples were faced with on that first Easter. If we have mixed emotions when we move, or start a new job, or start a new relationship, or lose a loved one, imagine those experiences magnified about two hundredfold and maybe that would start to come close to something like what the disciples might have felt that first Easter morning.

Because unlike the resurrection of the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son and Lazarus, Jesus’s Resurrection wasn’t a restoration of the way things had been before. The families of the people Jesus raised were comforted that their loved one was healed and things could go back to how they’d always been before, but for the disciples, the fact that Jesus was now alive didn’t mean they would go back to wandering the countryside with him, and healing the sick and watching him teach. Instead, it meant that their entire lives were about to be changed, even more so than when they had left everything to follow him. They were about to embark on an entirely new journey, something that looked and felt totally different from what they had been doing before. And while some might have been excited and thrilled by that prospect, others were probably wary and skeptical, even scared. It was much more complex than the unadulterated joy we express on Easter morning in our liturgies. It was a direct experience of the power and presence of God that shook them to the core and completely rearranged their lives.

So while we rejoice in the Resurrection of Jesus, that central event of our faith that assures us of the promise of everlasting life, we also realize that that Resurrection also means that we are now tied to a life of transformation that leaves things unlike the way they were before. Through our baptism, we are joined to Christ; we become a part of his body. And as the Apostle Paul says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5) – a resurrection that means not the restoration of breath to our physical bodies, not an assurance that we will live forever in this world, in these bodies, as we are now, but a promise of complete transformation into a different plane of existence, a plane where death can no longer touch us, a plane where we too will receive our resurrected bodies, which may be as different from our physical bodies as Jesus’s resurrected body was from his. We don’t know exactly what that day will be like, and until then, we can only imagine, basing our guesses on the glimpses of God’s transformational power that we occasionally receive in this life.

“Christ is risen!” is a message not of restoration, but of revolution. It means incredible, mind-blowing change is not only possible but inevitable for those of us who have chosen to link our lives with his.

And if that thought brings you something other than pure joy, if you find yourself a bit wary of what that could mean for your life, remember that the disciples probably had mixed feelings about the Resurrection as well. The first thing Jesus said when he appeared to them after his Resurrection, as he stood before them, the embodiment of disruptive, unsettling change, was, “Peace be with you.” That was the first thing he said to them. “Peace be with you.” Peace to those who stood by him to the bitter end at the foot of the cross, and peace to those who deserted him and fled. “Peace be with you.”

Peace, and “remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). This new reality may turn your entire world upside down, it may transform you in ways that scare you, but do not be afraid. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” Jesus says to the disciples the night before his death (John 14:27). And as he sends them forth after his Resurrection to spread this world-changing news, he tells them, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” “Peace be with you.”

Thursday, April 13, 2017

What is the "new commandment" of Maundy Thursday?

Sermon delivered Thursday, April 13, 2017 (Maundy Thursday, Year A) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34-35)

We call this day Maundy Thursday after this “new” commandment Jesus gives the disciples – the word “Maundy” comes from the Latin word “mandatum,” meaning “commandment.” But this all-important commandment, this commandment that we give its own religious holiday, doesn’t seem to be so new or unique. “Love one another” – isn’t that what the prophets have always said, both before Jesus and after?

“Well,” some Christians will say, “He tells them to love one another ‘just as I have loved you.’ Loving as Jesus loved is different than any other kind of love.”

Or, “He’s showing that the leader or master should serve his followers – this was a revolutionary idea in that culture. Washing feet was the work of a servant, something a great leader never would have done, so Jesus was breaking social convention and showing them a new way to love.”

But I don’t buy any of those arguments. Yes, in washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus did something countercultural by being a leader who engaged in humble, loving service. But he wasn’t the only or first leader to advocate for this kind of love.

I have no doubt my friends from non-Christian religious backgrounds would recognize this commandment from what they have been taught in their own traditions. According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad once said, “You will not enter paradise until you believe, and you will not believe until you love one another.” Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth and final of the Sikh gurus said, “Only those who have love, will attain God.” The Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism, teaches, “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union.” (Bhagavad Gita 6.28-32). There are passages like these throughout the world’s religions, some of which pre-dated Jesus and some of which came after him. “Love one another” was hardly a new idea with Jesus, nor is it unique to him. So why does Jesus say he is giving the disciples a “new commandment?”

Well, maybe that’s not what he actually meant. One thing that was lost when the stories of our faith moved from oral tradition to the written word is tone of voice. As we all know, tone of voice can completely change the meaning of a sentence. “You are so talented” could be a compliment or an insult depending on the tone of voice in which it is said: (demonstrate: “You are so talented!” (genuine) or “You are so talented!” (sarcastic)). We tend to read the scriptures straight, taking them at face value, assuming that what they say is what they mean, especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of God. But sometimes I wonder whether at times, Jesus might have been joking, or being sarcastic. I can’t remember who first suggested this solution to the puzzle of what’s “new” about the commandment Jesus gives the disciples on Maundy Thursday, but it’s the way I now read this passage from John, with a wry tone in Jesus’s voice that suggests that he wasn’t actually presenting a new idea, but was reinforcing what they should have already known and been doing all along, perhaps with a twinge of the frustrated “don’t you get it yet?” attitude we see him take with the disciples at other times throughout the Gospels:

“I give you a new commandment: that you love one another. There’s a novel idea for you – how about you try loving one another? That would be something different and new for you!”

And the church, in her infinite wisdom, has taken that phrase and elevated it – oh, MAUNDY Thursday! The day we got the NEW commandment from Jesus! That revolutionary new teaching… you know, the one God had been trying to get through our thick skulls since the beginning of time.

What was new the night of the Last Supper, though, was Jesus’s commandment to continue the sacred meal they shared, in memory of him. While John’s Gospel focuses more on the footwashing than the meal, all the other Gospels emphasize the Last Supper and the institution of the communion ritual that Paul recaps in our passage from 1 Corinthians tonight:

“The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25)

The Gospel writers disagree as to whether Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples was a Passover meal or was eaten slightly before the time of the Passover, but the institution of this ritual meal is the real “new commandment” of this holy night, this meal in which Jesus instructs his followers to take his flesh and blood into themselves. This wasn’t normal, this wasn’t something that was common sense to people of any religion. This was a strange new teaching that got the earliest Christians called cannibals on more than one occasion, when people heard them talking about eating flesh and drinking blood in their worship services.

Jesus’s followers interpreted this strange teaching by connecting Jesus’s death on the cross to the sacrifice of the lamb the Jewish people were commanded to eat during Passover, the history of which was recapped in our first reading from Exodus. Sacrificing a lamb and eating it every year at the Passover recalled the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Jesus’s followers decided after his resurrection that those strange words he had said to them the night before he died meant that Jesus was now the Passover lamb, and eating his flesh and blood in the ritual meal of bread and wine that he prescribed to them as his dying wish was their new way of observing the Passover, their way of recounting not just the liberation from slavery in Egypt, but the liberation from their sins and from the sins of the world.

“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,” we sing when we gather to share the Eucharist. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” All of this imagery links Jesus’s death with the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, and makes our ritual meal the liturgical descendant of the Passover meal, the seder. This “new commandment” Jesus gave to his disciples that night was what would eventually separate Jesus’s followers from traditional Jewish communities and Jewish practice, and is why Christians do not observe the holiday of Passover to this day. The Eucharist is our Passover, and more specifically, the first Eucharist of Easter, celebrated at the Easter Vigil or on Easter morning, is our Passover. It’s a reinvention and reinterpretation of an ancient tradition, changing it enough that it created a separate religion. Now that’s a new commandment.

But “love one another?” That’s not a new commandment. It’s perhaps the oldest commandment there is. And it’s one that we can all agree on, regardless of which ritual practices we observe in which tradition. So tonight, we remember simultaneously both the most universal and the most particular aspects of the Christian faith – the commandment to love and the commandment to celebrate the Eucharist. And at its best, that most specific of Christian commandments – to receive the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist – leads us to live out that most universal commandment – to love one another – more fully and completely than we would have without it. The particulars of our faith nourish the universal.

So as we wash one another’s feet tonight, an action that any human being can do for any other, and then receive communion, an action that is specific to the Christian tradition, let us remember that the God we worship in Jesus Christ, the God we attempt to take into ourselves through the sacrament of his Body and Blood, is the One who taught that very universal message – that the essence and core of all religion is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40).

Sunday, April 2, 2017

We must actively participate in resurrection -- we have a part to play in our own liberation and that of others

Sermon delivered Sunday, April 2, 2017 (Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45

Our readings for today seem to be getting a little ahead of themselves. They’re all about resurrection! God instructs Ezekiel to prophesy to the dry bones to bring them back to life, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and Paul tells us that “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also” (Romans 8:11).

Resurrection, bringing life from death, is everywhere in these readings. With the exception of the psalm, there’s hardly a word anywhere about the Lenten themes of sin and repentance. What’s going on here? If Easter is still two weeks off, why all this talk about resurrection in the middle of Lent?

Perhaps it is because we most need to remember the promise of resurrection during times of repentance. Whenever we stop to take a cold, hard look at the ways we are dead in our sins, we need to simultaneously remember the promise that we can and will be made alive through the Spirit of God working in us.

The 40 days of Lent metaphorically recall Jesus’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness and the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land, and it is during our own periods of wilderness that we are most in need of resurrection. When we come face to face with our shortcomings, our mortality, and our need, we are most open to the gift of grace and new life that God offers to us. By anticipating the resurrection two weeks before we make it to Easter, our readings today remind us that God’s offer of new life is available even in the midst of the wilderness.

And these readings also remind us of something about resurrection that we don’t hear as clearly in the Easter passages – they remind us that God invites us to participate in the process of resurrection. In today’s passages, the people are not passive bystanders to God’s miraculous power to bring life from death; they actually join with God in bringing about resurrection.

Ezekiel joins with God in bringing new life to the dry bones by speaking the words God has given him to speak, and the bystanders in the Gospel join with Jesus in restoring Lazarus to life by moving away the stone from the grave and removing Lazarus’s burial clothes. While only God has the power to bring life from death, in these stories, God does not do so without involving others in the process. God could have showed Ezekiel a vision of the dry bones coming back to life without any required words or actions on Ezekiel’s part, and God could have moved the stone away from Lazarus’s tomb miraculously, without human involvement, and Lazarus could have walked out already unbound from his burial shroud. But for whatever reason, God didn’t do it that way. He chose to leave parts of the process for us to do.

It has become somewhat of a catch-phrase in modern theology to talk about people as being “co-creators with God.” This idea proposes that human beings partner with God in the maintenance of the created world and in bringing about God’s purposes in it. In contrast to a view that sees human beings as entirely passive because “God is in control,” this theology insists that human beings are active partners with God in God’s redemption of the world.

A common critique of this theology is that it ascribes too much power to humans, coming close to saying human beings are equal to God, but the theologian who first coined the term, Phillip Hefner, actually used the phrase “created co-creator.” We are not co-creators – as if we were fellow gods in the heavenly court – we are created co-creators. We are, in fact, creatures, and the creature is not greater than the creator.

But, because we are created in the image of God who is a creator, we are made to be creators as well. From this perspective, our creative abilities – in the arts, in science and technology, in problem-solving – are seen as a stamp of the divine nature in us. This theology also emphasizes human freedom, because it stresses the ways in which God does not direct every little action that happens on earth, but gives us the freedom of self-determination. No, God does not need us to do anything, but rather than exert total and utter control over us, God chooses to leave certain things for us to do, so that we become partners with God in the great work of the divine redemption of the world. It is an unequal partnership, to be sure, but it is a partnership all the same.

The people in our readings for today are examples of the created co-creator. They are partners – however unequal – with God in making resurrection happen. Ezekiel delivers the words; the bystanders in the Gospel roll away the stone and remove Lazarus’s burial clothes. They remind us that although God is fully capable of bringing about transformation all by himself, God often asks for our help in doing so. God invites us to participate in the work of resurrection.

The actions that Jesus tells the people to perform in today’s Gospel reading are rather symbolic. His specific instructions to them are, “Take away the stone,” and “Unbind him and let him go.” Although we can assume the people were invited to do these things in a literal sense for very practical reasons, the stories in John’s Gospel always have a deeper symbolic meaning.

Jesus invites us to participate in the work of resurrection by taking away the stones – the obstacles in our lives and in the lives of others that prevent the power of God from reaching us. I’m sure we’ve all known people who have constructed such emotional walls around themselves that they shut out everyone around them, and even shut out God. We might have even done this in our own lives at some point. There is a saying of Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, who relates that God said to him, “O Son of Being! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.” We must give love in order to be open to receiving love. If we do not take away the stones from the entrance to our hearts, the power of resurrection can in no way reach us.

Jesus also invites us to participate in the work of resurrection by doing the difficult work of unbinding the shroud of death. Even though he had been restored to life, Lazarus’s freedom was still restricted by the shroud tied around him until the people unbound him and let him go. Likewise, even if we have received the gift of new life through the resurrection in our baptism, we too can remain bound by our old burial shroud of sin and death, unless we do our part in the resurrection process and work to loosen those bonds. We must do the difficult internal work of unbinding the painful memories, the negative self-talk, the grudges and resentments – whatever keeps us bound to the ways of sin and death. We must cut loose those cords in order to experience the full power of the liberation given to us in the resurrection.

And often, that process requires the help of others. Just as Lazarus could not untie himself, and certainly could not have moved the stone away from his grave while he was still dead, so we too sometimes must rely on others to help us move the stones and unbind the shrouds in our lives – therapists, spiritual directors, friends, mentors. Those helpers cannot do the work for us, but we do need companions as we do this work.

And while others have a part to play in our liberation, we also have a part to play in theirs, because the two are inextricably linked. As we strive to do the difficult spiritual work of opening ourselves to God and others, of rolling away the stones and unbinding the shroud of death, we often find that our best guides and companions on the way are those people who know something about rolling away stones and unbinding shrouds because they have done so in their own lives, those people who have been there and have found a way through.

So maybe it’s not so out of character to think about resurrection during Lent after all. For it is only when we have experienced resurrection in the midst of our own wilderness that we are able to understand how to participate more fully in God’s redemptive work in the world and to help others in their quest for liberation.


Sunday, March 26, 2017

Jesus invites us to focus on "what can I do?" instead of "why did this happen?"

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 26, 2017 (Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): John 9:1-41

“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The question would have been a natural one in Jesus’ day; it was widely assumed that sin and physical illness were connected in a directly causal relationship: if you were sick or had a disability of any sort, it must have been because you had sinned. If you were born with an illness or disability, either you must have committed some sin while still in the womb, or your misfortune was due to the sins of your parents. So the disciples were trying to figure it out, to determine which category they should place this man in to explain his abnormality, to find someone to blame.

Despite the advances of modern science, we’re not so different in 21st century America from the disciples who sought to explain the condition of this blind man by blaming it on sin. We’re always looking for ways to blame someone for the uncomfortable abnormalities and disabilities we see in others – “That poor child is deformed because her mother used drugs during her pregnancy,” or “If only he’d stop smoking, he wouldn’t have gotten lung cancer,” or “She has AIDS; that must be a punishment for her lifestyle or drug use.” And if we can’t find a reasonable person on whom to pin the blame, we pin it on God. “Why, God? What have I – or my sister or my uncle or my friend – done to deserve this?” we ask, the assumption being that illness and suffering are only inflicted upon those who “deserve” it as punishment for something they have done wrong.

But the interesting thing is that Jesus rejects this assumption that physical illness is an indication of the presence of sin. “Neither this man or his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

But is this really any better? The man’s blindness – and by consequence, the miserable life he would have experienced as a blind person in first-century Palestine, with no real opportunities for making a living open to him besides begging by the side of the road – was created just so Jesus could come along and perform a miracle? Does that mean all our sufferings are created just so God can be glorified through them? Certainly God can be glorified through our sufferings, but does God create them on purpose – does God make us suffer – just to glorify himself? What kind of God would that be?

But several biblical scholars have suggested that that is not necessarily what Jesus meant to say in this passage. Some scholars propose an alternative translation of the Greek text from the one we heard this morning, a translation that goes like this: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” (9:3-4a). In this translation, Jesus does not give an explanation for the man’s blindness, but simply accepts it as a given. Rather than dwelling in the “why” questions, Jesus is concerned with the more practical “what” questions – what can I do for this man now, and how can God’s glory be revealed in his life, regardless of his condition or his past?

In a similar vein, the blind man is not interested in explaining or justifying Jesus’ behavior when he is interrogated by the Pharisees; he is only concerned with testifying to his personal experience of Jesus. “We know this man is a sinner,” the Pharisees say to him, trying to get him to speak ill of Jesus. “I do not know whether he is a sinner,” the formerly blind man replies. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He offers no other explanations beyond this simple statement.

In the story as we have received it, both the blind man and Jesus are concerned with the here and now – with responding to the facts of the present situation without over-analyzing them. Jesus does not try to explain the reason why this man was born blind to his disciples, and the blind man does not try to justify Jesus’ actions to the Pharisees. Jesus sees a need and responds to it; the blind man receives a gift and testifies to it. The disciples are so caught up with trying to find a reason for the man’s blindness, to find someone to blame for this misfortune, that they miss seeing a real human being in need in front of them. The Pharisees are so caught up in arguments over what is and isn’t lawful according to religious tradition that they miss the miracle that has taken place in front of them.

The Pharisees tend to get a bad rep in the Gospels, since they’re always set as the “bad guys” in the story, in opposition to Jesus. But as this story shows, the disciples don’t always “get it” either. And aren’t we a little more like the disciples and the Pharisees in this story than we’d like to admit?

I sometimes wonder how Jesus would be received if he were to appear in an Episcopal church on any given Sunday morning. Might we not find ourselves to be modern-day Pharisees, more worried about whether Jesus was performing the liturgy correctly than about the miracle of his presence among us?

And don’t we often look around for people and institutions to blame when things go wrong in our lives, rather than accepting the circumstances for what they are and trying to think creatively about how we could contribute to making the works of God be revealed in that situation?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”

“I do not know whether he is a sinner,” says the formerly blind man. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

John’s Gospel this morning is inviting us to let go of the urge to explain, to analyze, to justify, and simply open our eyes to the world around us. Where is there a need that you can respond to, regardless of the reasons it exists? Where have you received a gift that you can testify to with gratefulness? Our personal stories about how we have experienced God working in our lives are the most powerful evangelism tools we have. What is the “one thing you do know” about God in your life? I invite you to share your answer to that question with someone in your life this week, and see what happens. Maybe you too have the power to open the eyes of the blind.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Meeting our spiritual needs is just as critical to our survival as meeting our physical needs

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 19, 2017 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-42

Water is essential for all known forms of life. It could even be said that water is the key to life, biologically speaking. So it no surprise that religious symbolism around water is extensive and widespread. We are dependent on water for our very survival, and we are dependent on God to provide us that water.

In our baptismal service, we give thanks to God for this physical, earthly element and recount the ways in which it is part of our religious history:

“We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise.
In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism.
In it we are buried with Christ in his death.
By it we share in his resurrection.
Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (BCP 306-07)

But this brief summary of significant events in the history of our faith that happened in water, with water, or through water doesn’t include the two we hear about in our readings today. The framers of our Prayer Book could have added a few more lines to that prayer:

“With it you nourished the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Through it your Son Jesus connected with a Samaritan woman, breaking down religious boundaries and bringing her to acknowledge him as the Messiah.”

God not only brought the children of Israel out of Egypt through water – by walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea – he sustained them during those forty years in the wilderness with water, providing them water from the rock in the desert. Despite the people’s quarreling and grumbling and complaining, questioning the purpose of that very liberation God had brought to them, God continues to be faithful and provides them with the basics for life – water from the rock, and food in the form of manna from heaven and quail.

And Jesus was not just baptized in water; he continued to use water as a powerful image in his teaching, including when he spoke to Nicodemus about being born “of water and the spirit” in the passage we heard last week, and when he told the Samaritan woman in our reading today that he had “living water” to give her, water that would never leave her thirsty again.

She doesn’t understand at first that he’s not talking about actual physical water, some kind of magic liquid that could slake her thirst forever, but about a spiritual sustenance that could feed her soul from within, an internal “well” of strength, of support, of love, of comfort, of protection, offered to her through a connection with this man standing before her, this man who “told me everything I have ever done.”

Jesus’s reference to this internal spiritual sustenance as “living water” draws on its vital importance to human existence: it is key to life; without it we die. The same is true of our relationship with God. We must continually seek it – like this woman coming day after day to draw water from the well – or else we perish.

In 21st century America, where clean water is readily available with little to no effort or money expended on our part, many of us have lost touch with just how important the search for and acquisition of water is when one does not have easy access to it. To us, an offer of “living water” that would never leave us thirsty might be a nice but unnecessary additional convenience. It wouldn’t really impact our lives that much, because for us, acquiring water is as simple as turning on a tap only a few steps from where we happen to be at any given moment. For this woman, though, to have access to water that would assuage her thirst forever would be life-changing. It would mean she would not have to keep coming back to this well to draw water and cart it back to her household. She would have time and energy to devote to things other than mere survival. And so we can almost hear the desperation in her voice when she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

It is with that kind of intensity, that kind of passion, that we should seek God as well. Our physical needs are so primary, so essential, that we can get stuck in seeking to fulfill them alone, but fulfilling our spiritual needs is the only way we will find true sustenance, true life, life beyond the physical, biological meaning of the word. Psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that until our basic physiological needs are met, it is nearly impossible for human beings to focus on anything else. Only when we have enough to eat, shelter, and water, can we begin to explore higher level needs like spiritual awakening. But what we often don’t realize is that our hunger, our craving, for those “higher needs,” is just as essential to our survival as the physical needs. Too many of us stop when we have our basic physiological needs met, neglecting to continue up that hierarchy of needs to pursue the rest of the things we need in order to be truly alive, truly fulfilled.

Jesus is telling the woman by the well that she has a deeper need even than the physical thirst that brings her here day after day, and that only when she addresses that need will her real thirst be quenched.

When the disciples come back and meet up with Jesus and encourage him to “eat something,” his response is, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Just like the woman at the well, they don’t get it either, asking one another, “Did you give him some food? I didn’t give him any food. Did you give him some food?” - but again, he’s talking about a deeper hunger than the physiological. The “food” he has is of the same sort as the “living water” – an internal source, connected to a higher spiritual power, that has the ability to truly nourish in a way that literal, physical food cannot do.

Jesus reminds us that we will only assuage our true hunger and thirst when we seek God as desperately as we seek to fulfill our physical needs. “Give me this water,” we should cry out, like the woman at the well, give me the living water of God that will quench my soul.

But since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do that seeking after God if our basic needs for food and shelter are not met, those of us who do have our basic needs met are called to do all in our power to assist others in meeting those basic needs so that they, too, can seek the kind of spiritual sustenance that will truly nourish them, completely, wholly, at every level of their being.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Faith is a two-way relationship, and we can control only our side

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 12, 2017 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.

Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.

In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.

I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?

I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.

But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.

So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.

Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once told me that she had to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.

But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.

And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," between two extremes. Rather than asserting that faith is entirely our choice or entirely a gift, I’m proposing that it’s both. Somehow at the same time it’s both a choice we make and a gift from God.

The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.

We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot MAKE God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, and we cannot force ourselves to have faith.

So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In our life of spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.

This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.

Sunday, March 5, 2017

Shame and fear: two things God never intended for humanity

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 5, 2017 (First Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19

Since the season of Lent invites us to reflect on sin and its consequences, it is appropriate that we begin with the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the first sin, the “original sin,” in the Garden of Eden.

According to the story, humanity’s first sin was disobedience. God said not to do something, Adam and Eve did it, and wham: God expels them from the Garden.

Setting aside any philosophical questions about whether God’s rules were just and worthy of obedience or not, this story attempts to make sense of one of humanity’s fundamental flaws: our inability to accept limits, to acknowledge that “God is God and we are not.” We never seem to be satisfied with what God gives us; we always want more. As a species, we have a tendency to go after precisely the things we know we cannot have. Many a parent will tell you that the quickest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to do it.

So what are the consequences of this sin? Immediately after their disobedience, after refusing to accept the limits placed on them, Adam and Eve feel shame -- they become aware of their nakedness and cover themselves, something they had previously not felt it necessary to do -- and fear -- they hide when God comes looking for them in the garden. Their relationship with each other and with God is changed because of their disobedience; rather than relationships characterized by trust and comfort and safety, they have become relationships tainted by fear and shame.

If fear and shame only entered Adam and Eve’s consciousness after the Fall, then it’s safe to say that fear and shame were not part of God’s intentions for humanity. Fear and shame are a consequence of sin, and in fact are sinful themselves, in a way, having nothing to do with what our relationship with God is intended to be like. Yet unfortunately, many people associate fear and shame with God. They think of God as a judgmental figure to be feared, someone in front of whom they should feel shame. Perhaps this is because so many churches and other religious communities -- the organizations that represent God to so many people -- use and rely on fear and shame to motivate and control people. Instead of seeing this as a characteristic of humanity’s sinfulness, people come to see it as a representation of how God relates to us.

And so when we enter a season like Lent, a season about repentance, a season that encourages us to look closely at our sin, it can stir up fear and shame for many people. They may feel they are being judged and shamed for their shortcomings in all areas of their lives. But while Lent encourages us to look seriously at our actions and make amends for any harm we have caused to others, it doesn’t invite us to wallow in shame or cower in fear.

Psychologists have written about the distinction between guilt and shame -- guilt is a feeling of remorse over some action we have done that we regret, while shame is a general feeling of unworthiness, a painful feeling about how we appear to others, whether or not we have actually done anything wrong. Guilt is about specific actions, whereas shame is about our sense of identity, our understanding of self [1]. That’s why shame is so destructive and unhealthy. It’s appropriate to feel guilt over something we’ve done that upset or harmed someone, and the season of Lent encourages us to acknowledge the sins of which we are guilty. But it’s not appropriate to feel like we are a horrible, unworthy person because we’ve done something that upset or harmed someone else -- that’s shame, one of the consequences of the Fall, something that God never intended for humanity.

According to psychologists, people who are overrun with shame often have an inability to feel true guilt, because they are so consumed with feeling bad about themselves they don’t have the ability to notice when they have hurt others or to feel remorse about it [2]. Feeling guilt, however, is considered a sign of emotional health. Emotionally healthy people are able to recognize that their actions may have caused pain to someone else, empathize with that person, and feel remorse and make amends [3]. Guilt may be painful, but it is healthy. Shame, on the other hand, is both painful and unhealthy.

And what about fear? Aren’t we supposed to “fear God?” The Bible constantly tells us things like “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10). Doesn’t fear motivate us to behave ethically, fear of punishment if we don’t?

Well, yes, that kind of fear can be a motivator, but the ancient wisdom of the elders in both Jewish and Christian traditions tell us that that kind of fear is an insufficient foundation for true faith, because it relies on an incomplete understanding of God [4]. Yes, God can punish us, God has the ability to punish us, but God is also merciful. The story of the Fall in the Qur’an says that while God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden for disobeying his law, he also provided them guidance for living in the world to which he banished them. In other words -- with the punishment also came mercy. That is a complete picture of God: as the psalmist says, “You were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds” (Psalm 99:8). With sin comes consequences, but we can also rest assured that God is merciful, that God is always working for our good, even when it may seem we are being slammed with a punishment. Because, as Paul points out in our reading from Romans today, God managed to turn even the Fall into a good thing. Yes, he punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from the Garden, but he righted their wrongs -- and all of our wrongs -- by sending Jesus to us as the “new Adam,” a new creation, a picture of humanity restored to God’s original intentions for us and a gateway to accessing that restored humanity ourselves.

When the Bible talks about “fearing God,” it is not talking primarily about being scared, dreading punishment, pleading with God, “please don’t hurt me.” The Hebrew word used in the phrase “the fear of the Lord” is yirat, a word that means awe, reverence, wonder, amazement [5]. If you’ve ever had a theophany, a moment where God’s presence was revealed to you, made known to you in a powerful way, then you will know that that kind of experience can be slightly “scary” in our normal sense of the meaning of that word, but the emotion generated is one that comes from feeling overwhelmed at being connected in a positive way to something larger than ourselves, not one that comes from worrying that that thing larger than us will squash us.

So this Lent, I invite you to focus more on guilt -- acknowledging and admitting when you hurt others -- than on shame -- thinking you are an unworthy person, and to focus more on awe -- marveling at the presence of God and your connection with God -- than fear -- worrying that God will punish you. Don’t allow Lent to be a season of shame and fear. In fact, maybe this year, you could try giving them up for Lent.


[1] Joseph Burgo, “The Difference Between Guilt and Shame,” Psychology Today Blog, 30 May 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shame/201305/the-difference-between-guilt-and-shame Accessed 4 March 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Eikev/Yirah/yirah.html
[5] Tara Sophia Mohr, “Is it Fear or Awe?” http://www.jonathanfields.com/is-it-fear-or-awe/ Accessed 4 March 2017.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

An invitation to take stock of individual and corporate sins during Lent

Sermon delivered Wednesday, March 1, 2017 (Ash Wednesday) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: all the right ritual actions are meaningless if not accompanied by the right intentions. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.

This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers.” And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.

The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.

Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of denying and emptying oneself in order to open oneself more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love one’s neighbor as oneself. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet of Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance.”

The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own hearts and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?

But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Cuthbert’s, as the Diocese of California, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?

But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people. In our current political climate, these communal sins of our culture are on display in a particularly vivid way. This year I am especially aware of “the evil done on our behalf” that our confession of sin refers to – sins we may have not have committed personally, but things our government has done “on our behalf,” in which we are implicated whether we like it or not.

On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our mortality and the fragility of human life. It is a time for examining our actions and behaviors and priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and taking stock of what is really important in the life of faith.

So as you begin Lent this year, take some time to consider: what is really important to you in your life of faith? What spiritual practices do you wish you were doing on a more regular basis? Could you commit to doing at least one of them during Lent? What relationship in your life do you most need to change in order for God’s love to be reflected in and through it? Could you take some steps toward changing that relationship during Lent?

Each of us may have a different Lenten discipline this year, but the underlying theme of our work is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

The Transfiguration gives us a "spiritual booster" before Lent begins

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017 (Last Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Matthew 17:1-9

“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5)

Peter, James, and John hear the voice of God speak these words about Jesus as they are gathered on the mountain in today’s Gospel reading.

We heard these exact same words just a few weeks ago, on the first Sunday after the Epiphany, when our Gospel reading was the story of Jesus’s baptism. After John the Baptist baptizes Jesus in the River Jordan, the Holy Spirit descends from heaven in the form of a dove and comes to rest on Jesus’s head, and a voice from heaven says,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)

The season after the Epiphany is bookended by this phrase – “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The season starts and ends with moments where God declares Jesus to be his beloved Son and commands those around him to take notice. These two great revelations from God take place at the beginning of the two significant phases of Jesus’s life. The first event – Jesus’s baptism – occurs at the start of his public teaching ministry, and the second event – the Transfiguration – occurs at the start of his passion, his journey to the cross. We are told to “look, listen up, take notice!” – as he begins to show us how to live and as he begins to show us how to die.

After the story of Jesus’s baptism, we get a series of his teachings in the following weeks. This year, our readings came primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, and we used those readings as starting points to consider how Jesus taught us to live, and how we vow to follow those teachings through the promises we make when we, too, are baptized. Our Baptismal Covenant is our vow to behave in ways that echo the teachings of Jesus: love your neighbor and your enemy, serve God in all people, strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

The Transfiguration marks the starting point of Jesus’s journey toward his death. Shortly before this revelatory moment, Jesus begins to predict his death and speak of it to his disciples, and shortly after shining with a holy light on the mountain, he “sets his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), where he will be killed. We always hear the story of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent begins because it marks the beginning of Jesus’s journey to the cross, the journey we commemorate during Lent and Holy Week.

It also gives us a preview of the Resurrection: the image of Jesus changed in form but yet still recognizably Jesus, shining with an otherworldly light, being proclaimed God’s beloved son, worshipped above all other revered prophets of old, foreshadows his eventual triumph over death through his Resurrection.

On their way down the mountain afterwards, Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about what they have just seen until after “the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” The Transfiguration only makes sense in light of the Resurrection, but the Resurrection cannot happen without walking the road to Jerusalem, the road to death. Peter, James, and John, Jesus’s “inner circle,” are given the vision of the Transfiguration as a “spiritual booster” before they head down that difficult road. They may not understand it in the moment, but somewhere in their consciousness, when they find themselves in the midst of despair, they will remember this: the road may be long and dark, but the end result is Jesus standing triumphant, radiant, shining, glorified above all the prophets.

And as we remember these events of so many years ago, we too are given this “spiritual booster” right before Lent, a “foretaste of the feast to come,” a reminder that the doom and gloom of Lent isn’t all there is to the story. As we prepare for Lent, the Transfiguration reminds us that the Resurrection is not far behind. We enter Lent with the image of a shining, glorified Jesus to lead us through the darkness. In the words of the psalmist, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). As we begin Lent this year, let us not forget that God is with us even as we walk through the wilderness. God is with us in our pain and God is able to transform that pain into new life. The road to death is lit by Resurrection light.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Loving your neighbor -- and your enemy: some practical steps

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 (Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, as part seven of a seven-week series on baptism and the Baptismal Covenant.

Sermon Text(s): Matthew 5:38-48, Baptismal Covenant Question #4

In this final week of our preaching series on baptism, we consider the fourth question in the Baptismal Covenant:

“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”

Our readings today invite us to consider what it means to love our neighbor, a common instruction in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures. Our passage from Leviticus includes this instruction:

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin… You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:17-18)

Jesus takes this even a step further in our Gospel passage for the day:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?... And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-48)

For much of my life, I would hear passages like these and throw my hands up with exasperation.

“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge?”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?”
“Be perfect, as God is perfect?”

Yeah, right!! Thanks a lot, God. There you go again, setting your standards so impossibly high that we could never reach them.

And then, in my study of world religions in college and graduate school, I discovered lovingkindness meditation, which comes out of the Buddhist tradition. For me, a lightbulb went on when I encountered this ancient practice. Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but he didn’t teach us HOW – at least, not in the records that were preserved and passed down to us. Just saying, “Love your enemies” without giving any practical instructions as to how to do that, especially since it is so contrary to the instincts of human nature, was, for me, not helpful at all. Reading and hearing these biblical passages did nothing for me except frustrate me and induce feelings of guilt and shame over how poorly I did at trying to follow these instructions. But when I discovered lovingkindness meditation, I felt like FINALLY, here was a set of practices that gave me tools to actually change my behavior and follow the teachings of Jesus more closely.

Robert Thurman, the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama, has noted the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha on loving one’s enemies, but he points out that Jesus was only able to teach for about three years before he was crucified. The Buddha, on the other hand,
“had to slave away [teaching] for 46 years after his enlightenment,” Thurman says. “So he had time to provide more practical methodologies to underlie these sort of high moral-sounding slogans like ‘love your enemy.’” [1]  
Discovering those “practical methodologies” has been an incredible blessing to me, and I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned with you all, in the hopes that it will be useful to you, too, as you strive to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “seek and serve Christ in ALL persons,” even your enemies.

At its most basic, lovingkindness meditation is the act of sending goodwill and well-wishes into the world. It involves repeating a certain set of phrases silently during meditation that express a wish for the person, people, or beings you are directing these wishes toward to be free from danger, to have mental and physical happiness, and to be content and at peace in the world.

The word translated into English as “lovingkindness” is the Pali word metta. (Pali is the language in which most of the Buddhist scriptures are written, a language that originated in ancient India.) Sharon Salzburg, a prominent American Buddhist teacher, writes about how metta differs from what Americans normally think of when we use the word “love:”

“In our culture, when we talk about love, we usually mean either passion or sentimentality,” she says. “It is crucial to distinguish metta from both of these states. Passion is enmeshed with feelings of desire, of wanting, or of owning and possessing. Passion gets entangled with needing things to be a certain way, with having our expectations met… By contrast, the spirit of metta is unconditional: open and unobstructed… When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. Metta – the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend things are other than the way they are – overcomes the illusion of separateness… and all of the states that accompany this fundamental error of separateness – fear, alienation, loneliness, and despair – all of the feelings of fragmentation. In place of these, the genuine realization of connectedness brings unification, confidence, and safety.” [2]

It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word hesed, often translated as “lovingkindness” in English, also refers to this kind of unconditional love, the kind of love God offers to humankind. It is this kind of love that Jesus commands us to have for our enemies. Not passion or desire or sentimentality, not a feeling of liking or being drawn toward them, but that kind of unconditional acceptance of what is, a love that sees all things and accepts them as they are. This kind of love recognizes the common humanity of all people and genuinely seeks the happiness of all, rather than nurturing resentments and wishing ill upon those who have harmed us.

In traditional Buddhist lovingkindness practice, the meditator moves through a series of six categories of beings in a set order. One begins by directing metta -- lovingkindness, well-wishes -- towards oneself, then moves on to a benefactor or mentor, someone who has supported you in your life or work in such a way that feeling gratitude toward this person and wishing him or her well is easy. Then, you consider a beloved friend, then a neutral person, then an enemy, and finally, all beings.

There is a wisdom to the order of this structure. First, we have to be able to love ourselves before we can truly love others, which is why metta starts with a focus on self. And finally, we can only say we love all people when we have been able to send love toward our enemies, toward those we find it most difficult to love.

You may see different translations or expressions of the metta phrases, but they all convey those basic sentiments: that the person you are focusing on be free from danger, be mentally and physically well, and have ease of well-being – be content and at peace in the world. The set of phrases I use that express these wishes is:

May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Ideally, you would spend a good deal of time with each category before moving on to the next one, but for the purposes of illustration today, I want to focus on just the “friend” and the “enemy” categories, to show you how this works and how you might use this practice to help work with the feelings of anger or pain that may come up for you when you think about a “difficult person” or enemy in your life.

So now I’m going to walk you through a guided metta meditation.

Take a moment to find a comfortable sitting position. Ideally, you’d sit with your spine straight, so that the air can flow unobstructed in and out of your lungs. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, hold it for a moment, and exhale all the way out. Then let your breathing return to normal, and just watch it as it settles in to a regular rhythm.

Traditionally we always start by directing metta toward ourselves, but since that can be somewhat of a complex practice in and of itself, today we’ll start by focusing on a good friend, someone it is easy for you to love, someone you naturally wish well. It is best to pick someone who is not a family member, and not a romantic partner, since we want to generate a feeling of pure, unattached love and goodwill, not love that is mixed up with feelings of desire, whether that be sexual desire or a sense of needing that person’s approval or attention. Think of a friend with whom you have a relatively uncomplicated, positive relationship, and bring up an image of that person in your mind.

Now say these phrases silently, directing them toward that friend:

May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Now shift your attention toward someone it is difficult for you to love. You might think of this person as your enemy, or it just might be someone who you find difficult or annoying, someone you do not naturally feel positively toward. As you work with this practice, it is best to start with someone with whom the dislike or difficulty is relatively mild. Don’t start by trying to love the person who has caused you more pain than anyone else in the world! (Over time you can gradually work yourself up toward being able to direct goodwill toward that person, but for now, pick someone you just mildly dislike.)

Think of that difficult person or enemy in your mind, and then direct the metta phrases toward them:

May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Notice if your interior landscape changes when you send positive wishes toward this difficult person. Do you feel areas of tightness loosening? Do you feel a relaxation or sense of relief?

If not, if you still find yourself angry and tight and clenched toward your difficult person, try playing with different visualizations to help you feel some sense of kindness and compassion toward them. You might imagine that person as a baby, as an innocent child. Or you might think of them in another situation where they are vulnerable or in pain – gravely ill, or on their deathbed – although be careful not to nurture any feelings of vengefulness or celebration at imagining this person suffering – that is not the point. The point is to open a door for you to connect with them, to see in their shared suffering your common humanity.

Sharon Salzburg says “you should allow yourself to be creative, daring, even humorous, in imagining situations where you can more readily feel kindness toward a difficult person.” One of Sharon’s students chose a difficult person who was extremely talkative and annoying, and it helped her send lovingkindness to that person if she imaged her sitting bound and gagged in a chair. Another student could only send lovingkindness toward his difficult person if he imagined him locked up in jail. Take some time to think of images or visualizations that would help you feel compassion toward this difficult person, situations that would soften your heart toward them.

Now with that image in mind, direct the metta phrases toward your difficult person again:

May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Notice if anything changes in your body as you sit with that image of your difficult person as you repeat these phrases.

May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Go ahead and open your eyes.

Now, if that was difficult, or if you didn’t feel or see any immediate changes in your feelings or attitude toward this person, it’s important to remember that it’s called spiritual practice for a reason! It takes practice! It doesn’t always happen overnight. It’s important to go easy on yourself, to not set expectations too high in terms of what the results of the practice will be. Ideally, you’d spend 30 minutes in silent meditation each day, working with this or any other meditation techniques. People do this for a lifetime and are still working at it, so don’t expect to be the perfect example of “loving your neighbor” after only trying this a few times.

When Jesus says, “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he doesn’t mean you should never make any mistakes. The Greek word translated as “perfect” is teleios, which doesn’t mean “without flaws or mistakes,” but “complete, whole, having reached its end, full-grown, or mature.” Jesus is calling us to be mature Christians, to be grown-up Christians, to put the effort in to work on our faith and develop it over time. That means not being content to stay in that frustrated, exasperated state – “yeah, right, Jesus, how can I ever live up to what you’re asking of me!” – but to actively search for tools and techniques to help you work toward making those commandments a reality. Maybe lovingkindness meditation will help you as it has helped me, maybe not. But in any case, we’re called to make an effort, using whatever tools are most effective for us. Because at our baptism, we made a vow to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. There is much wisdom in the teachings of the world’s religions about how to do that, and taking the time to find a practice that works for us is part of the way we keep our baptismal vows.

We’ll close with our 3 minutes of silent meditation that normally comes before the sermon. During that time, I invite you to try out these techniques more extensively, directing the phrases first toward a friend and then toward an enemy.

REFERENCE SHEET:

Metta (Lovingkindness) Phrases:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.

Metta Sequence:
1. Yourself
2. Benefactor or mentor
3. Friend
4. Neutral person – someone for whom you do not feel an immediate attraction or repulsion, someone who you do not like or dislike
5. Enemy or difficult person
6. All people/all beings


[1] “Sharon Salzburg & Robert Thurman: Meeting Our Enemies and Our Suffering,” On Being with Krista Tippett, 15 December 2016, http://onbeing.org/programs/sharon-salzberg-robert-thurman-embracing-enemies-suffering-2/ Accessed 17 February 2017.
[2] Sharon Salzburg, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995): 18-19, 21.