Sermon at St. Gregory's, Woodstock NY, Trinity Sunday 2014

It’s good to be with you again.  It’s been a long time, and so much has happened for me and for all of you.  We find ourselves at a different place than when we last met.  And that’s a good thing.  God is always doing new things, always creating, and if we are stuck in place then we run the risk of missing what God is up to now.  Change can be unsettling, but that’s good.  We’re not supposed to settle.  We are a people on the way.

Today is the only day in the calendar when we celebrate a theological idea rather than a time in the life of Jesus or his disciples.    And yet, even here there is evidence of God’s creation.  The Trinity is not a static triangle, like an axiom in geometry.  The Trinity is a dance between the different aspects of God, a constantly moving relationship within the heart of God.  Remembering that can remind us that we too are meant to be moving in this dance with God and one another.  Again, God is always moving, and so are we.

Now, I want to spend some time on the Gospel reading.  The people who assign texts have to work to find texts for Trinity Sunday, because the doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t really worked out in biblical times.  So we have some texts that refer to the three persons, without a full doctrine spelled out.

Our text for today is one of those.  It is a central text in our tradition, and one I think most of us feel guilty or confused about.  It’s about the movement of disciples as part of the dance of God.  And I think there’s hope in here for all of us.

This is the very end of Matthew’s Gospel.  Jesus has suffered and has risen from the dead.  He’s appeared to the women, who told the men to go to Galilee.  Now the eleven are there, and Jesus appears to them.  

They worshipped him, but some doubted.

This is such an important verse!

How many times in your life have you been told that doubt is bad?  Every year, the Sunday after Easter tells the story of Thomas.  We are told that we are blessed if we believe, and we call him “Doubting Thomas,” as though he’s unique and bad.  

But that’s not the message of the Gospel here.  Here, worship and doubt go together.  This is an honest picture of faith in the dance of God.

In the Jewish tradition, doubt is not a sin or a problem.  The sin is in turning away from relationship with God.  But doubting God, even doubting God’s existence, is just part of using our intellects.  Our reason cannot make sense of, cannot justify the reality of God.  So our reason is stuck between worship and doubt.  

And we can worship even when we doubt.  

When I first started praying, years ago, I didn’t know who or what I was praying to.  I prayed because other people who were happy and fulfilled told me to try it.  So I said, “Whatever you are, help.”  And one day I felt that help come.  Now, I could have argued.  I could have doubted that feeling.  Reason can’t prove it’s God, whatever God is.  But I felt that strength, so I kept praying.

We can go through the motions of worshipping, and our doubts will not be erased.  But if we truly worship, even in our doubts, I believe we will find the One we worship.  Or, that One will find us!

We see from the Gospel that Jesus is not offended by doubt.   Jesus addresses all of the disciples, and tells them to go make more disciples.  He doesn’t tell them to take care of their doubt before they go.   He doesn’t give them intellectual arguments.  He tells them to teach the commandments that Jesus has given them.  He sends them out.

And here’s the tricky part.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s doubt that keeps me from doing what I’ve been told.  I think more often it’s the belief that I need to be perfect to do this.  I need to be eloquent, and educated, and full of proofs.  I need to know I’ll be safe, and not laughed at.

The problem is that if we don’t share our faith, we remain trapped on the mountain where Jesus left us.  We’ve had a powerful experience, or maybe we just doubted, but we don’t have anywhere to go after the service.   And, lacking a mission, we stay behind while others go out.  Soon we find ourselves alone on the mountain.  And all the doubts flood in.  Was that really God, or just indigestion?  What happens to my belief if no one shares it?

Maybe the reason Jesus sends them out is because we need others to support us.  We all have doubts and struggles in our faith journeys.  We need others to hold us up when we’re tired or confused, and we are strengthened in turn when we support others.  We can’t worship well alone.  We can’t serve alone for very long.  We have to give away the good news if we are to keep it.

Jesus knows this is a daunting task.  He promises to be with the disciples, then and now.   We don’t have to be perfect - that’s not our job.  We don’t have to have all the answers, we don’t need a theological education.  We need to be able to tell what’s happening in our lives and hearts as a result of knowing the God who keeps creating.

Let’s practice.  Turn to your neighbor.  You have one minute each to say what God has done for you, or to confess your doubt.  There’s no wrong answer.  There’s just the need to get down off this mountain and out in the streets.

(I let them talk, and then called them back.)

Tennyson wrote, 

There lives more faith

in honest doubt,

believe me,

than in half the creeds.

Doubt is not the enemy of faith.  The enemies of faith are pride, sloth, fear in all their forms.  Freed from these, doubt becomes part of the dance by which God is revealed.  We are free to be surprised, again and again, by what God is up to.  Spread the news - God is still speaking!

And It's Not Even Pentecost Yet!

We've had an amazing week.  We met for four days with our formation team.  If we were novices in an established community, we would have a formation director who would help us learn about community life, monastic tradition, liturgy, and other things.  But we are building the plane as we fly it.  So three gifted people with experience in community are working with us to help us get "formed" and to prepare us to be formation directors for those who come to join us.

We wrote a charism statement that describes who we are and what our dream is.  It's now on this site. We wrote a Rule, after 17 months of reading other rules and living into our covenant.  We designed the next year's formation program.  That would be enough for anyone.  But the Spirit keeps coming.

As the week progressed, we started to share more deeply about our dreams of mission and ministry.  Dreams bigger than anything we had said to one another before, dreams that call us to use all our gifts and challenge all our limitations.  By Thursday night we found ourselves fundamentally changed from where we were on Sunday.

I think this is often how growth happens.  It's like an earthquake.  Underground, the pressure builds.  On the surface you don't see it, even if the air shimmers a little.  But then, one day, one minute - the ground moves under your feet.  Things you couldn't even imagine are suddenly not only desirable, but possible - even urgent.  Things that had mattered suddenly don't.  Things that had seemed stuck are in rubble.

Now, earthquakes are violent.  We need time to settle, and clean up, and learn the new territory.  We need prayer and patience.  But underneath is the certainty that a way has opened where there was no way.

Jesus has left the building, and is now dwelling in us.  The Holy Spirit is making even the cats restless.  We are Snoopy dancing up and down the hill.  Stay tuned!

Sermon at the monastery, May 4, 2014

"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.”  - Blaise Pascal

Our readings today all invite us to open our hearts to the message of Easter.  In the first reading, Peter tells a Jerusalem crowd about Jesus, and they are “cut to the heart.”  In the second, the author tells his readers to love one another deeply from the heart.  And in the third, Luke’s masterful story of two disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus, the disciples later recall that their hearts were burning while Jesus opened the Scriptures to them.  

The heart, we hear in these readings, is the royal road to God.

And yet, as Elizabeth pointed out to me, our Anglican heritage insists that we come to know God not only through the heart, but also through reason.   The heart has its reasons, but reason, we might say, sometimes explains the heart to itself.

This question of the heart leads us to a deeper mystery.  How is it, exactly, that we come to see Christ within and among us?  Is this a matter of the heart, or of the reason, or of some other faculty?  What leads us to see Christ, or to see new life, when we did not?

Each of the Gospel stories about Jesus’ resurrection  share a dynamic of struggle between heart and head, and between the individual and the group.  In none of the stories does Jesus appear first to the whole band of disciples, or even the eleven remaining apostles.  He appears to one person, to two people, at most to three.  

Those individuals are then faced with a dilemma: can I trust my own experience?  Can I go tell the group what I have seen and heard?  What will I do if they don’t believe me?  Should I ignore my experience and blend in, or should I stand alone and be ridiculed?

These are questions that each believer must face at some point.  We all must decide whether to listen to our burning hearts, our broken hearts, our loving hearts, or whether to turn away, explain them away.

Jesus meets Cleopas and his companion on the road.  The two companions think they know what has happened.  They are so familiar with it, so immersed in it, that they are shocked that anyone could have been in Jerusalem and not know all about it.  When Jesus asks them, they tell him the story as they know it.  He was a prophet.  They had hoped he was the Messiah.  He was crucified.  Now, his body is missing.  Some women saw angels, and heard he is alive.  Others went to the tomb and saw nothing.

Just the facts, ma’am.

And the facts as they know them, as the experts, say this is impossible.

The disciples cannot see Jesus until he reframes their story.  The story they tell has a Messiah, a prophet, a mighty one.  It does not have a suffering servant, or a divine child, or an incarnate God.  There’s no room in their story for the very person in front of them.  So Jesus reframes their story, opening the Scriptures in order to open their hearts.

So often it seems that what we think we know about God gets in the way of knowing God.  What we think we know about the Bible, or about doctrine, or about one another, gets in the way of knowing any of those, or knowing God.

In one of my learning communities, we refer to this already knowing as “already always listening.”  I’m already, always listening for some things, and so I miss things that don’t fit that shape.  I listen for criticism.  I listen for praise.  I listen for what is wrong, what needs fixing.  So when someone or something shows up that isn’t any of those, I might just miss it.  I might miss Jesus on the road.  

My assumption that I know about God is the greatest barrier to my relationship with God.

So God has to turn the tables, sneak up on us, and surprise us.

Jesus doesn’t just gently herd the two companions toward a new understanding.  He calls them foolish and “slow of heart” - that heart again.  He knocks them over the head, reframes their understanding of what they thought they knew.  He takes over their party and becomes the host.  

He breaks through their already always listening, and shows them something completely new and completely true.

Later, they can tell a new story.  “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?”  Well, yes, they were, but that burning didn’t mean anything until they had a frame of reference for it.  Their burning hearts were still slow, until Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them.  Suddenly, in that way that reason can never get to, their hearts and minds opened to a new possibility.

And just as soon as they recognized him, he vanished.

Notice that Luke does not say that Jesus left them.  Jesus vanished from their sight.  But that doesn’t mean he’s not there.  It doesn’t mean he’s not here.  It means that we have to choose for ourselves whether to believe.   We are not forced to believe that a communion wafer is the body of Christ.  We are not even given good reason to believe it.  

We are invited into a mystery of presence in which the heart has reasons that reason cannot comprehend.

I know a wise man who says that if you aren’t surprised, it isn’t God.  Surprise is that glorious moment of epiphany when the world looks different and fresh.  

We step out of our stories, out of our already always listening, and stand for a moment in a garden by an empty tomb.

We can’t force those moments.  We can open to them through practices of silence, of opening the Scriptures, of breaking bread together.  We can be on the lookout for God among us.  But we can’t be too sure of how God will look, or we’ll miss Her.  

The best bet is to start with the possibility that everything, everyone we meet is God until proven otherwise.

In this season of surprise, may you discover God where you never knew to look.  May your heart and your head align in joyful awareness of what God is doing, and may you run to your companions and report, “The Lord has risen indeed!”

The Sound of Silence

I want to write today.  I want to share the thoughts and feelings coming up for me as we approach Holy Week.  But nothing I think of seems right.  Or it seems premature.  I want to write to you about Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus' feet, giving him an example that he will share with his other disciples.  But it's not time.  That lesson comes next Monday.  Tonight I will talk with a church group about Mary Magdalene, about her time in the garden with Jesus.  But I don't want to go there yet.

In this last week of Lent it's as though the world is holding its breath.  Next week, with Holy Week, the action comes daily, with increasing drama and speed, until we rest again on Holy Saturday.  But this week is quiet, expectant.

Thomas Merton wrote of the danger of trying to share the experience of God with others.  Contemplation leads us to want to share the joy and peace we find, but in sharing that enthusiasm we can "become absorbed in the business of communicating something that is practically incommunicable" and so risk "being drawn away from the simple light and silence in which God is known without words and concepts."  Our very attempt to share can lead us betray what we have received.

So I will end my attempt to find something meaningful to say.  I will try to sit at the feet of Jesus, and let my silence speak to you of God.  May you glimpse the one who gives you life and love this week. May you breathe in the sound of silence.

Greetings, favored one!

Today is the feast of the Annunciation.  Today we remember Gabriel's announcement to Mary that she would become pregnant before marriage and raise an extraordinary son.
   As I read the Gospel passage, I'm drawn to three phrases of Gabriel's.  Three times he seems to offer a blessing or reassurance, and each time reminds me that these words are needed precisely because things are about to get hard.
   "Greetings, favored one!"  An angel appears from nowhere.  Or perhaps he knocks and walks in, a stranger.  However he arrives, he is not familiar.  The favor he announces is in fact a honor that her neighbors will see as disgrace.  This fits the upside-down world of the Gospel, where God's values break into a world that runs on other principles.  But for this young girl, as for many of us, the good news doesn't initially feel like favor.
   "The Lord is with you."  This familiar phrase may sound comforting to us, who hear it in church over and over, but as I ponder it I'm unnerved.  The immensity of God, the awesome power of the creator, is here with me?  Far from snuggling into my chair, I want to fall on the ground.  Perhaps we sing "lift up your hearts" after invoking God at the Eucharist precisely because the first announcement should have us on the floor in terror.
   But then we get the third good word.  If we've survived meeting the messenger and realizing God is with us, then comes this: "Don't be afraid."
   This is always a bad sign.  No one tells us to not be afraid unless there's something to be afraid of.
   "You have found favor with God."
   Well, who wouldn't want that?  But we know what that means.  It's the beginning of a lifetime of challenges and fears and disappointments.  It's the beginning of grief.  Later, joy will come in the morning, but even that joy can't eclipse the sheer bewilderment, the utter bafflement of seeing your Son resurrected from the dead.  Mary will know great joy and great pain.  The one thing she is not likely to know is the simple comfort of an ordinary life.
   Today begins Mary's journey to the cross and beyond.  The favor bestowed on her is the favor of an extraordinary life, of fears faced and loves embraced.  Her favor is surprise and wonder, both at what happens to her and at what she herself is capable of.  It's a fearsome, daunting favor she receives.
   May you be favored today with the extraordinary potential of your ordinary life.  May you find courage to enter whole-heartedly into God's dream for you.  May you be an angel in turn.
   Happy Annunciation!

Why I pray with my eyes closed

Well, first I want to say: I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote!
I've been thinking about this topic for a while, but just never got to it.

As a child I learned to pray by bowing my head and closing my eyes.  Of course, as an Episcopalian I was in a church with lots of books and words that needed saying.  So in church we were supposed to pray with our eyes open and our mouths speaking, except maybe for the Lord's Prayer.  Once you learned the responses, perhaps you might close your eyes, but to be safe not to make mistakes you'd really better keep them open.  So private prayer and corporate prayer were different, not only in who was there, but in which senses we used.

Now, I gave up bowing my head long ago, except where it would be a scandal not to.  I pray best with my eyes closed, with my head up.

Why?

I recently heard an interview with a woman who has written on the experience of being blind.  She is not herself blind, but she spent a year working with and talking to students at a school for people without sight.  She said that she learned that sighted people experience the "world," while blind people experience "consciousness."  What she meant is that the visual sense is so dominant when it is working that it puts other senses into the periphery of experience.  Further, vision presents a world "outside me," in which things appear to be separate and discrete.  When vision recedes, however, other senses - sound, touch, taste, smell - become more prominent.  These senses work in ways that erode the neat boundary between inner and outer.  People without sight live in a world where consciousness is more accessible, precisely because the "outer" world is not so insistent in its presentation.

When I heard this, I knew finally how to explain why I pray the way I do.
When I pray with my eyes closed, and my face raised, I feel the light of God on my face.  Even in the dark, it's there.
When I pray with eyes closed and another reading, I can let the words enter my heart more directly.
When I pray with my eyes closed, I feel any breath of breeze, any movement of Spirit around me.
When I pray with my eyes closed, smells are vivid and rich.
When I pray with my eyes closed, I rarely taste anything other than my empty mouth.  But I do experience my emptiness in a different way.  I'm open in my emptiness, not defending against it.
When I pray with my eyes closed, I am not separate from the world around me.
When I pray with my eyes closed, I am not cutting myself off from you.  I'm connecting with you in a deeper way, as I listen to you and sense your restlessness or your peace.  I'm just with you.
When I pray with my eyes closed, I'm in a whole world in which God is as visible as I am, as you are.

When I worship with others, I need to keep my eyes open much of the time.  When I lead worship, I need to keep them open almost all of the time.  But there are still times - before we begin, during readings, when others are leading the prayers, after communion - when I can close my eyes and be with you, and with You, in a deeper way.  I'm experiencing consciousness, in which we are all one.

Don't get me wrong.  I love icons.  They can help me focus and connect when my monkey mind is running around.  Our visual sense is a source of joy too.  But I, personally, need to pray with my eyes closed.

God bless you in your prayer, however you pray, every day.

Sermon at the Monastery, February 9, 2014

Why are you here?
Why do you come to this place?
Some of us are here for the weekend.  Some of us are here every Sunday.  And some of us are here every day, several times a day.  Some of us - some of you - may be wondering if you might become one of the people who comes every day.
Whether we come once, or regularly, or every day, we need to stop and ask ourselves why we come.  Our motives shape our experience, and they shape our relation to God in this place and every other place we go.

When I entered religious life, I told a friend that it was the first totally selfish thing I had ever done.  I meant by that that I was no longer trying to please my parents, or measure up to others’ hopes or expectations.  I wanted to pray, and to help others pray.  I had no sense of ministry or mission beyond that.  As Isaiah would have it, I sought God and wanted to know her ways.  And I thought that meant days in prayer, serving the community however I was asked, living a quiet simple life.
I wasn’t thinking about serving the poor.  I wasn’t thinking about spreading the Gospel.  I was thinking about soaking up God’s love, and loving God in return, in the comfortable confines of the convent.
And, I must confess, I was like the people Isaiah is castigating.  I wanted to fast, to be silent and austere, but in the meantime I quarreled and judged.  I no longer had an income, so I no longer gave to others.  I was treated as holy, wearing my habit, but I was a scribe, a Pharisee.  I knew about purity, but not about charity.
Soon enough, however, my horizons started to expand.  I experienced it as restlessness, as needing to get out of the enclosed life I was living, but as soon as I began to go out I encountered the world I had left in all its need.  I began working with teenage drug addicts, and later serving in a parish.  I realized that my intensive prayer had borne fruit, and that now I was becoming salt and light.

Now here’s the thing about salt and light: they do not exist for themselves.  No one sits down to a dinner of salt.  They use the salt to bring out the taste of the food.  And no one just sits and stares at a light.  They use the light to see what is around them.
Being salt, being light, means being the background that makes other things shine.  It means that my work, my ministry, is not about me.   It is about letting other people encounter Jesus, helping them to see God at work.  God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, is the point.  If I shine, when I shine, my light exists so that others may see God at work around them.
Even when we do good works, as Jesus prescribes, the point is not to show how wonderful we are.  It is not to earn points with God, or with our neighbors.  The point of good works, Jesus tells us, is to give glory to God.
Now, if you think of God as distant and other, this sounds cold.  Shouldn’t good works spring from compassion, from love of our neighbors?  Yes.  But this is not separate from giving glory to God, for the God we seek is incarnate in Jesus, and in us, and in those around us.  We give glory to God by treating others as Christ.
But being salt and light is not just about good works.  It also changes why I worship, and how I worship.
For many people, their only connection with church is on Sunday.  They come into the spiritual filling station, they “seek God and delight to know God’s ways,” but their worship is for them.  They may do good things during the week, or they may not, but the time of proclamation of the Gospel is only in church, and it belongs to the clergy.
Now, we need that refueling.  I need it so much I’m here every day!  And neither Isaiah nor Jesus are condemning that.
The question is: why are you here?  Are you here for yourself alone, or is worship part of your mission in the world?
We can worship for ourselves alone, but we can also worship as salt and light.
Sometimes I don’t want to come to worship, but others need me there.  They don’t need me just when I’m presiding or preaching or serving; they need me in a seat so they aren’t alone in the congregation, so that my prayers resound with theirs, so they know they have companions on the road.
Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are either living for ourselves or for God.  No wisdom, no eloquence, no disciplines, and no service, set the standard for our relation with God.  Devotion to God, in all spheres of our lives, makes God visible and audible and tactile among us.  Then indeed we shall be like gardens, like deep springs whose waters never fail.
John Henry Newman wrote a prayer that expresses this truth beautifully.  I leave you with his words.

Dear Jesus, help me to spread Your fragrance everywhere I go.
  Flood my soul with Your spirit and life.
  Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly,
 that my life may only be a radiance of Yours.

Shine through me, and be so in me
 that every soul I come in contact with
 may feel Your presence in my soul.
  Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
  Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as You shine,
 so to shine as to be a light to others;
 the light, O Jesus will be all from You; none of it will be mine;
 it will be you, shining on others through me.
  Let me thus praise You the way You love best, by shining on those around me.
  Let me preach You without preaching, not by words but by my example,
 by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do,
 the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to You.
  Amen.