Forgive us our debts - Sermon at the Church of Christ the King, Stone Ridge NY, 9/22/2013

I’m glad to be here with you.  Thank you for welcoming me.  But I suspect a plot.  Trying to make sense of this parable may explain why Alison took vacation this week.  The parable of the unjust steward, or the dishonest manager, has long been one of the scandalous stories told by Jesus.  Generations of people have scratched their heads to understand how the master could commend the manager for giving away what belonged to the master.  If Jesus is trying to teach us about faithful stewardship, he has a weird way of going about it.

In fact, though, this parable goes to the heart of Jesus’ teaching about God and about how we should live our lives.

Jesus has been talking to the Pharisees about God’s preference for the lost, those called “sinners” by the respectable crowd.  He tells them about the lost coin, and the lost sheep.  He tells them the story of the prodigal son, and of the son who cannot forgive his brother.  And then he tells this parable.

It’s no accident.  This is a story about forgiveness.

The manager is a sinner.  No doubt about it.  And he’s been caught.  Now he is called before the master.  And he knows he has no defense.  He cannot justify what he’s done.  All he can do is cushion the blow when it comes.

How can he do that?  He knows other people who are indebted to the master.  He calls them in and forgives them their debts.  Not all of them, maybe - that’s not up to him alone - but he lessens their burden.  And lo and behold, he is forgiven as he forgives others.

But why would the master approve this behavior?  Isn’t the manager taking what isn’t his?  In our world, of course, that’s how property works.  I may make friends by sharing stolen goods, but I wouldn’t expect the rightful owner to approve.

But the owner - that is, God - sees that the manager is learning an important lesson.  He’s learning that relationships matter more than money.  By forgiving others, he is building relationships that will sustain him when the money runs out.

It’s telling here that Luke uses the same word to describe the debts in this story as he does in the Lord’s Prayer.  That’s why some churches say “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”  Relationships sustain us, and relationships require forgiveness.

In our society, this is a lesson we have forgotten.  Over the past century we have become more and more reliant on our own resources, and less and less connected to one another.  Extended family networks have become strained as generations live far apart from one another, and neighbors are often just people whose cars we see in the street.  We do not expect help, and we do not expect to help.  We expect to pay our way.

But the truth is that none of us can earn our way into the places that matter.  We are all indebted to the Source of Being.  We all fall short at times.  We fail one another, even as we try to serve.  We all need a little help with our bill.  And the way we get it is by cutting the bills of others.

Elsewhere, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever they bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever they loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  This is not the prerogative only of the clergy, though we have an important role to play in speaking for the church.  Any of us, any member of the church, has this power.  And all of us, as Jesus tells Peter just afterward, have the obligation to forgive.  Over and over.

  Let me read you another version of this parable, as told by Eugene Peterson.  After describing the manager’s action, Jesus says:

“Now here’s a surprise.  The master praised the crooked manager.  And why?  Because he knew how to look after himself.  Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens.  They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.  I want you to be smart in this same way - but for what is right - using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”

Really living means going beyond good behavior.  And it means going beyond socially sanctioned ways of living without regard for one another.  It means letting go of our love of money and control.   Really living means recognizing our need for one another, and admitting the ways we let one another down.  It means forgiving debts of all kinds.

Now, we don't usually do this until we're in a corner.  Forgiving always feels like loss at first.  But as we do it, we find that we gain so much - reconnecting, ease in our hearts, trust.  Holding on to a grudge or a debt in fact keeps us impoverished.  We may have the IOU, we may be entitled to satisfaction, but we aren't going to get it until we let go.  We can serve money, and fear, and our rights.  Or we can serve God, who longs for reconciliation and relationship.

The problem with the "children of light," the good students, the achievers, the righteous ones, is that the richest parts of our lives are lived outside the box.  Like the older brother of the prodigal, the children of light can be blinded by their own rules and sense of justice.  I don't mean that justice is unimportant.  I mean the sense of justice, especially of my own rightness, will not carry me into the presence of God.

The dishonest manager has learned that wealth cannot protect him. Mercy, forgiveness, creativity, connection - these are the lifeblood of our relations with God and with one another.

In God's world, everything is upside down.  We gain by losing.  We receive by giving away. Hoarding, what looks prudent from the standpoint of the society, turns out to be foolishness in God's world.

We cannot pay our debts.  But we can ease them by forgiving one another, making others' debts lighter.  Let's start today.

Lost and Found: Sermon at the Monastery, 9/15/2013

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now I’m found,

was blind, but now I see.

A while ago I read a book about being wrong.  The starting point was the author’s recognition that we can never take in being wrong.  We just can’t.  We can see how we used to be wrong, even one second ago; but we cannot, in this second, coherently say or think, “I am wrong.”  Every statement is an affirmation.  “I am wrong” means “I know this much; I’m wrong.”  So even saying “I am wrong” amounts to saying “I’m right about my wrongness.  I know my wrongness.”  I can’t really know that I’m wrong until after I’ve left that wrong place for another place I take to be true.

If this is true, it makes the work of being lost and found much more confusing than the hymn suggests.

You might think some lostness is obvious.  People who are killing themselves with alcohol or drugs surely know they’re lost?  Not necessarily.  Part of addiction is denial, which is another name for lostness.  Until that moment when our vision changes, we cannot see ourselves as seriously lost.  

It’s especially hard to see our lostness when our way is rewarded by the world around us.  When we’re making lots of money, when we go to the best schools and can send our children there in turn, when we succeed in our goals, when our houses are big and well furnished - how could we be lost? 

Ah, but we who come to the monastery know better.  We come because we know, somehow, that those values are not the measure of the world.  We can see the lostness behind the achievement and the material wealth.  

Likewise, those who enter ordained life are able to see the limits of those choices, to see the lost souls in our congregations.  

Aren’t we lucky to be so smart?

We go to church regularly, and serve on its committees, and share in outreach - surely we aren’t lost?  And if we’re ordained, and shepherding souls, and praying regularly - aren’t we lucky to be found?  And we monastics, who have left everything to follow Christ - aren't we blessed?

There are so many ways to be lost.

I remember two conversations that send me back to reality, to God.

I remember Brother Scott saying, “If the Church is a hospital for sinners, then the monasteries are the ICU.”

I remember my former spiritual director saying that God called him to the priesthood because standing in the front of the class was the only way to be sure he’d get the message.

Those two conversations remind me that I am not here because I’m right.  I’m here because I’m not all there.

When I felt the call to the priesthood, part of my despair was my awareness that I must not be as healed and whole as I liked to think. 

I was already a nun, and I knew a lot of priests.  They were gifted and caring, and mostly lost.  I knew that my sisters, likewise, were not wiser or holier than those who came to us for help.  We were mostly there because we were lost.

So being here today, whether for life or for the weekend, does not make us less lost.

We may be righteous, we may be living good lives and loving God, and still be lost.

That’s who Jesus is talking to, after all.  He’s talking to the religious leaders, those doing their best to follow God’s way.  Their lostness shows up in their certainty about themselves, and their judgment of others.

We should notice here that Jesus is not talking about whether we’re sinful.  Sinning is one way to be lost.  But the problem for some of us is that  we are lost in our righteousness.  We can’t see the limits of our practices and our understandings.   

The righteous form of lostness is not, I think, intrinsically worse than other forms of lostness.  It is, however, more dangerous.  

The first danger is that others will be harmed by my judgments, that I might cut them off from human community.  

The other danger is to myself.  I cut myself off, from others and from God, and put an idol in God’s place.  I am so deluded that I offer myself as a guide to others, and lead them astray in turn.

It’s partly because we can’t know our lostness that we need community.  Sometimes I am so certain I’m right I just can’t find my way out.  Someone needs to come and get me.  I give thanks every day for Elizabeth, my sister in Christ.  I say something that seems obvious or given to me, and she’ll say, “Really?  That’s not how it seems to me.”  And because I trust and respect her, I find myself looking for where I might have left the path.  I look around and see if I can see God from where I am.  If I can’t, or if the God I’ve got in my sights doesn’t look quite right, I need to turn back and retrace my steps.  I need to start over.  

Fortunately, God does not have to wait for us to figure out that we’re lost.  The woman searches for the coin and rejoices, even though the coin is not thinking anything.  The shepherd rejoices to find the sheep, even if the sheep is thinking, “Put me down!”  God is so hungry for us that she reaches past our blindness and touches us.  Those moments when we realize our lostness do not precede the grace of God; they are gifts of God.  God searches for us and rejoices when we turn back.

And yet, even here, God does not insist.  

We are not sheep, or coins, to be grabbed.  We are created with free will, and God honors that.  God will call, and whisper, and even stick out a foot to trip us up, but God will not insist on our turning back.  So how much more does God rejoice when we, of our free will, return the love that is offered us?

Being lost and found is not a one-time event.  It is a constant dynamic in our relationship with God.  And just when we’re certain we’ve got it, we can be pretty sure we’re lost again.  It’s time to turn back.

So I want to propose another verse for Amazing Grace:

Amazing grace, come search me out,

come save your wandering sheep!

I’m lost, I’m found, I’m lost again,

please don’t give up on me.

Music that makes community

Elizabeth and I went to a wonderful workshop last week.  It's called Music That Makes Community.  It's offered about four times a year by the All Saints Company.  Their goal is to foster group singing with paperless music as a way to build community.  I had their songbook, Music By Heart, already, but it's hard to start with just - paper.  The workshop gave us an intensive introduction to leading group singing, to writing our own songs (!), to using music more freely in worship.  So basically we sang for two days.  Awesome.


We composed songs this way: people chose Bible verses and put them on the wall.  We picked one and made up a tune for it.  Easy!  My verse was, "I will make their waters clear, and their streams to flow like oil" (Ezek. 32:14).  Just one line.  I wanted it to sound like water running, and so I made a tune.  I felt silly, with just one simple line.  Other people went first, with beautiful harmonies and parts.  I didn't want to share.  But I did.  The next thing I knew, they were singing it as a round.  I had composed a round, and I didn't even know it!  And it was beautiful.

I learned in a deep, new way that communities are smarter, more gifted, than the individuals in them.  They are more gifted than the most gifted individuals alone.  If I can trust the community, miracles will happen.

Now we're home, and I'm thinking about how and where to use what I've learned.  I'm heading off next week to a meeting of the Executive Council Committee on the Status of Women (say that three times fast!), and we will do some there.  Then I come home to lead a retreat for women, and we'll do some there.  And I'm really nervous.  Singing in our churches is so drenched with performance, with organs, with paper, I'm afraid that others won't let themselves fall into the joy and ease of singing just to sing.

But I'm doing it.  Nothing could be worse than not trying.  Then we're guaranteed not to change.

So sing your own song today.  Today, as part of your time with the Bible, pick a verse and make up a tune for it.  Sing it in the shower, in the car, in - church!

I'm trying to learn how to record my song.  When I do, I'll post it here.  I'd love to hear yours, if you make them.  Until then, sing to God a new song!

Standing at my own empty tomb

Today is special for me.  On August 8, 1985, I took my last drink.  I was 28 years old.  Today, I've been sober half of my life.  I can only begin to describe the gratitude and wonder I feel.

When I stopped, I wasn't fully convinced I was an alcoholic.  I did know a few things, though.  I knew that I was from an alcoholic family.  I had watched my father struggle to go to work, be part of the family, hold up his end of life while alcohol ate at him.

I knew I was miserable.  I had dropped out of graduate school and was working at the local Kmart.  That left me plenty of room to drink, but it wasn't much of a life.  I had a partner, who had just stopped drinking.  I had no idea how to make and keep friends, how to feel a part of things.

What made me show up that day was the realization that if I didn't change my life I would end up like my father.  I would not be lucky enough to die young.  I was facing another 50 years of isolation and misery.  Whether I worked at Kmart or the university, I would be alone and desperate.  And I wanted to be happy.

I didn't believe in God.  All I knew was that people in the rooms I went to were happy and loving, and I was not.  I wanted what they had.  So I did what they said to do.  I got on my knees, and prayed to whatever it was.  Gradually I was able to see where I had been carried, where I had been saved from myself.  And one day, in my room, I felt God's energy of love and peace flow through me.  I knew that was God, and it knew me.

That was a long time ago.  But from that beginning, I have found a life so rich, so powerful, so joyful that no words suffice.  Eucharistic prayers come closest.  Icons of the Transfiguration, of Jesus filled with light, come close.

Every day I give "glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine."  And every day I offer myself to that God, to work with me and through me and on me.

And now I know, no matter how good it is, it will get better if I keep going.

It gets better.  Really.

Thanks be to God for all of you who carried me at every stage - to Bob, Skip, Kaile, Pam, Fran, Anne, Suki, the Daytop kids, and all of you who carry the message every day.  You saved, you save, my life.

Sermon, Feast of Mary the Apostle, 2013

     If you didn’t know before today that the Companions of Mary the Apostle are a new kind of women’s community, you can see it today.  At the same time, this Eucharist is a testimony to how much we need and depend on our brothers and sisters who have gone before us.  Elizabeth and I are to be clothed today, yet you have given us this place of honor.  We are experienced and ordained members of the Church, yet for all our experience and knowledge, we are only standing here now because you invited and welcomed us.  Thank you.

Having said that, let me say that I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t want to preach today.  It’s simply too big.  But I said I would.  So let me tell you what makes Mary so precious, so big in my mind.  Let me tell you why I want to be a companion of Mary the Apostle.

The first reason Mary matters to me is because I am a woman.  The treatment given her reflects the treatment given to women by the Church.  In reclaiming her, I claim women’s authority.

The early Church Fathers - I emphasize that title - conflated her with other women so that she became known as a prostitute.  Legends of her endless penance in the desert vie with almost pornographic depictions of her in Renaissance and later art.  Somehow she could never really be redeemed, really be forgiven, really convert.  The treatment given to her made clear that women’s bodies are not part of the new creation.

The other set of legends about her actually coalesce with these others.  It’s become fashionable to suggest that Mary and Jesus were secretly married and had children.  This is somehow supposed to be feminist, or liberating.  But it continues the theme that women’s discipleship must confront their bodies in a way that men’s does not.  In fact, it’s not far from saying she slept with the boss to get her promotion!

The reality of the love between Mary and Jesus, the love between Jesus and any disciple, is so much greater than any shape we can give it.  The generative love that creates new disciples is its own beauty.  It does not need to be sexualized just because the disciple is female.

Now, you may think that in a church with a female Presiding Bishop and many female leaders we don’t need to emphasize gender anymore.  This is suspiciously like the Supreme Court’s argument that with a Black President we no longer need the Voting Rights Act.  In fact, the deeper struggle is just emerging.  This is the struggle over the gender of God.  As long as God is named and treated as masculine, women will struggle to find and keep their places.  As long as women’s place in the story of the Church is distorted or hidden, each generation of women will have to discover it anew.

So the first reason that Mary matters to me is because her fate and mine are intertwined as women.  But she is not just the first woman apostle.  She is the first apostle of the resurrection.  She is the sign of healing and discipleship and new creation.  

In Mary we see the full transformation of human nature.  We see the path of recovery, of healing, of new creation in Christ.  She’s not the only disciple in whom we see that transformation, but she is the one who stands twice at the doors of resurrection.  She stands at the empty tomb, but before that she stands at the site of her own renewal, her own chance at new life.

When Mary Magdalene was healed, she began a journey that took her where she could never imagine going.  She saw signs and wonders, and she heard her rabbi talk about the reign of God.  She saw the glory shining in him.  Through him she gained a new family, a new community.  Through him she saw herself transformed from former nut case to apostle.

Mary was a twice-born soul.  She was healed, and she loved her rabbi.  She watched him die, and she saw him risen.  She told others, who didn’t believe her.  She was urged on by the love of Christ.  She was transfigured as surely as Jesus had been, part of the new creation.  She knew the deeper joy that comes with the second chance.

I think most of us who end up in rooms like this chapel have a moment when we reach the end of our limited resources, a moment when we realize that God really can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.   Over time, if we keep praying and living the life, we find that God does infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  In that, we are soul-mates with Mary Magdalene.  

In fact, we might call Mary a thrice-born soul.  She began her life, and at some point she fell prey to demons.  Then she was healed, and her second life began.  And then that life was endangered, as she saw her Savior die on a cross.  That Good Friday must have been a death for her as well as for Jesus.  The one who had saved her had not been saved from death.

And then she goes to the tomb.  She sees an absence that she cannot understand.  Then she experiences joy beyond reason.  Her third life begins here.  She learns that even the grave cannot stop the love of Christ.  From now on, she lives not with him, but for him and in him.  As an apostle, she shares the ministry of reconciliation that is the gift of the Church.

Today Elizabeth and I step further into another life.  The last six months have been months of unimaginable joy and discovery.  The next period I trust will be deeper, and different, but just as powerful and transformative as any that have gone before.  

I know that we can face any challenge, because the God who saved me once, the God who carried me on each step, is still here.  And I know, somehow, that we bring a message to you in turn.  With Mary may we all be able to say, “I have seen the Lord.” 

Mary and Martha sermon, July 2013

What a joy it is to be back with you at Redeemer today.  And how wonderful to be here with the story of Mary and Martha, two powerful women who were close to Jesus.  We meet them again in the Gospel of John, where Martha declares Jesus to be the Messiah.  There we meet the same pair: Martha tells Jesus what’s on her mind, and rants at him for not saving her brother Lazarus, while Mary comes running and is seemingly more deferential to him.  I love Martha’s familiarity with Jesus, her willingness to tell him what’s up.  She reminds me of Teresa of Avila, who loved God and founded dozens of convents.  She could still tell God during hard times, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them!”

Yes, I love Martha.  I also love Mary.  I love her desire to know and listen like the men, her willingness to defy convention and sit with Jesus instead of serving in the kitchen.

What I don’t love is the way these two wonderful women get pitted against one another in the Church.  We hear that this story is about the contemplative life versus the active one.  Monks and nuns love that version.  Or we hear that it’s about knowing how much is enough.  That fits with our culture’s obsession with more, and speaks nicely to it.  But there’s much more going on here.

Mary and Martha are stand-ins for a fight between groups of men in the early Church.  As the Church grew, people started to organize for physical needs as well as spiritual ones.  As the dispute grew, the twelve apostles said, “It’s not right for us to neglect our study to wait on tables.  But someone has to.  So let’s appoint some people to do this work.”  The result was the first deacons.  The word, deacon, comes from the Greek word for service.  It is the word for what Martha is doing.

But Luke couldn’t tell us a story about Jesus coming to a home where a man served.  The man of the house would be expected to be with Jesus.  The women would be in the kitchen.  So in Luke’s telling, the deacon’s role falls to a woman.

Martha is doing important work.  She’s doing work that later people are ordained for, caring for the physical needs of the community.  

So the problem is not that Martha is thinking about dinner.  Someone has to!  The problem is not that her dinner is too elaborate, as some people say - though this comes closer to the core.

The problem is how and why Martha is doing her work.  

The question is how and why we do our work.

Hospitality is the number one priority in pre-modern cultures, and still in poorer areas.  Hospitality may be the difference between safety and death, or between comfort and hunger.  Without the promise of hospitality, people could never leave their homes for more than a day.  

And welcoming others is, in those cultures, both an obligation and an honor.  Even if it means changing all our plans and killing calves and laying out a feast, it’s expected.  

In this case, Jesus is traveling with a group.   It would have been quite an enterprise to feed all those people, and quite an honor.  Imagine - the Teacher is staying with us!

But I imagine that it’s easy to let that go to your head.  It’s easy to think that you have to measure up, to be the best host ever, to show off.  The neighbors will want to know the menu - you have to keep up appearances.

If that is in our head, then our hospitality is really not about our guests at all.  It’s about us.  If my welcome of you is so focused on impressing you that I never listen to you, I’m not welcoming you at all.  You’re my target, not my guest.

And it’s clear that this happens for Martha.  Jesus becomes first a target, and then a tool.

Part of hospitality is easing people’s burdens.  This means giving them water to wash and to drink, and food to eat, but it also means giving them a place to relax and lay down their problems.

But Martha has broken the code.  She has violated hospitality by drawing Jesus into her dispute with her sister.  She’s got her plans for the meal, and Mary has let her down.  So she tries to get Jesus to intervene.  

In contemporary psychology, this is known as triangling.  “Tell my wife to give me the car!”  “Would you ask Jimmy if he likes me?”  “Let me tell you what’s wrong with my boss, or my partner, or my lover, or my parents, or my children.”  And Jesus does what priests and other counselors are advised to do - he refuses to get in between them.

I wonder what’s up between Martha and Mary.  What’s going on that Martha can’t talk to Mary directly?  What’s going on that Mary would leave her sister alone in the kitchen and go listen to Jesus talk about love and compassion and service?

I suspect it has to do with Martha’s inability to see who has come into her house.  

The one who eats with outcasts and sinners has come.  The one who has no place to lay his head has come.  Surely he does not need to be impressed.  He needs to be enjoyed.

I don’t know about you, but I can get into that Martha place.  As I write this sermon, I have to choose: do I want to leave you aware of my brilliant insight, or do I want you to see God among us?

Well, both, really.

But Jesus shows me how to choose.

Grace and peace have entered the house.

A simple meal, some talk, some listening, are all that’s needed.  

Everything else is ego.  

Jesus is here.

Listen.

A School of Love

Elizabeth and I have continuing shared reading as part of our formation.  We're currently reading Michael Casey's book, Strangers to the City, on the Rule of St. Bendict.  It spurs great reflection and conversation, even when we disagree with particulars.

In his discussion of chastity, Casey refers to St. Aelred's description of monastic life as a "school of love." This is really powerful and to the point for me.  We are about conversion of our lives and hearts, from fear in all its forms to love, openness, and compassion.  That shows up not only in chastity, but also in being willing to live with less, to listen to another's guidance and direction, to serve others.  This school of love answers my deepest needs for belonging and purpose.

Yesterday the school of love appeared again.  Our dream team met to consider how to be companions.  We compiled responses to questions we had asked locally, and the main thread that came out was the desire for a community that supports us in ongoing "conversion of life" - living by the values we want to live by, pursuing the disciplines that are part of that, rejoicing with us and comforting us as we journey.  We want to be a school of love.

We made amazing strides in our discussion.  Details will appear over the next few months.  We are clear that we are building community, not an organization, not a hierarchy.  We are going to be companions together, supporting one another in our various life situations, teaching one another even as we learn about love together.

So as usual after these meetings, I couldn't sleep.  I'm exhausted.  I'm a bit terrified.  We just gave birth, and the baby has a life of its own.  We're not in control.  Everything we hoped for is happening.  So, I guess like a new mother, I'm terrified.  And exultant.  I can't wait to watch it grow up, but I also want to catch my breath, get pictures for the scrapbook, and just enjoy it.  But even as I say that, it's starting to cry and want food and crawl . . .

I wonder if this is how Jesus felt after he started calling people, proclaiming the kingdom?  Suddenly people are interrupting his meals, his homilies, his prayer time.  It's what he came for, but I expect he was daunted too.  Whether he was or not, I sure am!

Keep praying!  Keep giving thanks!  Stay in school!