GRACE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

Candlemass - February 5

2012-02-07T10:33:00.002-05:00

We're still working out the kinks, but we now have sermons on video!

We will also continue to post the sermon texts.

Epiphany 3 - January 22, 2012

2012-01-26T11:28:00.006-05:00

Shane Marcus

Psalm 62: 6-14

Truly, our hope is in God. May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the basic Christian questions is this: what is the Bible? Across denominations you get a whole range of answers: The Bible is the only book worth reading The Bible is the infallible and inerrant word of God The Bible contains all things necessary for salvation, but Not all of the Bible is necessary for salvation The Bible contains the story of our faith The Bible has some nice religious/spiritual teachings.

Any community that goes by the name of Christ has to decide for itself what place to give the Bible, how much authority to give to it, how to hear its stories and practice its teachings. They have to figure out how much importance to give to it, figure out if and when they can disagree with it or afford to ignore it. The Bible is how we come to know about Jesus and take his name as Christians, and that is why week after week we read from it in community and listen for the word of the Lord. The gospel of John declares that the Word was in the beginning. Genesis insists that it was by God’s word that God created all that is, and named it good. Christian theology has always given an exalted place to the Word, to writing and reading and to preaching most of all.

Christian theology has always had a much harder time with silence. Centuries of theology have wondered about God’s silence. Martyrs and prophets and preachers and all the faithful saints have at some point wondered about God’s silence, longed to hear God’s voice, and wrestled with their faith when all they heard was silence. The Psalmist lifts silence up to us as a gift, but at the same time seems to know we struggle with it. Verse 1 is a confident assertion:

For God alone my soul in silence waits, from him comes my salvation!

Verse 5 is more like an apologetic attempt to convince us it’s really true:

For God alone my soul in silence waits; Truly!My hope is in him!/em>

Yeah right, the rest of us want to say, "Why doesn’t God speak to us?" is the easiest question for us to ask, and right after it comes, “When did God ever speak to you?!?” A question easy to ask but hard to listen for the answer.

I first wrestled with the meaning of silence when I was teaching a breakout session on prayer at a middle school camp. “How many of you know what the voice of God looks like in your lives” I asked them. Nobody raised their hand, which isn’t surprising. I couldn’t have answered the question either. At the time, the best I could tell them – and I was pretty impressed with myself at the time – Was that to be able to hear the voice of God, we need to spend more time with the words of God, to be in our Bibles daily.

I think most of us are more familiar with the statement that “silence is God’s first language.” It’s easy to wonder about the time before God spoke creation into being. It’s pleasing to recall the story of the reporter who interviewed Mother Theresa about her prayer life:

What do you say to God when you pray?
Oh, I don’t say anything. I listen.
What does God say to you?
Oh, God doesn’t say anything. God listens.

It’s helpful sometimes to think that silence does not suggest disapproval at all, that silence is the meaning of an intimacy that doesn’t have any need for speech. It allays our fears that God is ignoring us, or doesn’t care about our prayers, or doesn’t love us. Silence is not what happens when our ears don’t work properly; silence is the intimacy that has no need for speech.

This weekend helped me add another layer of meaning to what I think silence is. Not only did we have to slow down yesterday because of the snow, but I had to slow down all week because of a particularly nasty cold. I made it to all my classes but I was miserable, and I spent a lot of time by myself in my bedroom, trying to rest and regain my health. I started to wonder if silence isn’t a thing. I don’t think silence is just a way of relating to speech, to words. I think silence is a way of relating to time. Maybe silence itself is a kind of time. I wonder if silence is the entryway into God’s time, The time when we escape the ordinary sequence of events in our lives.

I wonder.

Every silent moment is a step towards God, a preparation for God’s words to be written into our hearts and our souls. Silence is the time when we see the fleetingness of our normal lives, when we can judge whether or not our activities are borne of love or pride, when we can realize the truth of Paul’s words that this present world is passing away. Jesus proclaims that the time is near; silence is always near; let us wait in sure hope for God to meet us, to heal us, to guide us into God’s future, to draw us into intimacy.

Let us enter into silence which is time, And expect that then we will meet God. Amen.

Epiphany message for Norwalk Hospital service

2012-01-09T12:44:00.002-05:00

Light looked down and beheld darkness.

‘Thither will I go,’ said Light.

Peace looked down and beheld war.

‘Thither will I go,’ said Peace.

Love looked down and beheld hate.

‘Thither will I go,’ said Love.

So light came, and shone.

So peace came, and gave rest.

So love came, and gave light.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

Laurence Housman, 1865-1959

For many Christians the weeks between Christmas and Lent are called Epiphany. This is the time we remember the ways Jesus was made known to the world. We see the Wise Men coming from foreign lands to worship him as God made flesh. We are there at his baptism in the Jordan, a young man now, who hears God say, “This is my beloved Son”. We are amazed as he changes water into wine at a wedding in Cana. We rejoice in his teachings and healings, his care for the weak, the poor, the elderly, the sick.

He said that he was the Light of the World.

We believe the prophets called him Prince of Peace.

He asks us to come to him, for he will give us rest.

He is the good shepherd, who knows us each by name, and we know the sound of his voice, and come to him when he calls.

He is the love of God, come to dwell with us and in us.

The Magi gave him gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. He gave us himself.

He knows our pain. He knows our joy. He comes with healing in his hands, balm for our spirits, for our souls, and for our bodies. He fills us with the healing power of his love through doctors and nurses, aides and technicians, therapists and staff.

The world he came into is not perfect. There is still illness and pain. He chose to share those with us, to promise us that whatever we experience, he is with us in it. The Word was made flesh and still dwells among us. We see him in a loving visitor, in a gentle touch, in a kind word.

Be still and know that He is God. Know that his love is unconditional. Know that in all things he stands beside you, to fill you with his grace. Know that he loves you. There is nothing that stands between you and his love.

Today, as we rest one last time beside his manger bed, with the magi who have come from so far away, look on his face once more, and let him fill you with his peace. May the Peace of this baby, this Jesus, the Holy One of God, be with you today, and always.

Amen.

The Epiphany

2012-01-09T12:41:00.003-05:00

The Epiphany, January 8, 2012

The Reverend Lois Keen
Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

THE MAGI by T.S. Eliot

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. (T.S.Eliot link follows) http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/magi.html

The word epiphany is used when two stories intersect, where the things of this world are shot through with the things of the beyond. Often, an epiphany is a turning point. In an epiphany we enter a territory of wonder and mystery. New meaning emerges.

In Education for Ministry, which is open the next two months to inquirers, epiphanies are those “aha” moments. Those occasions when something suddenly becomes crystal clear, where you say, “Aha, that’s what’s going on here!”, or, “That’s what that means, what it’s all about!”

In church language we use epiphany to mean “showing forth”, “revealing”, the “showing forth, or revelation” of Jesus to the world. For St. Luke, Jesus is revealed by angels to shepherds who leave their sheep and go to see the baby for themselves. For Matthew, Jesus is revealed to visitors from foreign parts.

Shepherds, in those days, were among the many classes of unclean people, people rarely fit to take part in the religious rituals of the Judaism at that time. For readers of Luke, to have the Messiah, the King of the Jews, the Savior of the World revealed not to the clergy or to the king or to the president of the synagogue but to shepherds will be an “aha!” moment – “Aha! God comes to the outcast before anyone else. Aha, that’s what this birth means! To God, those we call outcasts are just as good as we are!”

In our day this would be as if the Messiah were born in a brothel, revealed to crack users and welfare mothers and not to you and me until much later.

Magi, meaning astrologers or magicians, most likely NOT kings, would be just as bad as shepherds. It would be like wandering bands of gypsies from some old black and white movie like The Wolf Man. Matthew is called the most Jewish of the gospels because he is much concerned with the Law, and with portraying Messiah Jesus as the new Moses. For Matthew to reveal this baby not to the chief rabbis but to gentile rabble is like Luke having Jesus revealed to shepherds. “Aha!” the reader of Matthew says. “That’s what this birth means! In God’s world there ARE no outsiders! No foreigners! No borders!”

What about the shepherds themselves, what was their epiphany moment? There must have been one, because we hear that they left the stable and went and told everyone what they had seen. Mary, too, had an epiphany because we are told she pondered all these things in her heart.

And the magi, what was their epiphany? Matthew does not tell us what people the magi came from, and he does not tell us what happened to them after they return. But T.S. Eliot, in his poem “The Magi” tells us what sometimes happens to those of us who experience an epiphany.

“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Sometimes, people who find their own stories intersecting with some part of the story of God or Christ or the people who follow Jesus find they are no longer entirely comfortable in the world in which they live.

In Eliot’s poem, the magi are no longer comfortable. In fact, their own people have become alien to them. The gods they clutch, gods which they, themselves probably clutched before their epiphany, are useless. They have returned home to find they are no longer at home.

I imagine St. Luke’s shepherds may have had the same experience. Have you ever told someone something exciting, a new insight or a mountaintop experience, only to have it fall flat? To be met with incomprehension, or that “oh dear, he’s gone just a little crazy, hasn’t he?’ humoring response? I imagine that’s what those fellow shepherds who had not seen and heard the angels, or gone to the stable and seen the baby, thought. No epiphany for them. Just pity and maybe even mockery.

In Eliot’s poem, the mockery begins from the first moment the magi set out to follow that star.

“At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.”

And just maybe, it was their own voices in their own ears repeating, “folly, folly, folly.”

And still, they traveled on, and found what it was for which they were looking. Though it turned out not to be as clear as they had expected. There was birth, yes, and yet they also saw death. Maybe the death they saw was the deaths of the children Herod would kill in an attempt to kill this one child before he could grow up to be king. Maybe it was a premonition of the death which would come to this child as a young man. Maybe it was the living death of knowing nothing would ever be the same for them if they returned home, that their old life was dead to them, and they had died to their old gods and religion, and yet, they did return home, though by a different route.

Today we rejoice at the epiphany of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, his being revealed to the world as the Son of God. Not many weeks from now our joy will be turned to repentance and sorrow. Eliot’s epiphany of the magi foreshadows what is to come.

“Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins”

“… a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,” – the lintel that will be stained by the blood of the pascal lamb, Jesus, the true vine -
“Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,” – foreshadowing the pieces of silver paid to the betrayer, Judas -

“And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.” – a dead body on a cross, and the thoughtless bargaining for his clothing.

And yet we rejoice. Christ was born. In him God lived among us. Through him God lives among us still. And nothing is the same, or, at least, nothing should be the same. For epiphanies rarely leave untouched those people who have them, and rarely leave them the same as they were before. The Magi of Eliot’s poem were never the same, and yet, the Eliot’s magus says,

“All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again,”

The Feast of the Circumcision, or Holy Name Day

2012-01-02T07:53:00.005-05:00

January 1, 2012

Psalm 8
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:15-21

Philippians 2: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Hymn 435: “At the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow, every tongue confess him King of glory now; ‘tis the Father’s pleasure we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.

Today is the feast of the Circumcision and naming of Jesus. Eight days ago the angel who appeared to the shepherds called him Savior, Messiah, Anointed One, the Lord, a child wrapped in swaddling cloths.

The shepherds themselves called him, “this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us”.

One web site lists 200 different names and titles for Jesus, Son of God, Son of Man, Light of the World, Prince of Peace, Everlasting One.

In our commemorations between the Day of the Nativity and today, January 1^st, the feast of the Holy Name, our calendar of saints, puts flesh on these names.

On the Second Day of Christmas, Monday, we celebrated the feast of St. Stephen. Stephen was among the first deacons in the early Christian community which became the Church. The first deacons were charged with waiting on table at the weekly suppers and with the care of the widows and the orphans, the poor. They were to carry on Jesus’s work of hospitality and service to those in need: Jesus, hospitable one, servant, healer. The apostles were thus left free to carry on Jesus’s work as pastor and prophet.

Stephen was so successful at spreading the gospel himself through his service and works of wonder, and at giving an account of the gospel before his accusers, that he was stoned to death, the first martyr for the sake of the holy name of Jesus.

On the Third Day of Christmas, December 27^th we celebrated St. John the Apostle and Evangelist. It is John who gives us the name of Jesus, The Word. [John 1:1-5 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”]

Jesus, The Word which God spoke at the beginning of creation and called all things into being. “And God said ‘Let there be light…Let there be a dome…Let the waters under the dome be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear…let the earth put forth vegetation…Let there be lights in the dome of the sky…Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures…Let the earth bring forth living creatures…Let us make humankind in our image…” Jesus, The Word, by which God called forth and named all this creation – Day, Night, Sky, Earth, Seas, Sun, Moon, Stars, Birds, Sea Monsters, Cattle, Creeping things, Wild animals, Man, Woman.

It is John who calls him “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”, the gate to the sheepfold, the Good Shepherd, the Bread of Life, the Vine of which we are the branches, the Light of the World, the Way, the Truth, the Life.”

In the Revelation to John the Divine, Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the Lamb that was Slain. If we are tempted to make Jesus other-worldly and to let these names take us out of this world, it is John the Evangelist who brings us back to earth when he writes that at the tomb of his dead friend Lazarus, “Jesus wept”.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas, we remember the Holy Innocents.

When the wise men had departed, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

We call Stephen the first Christian martyr. We know, also, these innocent ones were martyred in place of the child, the Son of God. Only this one child escapes to Egypt until the time when “Out of Egypt I have called my son”, God says, the time when it is safe. It is from this story we ourselves name him Immigrant, Undocumented, Stranger, Refugee, Outcast, and Protected by God.

In his name we remember all children whose lives are thrown away during war, famine, rebellions, abuse, neglect, prejudice, ignorance, slavery, child labor.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas we remember Thomas Becket, drinking and womanizing companion of King Henry II of England in the twelfth century, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and cleaned up his act. Henry asked to be rid of this troublesome priest, so some knights assassinated him in Canterbury Cathedral, shortly after which Pope Alexander III made him a saint.

In the name of Jesus anyone can be converted from a dissolute life to one that serves the kingdom of God. In the name of Jesus those converts can become troublesome to thrones, governments and even the church. The name of Jesus is not to be taken lightly. Truly, at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bend, even that of a medieval king, if not today, on this earth, then in some other kingdom or realm which we have yet to see.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas we remember the Holy Family: Joseph, Mary and Jesus. Here he is named Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus, son of Joseph, son of Mary, child, young man, apprentice, carpenter, brother of his siblings.

Of the siblings of Jesus, we also remember on December 30^th Frances Joseph Gaudet, born in Mississippi in 1861 of African American and Native American descent. In 1894 she dedicated her life to prison reform and to the incarcerated ones, including youthful offenders. She founded the Gaudet Normal and Industrial School which also served as a boarding school of the children of working mothers. Four years after her school closed in 1950, the Gaudet Episcopal Home opened in the same location, serving African American children.

Hymn 435,“Name him, Christians, name him, with love strong as death, name with awe and wonder and with bated breath; he is God the Savior, he is Christ the Lord, ever to be worshiped, trusted, and adored.”

Jesus, our brother, became known as teacher, rabbi, healer, leader, liberator. Some thought he was Elijah, who had not died but had been taken up bodily into heaven and was to return to usher in the age of the rule of God. Others thought he was John the Baptist come back from the dead. Some even thought he was Beelzebub, the prince of demons.

All these names and titles came out of people’s experiences of Jesus, even the experiences of the saints we remembered this past week. In his own life on earth Jesus asked his friend and disciple, Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One of God”.

At his conception, the angel Gabriel named him Jesus – He will save. In a dream to Joseph, an angel quotes the prophet Isaiah, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel”, “God is with us”. On this day, the feast of his birth name, who do you say that he is? In what way have you experienced Jesus in your life? Who do you say that Jesus is?

The Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord

2012-01-02T07:46:00.002-05:00

December 25, 2011

[I did not preach on Christmas Day as it was Christmas Lessons and Carols. However, I did read the Presiding Bishop's Christmas message, printed below in both English and Spanish.]

From The Presiding Bishop

The Episcopal Church
Office of Public Affairs

Episcopal Presiding Bishop’s Christmas 2011 Message // Mensaje de Navidad 2011 de la Obispa Presidente Episcopal

Note: The following is presented in English and Spanish.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop’s Christmas 2011 Message:
“Jesus comes among us to remind us of a world living together in peace, to reclaim and make real that vision of creation for all humanity and all God’s creatures.”

[December 15, 2011] “Jesus comes among us to remind us of a world living together in peace, to reclaim and make real that vision of creation for all humanity and all God’s creatures,” Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori says in the Christmas message for 2011.

The following is the text of the Presiding Bishop’s message:

Christmas message 2011

See, your salvation comes – Isaiah 62:11

The great prophets before Jesus proclaimed a vision of a nation and a people redeemed. We continue to share that yearning – as the Christmas hymn puts it, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” We’ve seen abundant hopes spring up in the past year across the Arab world and Eastern Europe, and in the global Occupy movement. Those voices seek a world of greater justice, communities in which decisions and the gifts of creation are more available to all. Our understanding of salvation is most profoundly about justice in community, and as Christians we believe that help and healing for all are grounded in the incarnate presence of God – among us and within us.

We look for salvation to the one who came among us in the most humble way, a helpless child born in a scandalous way to a poor peasant couple. The Incarnation, God with us, changed the world in ways that we insist are leading to the ultimate healing of all creation. “See, your salvation comes,” says the prophet in every age, yet it is not yet fully come upon us. We live in hope for its fullness. May hope be nourished within us, in each and every human being and community, for the journey toward God’s healed and holy future.

That proclamation of coming salvation is a part of Isaiah (Isa 62:6-12) that will be read in some congregations at Christmas, but if you don’t hear it, go and read the whole of it. Its centerpiece speaks of what that salvation looks like:

The Lord has sworn…
I will not again give your grain to be food for your enemies,
and foreigners shall not drink the wine for which you have labored;
but those who garner it shall eat it and praise the Lord,
and those who gather it shall drink it in my holy courts.
Isa 62:8-9

That is not a vision of pristine isolation, but a vision of comfort and healing to a people frequently at war, occupied, or exploited by superior forces. The fear of powerful others taking and using for themselves the produce of the poor is healed and transformed into a society in which the gifts God provides will be shared by all. For when salvation comes, that society will

be called, ‘the Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord’;
and you shall be called, ‘Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.’
Isa 62:12

Jesus comes among us to remind us of a world living together in peace, to reclaim and make real that vision of creation for all humanity and all God’s creatures. That world is put right as relationships between God and humanity are set right. The relationship between God and human being cannot be set right without equal healing of relationships between us mortals. See, your salvation comes! Will we welcome that healing?

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

Mensaje de Navidad 2011 de la Obispa Presidente Episcopal:
“Jesús viene a nosotros para recordarnos un mundo en el que vivirán todos juntos en paz, para reclamar y hacer realidad la visión de una creación para toda la humanidad y todas las criaturas de Dios”.

[15 de diciembre de 2011] “Jesús viene a nosotros para recordarnos un mundo en el que vivirán todos juntos en paz, para reclamar y hacer realidad la visión de una creación para toda la humanidad y todas las criaturas de Dios” dice la Obispa Presidente de la Iglesia Episcopal Katharine Jefferts Schori en el mensaje de Navidad 2011

El siguiente es el texto del mensaje de la Obispa Presidente:

Mensaje de Navidad 2011

Mira, llega tu salvación – Isaías 62:11

Los grandes profetas antes de Jesús proclamaron la visión de una nación y un pueblo redimido. Seguimos compartiendo ese anhelo, como dice el himno de Navidad: “Las esperanzas y los temores de todos los años se cumplen en ti esta noche”. Hemos visto surgir abundantes esperanzas en el último año en el mundo árabe y Europa del Este, y en el movimiento de ocupación a nivel mundial. Esas voces buscan un mundo más justo, comunidades en las que las decisiones y los dones de la creación estén al alcance de todos. Nuestra comprensión de la salvación se acerca con más profundidad a la justicia en la comunidad, y como cristianos, creemos que esa ayuda y sanación para todos se basan en la presencia de Dios encarnado, entre nosotros y en nosotros.

Buscamos la salvación en uno que vino a nosotros de la manera más humilde, un niño indefenso nace de una manera escandalosa de una pareja de campesinos pobres. La Encarnación, Dios con nosotros, ha cambiado el mundo en formas que nosotros insistimos que conducen a la curación definitiva de toda la creación. “Mira, llega tu salvación”, dice el profeta en todos los tiempos, sin embargo, aún no nos ha llegado en su plenitud. Vivimos en la esperanza de su plenitud. Que la esperanza crezca en nosotros, en todos y cada ser humano y en la comunidad, por el viaje hacia el futuro sano y santo de Dios.

Esa proclamación de la salvación que llega es parte del texto de Isaías (Isa 62:6-12) que será leído en algunas congregaciones en Navidad, pero si usted no lo oye, vaya y lea todo el pasaje. Su punto central trata de cómo será la salvación:

El Señor ha jurado…
Nunca más permitiré que tus enemigos se coman tu trigo,
ni que los extranjeros se beban el vino que has hecho con tu trabajo;
sino que ustedes mismos recogerán la cosecha se la comerán y me alabarán a mí,
y los que la recojan beberán el vino en los atrios de mi santo templo. Isa 62:8-9

Esa no es una visión de aislamiento prístino, sino una visión de la comodidad y la curación de un pueblo frecuentemente en guerra, ocupado, o explotado por fuerzas superiores. El temor de que los poderosos se apropien y utilicen para sí mismos los productos de los pobres queda curado y transformado en una sociedad en la que los dones que Dios ofrece serán compartidos por todos. Porque cuando llegue la salvación, esa sociedad

será llamada, ‘el Pueblo Santo, Los libertados por el Señor’;
y seréis llamados, ‘La ciudad deseada, La ciudad no abandonada’. Isa 62:12

Jesús viene a nosotros para recordarnos un mundo en el que vivirán todos juntos en paz, para reclamar y hacer realidad la visión de una creación para toda la humanidad y todas las criaturas de Dios. Ese mundo estará en lo justo cuando las relaciones entre Dios y la humanidad, sean justas. La relación entre Dios y el ser humano no se puede enderezar sin la misma curación de las relaciones entre los mortales. Mira, ¡llega tu salvación! ¿Le daremos la bienvenida a esa sanidad?

La Rvdma. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Obispa Presidente y Primada
La Iglesia Episcopal

The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

2012-01-02T07:45:00.002-05:00

December 24, 2011

The Reverend Lois Keen

Christmas is all about presents.

You give me a necklace

I give you a shirt.

We give Aunt Sally a sweater.

Aunt Sally gives us a slow cooker.

Maybe we hate the slow cooker

Or Aunt Sally doesn’t like the color of the sweater

But it’s the giving of the presents that counts.

It’s being remembered.

A present says, “I thought of you”.

Tonight we remember when we all received a present.

A really big present.

We can’t hold it, or see it.

It doesn’t matter if we like it, or not.

We can’t return it for something different.

It is simply given to us, once, long, long ago,

in Bethlehem in Judea,

to do with what we wish.

Then, God gave us a present,

the gift of a baby.

Born in a stable,

Witnessed by shepherds and magicians

Proclaimed by angels

And a special star led the way

For everyone to come to the stable and see this thing that God had given us.

This present is given by God to all the world, for all time.

Like all presents, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it.

What you can’t do is stop this gift from being given to you.

For this baby, this gift, is God’s own self,

made vulnerable to us so we might know,

or maybe just get a glimpse of,

just how much we are loved by God.

Christmas is all about presents, this present, this gift.

God’s gift to us.

Our gifts to one another.

Gifts given and received.

And yet, we forget to give a present to the most important person of all.

Our stockings are hung by the chimney with care.

But there is no stocking there for the Christ child.

Presents are piled deep under our Christmas trees.

But did we remember to put a present there for the baby Jesus?

All year long our prayers have been lifted up to him, our requests for help, health, reassurance. All year long he has received our prayers and maybe even answered them, in some way. All year long we receive from him a listening ear, a lap to cry in, a place to feel. And when we think we have received help from him, he asks nothing in return.

This night might we give a present to him, to say, “I thought of you today”? I thought of you today without asking anything of you in return. Might we give him one gift with no strings attached?

What gift would you give him? What present would you put under your tree for the baby born in a stable? If you could give Jesus a Christmas present, what would Jesus want?

A long time ago Christina Rossetti wrote a poem for Christmas. A Christmas carol was made of the poem, called “In the Deep Midwinter”. The last verse reads,

“What can I give him,
poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would give a lamb.
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part.
Yet what I can, I give him,
Give my heart.

That’s the only present Jesus really wants this Christmas – our hearts. With the gift of our hearts, Jesus can do everything else that is needed – even Peace on Earth, and goodwill to all people.

There is great wrong in this world and in human existence. We don’t love ourselves. We don’t love one another. We’re kind to some people, and unkind to others. If it weren’t for the occasional shining star – a person, a saint really, who does love and care for everyone to the point of foolishiness – we might just give up on God and each other.

But on this one night of the year, all things can seem possible. We can remember what God did for us in becoming like us, being born, living, and dying like us, experiencing all the fears, deprivations and temptations and mistakes we all experience.

God made flesh, emptied of all power, except the power of love.

This one night, will you listen, really listen to the angels singing? They are saying, “Do not be afraid. A baby is born, a very special present, just for you. His name is Love. And nothing can ever take it away from you. He asks nothing of you, but maybe this year, you could hang up a stocking for the baby in the manger, or put a wrapped present beneath the tree, for the Christ child, and fill it with whatever gift you want to give him – tolerance, generosity, hospitality, justice, courage, peace on earth – or simply, give him your heart.

And for those for whom there are no trees or decorations or gifts because this time of year only makes the harshness of life even more painful, this newborn babe will give himself.

May your Christmas be bright.

May you make Christmas bright for someone who has less.

May you make Christmas all the year for those who need God’s love.

And may God bless us, every one.

La Navidad es para los regalos.

Usted me dará un collar. Yo te daré una camisa. Tal vez no me gusta el collar. Tal vez usted no le gusta la camiseta. Pero es importante que damos los regalos. Un regalo dice: "Estoy pensando en ti".

Esta noche recordamos un regalo muy grande. No podemos retenerla. No podemos verlo. No podemos volver a comprar un regalo diferente.

Es un regalo que se nos da en Belén de Judea. Dios nos da el regalo. Se trata de un bebé. Ha nacido en un establo. Los pastores y los magos son los testigos. Ángeles anuncian su nacimiento. Una estrella especial que nos lleva a él.

Este bebé es Dios mismo. Se ha convertido en vulnerables por lo que podemos saber que nos ama. Recibimos el don de este bebé de parte de Dios. Pero ¿dónde está nuestro regalo para el bebé?

Si se pudiera dar a Jesús un regalo de Navidad, lo que le has dado?

Una poeta, Christina Rossetti, tiene una sugerencia. Ella sugiere que le damos nuestros corazónes.

Este año le hemos pedido a Jesús de muchas cosas. Hemos pedido a la salud, para obtener ayuda, o para el reaseguro. Él nos ha pedido nada.

Vamos a darle un regalo de Navidad esta noche. Vamos a darle nuestros corazones este año.

Y para aquellas personas que no tienen a los árboles de Navidad o adornos o regalos, para aquellas personas cuyas vidas son difíciles, y que están tristes en Navidad, el niño nació.

Feliz Navidad. Puede hacer que la Navidad brillante para alguien más. Puede llevar la Navidad a aquellos que necesitan el amor de Dios. Que Dios nos bendiga, cada uno de nosotros.

Sermon for Advent 4 2011

2011-12-19T09:18:00.004-05:00

These are notes - in reality most of the sermon was extempore.

Sermon, The Reverend Lois Keen

Advent 4

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Grace Episcopal Church

Norwalk Connecticut

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16

Canticle 15: The Magnificat (Song of Mary)

Romans 16:25-27

Luke 1:26-38

“Wherefore let all faithful people

tell the honor or her name;

let the Church, in her foreshadowed,

part in her thanksgiving claim

what Christ’s mother sang in gladness

let Christ’s people sing the same.

Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary, full of grace.”

(from the hymn Ye who own the faith of Jesus)

On December 4^th Mary Glasspool, Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles, preached for the annual diocesan convention. She opened by saying that she is not a great traveler in the first place. It takes little to increase her tension and anxiety. On a recent trip, after a thorough body pat-down, the agent took Bp. Glasspool’s combination prayer book/hymnal, held it up and shook it, and asked if there was anything in this that could set off an alarm? Mary says she looked the agent in the eye and said, “Plenty!”

Imagine this. King David wants to honor God by building God a house – a temple, a church. God says “No”. This sets off alarms. Why would God not want a house? Because God will not live in temples or churches. This god is not like all the other gods who each have their temple. This God will not be confined or controlled. This God has always lived on the move. This God prefers to pitch a tent in the midst of the people, a tent that can move around with the people, to where the people are.

But, God says, I will build you a house. Do you hear that alarm going off?

What is this house God will build? It is a girl. A young woman. I don’t think we get the enormity of this. An engaged girl become pregnant and her fiancé is not the father. She risks being stoned to death if she trusts that the angel is truly from God if she says yes. And she does say yes!

What people would proudly proclaim that God of all the universe made his home in a human person, rather than in a temple built by human hands? What people would risk following a man born of an unwed mother fathered by a stranger and then rejoice in that scandal?! Alarms are sounding all over the place.

And to this the poet says to the churches, “Let the church, which is foreshadowed by Mary, claim its part in her thanksgiving and sing in gladness, “Here are we, the servants of the Lord; let it be with us according to your word. Do with us whatever you will.”

Be careful. That alarm is going off again.

What is that word in which we are to rejoice? “Rejoice that God confounds the proud and conceited; God dethrones mighty rulers and puts the poor, the worthless ones in their place. God makes the rich to starve while feeding the starving.” And this is how the God of Mary, the God of the Church, fulfills the promises made to Abraham and his descendants, promises of mercy – mercy that turns the social order on its ear and reverses the power structures of all nations and their institutions.

To this God we are to say, “Even then, if we the church turn out to be the mighty and well-fed who need to be humbled so God’s mercy can be shown to those who are despised, even so, here we are. We are your servants. Let it be with us according to your word.”

We should have listened to that alarm. Because the Magnificat means this: I am lowly compared to Donald Trump so, yeah, go ahead, God, cast him down and lift me up higher!

But, then, because there are people with no jobs, while I still have a job, I also have to say, “I, too, am the mighty compared to these. Yet, let it be with me according to your word.”

The Magnificat is a mystery. It is well beloved. Yet everyone who reads or hears it hears something different. Seldom do we hear in it our own judgment. And after all, doesn’t it really just mean that God has chosen a girl in which to dwell instead of a powerful prince? It is alarming that we can so easily deflect the truth contained in this song of Mary.

The Magnificat, combined with the beatitudes, are among the most alarming contents of the scriptures. God says, “I will make all things new!”, while all the churches want is a place to pray. Now that alone will set off an alarm in the cosmos.

How, then, do we discern what it is to which we are to say, with Mary, “Let it be with me according to your word”?

We begin with Mary. Mary foreshadows the church – before the Church, there was Mary. And Mary is pregnant.

The Church, too, is pregnant. It is Advent, after all, and so, the Church is pregnant. With what? What is coming to birth among us? To what are we about to give birth?

Advent is the season of the Annunciation. The angel says to Mary, “Do not be afraid. I announce that you will be pregnant with God.” That would make anyone afraid!

What fear would you ask the angel to cast out of you? What fear would you ask the angel to cast out of us? Out of the Church?

Advent is a time of hunger. The rich will be hungry and the poor will be fed. What are you really hungry for, this Advent?

Does your hunger lead you to what the church is pregnant with? And does that make you afraid? What fear would you have the angel cast out of you, or this place, so that the pregnancy the church is carrying can be born?

Cards and pencils are being passed out. The three questions are on the cards. Spend some time in silence pondering those questions. Praying those question. If you get any answers, write them on the card and place the card on the altar so it can be offered to God at the Eucharist.

After Eucharist, come back and retrieve your card. Take it home. Sit with in prayer between now and the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus, who makes all things new, who fulfills all God’s promises, who himself is the mercy of God, about whom the angel says, “Do not be afraid, for nothing will be impossible with God.”

Advent 3

2011-12-11T23:55:00.004-05:00

A Theological Reflection

May the Words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s the third Sunday of Advent, and I’m preaching. It’s a tradition!

And why do I preach on the third Sunday of Advent, Tevye the Dairyman might ask? Well I’ll tell you, he would continue. I don’t know, but it’s a tradition.

For those of you who don’t know Tevye, he is the narrator and main character of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem was a contemporary of Mark Twain and came from the Ukraine region of Russia. Fiddler is the story of life in Anatevka, a shtetl, or small town in Russia, where everyone’s lives are rooted in traditions.

I had a whole sermon prepared about the traditions of Grace Church and how today’s reading from Isaiah serves as a lens for us to view those traditions. But the more I thought about it, the less it sounded like something we, including myself, needed to hear today in the middle of Advent. So I brought something from a tradition that legend says goes back to Saint Francis and was probably brought to the Americas by the Spanish. This particular one is from Peru and is called a retablo.

I’m going to pass this around, so you can all look at it, touch it, hold it, examine it. While you’re doing this, I’d like you to think about these four questions:

What is the world like here?

What can go wrong in this world?

What challenges us in this world?

What could fulfill the promise of this world?

Don’t worry about remembering them all, I’ll repeat them once you’ve all had a chance to see the piece.

What is the world like here?

What can go wrong in this world?

What challenges us in this world?

What could fulfill the promise of this world?

When we look at our modern culture, what does it how does it view this world we’ve been talking about?

Drawing from this conversation, what are some of the things we believe? What positions do we hold?

What does this mean for us when we walk out those doors and return to the world?

Advent 2 2011

2011-12-07T16:55:00.003-05:00

Sermon

Advent 2, December 4, 2011

Grace Episcopal Church

Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8; Hymn 67, Hymnal 1982

[Note: I held a golden cord balled up in my left hand. As I pulled the cord out with my right hand I said the opening words, until the other end of the cord fell from my left hand and time had ended.]

This golden cord is time. We think of time as a straight line. We get up in the morning, the day moves on until evening, we go to bed and the next day, not the same day but the next day, begins. The week moves on in a straight line, then the months, then the years. And so on, until the end of time. Oops. There it is. The end of time.

Early on in the life of Christianity, the church took this golden cord, time, and tied together the beginning of time and the end of time into a circle. The cycle of the Christian spiritual life is a circle. It begins here, with Advent, a time of getting ready for the coming of Christ – which means different things for different people and maybe even all those different things are part of the truth.

For some this is a time for getting ready for the birth of the baby Jesus, or getting ready to celebrate his birthday. Then there are those for whom this is a time for getting ready for Jesus to come into our lives. There are even those of us who are using this time to get ready for Jesus to return to earth in power and great glory at the end of time.

Now you have to admit, the world is in a mess. The economy is in a mess. Our government is in a mess. Jobs are needed, right here in this congregation. Fair money practices are needed. The gap between rich and poor needs to be made smaller and the disappearing middle class needs to be restored. Otherwise we may just be heading for another Dark Age.

Historically it is times like these that people ramp up their hope that Jesus will return soon in power and great glory, justifying 2,000 years of waiting. In fact, if ever he was needed to come back and set everything right, it would be now, because surely, we can’t do it for ourselves.

But do we really want Jesus to come back? Wouldn’t that mean the end of everything we know; everything we have known?

Since last Sunday, as Father Jose Diaz was preaching, I was thinking about the descriptions of the second coming, descriptions like that of the second letter of Peter: “…the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire”, and “…the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire…”; “…the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved…”; …and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.”

And suddenly, I was reminded of the first coming of Christ – as a little baby. And I remembered how Jesus himself said he would come to us, as one who needs clothes or food or water or healing or is in prison and needs to be visited. Jesus said that whenever we care for anyone who is in need or in despair, we have met him. He has come to us.

The scriptures are full of hellfire and brimstone, and promises of a terrible, terrifying second coming of Christ, descending on a cloud, with armies of angels to back him up as he cleans up the mess we have made here.

And instead, Jesus has come to us quietly, and he continues to come to us, day in, day out, year after year: as a newborn baby, as a person in need, as a Muslim, as a Jew, or as a nobody, through whom Jesus comes to us with hand stretched out to carry us, as a shepherd cares for the sheep.

John says, in Mark’s gospel, that there is “one who is more powerful than I…coming after me”. And what is Jesus’s power? The power of force? The power of war? The power of destruction and death? If that had been, or is now, the power of Jesus, it would have happened on the cross, when the insult of crucifixion would have resulted in mass destruction.

Instead, the power of Jesus was in his descending to hell to heal the breach between hell and heaven and to go into the depths to shepherd and save. The power of Jesus is Love, and nothing can or will separate us or anyone else from the love of Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One of God.

In this world that seems bent on its own destruction through the power of financial and physical and even spiritual coercion, God says to you, through the prophet Isaiah today, words we may not want to hear.

Be comforted, be strengthened, my people. Speak tenderly to others. Tell others that what I say to you I say to them through you: that while humankind is fickle, the word of our God will stand forever. Here is your God: the one who is empty of earthly power and filled with the love of a shepherd, He will feed his flock, he will gather you in his arms, and lead you in gentleness.

And those of us who have experienced life under God as a mess, even as terror, or violence or betrayal, you who have experienced life as being nothing like Isaiah’s comforting vision of the rule of the Messiah are the ones given the authority to pronounce this blessing of comfort to a suffering world.

Let me say that again: Those days when your life has been brutal, even those days when you want to curse God, are the very days that give you the authority to say to others, out of your own depths of experience, “Be comforted. Peace be with you. Fear not. God is here.”

The final word goes to Br. Eldridge Pendleton of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist:

By our baptism we are incorporated into the body of Christ and given the authority to lead others to God. We do this best by the way we live, not with great fanfare, but in the quietness of daily living, by loving our neighbor, by good works, by resisting evil in every way we can. In doing so we become models for others, and by doing so we are prepared for the Lord’s coming.

-Br. Eldridge Pendleton Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Christ the King

2011-11-20T23:41:00.002-05:00

Matthew 25:31-46

Shane Marcus

“He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” May I speak in the name of the risen Christ. Amen.

I have these three chairs set in front of the altar for a reason. They are supposed to represent the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, seated, like they are in so many icons, with the son here, at the right hand of the Father. But I think the way these chairs are set up – the way that it’s easy to imagine Christ seated at the right hand of the father – it’s not very helpful.

To explain what I mean by this,I’m going to use two extended examples of how the way we normally think about things gets in the way of our spiritual growth, gets in the way of us really knowing who God is.

My first example is the parable of the sheep and the goats. What feeling does today’s gospel reading inspire in your spirit? Reassurance? Joy? Hope? Or does it inspire fear, insecurity, or self-loathing? Now, I’m sure that Matthew probably intended the parable of the sheep and the goats yo inspire fear and joy, insecurity and hope, depending on how you are living your life. The parable is about judgment for the unjust, and about justice for those who love their neighbor, about saving grace and about punishment. But I have to confess, I’m a little frustrated with the lectionary for giving us this parable on this day. Today is the last Sunday of the church year: the feast of Christ the King. This is our chance even as Advent starts again next week to look ahead to the end of time, when Jesus will put the world to rights and we will all live in that heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, where there will be no more sadness and no more pain, where Christ himself will be our light. Christ the king will reign over that city, and he will be our God, and we shall be his people. But instead of the heavenly vision of Revelation we get the parable of the sheep and the goats. Instead of a word of assurance that Christ is a good king, we are left wondering and afraid – at least I am – about the “outer darkness” and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Sometimes it’s possible to say that two things are true, but say them so close to each other that one of them loses its meaning. I think reading the parable of the sheep and the goats for Christ the king Sunday is like that. We make Christ’s kingship all about judgment. Especially because our eyes are colored by democracy, we can only think of kings and queens in two ways: as a matter of trivia, like the gaudy spectacle of the royal wedding; or sitting in judgment with power, and probably abusing it. The king is the judge. Jesus sits on the throne of Solomon, Sitting before the two prostitutes, listening to them argue about whose baby is alive and whose baby is dead, judging rightly between them. We think of Christ the king as a judge, waiting in fear and wondering if our acts of service make us a sheep or a goat, Wondering in our fruit is bearing life or if it is bearing death.

Christ is king; Jesus is judge; Both statements are true, but the one that sticks with us is judgment.

My second example – and I promise this will make sense in a minute, so please be patient with me – is this.

[SING "Joy to the World"]

Ok, how many of you know the tune to “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing?” Why don’t we sing this hymn to that tune, just to force our minds to think about the words in a different way than we are used too.

[SING]

Thanks. I hope this illustrates the point I made earlier, that saying two things that are true can make one of them lose its meaning. "Joy to the World" is one of my favorite hymns, but it is not a Christmas hymn. It’s commonly used that way, the glorious hymn at the end of the Christmas Eve Vigil, announcing the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ into human flesh, the dawn of salvation, tidings of comfort and joy for all humanity.

But Isaac Watts, the author of those words, wrote the hymn about the triumphant return of Christ to reign as king over all heaven and all earth. I think Isaac Watts helps us get a hold on what it means that Jesus is king. First of all, when the earth receives her king, what emotion should this bring?

Joy.

Joy to the world, as heaven and nature sing,
as every heart prepares Him room,

Joy.

When the savior reigns, is their weeping and gnashing of teeth? No, he says. Fields and floods, rocks hills and plains, they all repeat the sounding joy, joy echoing from our hearts and our songs out into nature.

Joy.

Jesus reign, The feast of Christ the king, should be a matter of joy and of love, not one of judgment.

Now, back to these three chairs. When we consider Christ at the right hand of God. See, most images you see of this have Christ facing out, the judge, sitting on a throne that looks as one of judgment, Christ the executor of the will and judgment of God. But what if that isn’t at all what it means for Christ to sit at the right hand of God? What if Christ – His work on earth complete, His body resurrected, His power made perfect – what if Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, not facing out to judge all people, but facing in? Because Jesus is resting in the love of his Father, the love of the Spirit, Loving, being loved, full of joy.

When we talk about Christ the king and Christ the judge in the same breath, we teach ourselves that the only part of kingship that matters is judgment. But for our spiritual lives to grow, we need to separate the two of them. Yes, Jesus cares about justice, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. But he reigns as king by teaching us how to be intimate with the God our father, and when we live into that intimacy we will be reformed into the kind of people who care about and do God’s justice in the world while Jesus rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove The glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.

Amen.

The Parable of the Talents

2011-11-13T23:30:00.002-05:00

Matthew 25:14-30

John F. Sutton

During my thirty-five years as a public school teacher, I worked under nine different principals. A few were educators, some were bureaucrats, and one or two were barely competent. One in the latter group redeemed himself with one profound statement. He advised us teachers to repeat it to students who complained about their courses being boring: Before you get interest you have to make an investment. Today’s gospel reading is about investment, about the use of money. It is also about another of Jesus’ favorite topics: the kingdom of God.

As we heard, the story tells of a rich man who, before going away for an indeterminate length of time, gives three of his slaves the responsibility of taking care of some of his property. He gives one five talents, another two talents, and another one talent, based on their individual abilities. Note that it is his property and that he does not tell his slaves what to do with it. (A talent is a large sum of money, based on a weight of silver or gold; it may be worth as much as fifteen times a worker’s annual wage, perhaps close to a million dollars in 2011 money.) The story goes on to tell that the first two slaves invest the talents they have been given—and double it. The third slave, unwilling to take a risk, buries his one talent for safe keeping. When the master returns and demands an accounting from his slaves as to what they have done with his money, he Is overjoyed with the two who have earned so much from their investments, and he chastises the one-talent slave who has made no investment.

As you know, a parable is a story in which the people and happenings have another meaning. So we may ask whom the characters in the parable of the talents represent. The master, obviously, is God. You may question this, as he is referred to as “a harsh man.” But that is the assessment of one slave, not necessarily the truth. The master, after all, trusts his slaves and generously rewards those who succeed. The slaves are…? You’ve guessed it: us. Like the slaves in the parable, God makes us stewards, temporary managers of God’s gifts. And God does not give us more responsibility than we can handle.

What lesson does Jesus want those who hear his parable—and us—to take from the story? First, we may ask, “What is the difference between the multi-talented slaves and the one-talented slave? The former are optimistic, faith-ful, willing to take risks. They see the world as one of abundance. The latter is pessimistic, fearful, dares not risk, plays it safe, and sees the world as one of scarcity.

Which slaves express what the kingdom of God is like? The optimists and risk-takers, of course. I believe that we are meant to focus on them and not on the slave afraid to invest. And we are meant to model ourselves on them. We are meant to use the gifts God gives us—after all, everything we have is God’s!—in such a way that one day God will say to us, “Well done, you good and faithful servants…enter into the joy of your master.” The faithful slaves share their master’s joy because they are such good stewards of his property. We, whom the faithful slaves represent, will share God’s joy when we use God’s gifts to the best of our ability. As the master says, “For to all those who have more will be given, and they will have an abundance.”

I have often thought that, if I were writing this parable, I would add two more slaves to the three in the story. How about a slave who invests his master’s money—and loses it all? What would the master say to him? Perhaps a generous master might say, “I applaud you for trying. You did your best. Don’t be discouraged. I still love you. Keep on working.” Or how about a slave who gives all his master’s money away to those in need? What would the master say to him? Perhaps—we will hear the following words in next Sunday’s gospel: “Inherit the kingdom prepared for you…I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was naked and you gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me.”

What is the purpose of earning money? Not just to make it. Not to hoard it. What are God’s gifts for? To help us live happy, healthy, safe, fulfilled lives, but also to use them in God’s service, to invest them in helping others. Helen Keller once wrote that our goal should be “to love this life as richly and helpfully as we can.”

Is the parable of the talents a commercial for capitalism, for investing? Yes, but it’s more about joy, the joy of being good stewards of God’s gifts. A. J. Jacobs, a journalist and agnostic Jew, wrote a book about his trying to live a whole year following all the commandments, rules and regulations in the Hebrew Bible. In his report about his following the commandment to tithe, he writes: “There’s a haunting line from the film The Chariots of Fire. It is spoken by Eric Liddell, the most religious runner, who carries a Bible with him during his sprint. He says, ‘When I run, I feel (God’s) pleasure.’” Jacob continues, “And as I give away money, I think I may have felt God’s pleasure…I (do) feel his pleasure. It’s a warm ember that starts at the back of my neck and spreads through my skull. I feel like I’m doing something I should have been doing all my life.” Jacob goes on to cite his own rule for giving: “Give what you can afford. Then give some more.” I say, “Give out of a feeling of abundance. Give out of joy. Give in order to feel that warm ember that starts at the back of your neck and spreads through your skull.”

I pray that you feel the joy of giving, to charities and to the church. How do you respond to the annual stewardship appeal? Do you say, “They’re asking for money again!”? Or do you say, “What can I do for God? I’ll do my very best to help.” Please look at your pledge as an investment. The ministries of Grace Church will make it grow. And God will say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Listen to the words of the Reverend Michael Kinman:

Each of us has been given gifts…beyond the conception of at least one-sixth of the world’s population who live in extreme poverty. But that’s not the best news. The best news is that we get to use those gifts to bring joy, bring life to other people. We actually can be God’s agents of healing in this world…We get to take chances and try risky things for the sake of love. We get to silence the voices that would say that in these difficult financial times we should circle the wagons and bury our gifts in the ground…silence them by doing the opposite—by giving more, by risking more, by trusting more.

The truth is we get out of the life God gives us in exponential proportion to how freely we give it away. That’s the real economics, God’s economics. The truth of the parable of the talents is that the first two servants didn’t need to be invited into the joy of their master, and the third didn’t need to be cast into outer darkness, because they were all already there by the way they had lived their lives. Right now, the media and the so-called experts are telling us to be afraid and hold back. But Christ in the world is telling us something different. That fear is not a Christian value. That holding back is not the way to the Kingdom of God. That we get to do great things. Take chances and try risky things for love with all we’ve been given. That is not about playing it safe. It’s about the joy.

As Saint Paul says in today’s epistle, “God has destined us not for wrath (such as the third slave earned) but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up”—especially as you practice stewardship along with all those who will make pledges to God through Grace Church this year. Everyone’s participation is important. Perhaps the one-talented slave thought, “I’m the low man on the totem pole. It won’t matter whether I earn money with my one little talent.” The hymn we sang before the gospel answers this kind of negative thinking:

Let none hear you idly saying, “There is nothing I can do,”
While the souls of some are dying and the Master calls for you.
Take the task He gives you gladly, let his work your pleasure be;
Answer quickly when He calls you, “Here am I, send me, send me.”

Pentecost 21-All the Faithful Departed

2011-11-06T20:40:00.003-05:00

Sermon, All the Faithful Departed
Sunday, November 6, 2011
The Reverend Lois Keen
Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT
Matthew 5:1-12

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
You who empty yourselves and come before God with open hearts, you are blessed.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
You who sorrow over the sufferings and wrongs of the world, you are blessed.
"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
You who are dispossessed, without enough work, without a home or a country or a people to call your own, without a place in this world, you are blessed.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
You who seek vindication for all those who suffer injustice, blessed are you.
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Those of you who forgive everyone as you have been forgiven by God, blessed are you.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
You who have a single-minded devotion for God, you are blessed.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
You who work day and night that God might use you to reconcile all people to God, humankind and all creation, blessed are you.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Any of you who have been, or are being, persecuted, God blesses you more than man can destroy you.
"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
For all those of you who do justice, who love mercy, and who walk humbly before God even when you are ridiculed and persecuted for going against the grain, God bless you.
Jesus pronounces outrageous blessings and then he lives them.
He is empty before God so God can fill him with God alone.
He is gentle, merciful and pure in heart with single-minded devotion for God alone.
He sorrows over suffering and wrong and seeks to relieve them even though he is persecuted for it.
He would make peace where others seek war, and is willing to stand up to injustice even though it costs him his life.
As we remember today all the faithful departed who have gone before us, we recognize that none of them embody all the beatitudes as Jesus did. But many embodied one or more of them.
Some of the faithful departed we miss, and some we want to be like, we want to imitate them because they embodied something we want to be. In imitating them, they live again.
I was born on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats, in an Army tent hospital in Wendover, Utah. When I was a year old my parents and I moved to Millington, New Jersey.
We lived there in a little bungalow across the road from the Passaic River. In the house behind us lived the Bingerts. Mr. Bingert, Uncle Teddy, was a music therapist in the Veterans
He was filled with a love for people, and his love for music served his love for people. From him I received the beatitude of that love for music that kept me connected to God even when there was nothing else for me, even when people let me down, or I let them down.
When I was in third grade, I was already way ahead of children my age in school. It was hard to stick out like that, but Mrs. Smith, my teacher, gave me extra, harder work to do, and left me the beatitude of a love of seeking, a love of knowledge and learning for its own sake, even if it did make me different.
Mr. Grossman was my junior high school music teacher. He was a funny little man with tight Italian patent leather shoes. One day, after I had moved away and was married, I read in a newspaper that Mr. Grossman had become Miss Grossman. In a time, long ago, when it was even more unheard of for a man to come out as transgendered and to become the woman he had been meant to be, Miss Grossman did it in a big way, so all the world would know.
From her I received the beatitude of bravery in the face of persecution and injustice, and the courage to be true to God by being true to myself.
My mother, who was by her own admission, terribly flawed, and died young, at the age of 69, gave me the beatitude of faith. And Mr. Rath, the Episcopalian minister when I was six, and Fr. Moon, the Episcopalian priest when I was fourteen, gave me the beatitude of the faithful servant in the temple, who stands before God day and night on behalf of the people, trying in my own terribly flawed way to be a vessel for God
What blessings did those of your loved ones who have died bequeath to you?
For all their flaws, and letdo with those things they passed on to us will determine what kind of life we live before the world.
Jesus passed on to us the Beatitudes as a roadmap to abundant life
Then he lived that life to the full so we could know it can be done.
What we do with these gifts he passed on to us will determine what kind of life we have to offer to others as a community and as individuals.
We will bless others when we have hearts that are open to God in all people;
When we suffer for those who suffer and act to change the wrongs and injustices in the world;
When we forgive as we have been forgiven;
When our single-minded devotion to God makes us thirst to be reconcilers and to make common cause with those who are persecuted.
As we bless others, even in the smallest ways, we will find ourselves blessed. As we leave ourselves open more and more to God working through us, we may even find ourselves being part of God
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and may Light Perpetual shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Sermon for All Saints: Spanish and English

2011-10-30T15:38:00.002-04:00

Sermon by the Reverend Lois Keen

October 30, 2011

Once upon a time the people of the world were afraid of the dark. They burned bonfires on all the mountaintops. They chased away the darkness with the light of their fires.

They took some of the fire to their homes. They carved out vegetables - giant turnips and pumpkins - for the fire. They put the turnips and pumpkins in their windows to warn the evil spirits to stay away.

In some villages people dressed up in scary costumes to frighten away the evil spirits.

Then, one day, a man came. He said wonderful things and he did amazing things so everyone was following him. They didn't know his name, so they asked him. And he said, "I am the Light".

The people of the world saw this Light. They knew it was the same light that was in their bonfires. But the bonfires only chased away the darkness outside. The man who said "I am the Light", his light chased away the darkness inside their hearts and their minds and their souls.

The people worshipped this true light, the Light for all the world, and they were never again afraid of the dark.

At the feast of All Saints we remember all the people who followed the Light of the World, Jesus Christ. These people were not better than you and me. We remember them because they loved Jesus more than they feared anything on earth. We hope to be like them. We hope to love Jesus like they did. We hope to be able to do what he needs us to do for his world.

Are you afraid of the dark? Are you afraid of anything? Come to Jesus. He is the Light that drives away all darkness. He can drive away your fears, if you will let him do that.

Jesus said, "I am the Light of the World. Follow me and you will find your way." Follow the Light of Christ and you never have to be afraid of the dark again.

Érase una vez la gente de todo el mundo se teme a la oscuridad. Se quemaron las hogueras en todas las cimas de las montañas. Que ahuyenta las tinieblas con la luz de las hogueras.

Ellos tomaron parte del fuego a sus casas. Se tallado verduras - nabos gigantes y calabazas - para el fuego. Ellos ponen los nabos y las calabazas en sus ventanas para advertir a los malos espíritus que se mantenga alejado.

En algunos pueblos la gente vestida con trajes de miedo para asustar a los malos espíritus.

Entonces, un día, llegó un hombre. Dijo cosas maravillosas y que hizo cosas sorprendentes que todo el mundo lo estaba siguiendo. No sabía su nombre, así que le pregunté. Y él dijo: "Yo soy la luz".

La gente de todo el mundo vio la luz. Ellos sabían que era la misma luz que estaba en sus hogueras. Pero las hogueras ahuyentaba la oscuridad exterior. El hombre que dijo "Yo soy la Luz", su luz ahuyenta la oscuridad dentro de sus corazones y sus mentes y sus almas.

La gente adoraba a esta verdadera luz, la Luz de todo el mundo, y que nunca fueron otra vez miedo a la oscuridad.

En la fiesta de Todos los Santos se recuerda a todas las personas que siguieron la luz del mundo, Jesucristo. Estas personas no eran mejores que tú y yo. Porque amaba a Jesús más de lo que temían cualquier cosa en la tierra, los recordamos. Esperamos ser como ellos. Esperamos a amar a Jesús como lo hicieron. Esperamos ser capaces de hacer lo que él nos necesita para hacer de su mundo.

¿Tienes miedo a la oscuridad? ¿Tienes miedo de algo? Ven a Jesús. Él es la Luz que aleja toda oscuridad. Él puede ahuyentar sus miedos, si usted lo deja hacer eso.

Jesús dijo: "Yo soy la Luz del Mundo. Venid conmigo, y encontrará su camino". Sigue la Luz de Cristo y nunca tener miedo de la oscuridad.

19th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-10-23T13:18:00.003-04:00

Exodus 22:21-27; Psalm 1; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

by Shane Marcus

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. Amen.

The gospel says from that from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions,

Which is a real shame,

Because I still have questions!

What exactly is my soul?

How do I love God with my mind?

If I love God with all my heart, what am I supposed to love my wife with?

What does love my neighbor as myself mean?

Do I love my neighbor as much as I love myself,

Or does it just mean that I myself, just as I am, have to love my neighbor?

And what about when my neighbor is a real jerk? What then, Jesus?

But Jesus doesn’t answer those questions. No one dared to ask them.

It’s a bit annoying, really, how much Jesus leaves to us to figure out on our own.

Some of you know this much better than I do,

But it can take a lifetime to figure some scriptures out,

To understand the answers to questions the Pharisees didn’t even dare to ask.

My youth group had a slogan that we used a lot when we thought about the two greatest commandments:

Love God, Love people.

God came first, other people second.

I tried to live this out in my own life the best that I could.

In high school, I learned to be a counselor to my friends,

Talking to them late into the night about the problems in their lives,

Sometimes I would offer advice but usually, I just tried to listen with compassion – to love people.

It got really out of hand the older I got and the more friends I made.

I would find myself out until well past my parent’s curfew, convinced that it was ok because I was helping out a friend, I was loving people.

Not only was I breaking rules my parents made to keep me safe,

But I was ignoring my own health and well being.

I thought I was loving my friends because I was following scripture.

Helping them to bear their burdens.

Loving people was the way I was trying to love God.

I took this pattern of living to college with me,

Where I was constantly rushing around to different people on campus,

listening to their stories and trying to cheer them up. I was loving people.

I have enough charisma that I was good at it,

And I soon made a lot of friends.

However, it really didn’t take long for this to become unsustainable.

I was stretched too thin, trying to love all these new people that I’d met,

And I didn’t want to neglect or ignore any of them.

But there were too many people for me to love them all.
This wasn’t quite a crisis of faith – I didn’t ever stop believing in God –

But my faith in the mantra of my youth group started to come apart.

How could I love people and love God

If God was putting too many people in my life for me to love them all?

It was in my second semester that a wise old professor came to me,

Full of love, guided by the Holy Spirit,

- an expert in the law, if you will -

And challenged me to pay really pay attention and learn the scriptures.

Shane, he said to me, you don’t pay attention to the whole commandment.

I see you trying to love all these other people,

But did you ever think about what it means to love your neighbor “as yourself?”

When do you ever stop to love yourself?

When do you ever stop to let God love you?

Shane, how are you loving God?

He had asked me questions I didn’t have any answers for.

The truth was that I didn’t ever stop to do any of those things.

In reality, I wasn’t loving God first – I had gotten the order confused.

But I wasn’t loving my neighbor as myself either.

I may have been showing love toward people,

I may have been acting in a loving way,

But it wasn’t really loving them.

It was actually a way for me to avoid myself,

to avoid my own insecurity and make it seem like the only reason I mattered for anything was if I could love other people.

I was hiding from myself, not loving myself.

Love God, Love people

I thought that’s what the two greatest commandments were!

But I had the order wrong.

And I missed out on part of it. I didn’t ever remember “as yourself.”

Now I’m trying to figure out what it means to love God,

Then to love myself,

And how to love my neighbor in the same way.

I think my favorite thing about the lectionary is that it puts so many readings together, in harmony with each other.

All of today’s readings have something to do with prayer.

The reading from Exodus talks about crying out to God,

And it says that when you do God will listen with compassion.

The reading from Psalm One talks about being planted by streams of water,

And those streams of water we are to sink our roots into are the words of God’s law,

That we meditate on day and night,

That we keep so close to our lips that we constantly mumble them to ourselves,

Making the sound of scripture the sound of a stream pouring forth from our mouths first, and then from our hearts.

Finally, the passage from Thessalonians talks about witnessing to the gospel of God -

Evangelism -

As the prayer spoken in the hearing of other people,

Not only for their benefit,

But so God can test our hearts.

So, the same day that the gospel leads us to ask what it means to love God, to love our neighbor, and to love ourselves,

We hear three other readings that talk about different kinds of prayer.

Praying with those who cry out to God is the prayer of hearts,

Lifting our voices in compassion for those who suffer.

Reading scripture and meditating on it is the prayer of our mind,

Soaking our thoughts and our words with God’s words

So that we learn to see God’s spirit at work everywhere.

The prayer of our soul, finally,

Is when we see God’s spirit at work in our neighbor

And we cannot help but talk about that Spirit and that love in their lives,

Cannot help naming the good news about the presence and the love of God at work in us, in them, and in the world.

Finding these different prayers has helped me reprioritize my life.

It helped me get the order of that original mantra back in the right order

Love God, love people.

I think what it means to love God is to pray.

That seems so obvious – how can you love someone you don’t talk to?

But prayer is the absolutely necessary foundation to loving God,

To spending time with God,

To getting to know God,

To learning how to see God in the world.

And when we have prayed –

When I have prayed,

And been bathed in the love of God,

And learned who I really am,

Then I am able to love myself,

Because I know I am a child of God first

And a neighbor second.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. And then, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Amen.

Sermon Notes

2011-10-16T00:48:00.000-04:00

Exodus 21:1-14; Psalm 106-1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
The Reverend Lois Keen

[This sermon was a textless sermon. Below are the notes from which I began.]

When I was growing up in Millington, New Jersey, my favorite place, on River Road where I lived, was Mrs. Brunowski’s house.

She lived there alone. Sometimes her grown daughter would visit her but we children were always welcome there at any time. She would serve us tea inside, in the front room, and sometimes she held court among us, sitting outside in a wicker chair with us kids all around.

Her lawn was not closely cut. There were domesticated and wild flowers. And in my memory a quality of light – it was always sunny! – a quality of light that was the essence of peace and well being.

I hadn’t thought of Mrs. Brunowski and her hospitality and her home in a long time. Then, in 2007, I was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer.

My primary feeling was, justifiably, anger. I wanted to cut myself off from God. But I didn’t. I can’t be angry with someone I refuse to face with my complaints. But in the early summer, I would sit in the back yard of 20 Hudson Street where I lived for my first few years here, and there I remembered Mrs. Brunowski’s house. I remembered it because the quality of light at 6 in the morning was the same as on those summer days at her house near the Passaic River in Millington, New Jersey. I would sit and say morning prayer – and sometimes refuse to say morning prayer – while gazing on the mist the hung just over the grass, watching the rising sun change everything.

On those mornings, with the memory of Mrs. Brunowski and her home filling me with memories of peace and well being, I felt joy.

Joy in the midst of my anger with God. Joy in the midst of being sick with chemotherapy. Joy in the midst of my growing weakness as I was able to eat fewer and fewer foods.

Joy.

I think the wedding garment in Matthew’s parable of the banquet is joy. The garment would have been provided by the host. And the crime, if you will, of the guest without a wedding garment, was not only to refuse to wear the garment provided, to refuse joy, but also the guest’s speechlessness. To be speechless when the host speaks to you is to refuse relationship. Even if all the guest did was make excuses about not being joyful, at least that would have been relationship. Instead, the guest was silent.

In my refusal to take my angry face away from before God, I was not speechless. In my refusal to pray I did still sit in the window of the front room on Hudson Street and gaze on the great oak tree on the other side of the street and face God with my feelings. Even if I thought, often, that God is no better than a feckless thug, at least I was struggling with who God really is and what God’s purpose is and what prayer is for.

And I was able, from time to time, against all reason, against all odds, to put on joy. And, when I thought about the wedding garment being joy, the first memory that came to me was Mrs. Brunowski’s house.

I do not have the answer to any of the questions that came to me during what I call the year of cancer. I only have more questions. And in spite of that, or maybe because of some sense of God’s faithfulness through all this, I am able to trust God enough to ask the questions, to stand before God with my challenges in true relationship, and to recognize joy when it comes my way and be thankful for it.

And now, speaking of joy, I have the pleasure of blessing any animals that have come with their human companions this morning.

“Bless, O God, this your creature, and all who are involved in its care and protection.”

Saint Michael and All Angels

2011-10-02T00:33:00.002-04:00

The Rev. Lois Keen

Genesis 28:10-17; Psalm 103: 19-22; Revelation 12:7-12; Matthew 21:33-46

In a little book called “Fallen Angels”, author Harold Bloom contends that we are all of us fallen angels.

He writes, “Angels – unfallen or fallen – make sense to me only if they represent something that was ours and that we have the potential to become again.” (pg 23)

Bloom is not speaking of devils or demons when he refers to fallen angels. And in speaking of angels he is not referring to the Victorian sentimental convention of small children as angels nor is he referring to our current cultural obsession with angels. Bloom is referring to C.S. Lewis’s view that “the angels who fell were those who failed to mature.”

This week on Facebook one friend posted something titled Gandhi’s 7 Dangers to Human Virtue. They are:

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Business without ethics

Science without humanity

Religion without sacrifice

Politics without principle

That is a little taste of what C.S. Lewis meant when he wrote that “the angels who fell were those who failed to mature”.

In Matthew’s gospel, the religious authorities are the ones who have failed to mature into the image and likeness of God. They have forgotten that everything they have and everything they are is the property of God alone. They merely have the loan or the lease of their lives, their families, their possessions, and even their righteousness. These are leased to them in exchange for them stewarding their lives and their religion and all they have to be used for God’s purposes alone.

Their righteousness in keeping the law was meant to mature into mercy for those who could not. Their wealth was meant not as a sign that they were righteous but instead to be poured out sacrificially in aid of the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, the widows and the orphans. Their learning was to be stewarded into love for all humankind. Even their currying favor with the Roman government was to be used to make life easier for the poor.

They did not do these things but instead adhered to religious prohibitions against all who were not Jews, and against all Jews who, by virtue of their professions or their status or their health or their poverty were to be kept in their place and admonished to do better on their own.

No wonder, then, when out of their own mouths they condemned themselves to being cast out and put to death. The tenants in the parable, they thought, were common day laborers, not worth much, and so how could you expect anything better from them than thuggery. So when Jesus asked them what the landowner should do with them, the eagerly replied, “OOo, Ooo, We know the answer to this one! They will be cast out and put to death and the vineyard given to others!” as if they were little 7th graders eager to please the teacher.

But then it dawned on them: They were the tenants in the parable, and the implication was they were to be cast out, they whose wealth and position were all the proof necessary to show they had God’s favor. How dare that upstart from Nazareth say such things! If only we could get rid of him before this heresy spreads.

It is almost as though John the Divine was writing about the fall of Jerusalem when he penned the final version of the passage we read today. For the war in heaven, read the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome. For the fallen angels, read the religious leaders who failed to do justice, love mercifully and walk in humility before God.

The leaders of Israel who were so threatened by Jesus meet C.S. Lewis’s definition of a fallen angel, as do the tenants in today’s parable, and the fallen angels of the Revelation. They have failed to mature.

James Kiefer, who writes lectionary notes online, writes about angels and humans very practically. Angels excel us in knowledge and power. Angels are totally obedient to God, having only God’s intentions for creation as their purpose. And part of God’s purpose for them is, apparently, to be sent to us to help and defend us.

Kiefer says this implies for us that we humans are not the top of the heap. That since the fallen angels are those who disobeyed god rather than be his willing servants, they are a reminder that “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”. Or, to quote Kiefer, “The greater our natural gifts and talents, the greater the damage if we turn them to bad ends. The more we have been given, the more will be expected of us.” And with regard to the protective attribute of the unfallen angels, we learn that “apparently God, instead of doing good things directly, often prefers to do them through His willing servants, enabling those who have accepted His love to show their love for one another.”

If, then, we are fallen angels, who have failed to mature, and the angels who have not fallen represent what we could become again, maturity would look like this:

Becoming totally obedient to doing God’s will
Using our gifts and talents to make the reign of God on earth visible and real.
Becoming people through whom God’s love for all people is truly visible, doing for God those things Jesus did.

Spiritual maturity is to accept that there are implications for humankind and all creation for those of us who accept that God loves us. That there is so much wrong in this world is a reflection of humankind’s accepting God’s love without giving deep thought to what is expected in return.

The trouble is, we are fallen angels, and even the saints, who we revere, were themselves, as perfect as they may seem to be, better maybe than we are but still imperfect. Even Mary, the mother of our Lord, is in the gospels, less than perfect. Yet she, and the saints, still were chosen to do God’s will, and did that to the best of their fallen abilities.

So where is the good news?

First, you who are employed, who have homes, who can feed yourselves and your families, who have health care, who are educated, who maybe even have retirement packages, you and I are good news for those who have none of these things, or even only some of these things.

Jesus was not interested in how a person got sick, or became poor, or even if the person was a criminal, a thief, a prostitute – these all had a claim on his mercy, his compassion, his gift for healing and his presence to aid them in amending their lives. Today, Jesus just might be the person who uses his wealth to create jobs at the cost of dividends to his stockholders, or gives full healthcare benefits to her employees and provides day care for their children. Jesus would be the contractor who, for every McMansion he builds, erects an entire development of low income housing and sees to its care himself, while reclaiming and putting aside some part of open space never to be touched by development.

Second, to return to today’s parable. Yes, Jesus lets his listeners condemn those immature, fallen tenants. But in reality, he, instead, died for them and for us. And God’s judgment on that death was to raise Jesus from the dead, making the resurrected life open to all fallen humanity – and, I imagine, all fallen angels.

An Interactive Sermon

2011-09-18T00:04:00.000-04:00

September 18, 2011

The Rev. Lois Keen with the congregation

The Texts: Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:106, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure: through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

What are the things you see passing away at Grace Church?

What are the things you see as enduring?

The reading from Exodus is all about God's generosity and the human response to that generosity. God has freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and they respond with grumbling, wishing they could go back to where everything was the same. In freedom, they have to learn to think for themselves and to be responsible for themselves and to one another. More grumbling.

What was the Hebrews' response to God's acts of generosity?

In the Gospel of Matthew, we encounter God as radically generous - those who work only an hour get the same full day's pay as those who worked all day. What was the response to God's generosity by those who worked all day?

In what ways has God been generous to Grace Church?

In what ways has Grace experienced God's generosity as unfair?

What have you learned about yourself and your church?

Final word: Our Dreams, on which we can build a future!

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while e are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sermon September 11 2011

2011-09-11T12:51:00.001-04:00

The Reverend Lois Keen
Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

Please turn to the BCP page 492.

In the midst of life we are in death;
from whom can we seek help?
From you alone, O Lord,
who by our sins are justly angered.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty,
Holy and merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death.

Lord, you know the secrets of our hearts;
shut not your ears to our prayers,
but spare us, O Lord.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty,
Holy and merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death.

O worthy and eternal Judge,
do not let the pains of death
turn us away from you at our last hour.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty,
Holy and merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death.

September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day. An achingly clear, blue sky. Sunny but comfortable. My niece Kirsten, who lived on 12th street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, says she was heading to work at Columbia University. Standing at the bus stop, a plane flew overhead. Something seemed strange, so, for some reason, she went back to her apartment instead of boarding the bus. When she got home, she saw through her window what had happened. She went next door to her neighbor. The neighbor had just come out of the shower. Framed in the window behind the neighbor, as she stood in the door, my niece could see the towers burning. The neighbor had no idea what was in the window behind her.

My niece’s boyfriend came downtown on his motorcycle and picked up Kirsten and whatever could be carried on the bike. He drove as far uptown as he could, away from the neighborhood where Kirsten had lived so close to the World Trade Center. The three cats were left behind. Miraculously, when, many days later, Kirsten could return home, the cats were alive and well. Two of them are still with her today.

I was home in Milford Delaware, getting ready to drive the 90 minutes north to the Cathedral in Wilmington for a clergy day. I had Good Morning America on. I saw the reporter whose name I no longer remember but he was a youngish man with blondish hair, reporting that a small plane seemed to fly overhead awfully low and had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. It didn’t seem like a big deal. It was an accident. I went in and took my shower.

When I came back to the bedroom, all hell had broken loose. I saw the second plane hit the second tower. I didn’t know what to think. Clearly this was no accident. As the morning wore closer to the time I had to leave for Wilmington, the worst had begun to happen. There were other attacks. I had to drive past Dover Air Force Base on my way north. There was speculation that this was one of the targets. It was like being in another world as I drove past it, waiting for something horrible to take us all by surprise.

At the Cathedral we were supposed to be celebrating the ordination of women to the priesthood which had first taken place thirty years before. The program was scrapped. We shared what we were feeling. Almost every clergy man and woman in the diocese was there. We just had to be there, together. We prayed together, then we all left before lunch. Before I left I phoned my senior warden. I told her to phone everyone in the parish to let them know there would be a service of prayers and laying on of hands for healing in the late afternoon. When it came time for the service, the place was packed. Nearly every person there remained to the end in order to receive the laying on of hands. I was the only priest there, so I laid hands on them all, one at a time, an endless line of men, women and children seeking some comfort.

The service that day was similar to what we will have this afternoon, and included this prayer:

BCP page 816, #6, for our enemies.

O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love
our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth:
deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in
your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Today, ten years later, it is time to remember that not everyone who died in the World Trade Center was a U.S. American and not everyone was a Christian. There were people from Central and South America, from Arab countries, from Israel, the former Soviet Union, and a large number of African and Central Asian countries. The United Kingdom, the British Isles, that is, and India came second and third after the U.S. for number of deaths. Many of the people in the World Trade Center who died that day were of other faiths than ours, including Muslims. The center included the offices of Arab oil interests.

Forgotten in all the focus on the twin towers as the icon for that horrible day are the attacks on the Pentagon and the plane that was brought down by its passengers in Pennsylvania, at the cost of all their lives, before it could get to the White House or Capital Hill, whichever it was headed for.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks of forgiveness as perpetual, never ending, poured out on us and our enemies by God and demanding in return that we, too, forgive to the extent to which we acknowledge how beholden we are to God for our own forgiven lives.

Forgiveness is not an easy thing. It may take an extraordinary act of will to forgive. The Amish families in Nickel, Pennsylvania, whose children were killed in their own school by a deranged man in 2006, will tell you that they have to remind themselves to forgive him every single day, and they do it because their very souls and lives and the lives and souls of those they love depend on it.

Forgiveness may also be an act of God. I experienced forgiveness as an act of God’s mercy when I realized one morning that I had forgiven a former perpetrator in my life – that I had in some way gone to sleep in the night still hating and being controlled by that hatred, and the next morning it was no longer there. I was able to move on with my life.
Forgiveness is a mystery. We are still embroiled in wars, the expressed purpose of which is to redress what happened to this country ten years ago. Revenge is still in the minds of many. Deep grief holds others back from being able to experience the abundant life for which Jesus was born, lived, died and was raised from the dead. Both grief and revenge seem inescapable, and at the same time vengeance and unrelieved grief do not serve life well.
BCP 467

Almighty God, look with pity upon the sorrows of your
servants for whom we pray. Remember them, Lord, in your mercy;
nourish them with patience; comfort them with a sense of your
goodness; lift up your countenance upon them; and give them
peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Bishops of the Diocese of Connecticut have issued a Pastoral Letter on this occasion, to be read in every parish and mission station this morning:

http://www.ctepiscopal.org/News/newsView.asp?NewsId=4096894&NewsCategoryID=1

In the service this afternoon there will be all the time you need to share your own experiences of and feelings about this day. For now I ask you turn to BCP 815, #3, A prayer for the human family

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us
through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole
human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which
infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us;
unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and
confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in
your good time, all nations and races may serve you in
harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

12th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-09-04T14:21:00.000-04:00

Year A Revised Common Lectionary – Proper 18
Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

It’s Not a Spectator Sport
by Jeffri Harre

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

When I first pulled the readings for this Sunday I had no clue how I was going to pull a sermon from them. The origins of a holiday that isn’t really ours, a Psalm with a dark side, Paul reiterating in his own way Jesus’ Great Commandment, and Jesus himself telling us how to do reconciliation. What do you do with those? Well, actually, you can pull several sermons out of them, but it takes some work.

Sermons are a lot like the shawls being created by the participants in Grace’s Shawl Ministry. In that ministry we’re given a set of instructions—or we find some. But being given the instructions doesn’t knit or crochet the shawl. We have to choose yarn for the shawl and obtain knitting needles or a crochet hook. And does the shawl knit or crochet itself then? Nope. We have to pick up the needles or hook, take the yarn and do the actual knitting or crocheting. After a while you have to stop staring at the reading and your notes and start writing because the sermon isn’t going to write itself.

During my recent stay at Holy Cross Monastery I was reminded that crocheting without television, radio, or social conversation can be a time of prayer and contemplation. So while I was in the contemplating the readings phase, I spent some time crocheting, and a phrase came to mind that shed some light on the readings as a group.

Life is not a spectator sport.

Let’s look at the passage from Exodus. God provided leadership for the Hebrews: Moses and Aaron. God plagued the Egyptians with several ecological disasters and was getting ready to visit one last catastrophe upon them. In preparation, God gave the Hebrews a set of very explicit instructions. But here’s the thing. In order for this whole Exodus thing to happen, the Hebrews had to participate. They couldn’t just sit there and wait for someone else to do it. They had to be an active part of their own deliverance. Otherwise, their own firstborn would have died that night. And more than that, if they hadn’t followed the instructions, packed up and followed Moses out of Egypt, they’d still be there.

We do have a similar history involving our own parish. Grace Episcopal Church was founded over 120 years ago by members St. Paul’s on the Green who were unhappy with the direction that parish was taking, such as the Anglo-Catholic reforms sweeping through England and the United States. If those folks hadn’t petitioned the Diocese to form a new parish, raised the money to build a new church, and walked down the hill to their new home, there wouldn’t be a Grace Church.

Life is not a spectator sport.

Psalm 149 starts out pleasantly enough. The people sing, dance and play instruments to praise the Lord. Then it turns to the people wreaking vengeance on others as part of God’s judgment. That’s something that makes liberal and most middle of the spectrum Christians uncomfortable. But it is in the Bible, and Psalm 149 is just one example of it. It’s not what we like to hear about God, wreaking vengeance. But God didn’t carry out His judgment alone. It is the people that have to “inflict on them the judgment decreed.” And even the worship and adoration in the first part of the psalm are about active participation. The timbrel and the harp don’t play themselves. Just ask the members of our music program!

And if we want to have a place to worship, that takes work, too. When we invited Betania to join us here in our building, they did not want to displace the Haitians, as had been done to them more than once. Instead, they refurbished the space in the Undercroft that had been our Children’s Chapel at one time. In fact, they cleaned and refurbished the whole Undercroft for the whole BetaniaGrace community.

Church is not a spectator sport.

In Paul’s day Christians expected Jesus to return at any moment. But did that mean sitting around and doing nothing? No. In today’s reading from Romans Paul tells them to put on the armor of light and live honorably. Yes, we are already forgiven and blessed by God’s grace, but that doesn’t mean sitting on our duffs and doing nothing. It means our lives should be changed in some meaningful way. And we should be DOING something.

And in Matthew’s Gospel today Jesus’ tells us that being the church in the world is not passive. Even to effect reconciliation among its own members requires doing something. Getting up and reaching out to the other person.

Christianity is not a spectator sport.

We keep wondering why people are not walking through the doors of our church, but when we walk out those doors, most of us simply go home. Times have changed. We no longer live in a society that expects church membership as a given and just being here on the corner of Mott and Union Park isn’t going to bring people through those doors.

Things aren’t going to change by us sitting on our duffs. God has given us leadership with vision. God has given us some instructions, although each of us may have different parts of them, and they certainly aren’t as clear and concise as those the Hebrews received for the Passover. One thing I do know, nothing will happen if we do not actively participate in the work of being a church. Of being Grace Episcopal Church and Iglesia Betania.

Doing something will mean not only doing those things we know how to do, it means learning how to do new things too. It’s what we do in the Shawl Ministry. Some of us have learned to knit. Some of us have learned to crochet. We’ve learned new skills in order to participate in this ministry. A ministry that reaches beyond the walls of this building.

Ministry is not a spectator sport.

My friends, our future is uncertain, as uncertain as the future the Hebrews faced when God called them out of Egypt. While we know the end of their story, they did not. They could only act on their faith. We don’t know the end of our story, but we can do no less. Act on our faith. Act.

It’s not a spectator sport.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

2011-07-24T16:43:00.003-04:00

Proper 12, Pentecost 6
Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The Rev. Lois Keen

I love this story about Jacob and Laban. Jacob, the sneak, Jacob, the manipulator, the trickster, is out-tricked by Laban!

All through this part of Genesis Jacob and Laban trade trick for trick. And Jacob the Trickster is the one to whom the people of Israel, the Jews, look back on as the father of them all.

In fact, most of the heroes of scripture are at the same time deeply flawed. Yet God loves them and upholds them and works salvation through them.

It says something about a people, in this case the Jews, that they don’t try to clean up their heroes but let the warts show for all the world to see, to the glory of God.

Yes, you heard me. The flaws of Jacob and Rahab and Tamar and David and Bathsheba and Solomon and Jonah and the prophets, all their flaws glorify God. For it is God’s love for them, warts and all, that proves to us that God alone saves, God alone reigns, God alone decides the value of a person. And if God wants to value a harlot or a trickster or an adulterer or a cranky, rebellious, disobedient prophet, then God will do so.

And God does do it! Over and over again. It is from within this flawed, sinful, life that God chooses to send the Messiah, the redeemer, the savior of the world.

Look at the parable of the dragnet, at the end of today’s Gospel. There is a tradition reading of this parable, the plain reading, that says that good and bad people will live together until the end of time when they will be sorted out and the bad people will be burned up in eternal fire.

There is a less traditional, but in some places popular reading, that says the good and bad in us will live side by side until we are judged, at which time the dross, the bad, will be burned out of us, we will be refined, and only the good God sees in us will endure.

I see in this parable that the dragnet is the lives of each of us, as well as the life of all of us together, and in that dragnet God takes us, individually and together, as we are, and uses whatever we are to advance the ultimate reign of God. For God alone judges truly. God alone knows the human heart, and the life that has gone into shaping the human soul.

See how much God loves and values each soul. Even the smallest, cramped, shriveled soul can, like a tiny seed of mustard, contribute to the reign of God, and only God knows how. We are left to take it on faith.

Together, even the smallest of souls can, in God’s economy, if God chooses, leaven enough flour to make a loaf of bread the size of this planet.

The tradition reading of the parables of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price is that we are to see the reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, as so great a treasure that we will give our all to obtain it, to be part of it. We are to pray and work for the kingdom, give ourselves away in order to possess it. God’s kingdom is to be prized beyond anything we can possess or imagine. This is one true reading.

The much less traditional reading, which is mine, is that God loves and values us and all creation so much that God has given up and sold everything to possess us just as we are. All of us.

We are so valuable, that, if necessary, God would steal us and hide us until God could purchase us. We are so valuable that God searches all creation until each of us is found and bought. And the price was God’s most precious possession: The only begotten Child of God, the birth, life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, born of a human woman, into a human family, in a specific place and time, to be given away for the sake of us all, and raised from death as the seal on the covenant, the promise that not only this one life, but all life is too precious to be lost in the end.

It is tempting to think that the merchant, searching for fine pearls, is God seeking only those souls fine enough and good enough to buy. That puts us back in the place of judge. We are not qualified to make that judgment. And we will continue to make those judgments because we are not God, we are human, with all sorts of good and not so good and even bad things mixed up in us, even the best of us, until God sorts it all out.

This is why, in our Prayer Book, in the rite of reconciliation of a penitent, sometimes called confession, the priest always acknowledges to the penitent one her own sinfulness and asks the penitent to pray for her.

There are, of course, huge holes in my reading and in my reasoning. I know it. None of this explains away the evil in the world, and the evil that humans do to one another and to all that God created.

I preach this morning against the backdrop of my own continual evolution of trying to know God, to understand God’s absence, God’s apparent failure to fix things that are wrong; against the backdrop of people I know losing their jobs and still jobless. Against the backdrop of six senior staff people being laid off at Diocesan House in Hartford, people I know and for whom I grieve and fear. I speak today against the backdrop of my own anxiety for Grace and Betania churches and the people I serve, and for myself. I preach having fallen asleep Wednesday night saying to God, “Who are you, really, God? What are you? What are you really about?”

There is no explanation, in God’s love, for a whole lot of things. Occasionally you hear of the survivor of some horrible crime forgiving, truly forgiving, the perpetrator. That is rare. The normal response is anger, hatred, desire for revenge, even depression. These responses can come up even in picky things, like being cut off by a driver on the highway. In those times, it is almost impossible to imagine that the person who has wronged us is equal to us in God’s eyes.

I could not in safety speak these things, these contradictions, out loud without the assurance from Jacob’s story, the assurance of Jesus’s parables, and of the verses from today’s reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Paul writes, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought…” while I pray – dear God, strike my enemy dead – “…but that very Spirit” Paul says, “intercedes with signs too deep for words…” – dear God, says the Spirit, your servant is in trouble. Help. – “And God, who searches the heart…” – Lois is really angry! – “…knows what is the mind of the Spirit…” – She needs my love, and some perspective – “…because the Spirit intercedes for [all people] according to the will of God” and God’s will is only, always, love.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And that goes for everyone who is, and ever was, and ever will be.

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

2011-07-10T16:00:00.004-04:00

Revised Common Lectionary Year A, Proper 10
Genesis 25:19-34
Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT

Jacob the Sneak
by Jeffri Harre

Loving God, you call us to be your stories in the world. We come before you seeking to be touched by your story. Open our lips to share our stories with one another and open our hearts to bring comfort, inspiration, joy and laughter to each other. Amen.

“Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.” Does this sound familiar? It does to me. When we were growing up Scott and I each claimed, only half jokingly, that our parents loved the other brother best. Then came the year when Scott brought Maureen up from college to meet the family, and I arrived with Brian in tow for the same reason. For many years after that the family joke was that our parents loved Maureen and Brian best.

Sibling rivalry is nothing new, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Bible is familiar with its stories of siblings living in the various parts of what one friend of mine calls Jesus’ big, fat, dysfunctional family tree. But how many families do you know that hang their dirty laundry out for the world to see? And yet, that is exactly what the writers and editors of the Hebrew Scriptures have done. Not in terms of Jesus, although we Christians have done enough of that in our own Scriptures and traditions, but definitely in terms of their own history. Who celebrates ancestors who are not, shall we say, the most upstanding examples of human beings, especially when measured against their own laws and traditions?

Yet those are the very stories that have been passed down and repeated through the generations. Cain the murderer; Joseph the spoiled brat; Rahab the prostitute; Sampson the lustful; David the Adulterer; Ruth the foreigner; and in today’s reading, Jacob the sneak.

A sneak? The great patriarch of Israel? The man God names Israel, the father of a nation? Well let’s look at the story.

During her particularly difficult pregnancy Rebekah goes to God to ask why. It is God, after all, who, in response to Isaac’s prayers for his barren wife, “granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.” She asks him directly, "If it is to be this way, why do I live?" God responds by telling her that "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger."

Yet Jacob feels the need to maneuver Esau into selling the birthright due to the oldest son by tradition, even though God has already promised that Jacob is the favored child. Once again we have a younger son favored by God. What is it with the writers of Scripture and younger sons? Let me tell you, as an older son, this kind of stuff makes me nuts. On the other hand, the word games used in this story mean that it is as much about tribal rivalry as sibling rivalry. The Hebrew that describes Esau as red and hairy plays on the location and name of a neighboring tribe, the Edomites.

Ralph Milton writes:

In many tribal cultures a sense of what is right and wrong depends on who is doing what to whom. If you can [needle] someone from another tribe, that’s just fine. In fact, it’s your responsibility to do that if you can. The Israelites told with relish, how their Jacob [hoodwinked] those slow, stupid Edomites. We think it reprehensible of Jacob to cheat Esau, but the Israelites would have considered it downright traitorous not to rip off another tribe, provided you could get away with it.(http://ralphmiltonsrumors.blogspot.com/2008/07/preaching-materials-for-july-13-2008.html, as of July 8, 2011)

So here we are back to Jacob the sneak.

Why do I call him a sneak? Because, in spite of the fact that this story is probably as much about two tribes as two brothers, it’s the story of the brothers that has come down to us as Christians, not the tribal story. And there are a few pieces of the story that we aren’t even going to hear because of the way our lectionary is laid out. The part of Genesis we’ll hear next week is the story most of us know as Jacob’s Ladder. There are three, count them, three whole chapters between today’s reading and next week’s. We won’t read about famine causing Isaac to move his family a number of times and repeat many of the things that his father did. Nor will we read a few short lines about Esau’s wives. Nor the story of Esau and Jacob that we’re probably most familiar with.

And that’s where we learn just how much of a sneak Jacob can be.

Isaac, now going blind, calls Esau, his favorite son, and says, “See, I am old; I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quivers and your bow, and go out to the field, and hunt game for me. Then prepare for me savory food, such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may bless you before I die.” Rebekah happens to overhear them, and she quickly goes to find Jacob, her favorite son. She tells him, “Go to the flock, and get me two choice kids, so that I may prepare from them savory food for your father, such as he likes; and you shall take it to your father to eat, so that he may bless you before he dies.” Jacob points out that he isn’t hairy like Esau, and his father, though blind, will be able to feel the difference and curse him instead. As we might say today, Rebekah has an App for that. While the dish is cooking, she dresses Jacob in some of Esau’s clothes and puts the skins of the slaughtered kids on his hands and the back of his neck.

But doesn’t that make Rebekah the sneaky one? Okay, I’ll give you that one, but Jacob goes along without protest. Not to mention he’s already manipulated Esau into selling his birthright for a meal of bread and stew. Not a particularly fair deal, if you ask me. So he comes by it naturally. He takes after his mother.

With the preparations complete, smelling and feeling like his brother, Jacob goes to his father and fools Isaac into believing that he is Esau. And so Isaac eats and then gives his younger son the blessing that should have been the older son’s. Now Jacob has not only his brother’s inheritance, but his patriarchal blessing as well. What was it we heard God say before these men were born? “The elder shall serve the younger." So why did Jacob find it necessary to use deceit to obtain what he has already been promised?

Jacob the sneak, indeed.

No sooner does Jacob depart from his father’s tent then Esau returns from his hunting, prepares a savory dish, and takes it to Isaac, who realizes the trick. Can we blame Esau for saying to himself, “The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob.” Unfortunately, he says that out loud, and again Rebekah overhears something not meant for her ears. And again she runs to her younger son, warns him of his brother’s intention, and sends him off to her brother in the land of her birth. (Genesis 27)

And so Jacob the sneak runs off in the night.

But before we get to the story of the ladder, there’s a slightly different version of the blessing story, which many scholars believe comes from a different source. Here Isaac calls Jacob to him and blesses him and then sends him to his mother’s family to find a wife there rather than marry one of the Canaanite women from the land where they are currently living. (Genesis 28:1-5)

So we have Jacob the sneak, and Jacob the dutiful son. Two traditions placed in tension for our reading, reflection, and interpretation.

This week I find myself in a place where I strongly identify with Esau. Some of it has to do with being an older son, but mostly I’ve been put in the role of the metaphorical big brother over and over. I’ve watched those younger brothers and sisters receive blessings and inheritances I will not. I have seen them go places I cannot. Next year, next month, next week, or even tomorrow, I might find myself interpreting the story of Esau and Jacob differently. Neither interpretation is wrong. They are reflections of where I am in my life and how that affects the way in which I tell my story of being part of God’s creation.

You will have your own reflections and interpretations. How do they affect the way you tell your story of being part of God’s creation? Can we share those stories with each other? I invite you to do so, ending as I began:

Loving God, you call us to be your stories in the world. We come before you seeking to be touched by your story. Open our lips to share our stories with one another and open our hearts to bring comfort, inspiration, joy and laughter to each other. Amen.

Our Independence Day Service is Covered by The Norwalk Hour

2011-07-05T13:41:00.000-04:00

Grace Episcopal Church uses historical readings to highlight 'Independence Sunday' - The Hour - Norwalk's Newspaper

Independence Sunday

2011-06-28T19:51:00.000-04:00

The Rev. Lois Keen

Independence Sunday Service of Readings and Music

There will be no sermon at Grace on Independence Sunday, July 3, 2011. The readings from various historical sources, and the Gospel of Matthew, will be let stand on their own, followed by Holy Communion. Instead, here is a meditation on the portion of Matthew appointed for that day.

Gospel: Matthew 5:43-48

Jesus said, "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, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Three hundred years ago this nation was founded in protest against tyranny and fashioned in freedom for all men. At the same time, it was decided that the 1700’s were not the time for freedom and equality for women, or for slaves who had been imported from Africa. The matter of women’s suffrage was delayed whilst this nation took up, decades later, the matter of freedom for African slaves. This nation of freedom, liberty and justice for all, came to war over the matter.

In the readings for this morning, we heard the ending of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In the main body of that address, Lincoln wrote this about the civil war:

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it. All sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war – seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war. But one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive. And the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

“…Each [side] looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes [God’s] aid against the other…The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully…Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” (carved on the wall inside the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC.)

Today we Christians all over the world still read the same Bible. We share the earlier scriptures with Judaism. And Islam reveres our scriptures and Jesus. We Christians, with Jews and Muslims, pray to the same God. It is in how we each read the scriptures, and how we imagine God, that draws us into coming to blows with one another, Christian with Muslim, Muslim with Jew, Christian with Christian, and on and on world without end. All of us drawing from our scriptures the right to war, and all of us drawing from our prayers the strength to go to war.

I cannot speak to how Muslims and Jews understand their scriptures or how and who they believe God is. I can speak to the Christian scriptures.

Do we Christians not believe Jesus meant it as a command to us, what we read today from Matthew’s gospel?

“I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”

And do we not hear what Jesus is really saying when he says we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? Does he say, “Love them, pray for them, and go to war against them”? Where in these words is the warrant for war, on the world stage, within a nation, or against one another in our families, our churches, our jobs, our acquaintances?

And are we always “the righteous”? If we have enemies, are we not also someone else’s enemy? And you know the history of persecution, how those who have been persecuted so often then turn and persecute others in return.

I’m no fool. I don’t think we will see an end to war or persecution on this side of life. We humans are too invested in possessiveness and greed and even fear of one another. Without these, England might have said to the colonies, “Oh, of course. We see the injustice in what we are doing. We will make you equals in this enterprise of colony building, or maybe we will even set you free from us to build your own nation!” But no, England wanted the revenue and the resources to be had, and the power and control. And so did we.

It was the same on both sides of our nation’s Civil War. It is the same when nations war on others in order to annex territory, or to gain access to some resource or other. And of course those on the receiving end of tyranny and war have no choice but to defend themselves. And we see no alternative to war when we see others being persecuted. And so we continue.

And so Jesus weeps, while he commands us to love one another, all others, and pray for one another, all others.

I believe in God. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to make real the teachings of Jesus. I think that we would see a difference in the world if we Christians, all of us, took Jesus’s command to love and pray, without prejudice, unconditionally for our enemies and persecutors. I pray that I can be one who prays thus, “With malice toward none, with charity for all…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Second Sunday after Pentecost

2011-06-26T19:47:00.002-04:00

The Rev. Lois Keen

Proper 8, RCL: Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

ENGLISH

Almighty God, Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you. (from the collect for the day)

In Genesis this morning we heard that “Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" and Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son…And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide”.”

We, Iglesia Betania and Grace, Hispanic/Latino, Caribbean, African, African/American/, European, have offered up everything in order to be a community that reflects reconciliation and restoration and transformation to this city, this diocese, this nation, this world.

How will God, then, provide for this enterprise?

What is God waiting for us to provide first?

In Psalm 13 we pray, “How long, O LORD? How long shall I have perplexity in my mind…But I put my trust in your mercy; I will sing to the LORD, for the LORD has dealt with me richly…”

What has God already provided?

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he thanks God that the congregation has “become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted…” What is that teaching?

The teaching is this: that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, Jew or Greek, male or female, legal or illegal, documented or undocumented, Caribbean or European, Hispanic or African, but one body.

God has provided that we have come together in Jesus’s name. How will we build on that gift?

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me…”

Whoever you welcome is Jesus Christ. When all of us together welcome one another as equals, ready to learn from one another, none of us being more in possession of this building or this place than one another, we welcome Jesus Christ.

We have been sent here by God, each one of us. God alone has called us together. We are the gift provided by God. God may indeed provide more. In gratitude, we must provide our selves, our souls and our bodies, in the name of Jesus Christ.

SPANISH

Dios todopoderoso, Concédenos que estemos unidos en espíritu, de tal modo que lleguemos a ser un templo santo aceptable a ti. Amen.

Hoy en el Génesis leemos:

Isaac le dijo a Abraham:

—¡Padre!

—Dime, hijo mío.

—Aquí tenemos el fuego y la leña —continuó Isaac—; pero, ¿dónde está el cordero para el holocausto?
—El cordero, hijo mío, lo proveerá Dios —le respondió Abraham.

Abraham alzó la vista y, en un matorral, vio un carnero enredado por los cuernos. Fue entonces, tomó el carnero y lo ofreció como holocausto, en lugar de su hijo. A ese sitio Abraham le puso por nombre: «El Señor provee.»

Nosotros, la Iglesia Betania, Iglesia de la Gracia, hispanos / latinos, caribeños, africanos, africanos / americanos y europeos, ofrecen a Dios todo lo que tenemos para que podamos ser una comunidad. Somos la imagen de la reconciliación, la restauración y transformación de esta ciudad, esta diócesis, a esta nación, este mundo.

¿Cómo proveyó Dios para esta empresa? Lo proveerá Dios?

¿Qué quiere Dios de nosotros?

Salmo trece:

¿Hasta cuándo, oh Señor?

¿Hasta cuándo tendré dudas en mi mente?

Mas yo en tu misericordia he confiado;

Cantaré al Señor, porque me ha hecho bien.

¿Qué ha dado Dios ya?

Romanos: San Pablo da gracias a Dios: Que ya se han sometido de corazón a la enseñanza que les fue transmitida.

¿Qué es esta enseñanza?

Esta es la enseñanza.

En Cristo no hay esclavo ni libre. En Cristo no hay Judio ni griego, no hay hombre o mujer, no legal o ilegal, no documentada o indocumentada, no el Caribe o Europa, no hispano o africano. Hay un solo cuerpo.

Dios establece que nos reunimos en el nombre de Jesús. ¿Cómo vamos a aprovechar ese regalo?

Jesús dijo: »Quien los recibe a ustedes, me recibe a mí…<<

Todo el mundo le dan la bienvenida es Jesucristo.

Cuando le damos la bienvenida unos a los otros como iguales, damos la bienvenida a Cristo.

Cuando creemos que todo propietario de este lugar juntos, damos la bienvenida a Jesucristo.

Cada uno de nosotros ha enviado aquí por Dios. Sólo Dios nos ha convocado. Somos el regalo dado por Dios. Dios puede dar más. En agradecimiento debemos ofrecer nuestras personas, nuestras almas y nuestros cuerpos en el nombre de Jesucristo.

Sermon, Trinity Sunday

2011-06-20T19:40:00.000-04:00

The sermon for yesterday, Trinity Sunday, was the Rublev Trinity...and its means as a window into the eternal.

Note the space between the first and third figures, down front. That is your place at the table. Welcome. Enter. Rest.

Easter 6 May 29 2011

2011-05-29T08:23:00.001-04:00

The sermon this morning is in Spanish, Jorge Rosa, preacher. So there is no sermon for me to post.

However, as I have been asking on Facebook and Twitter, Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commandments...".

Do you love Jesus?

How do you show your love for Jesus?

I propose that loving Jesus is more about actions than feelings.

The opening prayer, or collect, for the day includes the petitions "Pour into our hearts such love for you...". Is it even possible for us to love Jesus without God's help? Is it possible for us to do love toward one another and all people and, indeed, all creation, without God's help?

Easter 5

2011-05-23T09:48:00.002-04:00

5 Easter, May 22, 2011

The Reverend Lois Keen

Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT

Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

My family moved to Lewes, Delaware in 1959, when I was fourteen. We attended St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and I was active in the choir and the youth group, taught Sunday school, played the piano for Sunday school worship, and played the organ at Christmas and Easter when Mrs. A. was on vacation.

As a member of the youth group, I attended the diocesan youth events and often Bishop Mosley would be there to give us a little talk. The big buzz always was the assumed romance between one of the Mosley girls and the son of the dean of the cathedral. These are the things that interest teenagers.

However, I do not remember ever knowing the bishop’s wife, Betty Mosley. And that’s too bad, because just yesterday I learned that Mrs. Mosley had a profound influence on my life and vocation.

Betty Mosley died on May 2^nd. Her obituary reports that in 1972, when Mrs. Mosley and other bishops’ wives accompanied their husbands to the annual meeting of the House of Bishops, Mrs. Mosley was among those who invited four women who were seeking ordination to the priesthood to talk with all the bishops’ wives. Ordination was still closed to women in the Episcopal Church at that time. The bishops’ wives all heard from these three women and it caused a great stir. Some of the bishops were, as the obituary reports, livid.

A year later, while some men were being ordained in the cathedral in New York, the women who hoped someday to be ordained were meeting with Mrs. Mosley for refreshments and strategizing.

In 1974 the extra-canonical ordinations of eleven women to the priesthood took place in Philadelphia. “Extra-canonical” means “outside canon law”. Mrs. Mosley was there as the lay presenter for Carter Hayward, one of those eleven women ordained “irregularly”.

In 1976 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church changed church law to allow for the ordination of women to the priesthood, thanks, in part, to Betty Mosley.

So, you see, I owe the fulfillment of my vocation as a priest to her, and I give thanks to God for her advocacy.

I owe my vocation, as well, to at least two other women. I graduated from seminary in 1997 with no promise of ordination. The bishop allowed me to substitute for vacationing clergy during that summer so I would have something to do. In one of those places an eleven year old girl saw a woman leading worship for the first time when I was allowed to supply as officiant for Morning Prayer.

The child’s grandmother took me out to breakfast between the two services. In short time I was re-examined by the necessary committees and was shortly made a candidate for ordination. I have been told that the woman with whom I had breakfast was the most influential woman in the diocese and she had commended me to the powers that be. I had no idea until after I was ordained.

And then there was Blanche. Remember that irregular ordination service in Philadelphia in 1974? Blanche was there. She helped plan the service. In due time she herself was ordained a priest, and for my first two years as a newly ordained priest, she was my mentor. Blanche was a huge influence on me for good.

The collect for today contains these words, “…that we may steadfastly follow his steps…” I stand on the shoulders of countless women and men who have gone before me, who followed in the steps of Jesus, and these three symbolize them all.

Every Christian community, as they follow in the steps of Jesus, stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Take another look at the reading from Acts – that tiny, short reading about the death of St. Stephen. I notice two things right off: the witnesses “laid their coats at the feet of a young man…” and, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”.

When did we first read about the crowd throwing their coats at the feet of someone? Was it not Jesus, as he entered Jerusalem in triumph? In the gospel of Luke, who also wrote Acts, we read, “As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.” Luke also has, in some texts of his gospel, the words of Jesus from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

Luke is building the story of the acts of the apostles on the story of Jesus, just as God’s Holy Spirit builds us on the story and acts of Jesus and of the apostles.

The young man at whose feet the crowd spread their cloaks was Saul, who would later become Paul. At the time of Stephen’s execution Saul was persecuting zealously the followers of Jesus. As Luke reports Stephen seeing the heavens opened “and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”, so Saul, on his way to Damascus, saw a great light from which came the voice of Jesus calling to him.

In God’s good time, Saul became Paul, a devout follower himself of Jesus, standing on the shoulders of those he persecuted and following in Jesus’s footsteps even to death.

The writer of the first letter of Peter reminds his readers that God promised to lay a cornerstone in Zion, one that would be rejected. We are to be built up as a spiritual house, with that rejected but precious stone as the head of the corner.

In the gospel of John, Jesus says that in God’s house there are many dwelling places. He doesn’t say, “In heaven there are many dwelling places”, he says, “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places”.

You are some of those dwelling places when you are built up as a spiritual house, with Christ as the cornerstone. Whoever believes Jesus is promised to be able to do his works, and even greater works than Jesus has already done.

Some of Jesus’s works are St. Stephen, St. Paul, Betty Mosley, the grandmother in my old diocese, Blanche, me, and you.

I am still learning whose shoulders I stand on. On whose shoulders do you stand? You are a dwelling place in God’s house – what are the works of Jesus that you have done and still are doing?

Do you work to reply kindly to angry customers?

Do you work to overcome your antipathy to someone you know? Have you spent your whole life writing letters to people, giving them words of encouragement and support?

Have you given yourself to passing on wisdom and beauty to the young? Do you stand up for the underdog, the despised ones, the rejected ones?

Do you see in yourself, much to your surprise, a living stone of love, of light, of life, of joy? Have you worked to transform a life of pain and disappointment into a life of prayer for others?

You were baptized in Jesus’s name. Somewhere in your story are the footsteps of Jesus. What is your story of following Jesus? On whose shoulders, on whose stories, does your own life stand? Can you feel the feet of those who, even now, stand on your own shoulders?

I wonder what stories they will tell when they realize the legacy from which their lives came – “from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted”, from broken to whole, living stones, built up over the centuries as a spiritual house of many dwelling places, many rooms, stone on stone, with Jesus Christ as the head of the corner, world without end.

4th Sunday of Easter

2011-05-16T10:32:00.001-04:00

May 15, 2011
The Reverend Lois Keen
Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10; Psalm 23

In a blog post at Episcopal Café I read about a Chicago banker who lost her job last year and was facing living on the street with her child. A man who himself has been living on the street for seven years has been paying her rent in a hotel to keep them off the streets. The man is repaying the banker’s past kindness. He panhandles to get the money for her hotel. [See the whole story here.]

Who is the shepherd? Who are the sheep?

What we read and hear of scriptures on a Sunday morning, from the Hebrew scriptures or the Epistles and Gospels of the Christian scriptures, we hear in bits and pieces that don’t necessarily hang together, and we hear them out of context.

Today’s reading from 1 Peter, chapter 2, is irresponsibly out of context and, on Good Shepherd Sunday, a poor choice. I suppose it is here because it mentions the shepherd in the last line. The reading itself, however, must not go without comment from the preacher.

If you go home and read all of the first letter of Peter, you will find that Peter is encouraging people who, for their faith, are living as foreigners in their own land, and enduring great trials, which Peter says have been sent in order to test their faith as gold is tested, tried, in the furnace.

He reminds his readers that they are living stones, rejected by others but precious to God. As virtual foreigners, for the sake of God, they are to obey all authorities in their pagan society. And then, he writes, specifically to slaves, literal slaves, not figurative slaves, “Slaves, in reverent fear of God, submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.”

And then follow the words of today’s reading, words addressed to those slaves, instructing them to put up with abusive masters.

In or out of context this passage is among the texts of terror that have been used by well-meaning ministers, and not-so-well-meaning abusers, to keep women in abusive marriages and to justify all kinds of abuse of adults and children alike. The excuse for this is found in today’s selection: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”

Free men and women who suffer persecution for their faith may find encouragement to endure, and to give their suffering some meaning to their lives from 1 Peter. Certainly in Peter’s time, when abuse and molestation of women, children and slaves was expected, and recourse against abuse was impossible, these words surely did give comfort, encouragement and meaning.
Today, however, now that we know better, now that we know the legacy that abuse carries with it in perpetuating violence and more abuse, this scripture must never be used to justify abuse, or to encourage a person to endure abuse.

And this passage must not be left to just lie there without comment from the preacher.

Clergy or counselors or others in authority who still do misuse this passage, are the thieves and robbers of John’s gospel, who come into the sheepfold by ways other than through the true gate, the Good Shepherd.
And now we come to John’s gospel and the true gate. When John was writing his, the good news of Jesus gave real life to all sorts of people who were otherwise outside the pale – not just adulterers, and prostitutes and tax collectors and women and the little children, but undertakers, and people who tanned hides or worked in gold, and, yes, shepherds. It was, therefore, imperative that this gospel should be held up as the only way to that real, true, abundant life.

The Christian communities were breaking down barriers between insiders and outsiders, righteous and unrighteous, holding all property and things in common, as Luke reports in the Acts of the Apostles, and living in a way that was turned against them. They did not comply with the civil cult, the civil religion. They did not burn incense to Caesar nor would they call him “Son of God” as the law required. This put them at constant risk of persecution, so it was necessary that they protect one another – only letting in the true shepherds, and those who had been tested and found not to be spies, because all others could cause the sheep to be scattered and even slaughtered.

Having said all this, while the bits of scripture chosen for today have some things in them that require rehabilitation, things that raise red flags, they are scriptures and as such we take them seriously, while not literally or out of context. So how can we reframe these readings?
Today, to be a Christian may just feel like being a foreigner in your own country. Christianity is getting a bad rap because of the beliefs and practices of some, the most vocal, whose understanding of their faith in Christ makes them enemies of other Christians who do not believe as they do. As we Christians war with one another about “absolute truth” and just what is the “faith once delivered to the saints”, atheism is becoming a militant religion all in its own right.

A very tiny example of what makes Christianity a mockery in the world today is my experience of an extremely conservative Episcopal Church in another part of this country. There, one day, I observed milk crates of bag lunches being guarded by women in the church porch while the poor and homeless were inside having to attend Bible study before they could receive their “free” lunch.

The expectation that the poor have to earn their lunch by attending revivals or prayer meetings or Bible studies probably goes back at least to the Dust Bowl era in this country, and it makes a lie of the gospel it hopes to preach.

But mostly we are foreigners in our own land because so few people today know anything about us except through the media, which is interested only in the sensational. So 1 Peter can bring us some comfort: We are living stones, precious to and loved by God, even when we’re despised by others. And, at the same time, we can push past Peter to realize, after 2,000 years, that all people, because they are created by God, are living stones, precious to their Creator.

We can even reframe the instructions to endure abuse. We all experience trials, sickness, pain, and anguish. While we are experiencing that part of those trials which we can do nothing about, we can make of them an offering to God on behalf of others who are also suffering.
Those of you who have shared with me the journey through breast cancer treatments may relate to this. Chemotherapy was horrible. Over the months of my visits to the infusion unit I got sicker and sicker. My time was hard, and at the same time I saw others, every week, who were having a worse time than I, whose cancer was worse, whose treatments were worse, who were much sicker.

Their trials did not diminish mine. Instead they united me with these other living stones, for whom I offered to God on their behalf my own trials and whatever measure of healing I was receiving. You can do this, too.

We can also reframe those parts of the Gospel of John which seem to say that only baptized Christians will be saved and get into heaven. We know that God has been at work from the beginning working to restore and reconcile all people to God, one another and creation. We Christians are baptized to participate in that work which is God’s, the work of restoration and reconciliation. We know that for us, Jesus is the true gate into that work. When we hear and recognize his voice, we try to follow him.

And, after 2,000 years of following, and failing, getting it right, and getting it wrong, we begin to see that Jesus, as he says earlier in the gospel of John, does indeed have sheep from other folds about which we know nothing and about Jesus’s way with them that we also know nothing about, though we might catch glimpses once in awhile, even in atheists!
So Jesus is the gatekeeper of our souls, but not a gatekeeper who keeps out non-Christians. We are coming to recognize that God’s enterprise of salvation may be a greater mystery than we ever thought, and much more far-reaching than we imagined.

A story from one of the Desert Fathers of the 4^th century which might be helpful. A soldier came to the holy man as asked if God could accept him. The old man asked the soldier, “Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn do you throw it away?” The soldier replied, “No. I mend it and use it again.” The old man said to him, “If you are so careful about your cloak, will not God be equally careful about his creature?”
My friends, the world needs to hear this about God, especially when scriptures and life seem to fly in the face of a loving God. If you yourself are so careful about your cloak, or your house, or your yard, will not God be equally careful about all God’s creatures?

Good Friday 2011

2011-04-23T08:11:00.002-04:00

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Psalm 22

Hebrews 10:16-25

John 18:1-19:42

A Sermon on the Seven Last Words of Christ

Wisdom 1:16-2:1,2:12-22 (probably written last part 1^st c before Christ)
16 But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death;

considering him a friend, they pined away
and made a covenant with him,
because they are fit to belong to his company.

2For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
‘Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.
12 ‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
13 He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
14 He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
15 the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
16 We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
17 Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
18 for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
19 Let us test him with insult and torture,
so that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
20 Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.’
21 Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
for their wickedness blinded them,
22 and they did not know the secret purposes of God,
nor hoped for the wages of holiness,
nor discerned the prize for blameless souls;

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing. (Lk 23:34)

I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Lk 23:43)

Woman, here is your son. Friend, here is your mother. (Jn 19:26)

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Mk 15:34)

I am thirsty. (Jn 19:28)

It is finished. (Jn 19:30)

Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit. (Lk 23:46)

He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him.

He was pierced for our transgressions, and by his scourging we are healed.

On himself he bore our sufferings; our torments he endured.

He was pierced for our transgressions, and by his scourging we are healed. (St. Helena Breviary)

Forgive: He who is innocent forgives the guilty.

Assure: He who committed no crime assures a criminal of his place in paradise.

Care: He who had no place to lay his head gives his mother a son to take care of her, and gives the disciple a mother to care for him.

Abandoned: He in whom God dwelt is permanently united with humankind in our sufferings.

Thirst: He blessed those who are thirsty for righteousness. Now he, too, thirsts.

Death: The end. “And as in Adam, all die, even so, in Christ shall all be made alive.”

Trust: All that is left is faith, hope and trust – in God.

All my friends have forsaken me; those who laid wait have prevailed against me.

They have smitten me with blows; they gave me vinegar to drink.

One whom I love has betrayed me; they have cast me out among the wicked.

The have smitten me with blows; they gave me vinegar to drink. (St. Helena Breviary)

For those among you who have been falsely accused, can you forgive as Jesus forgave?

For those of you who suffer guilt for wrongs you have done, can you accept that paradise is yours today?

Where is your true home? St. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Will you let God give you rest?

Have you ever felt abandoned? Can you find comfort in Christ’s sense of abandonment?

For what do you thirst? Do not make do with vinegar on a sponge, but reach into the spring of living water flowing from Christ’s wounded side.

For those who may wonder if your life has been worthwhile, Jesus’s people, the Jews, have an ancient proverb: “It’s not for you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

When you feel unable to forgive yourself or another, when you feel lost or abandoned, thirsty for something, seeking fulfillment, will you, can you, trust in God, commending yourself and all your life to Christ, trusting the Holy Spirit to give you God’s peace, God’s shalom, God’s wholeness?

Into your hands, O God, I commend my spirit,

For you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth.

Keep me as the apple of your eye;

Hide me under the shadow of your wings.

Lord, have mercy,

Christ have mercy,

Lord, have mercy.

(Compline, The Book of Common Prayer)

Christ rests in the tomb. It is the Sabbath of Our Lord.

But as God will not abandon on the Sabbath a person whose life is at risk, neither can Christ abandon us.

He has gone into Hell, into death. He goes to seek the lost sheep. His cross is the weapon with which he strikes down the gates of Hell and death, and becomes the bridge over which the lost cross into life. The first are Adam and Eve. And after them, surely the most lost sheep of all, Judas. A thief has been granted Paradise.

The cross, once a shameful instrument of death, has instead led the whole human race into life. A tree stood in Eden, a mix of evil and good. Now a tree stands on Calvary, a tree meant for good.

“It is the source of light, not darkness.

It offers you a home in Eden.

It does not cast you out.

It is the tree which Christ mounted as a king [mounts] his chariot,

and so destroyed the devil, the lord of death,

and rescued the human race from slavery to the tyrant.

"It is the tree on which the Lord…

healed the wounds of our sins,

healed our nature that had been wounded by the evil serpent.

"Of old we were poisoned by a tree;

now we have found immortality through a tree.

Of old we were led astray by a tree;

now we have repelled the treacherous snake by means of a tree.

Indeed what an unheard-of exchange!

We are given life instead of death.” Theodore the Studied (759-826)

Palm Sunday

2011-04-18T12:54:00.000-04:00

Palm Sunday, the Sunday of Our Lord's Passion, is a very emotional service.

We begin outside the church for the blessing of the palms. There are prayers, singing, and the Gospel, this according to St. Matthew, about Jesus's triumphal entrance into Jerusalem with cheering crowds lining the road, through their cloaks and tree branches - olive and palm - before his donkey. The palms are blessed and the process from that place into the church, stopping at the door of the church for another prayer specific to the day.

We process together - all the congregation - singing "All glory, laud and honor" in English and Spanish and the service of Eucharist, Holy Communion, begins. When it comes time for the Gospel reading for the Eucharist, the entire passion narrative is read, with various people taking parts and the congregation playing the part of the crowd that shouted for Jesus to be put to death.

With the songs and the readings and the people's active part in the service, much more active than on a regular Sunday, I find a sermon to be superfluous. So, there is no sermon to post for this week.

There will be sermons on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day. For now there is only the silence of the grave. We wait.

April 10 Sermon 2011

2011-04-10T16:29:00.001-04:00

Sermon for Lent 5

Lent is a time for stripping down. A time to unbind and be set free. A time to be stripped down to bare, dry bone, thirsting for the breath of God.

The stripping down begins with the temptations. Jesus has been in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. He is hungry. He thinks of the world’s hunger. He is tempted by a devil to turn stones into bread to feed the world. But he knows the world’s real thirst: the word of God.

He is tempted to test God, to throw himself from the top of the temple to see if the angels will save him. But Jesus knows that even if someone comes back from the dead they won’t be believed to be the Son of God. All he will be is dead.

He is tempted to become emperor of the universe so he can bring God’s reign instantly. But he knows this will not work; the world needs to learn to worship God, first, before the coming of the kingdom can be a blessing to them.

So, after this testing and stripping away, Jesus is ready – free to be God’s word in the world, to bring God’s message of peace, reconciliation and mercy where it is not wanted but is desperately needed. Free to live as God’s beloved child and to die for the sake of God’s love.

For the most part, he will not be appreciated for who he was and what he did, until the worldly powers, represented by the Emperor Constantine, declare him legitimate and make his faith the law of the land, as though the temptations were run in reverse. Satan’s words come back to haunt us: “I will give you all the power of the world if you will fall down and worship me.”

Meanwhile, in John’s gospel, our unbinding, our stripping down to dry bone begins.

Nichodemus comes in the dark to ask questions. He is hungry for something but he doesn’t know what. Jesus has said things that make him think, things that churn in his mind. And so he comes, but at night, in case he should be seen to be a fool.

Nichodemus sees and hears the Light but he is still blind. He does not get it. But Jesus doesn’t give up on him. He knows it is always worthwhile to sow seed. You never know when it will sprout. At the beginning of Lent, we are like Nichodemus: seeds are sown but what will come of them?

Then Jesus spends time with a Samaritan woman. She is at the village well at the time of day respectable women are at home. So we know she is a Samaritan, she is a woman, and she is a disreputable woman at that. But she thirsts, and so she is at the well. Then we learn she has had five husbands and is not even married to her current man. Her thirst may be for more than water.

Jesus speaks with her and her spirit is set free from the chains of social convention, of prejudice and ignorance. A man, not her relative, has spoken to her in public and conversed with her on deep things of the soul, like an equal, like one who can be taught. Shackles fall from her and she runs and spreads the word of Jesus.

Maybe by now, we are beginning to realize that for which we thirst, and maybe we are getting an idea what it will take to satisfy that thirst.

Next, Jesus sees a man born blind. His disciples, like us, are concerned with externals and convention: the law says that disease and disability are caused by sin. Therefore there must be sin present in the man or his family for him to be born blind. But before their very eyes Jesus shows the old way of seeing things to be true blindness.

In receiving his sight, the man goes through a transformation, as people question if it’s really him, and he starts to speak the truth of his life and comes, finally, to recognize that it is not the vision of his eyes he has received, but the unbinding of his spirit from inner blindness. He recognizes Jesus for who he is and he worships him.

Finally, today, we reach the tomb of Lazarus. The end of hope. The grave. There is no life here. Is this where our Lent is to end? In tears?

Here at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus, who would not be tempted by Satan to throw himself from the temple to see if the angels will uphold him, now hears God’s own voice clearly and speaks God’s words, “Lazarus! Come Forth!”

From where is Lazarus being called, and to what? The Jewish tradition was that the soul is still with the body for three days. But it is now day four. Lazarus is truly dead. The corpse is decaying. It smells. Any body that comes forth will be full of rot.

And yet, Lazarus comes forth, from the dark, bound, blind, and helpless.

“Unbind him,” Jesus commands. “Unbind him and set him free.” The people remove the funeral shroud and the body wrappings. Under it all, Lazarus stands, alive.

But is he still Lazarus? The same Lazarus?

Those bones on the valley floor, over which Ezekiel spoke God’s words of resurrection, were once human beings. As God reclothes them in sinew and flesh and blood, and as God breathes the breath of new life into them, they will look the same as they did before they died, just as Lazarus looks the same as he did four days ago. But will they be the same?

How could they be? How could Lazarus be, the same? They have been brought back from the fullness of life with God, to this place of blindness, thirst, hunger, fear, prejudice, war, pestilence and death. They will die again one day. Are they angry?

Or do they now live without fear, the fear that binds us in our fears and anxieties, our selfishness and greed, our prejudices, our blindness and the shackles of a tame religion?

After the desert, Jesus lived without fear. He embraced the outcast and the sinners without fear; he faced his detractors without fear; he taught us to love our enemies without fear; and in the end he went to his death without fear, the kind of fear that paralyzes the man or woman into doing what is expected or polite or acceptable, the fear of what people will think or do if we think and say and do what Jesus did.

Lent is an invitation to unbinding. An invitation to be stripped down to bare, dry bone. An invitation to ask, “What can my spiritually dry bones teach me? What can they tell me about myself? What can they tell me about God’s intentions toward me?”

The desert of temptation, the valley of dry bones, the dark night of the soul, the searing thirst of desire, the blindness of not knowing where we are going, the fear of death and annihilation, none of these places are unknown to Jesus, or to God. There is no place God cannot redeem and transform.

It is true that if we allow ourselves to be stripped and unbound, we do not know what we will be like once we are transformed by the voice of Jesus and the life-giving breath of God. Yet Lent holds before us this truth: Those who would be unbound, will be reborn free.

The people of this world are dry bones. Our nations are dry bones. Our churches are dry bones. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” And yet, God can and will open our graves and bring us out into a place of refreshment, and will live in us and make us free. All that is left is for us – our nation, this church, ourselves – to allow ourselves to be unbound and set free, without knowing what that future will look like or what it will bring.

Lent 4 2011

2011-04-06T16:58:00.000-04:00

Sermon, April 3, 2011

Lent 4

Ephesians 5: 8-14; John 9:1-41; Psalm 23

Day by day, dear Lord of thee three things I pray:

To see thee more clearly,

Love thee more dearly,

Follow thee more nearly,

Day by day.

“Sleeper, awake!

Rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14)

A man is born blind. Jesus slaps a paste of mud on his eyes and sends him to a pool, named Sent. At Jesus’s command, the man baptizes himself in the Pool of Siloam and he is reborn. He sees!

Dear Lord, I pray to see thee more clearly.

Both neighbors and temple elite, the Pharisees, question the man about Jesus. He answers truthfully and politely, but the questioning continues, repeating over and over, “How was it done? Who is he who did this?” With all this questioning, the eyes of the man’s heart are opened to the truth – love belongs to the one who does God’s will. He answers “He opened my eyes. He must be from God.”

Dear Lord, I pray to love thee more dearly.

The man is thrown out of the synagogue. Jesus hears of this and finds the man. He asks, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The new disciple asks, “Who is he? Tell me so I may believe in him.” Jesus says, “It is I”. And the man’s soul is filled with light. He sees truly, and he says, “Lord, I believe” and worships Jesus.

Dear Lord, I pray to follow thee more nearly.

To the contrary, the disciples, the followers of Jesus, want to know who sinned, the man before he was even born, or his parents, that he was born blind. It’s like asking a homeless man, “How did you become homeless?” or a cancer victim, “What did you do wrong to get cancer?” or an abused spouse, “Why do you stay?” Jesus says, “It doesn’t matter. God’s glory can be seen in anyone.”

Whose faith gave the man his sight? No one’s. Jesus’s faith is sufficient for everything.

Where have you looked for Jesus this Lent?

Have you seen him?

If not, where might you look for him?

What have you done to show Jesus you love him this week?

What might you do to show him you love him more?

Is there something Jesus might have to do for you to love him more?

How have you followed Jesus this Lent?

Where has it led you?

How might you follow Jesus better, more nearly, doing and being what Jesus was and did and is now?

If Jesus is the one who was sent, by God, and we, the man born blind, are the body of Christ in the world today, sent to see and love and do as Jesus did, where are you being sent?

Where is this church being sent?

I pray that in the remaining weeks of Lent, through Holy Week, we will enter into practices of prayer and study and engagement more deeply with other people, that we all will be led to see Jesus more clearly in all that is around us, that we all will love him more dearly in all the people we meet and hear about, and that we all may follow him more nearly, even though following Jesus always leads to the cross. For it is only by going through the cross that we can hope to reach the Easter of resurrection.

“Sleeper, awake!

Rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14)

Sermon March 27, Lent 3

2011-03-30T10:35:00.003-04:00

A sermon on the Gospel according to John: 4:5-42
Preached by the Reverend José Díaz
March 27, 2011
Grace Episcopal Church and Iglesia Betania

A thirst could be physical or spiritual. Often it is both, as in the case of the unnamed woman whose meeting with Jesus by Jacob´s well gave us today´s gospel story. Physically she is thirsty, thirsting for water, and that brings her to the well day after day. But she is thirsty spiritually, also.

Numbers are often significant in biblical interpretation. The woman is in her sixth marriage and according to the biblical symbolism of numbers, six is a number of imperfection, of lack, of deficiency. Seven, on the other hand, is a number of perfection, completion, finality and sufficiency and Jesus comes to this woman as the seventh man in her life. She opens up to him and finally experiences the satisfaction of all her soul´s desiring. Isn't this the king of experience we wish for ourselves and for all in this season of Lent?

Jesus shows in today's gospel that in order to reach out to the other and create the necessary conditions for conversion, one must be prepared to challenge the man-made boundaries and break the dividing walls of prejudice. This is exactly what Jesus does to get to this woman. According to the convention of the times, Jews were not supposed to interact with Samaritans. Walls of prejudice built on the foundations of ethnicity and religion kept them apart. Jesus broke these boundaries when he asked the woman for a drink, as her reaction shows. It was also against the moral norms of the day for a man to engage a woman in dialogue in a public place. And yet Jesus engages this woman in the longest dialogue we have in all the four Gospels, an act which even his own disciples saw as morally questionable.

Note that Jesus never tries to condemn, threaten, or intimidate the woman. All he tries to do is invite, challenge and affirm her, patiently trying to enlighten her doubts.

Why does Jesus make such a tremendous impact on the woman? Because for the first time in her life she meets a man who really understands her. In her excitement she forgets her water jar and physical thirst (and so also does Jesus!) and runs back to the village inviting the villagers to come and see "a man who told me everything I have ever done" - probably the first man to know her so well without rejecting her. Before you know it the convert has become a missionary bringing others to Jesus and to the joyful experience of conversion.

We see that there are two stages in the believing or conversion process: (a) believing because of what someone told us about Jesus, and (b) believing because we have come personally to know Jesus ourselves. Lent is the period when the Church invites all her children who still believe on the strength of someone else's witnessing to come to Jesus personally and believe, not because someone told us, but because we have known him and experienced his love personally in our own lives.

En español

La sed puede ser física o espiritual. En el caso de la mujer no identificada cuyo encuentro con Jesús en el pozo de Jacob nos dió la historia de hoy del Evangelio. Ella padecía de ambas. Físicamente tenia sed, sed de agua, y por eso iba al pozo día tras día. Pero espieirualmente también tenia sed. Los números son a menudo importantes en la interpretasión bíblica. La mujer está en su sexto matrimonio y de acuerdo con el simbolismo bíblico el número, seis es un número de imperfección, de la falta, de carencia. Siete, por el contraris, es el número de la perfección, la realización, la firmeza y la suficiencia y Jesús viene a esta mujer como el séptimo hombre en su vida. Ella se abre a él y, finalmente, experimenta la satisfacción de todos los deseos de su alma, la lleve a saciar su sed espiritual. ¿No es este el tipo de experiencia que queremos para nosotros y para todos en este tiempo de Cuaresma?

Jesús nos muestra en el evangelio de hoy que con el fin de llegar a los demas y crear las condiciones necesarias para la conversión, uno debe estar preparado para desafiar esos límites artificiales y romper los muros divisorios de los prejuicios que los seres humanos nos hemos impuesto y esto es exactamente lo que Jesús hace para llegar a esta mujer. De acuerdo con las creencias de los tiempos, los Judios no debían interactuar con los samaritanos. Los muros de los prejuicios construidos sobre los cimientos de la etnicidad y la religión les mantenian separados. Jesús rompió esos límites cuando le pidió a la mujer agua para beber. Actuó en contra de las normas morales de la época que impedían que un hombre y una mujer participaran de un diálogo en un lugar público. Y sin embargo, Jesús entabla con esta mujer el más largo diálogo que tenemos en los cuatro Evangelios, un acto que incluso sus propios discípulos veían como moralmente cuestionable: Tengan en cuenta que Jesús nunca trató de condenar, amenazar o intimidar a la mujer samaritana. Todo lo que intentó hacer fue invitar, desafiar y afirmar su confianza, y pacientemente tratando de aclarar sus dudas.

¿Por qué Jesús hizo un impacto tremendo en ja mujer? Debido a que por primera vez en su vida ella conoce a un hombre que realmente la comprendia. En su emoción se olvida de su jarra de agua y la sed física y corre de vuelta al pueblo invitando a los habitantes del pueblo para venir a ver “a un hombre que me diuo todo lo que he hecho” – probablemente el primer hombre que sabe todo sobre ella y no la rechaza. Sin darse cuenta se habia convertido en una misionera trayendo a los demás de su villa al encuentro con Jesús y a la experiencia gozosa de la conversión. Así vemos que hay dos etapas en el proceso de creer o de la conversión. A. Creer, por lo que alguien nos dijo acerca de su experiencia con Jesús, y B. Creer porque hemos llegado a conocer a Jesús a través de un encuentro y una experiencia personal. La Cuaresma es el período en que la Iglesia invita a todos sus hijos que creen en la fuerza del testimonio de los demás y en el propio porque lo hemos conocido y hemos experimentado su amor personalmente en nuestras propias vidas.

Lent 2

2011-03-20T16:32:00.001-04:00

Sermon March 20, 2011

The Reverend Lois Keen

Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT

Lent 2

Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17; Psalm 121

Our bishop, Ian Douglas, tells us often that God has one mission in the world: To reconcile all humankind and creation to God and one another. Love God and your neighbor as yourself; do justice, love mercifully and walk with humility before God; love your enemy, pray for him and do good to those who persecute you – all these commandments are given in order that we might participate in and fulfill God’s one mission: the restoration and reconciliation of God’s good creation.

After the creation, after the fall, after Noah and the flood, God called Abram and sent him and his family out into the world. They had no road map; only a promise: “You’ll know where I’m sending you when you get there!”

Abram’s faith in this unknown God, Abram’s trust, was the foundation of God’s cosmic mission of reconciliation.

After Abram, there was Moses and the Law. After Moses and the Law there were the prophets. After the prophets, there was Jesus, in the fullness of whom God’s mission of reconciliation and restoration through love and mercy were made flesh and dwelt among us.

But most of humankind have been and still are like Nicodemus and the disciples – slow, thick witted, getting it wrong, but stumbling through in the dark anyway, sometimes with only a fraction of the faith of Abram and Moses and the prophets, but enough to serve to keep the light of Christ burning against all odds.

Sometimes it feels like there is still no road map, no light in the darkness. New Zealand was just the latest in a ceaseless string of natural disasters when their earthquake hit. Then Japan’s earthquake and tsunami topped New Zealand for horror and powerlessness against God’s creation. Haiti has hardly begun to recover from its earthquake and now, when they are about to have democratic elections, two formerly exiled dictators have returned to Haiti, “to help”, they say, but truly for God only knows what kind of mischievous reasons.

And in a string of mostly peaceful protests for freedom in the Arab world, Libya’s dictator has attacked his own people. Yesterday France struck the first blow to support a U.N. no fly zone by shooting down a Libyan bomber. The United States has joined in to protect France’s fighters. Meanwhile the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue and Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, CA, tops it all by continuing to proclaim that the world will end on May 21^st of this year.

Where is God? Where is God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation in all this? Are we still wandering in the dark without a road map?

Nora Gallagher was once sitting at table at Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara, California with a young priest and a great bishop of the church, Daniel Corrigan. She writes that “Dan was in his eighties at the time retired, still strong as an ox. For most of his life, he had defied authority for the sake of compassion. […]

“As we were eating together, the young priest was suddenly overcome with earnestness"

“Bishop Corrigan,” he asked… “What would you die for?”

“Water rights,” Dan replied, without missing a beat.

The boy sat back in his chair. Dan smiled. “Why not?” He asked. Then he continued, “You don’t actually get up one morning and decide to die for something. You put your foot on a path and walk. One day, you look back, maybe fifty years, and say, “That’s what I gave my life for.” (Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher, as quoted on Anglicans Online.)

That’s what we continue to do. We get up each day and put one foot in front of the other. And while we may think we have no road map, at the end of 50 or 80 years we find that God has already gone before us. God does not leave us to figure it out alone – God’s Holy Spirit is with us and if we will, we can encourage our souls if we would stop, once in awhile, and listen – wait, and listen.

When I was working with young children in Delaware, I walked a six year old child home and I realized that I had no clue how to get back to the Cathedral. I was lost in all the left and right turns we had taken. The little girl said to me, “Turn around!” I turned around. She said, “You see that cross?” I said yes. She continued, “That cross is on the top of your church. Follow that cross and you won’t get lost.”

What other sermon ever has to be preached but that one?!

Regardless of the chaos in the world, despite Harold Camping’s promise that the world will end two months from now, the promise of life still stands: God so love the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall have eternal life. And the son came into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:16-17)

Turn around. Look up. Follow that cross. You can’t get lost if you follow that cross.

Second Sunday after Christmas

2011-01-02T15:47:00.003-05:00

There was no sermon today. Instead, we had Christmas Lessons and Carols and let the scriptures and songs speak for themselves.

Hymn #93 (All hymns and carols are from the Episcopal Church Hymnal 1982)

Bidding Prayer: Beloved in Christ, in this Christmastide, let it be our care and delight to hear again the message of the Angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought to us by this holy Child; and let us make this place glad with our carols of praise.

But first, let us pray for the needs of his whole world; for peace and goodwill over all the earth; for the mission and unity of the Church for which he died, and especially in this country and in this city of Norwalk.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless; the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick and those who mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; and all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God his pure and lowly Mother, and all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the throne of heaven, as we pray:

Hasten, O Father, the coming of your kingdom; and grant that we your servants, who now live by faith, may with joy behold your Son at his coming in glorious majesty; even Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lessons

Genesis 3:1-15 (Adam and Eve rebel against God)

Hymn #105 God rest you merry, gentlemen

Isaiah 40:1-11 (God comforts his people and calls on them to prepare for redemption.)

Hymn #65 Prepare the way O Zion

Isaiah 7:10-15 (God promises that a child shall be conceived who will be known as “God with us”.)

Hymn #61, verse 1 Sleepers wake

Luke 1:5-25 (An angel announces to Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth will bear a son)

Hymn #272, verses 1,2 The great forerunner of the faith

Luke 1:26-58 (The Angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will bear the Son of the Most High)

Hymn #81 Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming

Luke 1:57-80 (John the Baptist is born)

Hymn #272, verses 3,4,5

Luke 2:1-20 (Jesus is born at Bethlehem)

Hymn #94 While shepherds watched their flocks by night

Hebrews 1:1-12 (In the fullness of time, God sent

his Son whose reign is for ever and ever.)

Hymn #247 Coventry Carol – Lully, lullay thou tiny child

John 1:1-18 (The Word was made flesh and we

have seen his glory)

Hymn #83 (Verses 1,2,3) O come, all ye faithful

The Collect of the Day
The Celebrant says to the people

The Lord be with you.
People And also with you.
Celebrant Together, let us pray.

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

1st Sunday after Christmas: Holy Name

2010-12-31T19:05:00.002-05:00

Sermon, December 26, 2010 1 Christmas The Holy Name

In the beginning there was only God, and the gifts of God in creation, and the Word through which all was created.

Then there was the law. The law was given by God to bring us life, but we used it to make prisons – prisons of the mind, prisons of the spirit. Prisons that say some people are respectable and some are not. Prisons that say some people will see heaven and some will burn in hell forever. Prisons that build walls to keep people out, prisons that build walls to keep other people in. In the hands of people, all that the law could bring us was walls.

And so the Word became flesh and came to live with us, as a little baby. And eight days after he was born, Mary and Joseph took the baby to be circumcised, according to the law. And they named him Jesus.

What is in a name? In Hebrew, the baby’s name is Yeshuah, or Joshua. In those days it was a very common name. Lots of boy children were named Yeshuah. The Son of God was to be given an ordinary, common name, the name of the great hero Joshua, who led the people into the promised land after their wanderings in the desert. Joshua, who fit the battle of Jericho, and made the walls come tumbling down.

Joshua, a name which means “he will save”. Maybe the name was so common among the Hebrew people because every family wanted their son to grow up to be the new Joshua, to save his people.

This little baby we worship today was born out of wedlock, to a mother condemned by the law to be stoned to death. He was born in a stable, a symbol of outcast and shame. He was given a common and ordinary name. But he would not grow up common and ordinary at all. He grew up chastising the righteous and blessing the unrighteous. He healed the sick. He released those captive to demonic possession AND those captive to a religious law that had failed to save them. He gave sight to those blind in body and soul, and hearing and speech to the deaf and mute. He fed the hungry. He went after the lost.

Those who had been oppressed by the law were redeemed by him. They were set free from the law. They were called children of God and heirs of all God has to give – the unconditional love of God.

We call him Prince of Peace, and God of Love. We worship him, and we praise his name, and when we hear or say the name Jesus, many of us bow our heads briefly, in obedience to the pronouncement in the letter to the Philippians, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend”, because God has “highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name”. Jesus – he will save.

His followers called him the “anointed one”, the messiah, in Greek, the Christ. We are called by his name – Christians, followers of Jesus the Christ. We bear his mark on our foreheads – the sign of the cross, placed there at our baptism, sealing us in his Holy Spirit and marking us as his own forever.

What does it mean, to bear his name? It means that, after the angels have returned to heaven, and the shepherds have returned to their flocks in the high country, our work has only just begun.

We, the adopted children of God, still labor under the law. When will we give it up? When will we give up our deeply held belief that people have to keep the rules if they are to be redeemed by God and treated well by us? When will we treat all people as part of the family just as they are? When will we give up racism, homophobia, judgmentalism?

This little baby, with the name, “He Will Save”, is the pledge of God’s passionate love for all people – all people on the face of this earth, without exception. In this baby we are all brothers and sisters. In this baby, there are no national boundaries, no cultural barriers, no outcasts.

In this baby, all the people of the earth are one. Our work, those of us who bear his name, is to make this true, here, now, in this life. Because you are a child of God, you are no longer a slave to custom, a slave to division, to exclusion, to building walls and barriers. As children of God and heirs with Christ, through God, we are to break down walls and barriers wherever we find them, inside ourselves and outside.

Frank Weston, who was Bishop in Zanzibar in the early 1900’s, put it this way:

“We cannot claim to worship Jesus in our churches if we do not seek out Jesus in the slums. It is madness to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are abusing him in the bodies and souls of his children who have little or nothing. Now go out into the highways and hedges and look for Jesus in the ragged and naked, in the oppressed and the hungry, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them and when you have found him, gird yourselves with his towel of fellowship, and wash His feet in the person of his children.”

When we do this work, we make the Reign of God real, in flesh and blood. When our worship reflects many of the faces of Jesus together in one place, we make the Reign of God real, in flesh and blood.

Jesus, He Will Save. God has placed great trust in those who bear his name, Christian. In the face of God’s trust, we should never let our fears, or the expectations of others, dictate the frontiers of our dreams. And the greatest of dream of all is the dream of redemption, reconciliation, the restoration of all people to one another as equals, brothers and sisters together, in the name of Jesus, who bears the name, God Saves.

Christmas Day 2010

2010-12-31T19:02:00.002-05:00

Christmas Day: The Feast of the Nativity
December 25, 2010
Lois Keen, Priest
Grace Episcopal Church Norwalk CT

This is my favorite morning of the year, and my favorite service. I come in early. I rearrange the furniture for more intimacy. I sit and enjoy the light, the clarity in the air that is always here, no matter what church building I’m in, a clarity that is not there on any other day at this hour. The festivities of the night before are wonderful. This morning after is, on the other hand, filled with wonder, wonder and peace, in the intimacy of a smaller gathering, with less pageantry, more casual, this morning.

Renée Miller writes,
“I guess the question I ask myself is, "If I were going to meet God, how would I want to do it?" I think I'd want to be so still that I didn't miss a single movement, a single shaft of holy presence. I would want to open every inner pocket in order to be attentive and receptive to what came to me from beyond myself. I would want to watch carefully until I felt the One I had waited so long to apprehend. Yes, I think I would be still and patient as I got myself ready to meet the One my soul loved.”

That’s how I feel on Christmas morning. This is the time when I come face to face with wonder and mystery. The next day it’s gone, but I always have the memory of these Christmas Days to go back to, and the hope of more such days to come, until I see God, not through a glass darkly, but face to face.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Maybe on the other side of life, his glory will be like a million suns shining. On this side of life his glory is a light in the darkness, which the darkness cannot overcome. The poet Laurence Housman had this vision of the glory of the Word made flesh, as he lives among us:

Light looked down and beheld darkness.
‘Thither will I go,’ said Light.
Peace looked down and beheld war.
‘Thither will I go,’ said Peace.
Love looked down and beheld hate.
‘Thither will I go,’ said Love.

So light came, and shone.
So peace came, and gave rest.
So love came, and gave light.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

These days we see plenty of darkness – It is in those places of darkness that Light dwells.

We have more than enough of war – multiple wars – all over the world. Wherever you see or hear of war, it is there that you shall find the dwelling of Peace.

And hate – the incivility of our civic processes and of our interpersonal interactions we may not think of as hate, but they are certainly hateful. Yet it is in our hate that Love makes its dwelling.

So these three make their homes in strange places, and that is a mystery, a mystery that surrounds us on each Christmas morning, invoked by the words of the evangelist, John: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

May light come and shine in all our darknesses.
May peace come and give us rest in the midst of our warfares.
May love come, and give us light.

May you have a glimpse this day of the light, peace and love of the child, the Word made flesh, and even now, glimpses of his dwelling among and in each of you, throughout the coming year.

Christmas Eve

2010-12-30T11:00:00.002-05:00

As the "sermon" this Christmas Eve of 2010 the Reverend Lois Keen read The Spirit of Christmas by Nancy Tillman. The only commentary was the first verse of Hymn 84 in the Episcopal Church Hymnal 1982, "Love came down at Christmas", words by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), sung to the tune Gartan, melody from Petrie Collection of Irish Melodies, Part II, 1902: harmony by David Evans (1874-1948)

Last Sunday before the Feast of the Incarnation: Advent 4

2010-12-20T06:12:00.001-05:00

Sermon
Advent 4
December 19 2010
Grace Episcopal Church
The Reverend Lois Keen

Today, on this last Sunday in Advent, in this season of hope, expectation, and waiting, six days before Christmas, I wanted to remind you that salvation was worked by God through the cheaters, the liars and the rotters. I wanted to remind you that Jesus comes from the line of Jacob the cheat, the trickster, and not his older brother Easu. That Jesus comes not from Jacob’s favorite sons, Joseph the golden boy who saved Egypt and the entire known world from famine, or his little brother Benjamin, but from Judah, who sold his brother Joseph into slavery and lied to his father that Joseph had been killed by a lion.

That Jesus comes from the line of King David, who is known for his bravery and skill in slaying Goliath, but who, to cover up his adultery, sent Bathsheba’s husband, back into battle and has him killed. And of all David’s sons, it is from Solomon, the son of Bathsheba, from whom Jesus is born, Solomon to whom God gave wisdom and Solomon used it to enslave his people so he could have a free workforce for his grandiose building projects.

The rest of Jesus’s male ancestors are, for the most part, nobodies, ordinary people like you and me. None of them particularly righteous, except Joseph. Joseph, when he finds his wife to be pregnant by another, decides not to make a public spectacle of her but to put her aside quietly. Joseph, who, when an angel tells him not to be afraid to wed Mary, believes, and becomes the most famous foster-father of all time.

And I wanted to remind you today about the women in Jesus’s ancestry. Here we find the strength, the courage, and, yes, God’s use of the deeply flawed to work out our salvation, our reconciliation to God.

Tamar, the widow, a gentile, a non-Jew, whose father-in-law Judah cheats her out of her right to his youngest son to give her a child. So Tamar pretends to be a harlot and seduces Judah, and when she gives birth to a son, Judah proclaims her righteous, for she obeyed the law better than he had.

Rahab, the harlot, the gentile, a non-Jew, who helped Joshua’s army defeat her city and whose family became part of Israel forever.

Ruth, the faithful widow, a gentile, a non-Jew, who loved her widowed mother-in-law Naomi so much that she made Naomi’s people her people and Naomi’s god, her god. Ruth the gentile is the grandmother of King David.

Bat-Sheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, victim of rape, taken in adultery, survives the death of her first-born and becomes the mother of Solomon.

And Mary. Found by her espoused husband to be pregnant. In Matthew there is no annunciation to Mary. There is only an angel’s assurance to Joseph that the child she carries is from God. In this woman, in her womb, is the sign and seal of heaven, the pledge of our reconciliation, to God, to one another, and to all creation.

All this I wanted to remind you of today.

I also want to remind you of the implications of salvation. It brings with it the gift of being reconcilers and restorers in the world, to those who live on hope alone.

In Waterloo, Sierra Leone, there are young girls who hope for a better life. Through your gifts you have helped build a school and provided scholarships to 25 girls there.

In Haiti things have gotten worse, if that is possible, since the earthquake devastated that part of the island of Hispañola. Now there is disease, rioting, pillaging and destruction. As my friend the Rev. Mark Harris writes, “Hope for Haiti will primarily be found when the Haitian people are lifted up, in our thoughts and prayers, and in our encouragement of their efforts to be a New Haiti, born of the promise of new hope beyond the boundaries set by the old orders of slavery, dictatorship, occupation and corruption.”

As bearers of hope, as reconcilers and restorers, we owe Haiti our continued prayers, and our continued assistance to rebuild our sister Episcopal Church diocese of Haiti with our continued financial support.

But today there is something closer to home of which I want to remind you, something which will not cost you one penny.

Today, here in Norwalk, there is a seven year old boy. His name is Sebastian Hernandez. He has leukemia. He has been treated with all that medicine can offer and his leukemia has returned. Now his hope and the hope of his family is in finding a bone marrow donor. It requires a perfect genetic match.

A search for that match is taking place at this moment, in the gymnasium of St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Norwalk. All you need to do is have a swab taken, just like you’ve seen on Law and Order on TV. I plan to go to St. Thomas as soon as the vestry meeting is over. If I don’t make it, I can order a swab kit by mail and become a registered donor.

Jesus saved our lives 2000 years ago. Today there are so many lives that might be cut short without help. Here in Norwalk there is one life to which we can make a difference. You can go, as soon as worship is over, to St. Thomas the Apostle and at least check out how you can help give one child the hope for which he is waiting this Advent.

Hope of all the nations, come, and make in us your home.

Advent 3, 2010

2010-12-12T22:22:00.002-05:00

Year C Revised Common Lectionary
Canticle 15 – The Song of Mary

Our Lady of Guadalupe
by Jeffri Harre

Loving God, you call us to be your stories in the world. We come before you seeking to be touched by your story. Open our lips to share our stories with one another and to bring comfort, inspiration, joy and laughter to each other. Amen.

The first time I went to Ireland I had to take the bus from Shannon in the center of Western Ireland to Sligo, which is in the Northwest part of the country, to meet my tour group. The trip included a bus change in Galway. As we boarded the bus, a group of nuns got on and sat in front. I didn’t think anything of it until we pulled out of one of the small towns on the route, and the driver announced that our next stop was Knock. I almost fell out of my seat laughing.

Knock is the site of a shrine to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and you’re probably wondering why I found the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock funny. Some years ago the local parish priest managed to push through the approvals and raise the money to build an airport just outside of this small Irish village. Build it in time for a Papal visit. The priest became the laughingstock. Why did this tiny town, shrine or no shrine, need an airport? And Irish folk singer Christie Moore wrote a song about the building of the airport. A bitingly satiric and funny song. I don’t know if the priest lived long enough to see it, but he had the last laugh. The airport at Knock is one of the busiest regional airports in Ireland even without the pilgrims coming to visit the shrine.

The shrine in Knock is a walled complex. As we pulled into town, the bus was just high enough for me to look over the wall and see the church built where several people saw a vision of St. Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and Christ as the Eucharistic Lamb. The street that runs along the wall, the village’s main street, is lined with souvenir shops. You wouldn’t believe the number of plastic holy water bottles, plastic statues of Mary, plastic rosaries—or maybe you would. Between the tchotchkes and the song, how seriously can you take this kind of thing?

Before my visit to Ireland, the only direct experience I’d had with people who visited a Marian shrine and made devotions to Mary were members of, well, a cult, for lack of a better term. This cult is centered on the so-called Our Lady of the Roses, Mary help of Mothers in Bayside, Queens. These women—and they are mostly women— in their blue berets would show up in Hartford and other places across Connecticut for any legislative hearing or vote and any activity surrounding civil rights legislation for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. This group was virulently homophobic and cited messages from their Mary to justify it. On the other hand, even the local Archdiocese has found the supposed visions to completely lack authenticity and condemned the group for proclaiming things contrary to Roman Catholic teaching. For the better part of a decade, if I was attending or participating in something to do with the fight for the protection of my civil rights, they were there, too.

Not very positive or favorable experiences when it comes to Mary’s presence in the world.

Of course, most of us of European descent have heard of the more famous shrines of Mary: Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje, to name a few. There’s even one held dear by Anglicans—Our Lady of Walsingham, with a secondary shrine in Ohio, of all places. But I would hazard a guess that most of you hadn’t heard of Our Lady of Guadalupe until Lois arrived here at Grace, and we began our conversations with Iglesia Betania. I hadn’t either, until several years ago when I took a job at the Episcopal Church Center where I worked regularly with individuals, congregations, and dioceses in Province IX, which includes parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Why not until then? Because, quite frankly, my involvement with Latin American, specifically Mexican, communities had been fairly limited until then. My first serious boyfriend may have been Mexican and Apache, but given that period in time and his community’s culture, we didn’t have much to do with his family. So we never went to any family celebrations.

So let me tell you another story; this time not one of mine. This is Juan Diego’s story.

Almost 500 years ago, in the Mexican portion of the Spanish empire lived a mestizo, a young man of mixed native and Spanish blood, named Juan Diego. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 9th, he was on his way to mass in Mexico City and passed Tepeyac Hill—and I’m going to mispronounce the name of the hill throughout because it predates the coming of Spanish to Mexico—he passed the hill where he heard music that sounded a bit like birds singing. He stopped to see where the music was coming from and heard a young woman’s voice calling his name. He climbed the hill and saw at the top a young mestizo woman surrounded by radiant light, the Virgin Mary. She called Juan mi hijo, my son, and told him that she wanted him to be her messenger to the bishop of Mexico City. Her message was that she wanted a church built for her children.

It’s important for you to know a couple of things at this point in the story. Remember, the Spaniards had conquered Mexico not too long before. Unlike the English up here, they were more interested in accumulating wealth. They moved in just enough colonists to govern the area while forcing the native population into a state of near, if not actual, slavery. As with any kind of clash of cultures, children are born of mixed parentage. So it was in Mexico. And those children, the mestizos, were looked down upon and excluded not only by the Spanish but by the Mexicans as well.

So when Juan arrived at the bishop’s residence, before he could even tell his unbelievable story, he had to deal with the fact that he was coming to see a Spanish bishop served by both Spaniards and Mexicans who wanted nothing to do with the likes of Juan Diego. The servants tried to turn him away, but he was persistent and was finally granted an audience with the bishop. At first, the bishop didn’t believe Juan and asked him to come back another day. A discouraged Juan retuned to Tepeyac and asked the Virgin to use someone else more worthy than himself. Sound line anyone else we know? Moses, perhaps? Mary assured him that she had chosen him personally as her ambassador. The next day he returned to the bishop to try again. Still disbelieving, the bishop sent Juan to tell the lady he needed a sign in order to know if she truly was the Virgin Mary. Doubting Thomas, anyone?

When Juan relayed the bishop’s message, Mary told him to return the next day, and she would give him the sign he needed. But when Juan got home, he found his uncle very ill. So instead of returning to see the Virgin, Juan stayed home to care for his uncle. On the morning of December 12th Juan rushed to Mexico City to find a priest to administer the last rites to his uncle. He went around the back of Tepeyac hill in order to avoid Mary, though he thought she would understand. But she met him on the path took and told him that his uncle had already been healed. Later Juan would find out that at that same moment the Virgin had appeared to his uncle, who was immediately restored to health. Mary urged Juan to go to the top of the hill where he would find flowers growing. He did as she asked and was astonished to find so many flowers where there should have been frost. He cut and gathered them in his cloak. Mary arranged them, rolled up his cloak, and told him not to unroll it until he saw the bishop.

Once again, the bishop’s servants gave Juan Diego a hard time, but again, he persisted. When he finally reached the bishop, he told him about his conversation with the Virgin. Then he unrolled his cloak, and the flowers tumbled to the ground. The bishop, Juan, and everyone else in the room were startled by what else was there. On Juan’s cloak appeared an image of Mary as Juan had seen her. The bishop then believed and promised to build the shrine requested by the Virgin.

Juan Diego’s story does not end there. In 2002 Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego, making him the first Mexican saint. And his cloak is preserved to this day in la Basílica de Santa Maria de Guadalupe in Mexico City. If you get a chance, you can see a copy of this image in the chapel, where the young people of Betania have decorated the altar for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And when you look, I want you to notice something different about the image of the Virgin. Unlike every other apparition of Mary, even throughout Latin America, she isn’t a young white woman. Mary appeared to Juan Diego as a young mestizo woman. She looked like him. And by calling Juan “mi hijo”—my son—she was telling not only Juan, but the whole world, that he and all those like him, the despised mestizos, were her children and children of God. She arrived with a changed appearance to bring a message to a changing world.

So why have I told you these stories, mine and Juan Diego’s? Why are they important to a small Episcopal congregation in Norwalk, Connecticut? For one thing, without stories, there would be no church. Without the stories of the first disciples and first Christians, we would have no sacred story and no Christian community. It was through the retelling of stories that the Gospel spread. And not just stories about Jesus, but also the very personal stories of those early Christians and Christians across the centuries. It is those personal stories that forge community because they help us to get to know each other and understand each others’ faith journeys. They are what help us to forge a community. Here at Grace we are in the midst of forming a new community with the members of Iglesia Betania.

Even with each other we need to keep telling these stories because not everyone has heard them. For instance, we of Grace and many of Betania have not heard Juan Diego’s story because it comes primarily from the Mexican communities. Although that's changing both here and across Latin America.

Now, more than ever, we need to share our stories. We need to learn from each other that we are individuals, not those Anglos, those Islanders, or those Latin Americans. Each of us has something important to bring to this new community. And without telling our stories to each other and then not only telling them to the larger community around us, but then engaging that greater community in shared ministry, without sharing ourselves, how do we bring the face of Jesus, the face of God, to others?

Almighty God, of your saving grace you called Mary of Nazareth to be the mother of your only begotten Son: Inspire us by the same grace to follow her example of bearing God to the world. We pray through Jesus Christ her son our Savior. Amen.

Advent 2 2010

2010-12-06T08:12:00.002-05:00

No text for the sermon from Sunday, December 5, 2010. However, here are the texts that informed the sermon.

Matthew 3:1-12
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:`Prepare the way of the Lord,make his paths straight.'"
Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, `We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
"I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

A headline from The Hour (Norwalk, Connecticut), Saturday, December 4, 2010
The front page:
"Christian group says Jesus Christ to return May 21"

What are you going to do? How are you going to get ready for May 21st, 2011?

Repentance = Turning around
Once my husband was photographing a sunrise when something inside told him to turn around. He did so and shot what became an award-winning photograph of the reflection of the sunrise off a row of houses and their reflection in the water with lowering clouds coming up from behind.

After John the Baptizer called the people to repent, after he heard their confessions, after he washed them with water, what did he do? Did he send them to a church? Did he send them to a convent? Did he send them to a monastery? No.

He sent them back to their lives, their homes, their work. Are we looking in the wrong direction for God?

Daily meditation from CREDO, a wellness program for Episcopalian clergy:
Advent Creativity
The people who came to John the Baptist wanted to know, even as every good church person today wants to know, just what they ought to do to restore religion and renew their faith. Turn around, says John. And he meant just that.Readers who have attended a CREDO I conference will recall a similar self-admonition from photographer Dewitt Jones in the film Everyday Creativity: "Turn around, Dewitt; you're shooting the wrong way."The Biblical people who approached John the Baptist wrestled with the same dilemma. They were looking in the wrong direction. They sought suggestions on how to be more holy, more spiritual, more sacred, more devout. And John gave them very strange counsel. He didn't tell them to pray more. He didn't tell them to fast. He didn't exhort them to make greater sacrifices in the temples, nor did he tell them to read scripture.In answer to their cries, he told them to literally turn around and go back to their work. He told them that to be holy people, to be God's people, they should go back to whatever they had been doing, and do it as God would have it done. To the person with abundance of clothing and food, he said they should simply achieve equitable balance by giving what they didn't truly need over to someone who could make good use of their excess.. Soldiers were told to be better and more honest soldiers. Tax-gatherers were told to go back to their jobs and ply them honestly.Being the people of God, then, had nothing to do with going to worship or undertaking special devotions. In short, it was not a matter of being more religious, but of being more fully secular that would distinguish them as people of God. They were not to turn away from the world, but rather they were to turn away from their false religiosity, do a complete about face, and embrace the world they sought to escape -- embrace it fully as God embraces the world.
--Sam Portaro
CREDO Faculty member

What are the signs to look for? Second CREDO reflection:
WARNING......WARNING:ADVENT VIRUS
Be on the alert for symptoms of inner Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to this virus and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions. This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been a fairly stable condition of conflict in the world.Some signs and symptoms of The Advent Virus:· A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences.· An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.· A loss of interest in judging other people.· A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.· A loss of interest in conflict.· A loss of the ability to worry. (This is a very serious symptom.)· Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.· Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.· Frequent attacks of smiling.· An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.· An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.Please send this warning out to all your friends. This virus can and has affected many systems. Some systems have been completely cleaned out because of it.
--Anonymous source

You are God's hope. God is always with you. You don't have to run somewhere to find God. Just live your life and, while you do that, begin to become attentive to the signs of God's presence: Joy, Love, Peace, Inner Hope.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (Romans 15:4-13)

Advent 1 2010

2010-11-29T08:44:00.002-05:00

Today was the monthly bilingual Spanish/English service and Padre Jose Diaz was the preacher. He reminded us that at this time of growing darkness we wait for the light. We wait for the birth of Jesus. We also wait for something about which we know nothing - only God knows, and we can only catch glimpses if we will spend time with God. And our culture, which is now intent on arousing our fears of one another will get in the way. So, he says, turn off CNN or Fox or CBS or whatever just for these four weeks, and read your Bible. Take 10 minutes each day just for time to sit and be still and quiet. Wait...for that for that which we don't yet know. Wait for Jesus.

Christ the King and Thanksgiving

2010-11-21T15:14:00.002-05:00

There was no sermon today, Sunday, November 21st. Instead we did all the readings for Pentecost Last and for Thanksgiving Day, with hymns after each reading. However, I leave you, if you are reading this blog, with this thought for today.

As we celebrate our annual day of giving thanks, I hope you will thank God for the gift of his son, Jesus. I am thankful that Christ reigns in heaven, on a throne, high and lifted up. I am even more thankful that Jesus reigns, as well, from the cross. After all, that is why we read the crucifixion on this day.

Jesus reigning from the cross reminds us what is our true worship: To follow Jesus. To do what he did, to do the things he told us to do, and to be his hands and feet and heart in this world in our everyday lives.

I am thankful that Jesus reigns from the cross to remind us that following him may just lead to the cross. This way I will, I pray, never forget that he is with me and you always, in the good times and the bad, and even in those places of personal crucifixion.

After church today, I went to East Avenue United Methodist Church to help with their annual Thanksgiving Community Free Luncheon. My place was to hand out the plates as people came through the line, and be a welcoming and inviting person. As I handed a plate to a young boy and said hello and welcomed him, I asked him what he was thankful for this year. He said, without blinking an eye, "God".

I hope as you give thanks around your various tables this Thursday that you will give thanks to God for Jesus, and for the Love that is the life and kingship of Christ.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Advent comes next Sunday!

28 Pentecost 2010

2010-11-14T15:29:00.002-05:00

Sermon November 14, 2010
The Reverend Lois Keen
Grace Episcopal Church
Norwalk Connecticut

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning…”

A friend of mine once said that the scriptures are meant to be chewed, like a good meal. And once you have chewed over and tasted and savored a piece of scripture, you return to it again and again, finding different flavors. All holy Scriptures are written so that they never lose their savor. The hard news is that scripture is not for a light read. Like a good meal, it asks for attention, time, discernment.

My grandmother was a fundamentalist Baptist. I grew up thinking the Bible was a rule book, a rule book that I could never measure up to. When I became a preacher I learned that people wanted me to be able to tell them how a particular reading from the gospel relates to their everyday lives.

I stopped reading the Bible as a rule book when I first read St. Paul writing that the Law cannot save anyone; all it can do is point out our faults. Only Jesus can save us from ourselves.

As to scripture relating to our everyday lives, I’ve discovered that some scriptures might related to my life today and others don’t, and on another day, entirely different scriptures will relate and those others no longer relate. Eventually, I realized this thing of scripture “relating to my life” was just another way of seeing scripture as a rule book. If I can only crack its code, I’ll know how to live so that I will be lovable in God’s eyes and get to heaven when I die.

But even so, reading the scriptures are my joy and delight. And I have learned some important things from reading scripture, from chewing them slowly, over and over again.

The first thing I learned is from reading the Psalms. Some of the Psalms are hard to take. There’s a lot of desire for revenge, anger at God, anger and hatred of enemies. I think maybe the worst example comes from Psalm 137: “Remember the day of Jerusalem, O LORD, against the people of Edom, who said, ‘Down with it! down with it! even to the ground! O daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock!”

What in the Name of God are we supposed to learn from that?! If all scripture is meant for our learning, what can we learn from such a scripture as this?

And yet, from Psalms like 137 I learned the most important thing I was ever to learn from scripture, the thing that has become the core of my reading of scripture: If the Psalmists can say anything – anything – to God, so can I.

There’s nothing so horrific in my thoughts or desires that God hasn’t heard before. There’s nothing God can’t take from us. Even if I’m angry with God, the one totally safe place in all the world where I can take those feelings is to God. The scriptures teach me that: The one true safe place in the world is God.

This is huge. All my reading of scripture happens from within this place of safety.

Following that revelation, I learned from the scriptures as a whole, starting with Genesis all the way through the Revelation to John that the people of God have been on a spiritual journey for thousands of years, and we still are. The writers in the Bible tell the story of that journey through their understanding that God is working in their lives. They tell the story by remembering how they have responded to God – obeying, disobeying, following, ignoring, taking God for granted, returning to God. They tell their God stories: One day I was here, and God spoke, and I either obeyed and found abundance or I turned away and was sent into exile until I learned to return to God.

These stories are not dead stories. Yes, they take place in a time long, long ago. Some of them go back to before written history. But the story of the Jewish people, and later the story of the early Christians, is our story, too.

The books of the Bible are not the last word, they are the first word; the beginning of a story that keeps on being told. New chapters are added with each life that is lived. Your story, my story are each chapters in this ongoing story of humankind’s spiritual journey with God.

And we are all headed to the same place. Our stories are each different but we are all headed for the heart of God, where we already live but will not fully know it until all the stories are told.

I learned one more thing from reading and chewing and savoring scripture. When I was growing up, my mother, who had a prejudice against Jews, taught me that the Old Testament God was a god of vengeance and the New Testament God was a god of love. I believed this because she told me it was so.

In my thirties I read the scriptures for myself and I learned that this was not only not a helpful way of understanding the scriptures; it is also not true.

The God who speaks today’s words through Isaiah in the first reading and the canticle is the same God who Paul credits with his unhelpful and judgmental declaration that those who do not work are not to be allowed to eat. The God who Jesus declares will bring destructive signs for us to watch for, including betrayal, hatred and death, is the same God who promises restoration and reconciliation to everyone:

“For I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind…no more shall the wound of weeping be heard…or the cry of distress…The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox…”

Surely it is God who saves us. God is our stronghold, our defense, and our Savior.
The collection of stories we call The Bible, and the collective stories of our lives reveal this promise. No matter how dire, these stories, taken all together, reveal the promise of hope to which we cling, the hope we hold out to others without hope, the blessed hope of God’s eternal, unconditional love in which we already live, though we may not yet know it fully, now and for all eternity.

Give thanks to God. Make God’s deeds known among all peoples, by word and actions and love. Sing God’s praises. Cry aloud, ring out your joy, for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel, and his steadfast love will never fail.

Feast of All Saints and All the Faithful Departed

2010-11-08T10:21:00.001-05:00

Sermon November 7, 2010

All Saints and All the Faithful Departed

Grace Episcopal Church

The Reverend Lois Keen

Many years ago I was given a copy of the Reverend John Claypool’s little book, “God is an Amateur”. I’ve since lost the book but I remember that in the preface John reminds us that the word “amateur” comes from the Latin word for love. An “amateur” is someone who does something for love, even though they might be – well – an amateur! So to say that God is an “amateur” is to say that God is a lover.

The sermons in that little book were all about how God is a lover. The one sermon that stood out for me was about the Communion of Saints and it is the Communion of Saints which we celebrate this morning.

We celebrate those exemplary people who have led the way for us to the heart of God – led in service to God, in love of God, in prayer with God, in living for God – exemplary people like St. Paul and St. Luke and Sts. Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, and modern saints – William Stringfellow, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the women who led the suffragette movement – Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, the women who led their people to freedom from slavery – Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth – and countless others – All the Saints.

We also celebrate those people in our lives who have gone before us to that heavenly kingdom – our loved ones who have died in the Lord – family, friends, neighbors, strangers, even enemies.

All these make up the Communion of Saints.

The story John Claypool tells, however, is not about people but about two birds and a man. The man’s life work was following the habits of birds – in this case, specifically in the United States Southwest. The man had come to an abandoned barn in the desert, a barn which he hoped would house some interesting birds.

As he entered the barn, he could hear rustling in the rafters. He quietly came closer, and began to climb a ladder which still reached up into the rafters. As he climbed, he saw two kestrels – small hawks – together in the rafters. He slowly climbed nearer them, hoping to catch one to examine it and tag it. As he reached out, one of the small hawks flew at him, but the man was able to reach the other bird and catch it in his hand. The first hawk flew out of the barn and up into the sky and was seen no more.

The man climbed down the ladder with the hawk and put it in a cage built for the purpose of holding birds. The hawk lay on the bottom of the cage. It did not move. The next day was one of those brilliant days with an achingly clear, blue sky and a sun that beat down on him. The hawk was still, lying on its side. The man was moved to pity – the hawk was dying. He removed it from the cage and held it in his hand. It didn’t stir.

Suddenly, out of that clear sky, from somewhere near the sun, there was a piercing cry. It was repeated, and repeated again. The small hawk in the man’s hand moved. It called out in reply. From out of the sun itself came a flashing body screaming toward the earth. The hawk in the hand of the man cried out and flew from his hand. It ascended toward the sun and the hurtling body in the sky. The two met. The circled one another. They danced. They flew and suddenly they were both gone.

Claypool says this must be something like what the Communion of Saints is like – all that cloud of witnesses who have flown away, waiting to meet us in the sky, streaming toward us, bearing God’s love for us in their arms.

Somewhere we know there is a piercing cry, calling us to join with all those who have gone before, all those who live now, and all those who are yet to come – A cry that comes from none other than the Master Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ. When we respond with our “Yes!”, or with our “Maybe”, or even with our, “I am afraid!” he flies to meet us where we are, so that together we might do the work he has given us to do, in company with him and all that wondrous mystery the Communion of Saints.

Sometimes we appear to have died. We are weary. We are afraid. We are poor, hungry, weeping. We feel hated, excluded, defamed, or worse, abandoned and ignored. We lie there, to all appearances, dead, done with everything.

“But…” Daniel writes, “the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever – for ever and ever.” (Daniel 7) “I pray” says Paul, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe…” (Ephesians 1)

Suddenly, out of the sun, comes the call, the cry, and we answer and rise to meet our Lord, maybe right here, right now, or maybe on the other side of life, it does not matter. He is there. He calls, continually, invitingly, searchingly, ready to meet us more than halfway, he and all that unnumbered cloud of witnesses to which we ourselves also belong.

God grant that, having this hope, we may let ourselves be made like our Lord Jesus Christ, knit together with those who have gone before in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of him our Savior. May we have the grace so to follow the blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may experience now, and give to others, those ineffable joys that are prepared for all people, the children of God and heirs of eternal life. To God be the praise; to Christ be the glory; and through the power of the Holy Spirit, may we say, Hallelujah! Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

Amen.