Santuario de Chimayo, September 27

This past Saturday we went with friends to the Santuario de Chimayo in northern New Mexico.  This holy place has been a center for healing and prayer since 1806, when a farmer discovered a cross at the site.  Pilgrims come and scoop up "holy dirt" to use for healing, as others do with water from Lourdes.
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the churches or the chapel of dirt, so words will have to suffice.  Entering a small room, we saw a wall of abandoned crutches from people who no longer needed them.  In the center of the room is a small hole where the dirt is.  People can scoop up a bit of dirt, so we did.  I have no idea where the dirt comes from - it must be replenished, but no details are given.
There is a beautiful chapel done in the New Mexican style, dating from the 1830s.  Another tiny chapel holds reserved sacrament in exposition.  But the most powerful chapel is the children's chapel.  Walls are covered with photos of children who died, and of children to be prayed for.  There are dozens of baby shoes, in honor of the tradition that when Jesus' family fled to Egypt, they had no time even to put on his shoes.  There is simply an overflow of love here.
Another chapel honors the mix of cultures in this place.  An altar shows a Native American version of the Last Supper.  I'm trying to upload a photo.  It reminds me of the complicated history of Christianity in this place.  Catholicism was imposed on the indigenous peoples, but over centuries they have made it theirs in distinctive ways.
Chimayo is like much of northern New Mexico - standing between cultures, between times.  I'm not exactly "in" the faith it represents, but I can feel the love and the pain and the hope that people bring there.  Please pray for all those in search of healing today.

Sermon at St. John's Cornwall, August 31

I’m glad to be back with you.  Whenever we come together to worship it’s a special occasion.  We do well to remember God’s word to Moses: the place where we are standing is holy ground.  It is holy, as holy as the mountain where Moses met God.  The whole earth is God’s, and we are God’s.  It is all holy.

Sometimes, maybe most of the time, we don’t notice the holiness of the earth, or of one another, or of ourselves.  Most of the time we get up, wash, eat, and run out to whatever task is ahead of us.  We come home, we eat, we may run out again, or we may stay home.  But in most of that time, most of our days, I think it’s safe to say that we are not aware that we are in the presence of God.  And that may not be just an oversight.  It may be self-protection.

Moses sees a burning bush, a bush that burns but does not burn up, and he goes to investigate.  He’s not looking for God.  He’s just curious about the bush.  But God shows up, and calls him.  And it turns out that God put the bush there to get Moses’ attention.  He knew that Moses needed a lure, a hook, to get in range of God’s intent.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds familiar to me.  Sometimes, when I think I’m the beginning of the story, it turns out that God has been running ahead of me.  From my point of view, like Moses, it can seem that ideas about my life or my work start with me.  But eventually, sometimes, I can look back and say, “God was in that.”  It may not be a burning bush.  It may be a friend who tells you you should consider being an architect.  It may be someone you fall in love with.  It may be a chance encounter that changes your life.  

How would the history of Israel be different if Moses hadn’t turned aside to look at that bush?

How would your life, and the lives of others, be different if you had chosen another path?

How would your life be different if Jesus hadn’t gone to Jerusalem and given himself up to be killed?

Honestly, we don’t know.  That kind of question doesn’t have an answer.  It opens up a line of questions, a wondering, and that’s more valuable than an answer could be.

But Moses does turn aside.  He does take off his shoes.  He does hear God.  And his life, our lives are changed forever.

God starts by telling Moses about God’s plans and promises.  God will deliver the Israelites.  

But then comes the hard part.  It turns out that God will do all this through Moses.  Through a human being.  And not an obvious hero, but a fugitive from the Egyptians.

  In one sentence, God’s intention has become a specific human obligation.

“So now, go.”

It’s tempting to think that God waits for us to get on board, that God just wants us to do our best without risking too much.  We can tell ourselves that we’re doing as much as our neighbors.  We’re giving more than the minimum, even if we aren’t tithing.  We donate to charity.  Maybe we give some time to our community as well.  And those are good things.

But it seems that God’s plans always call us beyond our comfort zones.  They call us beyond where we volunteer to go, to the point where we have to be dragged.  We’ve learned that vocation is where the world’s need meets our bliss, as Frederick Buechner said, but we can forget that our bliss lies in God.  Bliss isn’t always comfort.

In the story of Moses we see God working through a vulnerable but courageous man.  God’s purposes depend on this fragile reed.  And God will give him a companion, his brother Aaron, to help.  But Moses has to go.

How would your world be different if he had said no?

Over and over, through the history of the Israelites, God will call people to lead and to speak to the people.  God calls Samuel, and Elijah, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and other prophets.  God calls Saul and David to rule, not because they’re so much better than others, but because they’re called.

In each case, the mystery that is God intersects with the history of humans.  We don’t know the name of this mystery, but we know when it shows up.  God works through these vulnerable people to achieve God’s purposes.

Finally, God goes all in.  In Jesus, God conjoins mystery and history.  God calls Mary, and Joseph, and Elizabeth, and a host of others to show us how to be part of God’s dream for the world.  Jesus is vulnerable like we are, but so close to the mystery that he can walk through the fears we all share to follow God’s dream.  

The disciples don’t get this.  Peter is horrified, and says, “No!  You can’t risk death!  You’re the Messiah!”

Peter doesn’t get the mystery yet.  Peter thinks he knows who Jesus is, he’s got Jesus fixed in the history of Israel.  But Jesus is where history and mystery meet.  The mystery of death and resurrection is so much bigger than Peter, or we, can grasp.  We want Jesus to get back in the history box of doing good, of teaching, of healing.  But no.  

Jesus wants to show us how to live out our vocations, our own calls. 

Jesus knows that the biggest barrier is fear, and the biggest fear is death.

Jesus wants us to be free of fear, so we can accomplish God’s purpose.

How would your life be different if Jesus had backed away?

How would your life be different if you back away?

How would it be different if you say yes?

Sermon at the monastery, August 24 2914

I’d love to open this sermon with a little story, even a joke.  I really wanted to think of something clever to say about Peter, now that we have a Peter in the house.
I could take you through some historical or textual exegesis.  I could find a quote from someone to elaborate my points.
But that’s not what I’m supposed to say today.
What I have to say is too simple and too important to try to be clever or facile.  I just have to say it.
There’s just no getting around it.  Being a Christian is a counter-cultural choice.   In this country, after centuries - millennia - of Christendom, that fact is obscured.  As we become more secular and more diverse, however, the reality of following Jesus is re-emerging.
Just as Peter, in confessing Jesus as the Messiah, had no idea what he was getting into, so we find ourselves always out on a limb with Jesus.  Just as in Paul’s time, we are challenged to choose between belonging to Christ and belonging to an imperial culture of violence, oppression, and consumption.
Right after Peter makes this confession and Jesus gives him his teaching commission, he will see how hard it is to follow.  As Jesus tells the disciples that he will have to suffer and die, Peter objects.  He can’t accept yet that living the Christ-life will put him that deeply at odds with the empire.  And Jesus will call him “Satan” and a stumbling block, because his mind is not yet transformed.
And this is true for all of us.  Even the wisest among us struggle to understand and follow Jesus on a daily basis.  It’s great to be able to say that Jesus is Lord, but presenting myself as a living sacrifice is another matter.
When Paul calls on us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, he is telling us that it’s not enough to say the right words or feel deep feelings  about Jesus.
It’s not enough to wear a cross while we benefit from the low wages of garment workers in Nepal or the deadly working conditions of so many in China, in Peru, in Appalachia.
It’s not enough to sing hymns, or even to pray for those we love, while we spend our money and our time pursuing the larger culture’s idols of power and comfort.
It’s not enough to read the Bible while we stuff ourselves with Big Macs and Dunkin Donuts.
It's not enough to enter a monastery or convent, to give away our goods, and deny our continued sharing in the sins of the world.

We are called to present our bodies - with brains, hearts, and all - as a gift from God and to God.
All of us, not just our minds or our hearts.  Our bodies, whole and entire, are at God’s disposal.

Like Peter, we are called to go through all the stages of discipleship.  We may begin with confessing Jesus, with finding that deep relationship, but that’s just the beginning.  The human fear of death and pain remains.  The cultural values that compete with the Gospel remain.  Like Peter, we are called to walk through those fears and competing values.  We are called to present ourselves as holy.
One of the most radical and difficult ways that we are called to be transformed is in our sense of ourselves and our place in community.  Paul doesn’t make this appeal to individuals living alone, working alone.  He knows that the first, great leap in our thinking is to become aware of our interdependence.  We are members of one another.  Whatever choices I make impact all those with whom I am bound.  And I am bound, even when I don’t want to notice it or claim it.  I am bound not only to my companion Elizabeth, not only to the brothers, not only to my family.  I am bound not only to those to whom I have vowed obedience.  Through the baptismal covenant I am bound beyond the Church, to every person.  In fact, I am bound before the baptismal covenant; the moment of baptism is simply the time when I acknowledge that fact and take responsibility for it.
I am bound not only to in the impact I might have on others, however.  I am bound just as much by the impact you have on me.  My life is incomplete when I am the only one acting in it.  You shape me, by what you do and what you do not do.  Your gifts enrich me.  Your griefs and your anger wound me.  I am called to receive from you, as much as I give to you.

We live in a world where our interdependence is both denied and distorted.  The United States was founded on an ideology of individual property for white men, combined with a theology of conquest.  The thread of community runs through our fabric as well, but it is so often a community for us, against others.  Our interdependence is acknowledged within a tightly bounded circle, and others are pushed out or killed.  We refuse to see how our actions impact others, unless we see ourselves as helping them.  We can see in Iraq how our assumption of our benign power makes us as dangerous as some who actively plan destruction.  When we are the center of the universe, it is very hard to learn from others.
We live in a world, too, where the ideology of individualism leads people to loneliness and isolation.  In that vacuum they look for meaning in objects, in things that cannot satisfy.  The rampage of addiction and violence in this country is directly linked to the denial that we belong to one another.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.

Turn now.  Turn every day.  We are never done, never finished.

The world - God's good creation - depends on the choices we make.

I don’t know how else to say it.  I tried haiku:

Do not be conformed;
be transformed, with a new mind.
Seek God’s will for you.

I might write a song, a love song.  But I’m not sure how to start.

So I have to settle for Paul.
I could do worse.

Like Peter, we all have the keys of the kingdom.  Whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  May we open the gates and swing wide the doors to our hearts and minds.  May we present ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

Till there was You

This week I got to spend three days in silence with the Holy Cross community.  They have these three days each quarter, but usually my calendar is full and I'm lucky to get one day.  This time I was able to spend three blessed days reading, sitting by the river, waking slowly, praying.  And I was reminded of hw much I miss by going at my normal speed.
Here's some of what I saw:
A lesser blue heron over the Hudson
A great blue heron over the Hudson
A fish jumping out of the Hudson
The patterns on rocks
Tiny purple flowers
Amazing green leaves on trees hanging on by their roots
Tiny orange and white butterflies
A bee that killed and ate another bee
Three fawns who nursed from their mother while I stood in full view

As I walked away from the fawns I thought, "I have to slow down more."

I was reminded of the Beatles' song, "Till there was you."

There were birds all around, but I never saw them winging,
No, I never saw them at all, till there was you.

There was love all around, but I never heard it singing,
No, I never heard it at all, till there was you.

(And yes, I find many pop songs translate quite well into love songs to God.)

The hunger for God leads me to places and times of quiet.  There I find God's love in my heart and in all creation - even in the bee that consumes other bees.  The wonder of the universe feeds me, and makes me hunger for more.

I hope today to walk slowly enough to see and feel more of this glorious creation.
I hope you find some time to wonder too.
Blessings!

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!”