because he loved the risen Jesus

Funeral sermon preached at St. Christopher's, the Burial Office of Les Maley, April 25, 2011.

How do you know that the thing you are doing is really worth doing? This question snags most souls at some point or another along our earthly pilgrim walks. Others, though, don’t seem nearly as perplexed, which can frustrate the rest of us. Their answers to questions of self-importance and action are gentle, fluid, and obvious. Lived out in their lives. These ones exude a selflessness centered on something they seem to see clearly, as if on a far off horizon, even if it’s not so clear to the rest of us. They are often marked by a willingness to serve and a gladness and readiness to give without bringing undue attention to the giving. Such a one is clear about his purpose and transparent in his humility.

By all accounts, and on every count, Leslie Earl Maley –Les – was such a one.

Let me say up front that I didn’t know Les. But it’s hard to hear much about the formative years of this parish without his name and Kay’s popping up. And if you’re lucky enough to hear the stories from someone who knew Les or Kay, the warmth of the smile and the regard in the voice is at least as telling as the story.

Talk about Les, as it’s come to me through his friends in this church, often goes something like this: “You know, Fr Jonathan, Les built most of the set for that Vacation Bible School camp, the one called 29 AD. Over 70 people from all over Portland here learning of God. But don’t bother looking for him in the pictures. He’s not the kind to show up in the pictures. That just wasn’t like him.” Or “That coffee kitchen over there – I’m pretty sure Les did that, too, but if he did, you know he just did it – whatever it was that needed to be done. Didn’t talk much about it.” Or “Les wasn’t one to waste many words, but when he spoke, we listened.”

Words you hear folks using to describe Les include: selfless, diligent, not one to make a fuss, loyal, devoted.

So the reading from Wisdom is not out of place with respect to Les: “...the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.”

Of course, if Les had pursued selflessness for its own sake, or loyalty as an isolated virtue, we’d celebrate a life well-lived today, shrug our shoulders and be done. But that would be to make too little of Les’s selflessness and devotion, a disposition not unlike that of John the Baptist who said, “He must increase, I must decrease.” That is, a disposition that sought to point to and live in the mercies of Jesus.

And because Les sought to point to and live in the mercies of Jesus, we do more today than simply remember a life. We celebrate Les’ entrance into the eternal life made possible by the God to which he pointed.

As we celebrated yesterday, the God to which he pointed is the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Even as we announced plans for this service yesterday, at our Sunday worship, it was in the midst of loud, glad, brash Alleluias! The Easter Feast. And truly today Les is met, married, united to the Good News of Easter. That because Jesus is raised from the dead, we too will be raised. And Christ’s own life reminding us that the life of a humble servant is not too low for resurrection joy.

What a reminder: that we need not fear death or loving one another as servants. Les embodied this reminder, this truth, because he loved the crucified and risen Jesus.

Thank God and praise Him.

Amen.

because I see how much He loves you

a maundy thursday homily. st. christopher's. april 21, 2011.

It's a solemn day, but I'm a little distracted. So many sandals. I can't look at you out there without thinking of a verse from Isaiah 52: "How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of the messenger who brings good news, the good news of peace and salvation, the good news that the God of Israel reigns." In case I haven't told you lately, can I just say you have beautiful feet? Feet made to carry the Good News of God.

Today the Church observes the day called Maundy Thursday, or commandment Thursday, after we untangle the Latin. Commandment Thursday, the first of the three great days of Holy Week. The three days that signal the heart of what everything else has led up to until now: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil and Easter, all Good News.

The three-fold, three-day mystery of Jesus Christ for us.

Tonight we enter the mystery.

Commandment Thursday. Jesus, at the table with his closest friends, sharing the meal he has longed deeply to share. Taking, breaking, bread, drinking wine, symbols of redemption – the provision of God and the night on which God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt – but this time, in Jesus’s hands, something other. Something more. “This is my body. This is my blood. For you and for many. For the forgiveness of sins.

“Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this.” That’s where Commandment Thursday comes in. We pay attention on this night to what Jesus commands his friends to do around this table. “Do this,” he says. Jesus at this table giving his disciples the commandments that are to shape their lives from this moment on. These are the pillars on which his friends are to understand their life together and its meaning after he leaves them. This is Jesus entrusting to the would-be Church the most cherished moments of his story.

And what exactly is it that Jesus commands them to do?

The bread and the cup. Holy Communion. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s gospels, this command stands alone.

But in John’s gospel, the one we just read, Jesus interrupts this meal, the Last Supper, with another commandment: taking off his robe, bending down, he washes their feet and commands them that “you also are to wash one another’s feet.” Another commandment. Then he adds, “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.” And finally, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

"Do this." Thus Commandment Thursday. "Do this." The day the Church remembers the night on which we receive the commandments of Christ. The things we are to do in the days after his death.

I don’t know if you feel it, but there’s an uneasy tension at this point in the evening. Even as we hear the things we’re commanded to do, and probably breathe a sigh of relief that the list seems fairly manageable (that is, it’s a short list – eat this bread, love one another), even so we can’t escape the feeling that the simplicity of this night nonetheless holds a dark secret.

Or maybe that we in ourselves hold a dark, mocking secret.

And the secret is that we receive the things God commands us to do on the same night we’ll betray him.

Like the disciples, we say, “Surely not I, Lord?” But by the end of this night, all are deserters, unable to keep even the simplest command, “Stay awake, don’t fall asleep.”

On a night when we know the truth of who we are like this, who am I to say what I will or will not do with God’s commands?

The day of commandments is also the day of betrayal; rejection; my total failure.

Commandments can’t be the whole of the story. At least not if our hope is in how well we will keep them.

No, there’s something else at work here. Though we may not see it all the way until acts 2 and 3 of the three-act mystery, it’s already present here, in act 1, here, Maundy Thursday, as he lifts up the bread, as he washes the feet, even of the one who will send him to the cross; it’s simply present in him, the beating heart of the mystery, and forgiveness is the heart of the mystery.

So forgiveness is also the beating heart of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI says that this is why Jesus made Peter the head of the Church: not so that one man might wield power over many– no, he argues that that would be to forget the particular role of Peter on this night; Peter, not as leader, but Peter as deserter, Peter, all-talk and no-walk and bitter tears at the ending, what he thought was the ending; "no, I don’t know that man." No, Pope Benedict says that Peter was not made the head of the Church so that the Church might be ruled by the might of one man, but so that the Church – and especially her leaders – would never forget her need of forgiveness. Peter, the emblem of Christ’s tender forgiveness. We are never not in need of forgiveness.

This is my blood, for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.

If the cup is forgiveness, and we are commanded to drink it, you are, in a sense, commanded to let go of your inability to keep the commandments. Or at least entrust your inabilities to the tender compassion of the God who washes feet. Be reconciled to God. Taste the forgiveness of God.

For how else are we made able to wordlessly, silently, stoop down and wash each other’s feet, if not as those forgiven by God?

This day begins as commandment and bends toward forgiveness so that it can finally be about him, who is our forgiveness, and the love he has for his own. And he does love you, his own.

So, finally, tonight, it becomes impossible for me to pick up your foot and wash it as a token of my humility or my sincerity or my best good intentions, but only because I see how much He loves you.

Let us pray.

Merciful Lord, you revealed your glory by humbly serving the one who would betray you. Shower us with your mercy, Lord, and grow us up to be merciful.1

Amen.

what do you pray for? a good friday homily

Sermon preached at St. Christopher's by-the-Sea, April 22, 2011

What do you pray for? For what do you pray? In quiet; in darkness; on days like today. The still of your heart. Time to reflect between you and your Maker. And he’s listening. When all of the names of the sick, your loved ones and family, your friends, have come into mind and gone out again, when your immediate worries and prayers for protection depart from this earth, lifted up, and there’s still some time left, for what do you pray?

I was walking the stations of the cross one Friday a few weeks ago. Some of you were there. Here. We walked together the fourteen stations of this day, Good Friday. A kind of practice for this day. A steeling of the soul. From the station at which Jesus was condemned to die to his falling on the road, to the man who carried Christ’s cross beside him, to the women he met on the way, to the stripping of his garments from his body, to the death and the cry, the vinegar and the blood. Jesus in the arms of his mother. The silence of the tomb.

Fourteen all together. Fourteen stations.

Each with a certain order. A kind of painful monotony. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, we said. Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Each station, that’s how we started. Then you read the story, quoting Scripture. Invited us to pray.

Fourteen times, fourteen Scriptures. Fourteen prayers you offered.

That’s what I noticed on that particular Friday. The prayers.

What do you pray for, what does one ask for, in the shadow of the cross and this day?

It’s not all rhetorical. I made a list that night, when I got home, of each of the things we asked God for at the end of each station. Call it a collection of cruciform - or cross-shaped - prayers. Allow me to share them, briefly: the petitions of the prayers from those fourteen stations:

That we may find the way of the cross to be the way of life and peace; that we would learn to walk in this way. That God would grant us courage to take up our cross and follow. That the Lord would grant us strength and protection to support us in dangers, especially our temptations. That we may share in this passion and so also share in resurrection joys. That God would bless those who give themselves to the service of others, that they may minister with wisdom, patience, and courage to the suffering, friendless, and needy. That we may be strengthened to bear our cross, and changed into his likeness. That we may walk in the way of his suffering, also share in his resurrection. That we may be taught to mourn our sins, and to leave them, so that the results of our iniquities would not be visited upon our children and their children. That we may so glory in the cross of Christ that we would gladly suffer shame and loss for Jesus’s sake. We prayed for grace to accept the suffering of the present time. We asked that the Spirit would clothe us in love, so that our hands would so share God’s love that others would know Jesus. That we may die daily to sin, and walk in resurrection joy. That we would follow in faith where Christ has led the way.

Let me be the first to confess that, left to my own devices, these are not the things I would pray for. For starters, they’re a little redundant. More than that, left to myself, the days I would pray to suffer shame and loss are few and far between. Most of the things that we prayed for that day are things I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. As a child, when I prayed, I might have asked for a bicycle. Or more seriously, more grown up, prayed for a less stressful day, less trying life circumstance, healing for my mother, reconciliation with my brother; even on my best days something along the lines of a materially and peacefully prosperous world for the all of us.

But with the God of all Creation before me; with the ear of the Almighty listening to me; in the still of my soul, and the darkness of this day, with this day as my chance to open my honest desires, the requests of my heart before His face, this is what I ask for. This is that for which what I pray. That I would be changed; taught to lament; made to suffer; and serve; even sacrifice. Die daily to sin. Made to walk the way of the cross, and walking it, find it to be the way of life and peace.

As opportunities to get what I want go, the prayers I offer this day are a waste. Don’t make sense. Ask for healthy children, healthy heartbeats, healthy 401ks. And long life. But the way of the cross?

And yet, because it is here, beneath this cross, that I find him, for what else can I pray? This man on this day is my center. And my whole life revolves - or is learning to revolve - around these moments and these days and the one who hangs before me here. Here I learn, here I see, the face of the living God. For what else can I pray?

When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,

Save in the death of Christ my God!

All the vain things that charm me most,

I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,

Sorrow and love flow mingled down!

Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were a present far too small;

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

And God’s People said, “Amen.”

the company of saints

This year, the Presbyterians have invited us to partner with them and other churches to provide a community-wide VBS program. May 31-June 3. Anyway, I'm excited. Serving with brothers and sister who up 'til now have been strangers. Living gospel. Newbigin, maybe Claiborne, would be proud. And then, at a partner planning meeting at 1st Pres, an unexpected gift: this stack of photos from the last time these churches partnered like this: 25 years ago. Wonderful. Also sobering. Not only had they been there done that, they did it a loooong time ago. A quarter century! (for perspective, I may or may not have been old enough to attend their camp). They, just like us, now coming together. Just like us now, praying to live out this gospel. So thankful for their company just now; for their witness. Praying to take a small step in the direction they imagined-following the footsteps of our Lord. Grateful.









































My favorite.








- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Follow Me to Freedom, or at least read the book

Just finished 'Follow Me to Freedom: Leading As an Ordinary Radical' by Shane Claiborne and John Perkins. Not gonna lie, I have struggled with Claiborne up until now. Growing up a deeply rooted Anglo-Catholic, I had a hard time understanding the need for a 'new monasticism,' when the old one had so much to offer by way of Christian example. Where were the Church Fathers and Mothers in the conversation? Plus, he smelled of hipster before hipster had a label. Dark-rimmed glasses, rough cloth get-up. But I'm starting to think that the labels with him don't come from him, but from people like me who want to know what to call him. Moreover, and especially through this book, I really came to appreciate his imagination and follow through for how the life of faith can be lived out in flesh and bones and cars and kumquats and community and things in the realm of touch and the tangible. He's not going to think himself into inaction.

I had read some of John Perkins before, too, and his train of thought loses me sometimes, but I appreciate the 'been there, lived that' honesty and humility that births the wisdom he offers.

With that in mind, I want to recommend the book, and also share some highlights that I scribbled around across the pages. Some of it is Captain Obvious type stuff, but a good reminder. Other stuff is less obvious, just as good. None of it, as I read over it, does justice to the book or the thoughts in context. But hopefully you'll read it, too, and tell me what I missed.

"If we cannot be reconciled with people that look different than we look, then what is reconciliation?" p 17

"[Their dependence on God] put the early Christians in a position where not only were they to practice hospitality, but they were also to be dependent upon receiving it. As one of the early Christians said, 'We have no house, but we have homes everywhere we go'...From that we can learn that vulnerability is a value, not a threat. It's something that good leaders know well: they need other people." p 36

"Good leaders and good followers interrupt each other, yet somehow pause to listen to each other too - and that is the key. Count on it." p 29

"'Unearned suffering is redemptive.' To me, that means, 'I haven't had the problem, but I'll go and suffer with you.'" p 32

"God did not make too many people or too little stuff." p37

"The Christian life is about surrounding ourselves with people we want to become." p 54

"God seems to have an aversion to power...not because people are a threat to Him, but because they are a threat to themselves." p 61

"You are as young as your dreams and as old as your cynicism...and I am younger than any of you." p 64 (quoting Tony Campolo)

An interviewer asked Mother Teresa:

"Is your work going to live after you?" She quietly and respectfully dismissed the question, saying, "That is of no concern to me." It was like she was saying, "That's God's business." p 67

"All great leaders have the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of the people in their time." p 73

"I know you're strong enough to do it alone, but are you strong enough to do it together?" p 85

"That is one of the key ways we discern God's will, by asking, "Does this - this community, this spouse, this leader - move me closer to Jesus?" Can I smell the fragrance of Christ on them? p 97

"I don't understand begging Christians to do God's work. I don't understand it at all. It's a contradiction. He created us and saved us so that we might be His workmanship. We are here to serve Him, not to use Him to serve us." p 121

"...we have over-evangelized the world too lightly. We've gotten a lot of people to have supposedly asked Jesus into their hearts, but they are not living with any gratitude. They've got Jesus working for them instead of them doing His work in the world." p 123

"Leadership is about protecting folks from themselves before they destroy themselves." p 132

MLK, JR:

"Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our houses and threaten our children and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory." p 141

"...anything worth doing is beyond our power to do alone. We cry out to God because we know we need help." p 158

"For some, 'I will pray for you' becomes a convenient excuse to not act. Real prayer is this: 'Lord, what would You have me to do?" p 194

"We cannot simultaneously love our enemies and prepare to kill them en masse." p 217

"It seems that 'emerging church' has become little more than a box where you can put anyone who is under 40 and has fresh ideas - and not have to listen to them." p 219

"Above all else I urge that there should be no murmuring in the community." St Benedict of Nursia, p 230

"'Issues'...that's how they're presented to my generation, and that's how we interact with them. We get to pick and choose what we want to get involved with - even going along with what might be trendy. After we've joined a Facebook group, forwarded an email or even taken a short-term mission trip, we might move on to the next 'issue.' Of course, the bouncing from one issue to the next runs counter to what both [of the authors] say, and it's counter to what God asks of us. So there will always be 'issues,' but do we recognize them as 'pains'? p233

"Love your enemies," he said.

[Sermon preached Feb 20, 2011, at St. Christopher's by-the-Sea]

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Love your enemies.”

If last week was the frying pan, this week is the fire. You remember last week: If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out, that sort of stuff. This week, love your enemies. Ugh.

Can we just start by saying that loving our enemies is not an altogether straightforward proposition? Loving our enemies requires difficult work. In the first place, if I’m honest, it's a big step just to name out loud that I have enemies. Oh, sure I do - I’m not naïve - but who says that out loud? I'd rather just say that certain individuals and I are of differing opinions about the way things ought to be - not really enemies. Great minds think alike, but pretty good minds can still disagree, and even sometimes hurt one another without our having to be enemies. Just a misunderstanding.

It's not for nothing that facebook keeps track of your friends, with no mention of enemies. Nobody wants enemies. Enemies just happen. Like bubble gum on the bottom of your shoes, they happen. And since most of us don't want them, we try to turn them into something else. Like good friends we never talk to. Distant relatives we never visit or write. We're not at odds, we just have no real relationship. No harm, no foul, right?

But by telling us to love our enemies, Jesus is assuming that his followers will have enemies, because Jesus's followers are to preach Christ crucified, and this is judgment on the world - the same world Jesus came to save.

So that's point number one: Jesus gives us permission to have enemies. Indeed, he expects it. It's part of being a faithful follower of Christ.

Yet, but, and...

Jesus refuses to let our having the enemies he expects us to have be the end of our story. Jesus refuses to let our having the enemies he expects us to have be the end of His story:

Love your enemies, he says.

Not so that you won't have them, but so that you'll know what to do when they happen - love your enemies.

A nice thought. A pious sentiment, perhaps. But on the sun-baked, hard, cracked ground of the real world - where the rubber meets the road - what can this possibly mean?

A priest friend of mine used to say after the birthday blessings, to the ones who had just celebrated their special day, "I'm glad you were born." On the most basic level, to love another person is to say I'm glad that you were born. I’m glad that you exist. So says Jean Vanier, founder of the L'arch Community, a residential community of faith built around the lives of the physically and mentally handicapped.

I love you. I'm glad for you. I'm glad that you are.

When Jesus says love even your enemies, that's where we start.

Even to my enemy, I'm glad that you exist. But that's where things get sticky, isn't it? In what sense do we mean that? In what sense are we really glad that our enemies exist?

Not necessarily glad that we have enemies, but glad that the enemies we do have are. And not just for what we stand to get out of them one day, but glad for them, period, because God has given us one another.

An example of one thing this means: I think it changes the way Christians think about the future. When I close my eyes tight on dreamy days and imagine my future, Jesus asks me not to imagine a future without my present enemies. That is, to love my enemies is to not wish for a future in which my enemies have been eliminated. Instead, love of enemies means desiring that God would make us a part of one future. That we would share one, whole, reconciled future together.

But maybe that all sounds too obvious...too basic...I don't know. Still, we’ve all seen the other end of it, haven’t we? We’ve all looked at our lives cluttered with others who looked liked obstacles to be overcome for our future successes.

A man arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks, "Religion?" The man says, "Methodist." St. Peter looks down his list, and says, "Go to room 24, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."

Another man arrives at the gates of heaven. "Religion?" "Baptist." "Go to room 18, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."

A third man arrives at the gates. "Religion?" "Jewish." "Go to room 11, but be very quiet as you pass room 8." The man says, "I can understand there being different rooms for different religions, but why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?" St. Peter tells him, "Well the Catholics are in room 8, and they think they're the only ones here."

Now, two quick disclaimers: First, jokes by definition have to pick on someone, and we could just as easily have put ourselves, not the Catholics, in room number 8. It’s just a joke. Second, I’m not saying that everybody makes it, no matter what they believe, that it just doesn’t matter. I am saying that we all have had practice imagining futures that kill off our enemies and that leave us and God alone in a room at the end. And Jesus asks us to stop that; to pray for and work toward a future that includes even our enemies.

That's the beginning of what it means to love. Because that's what God has done for us in Christ Jesus: God in Christ Jesus has made us a part of God's future. God in Christ shares eternity, God’s future, with us. “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they do.”

So God in Christ makes us a part of God’s future; we are called to show and share that love by re-imagining our futures to include even those individuals, nations, families, persons, and peoples toward whom we aren’t instinctively inclined; even the ones who have nothing to give us - indeed, if we take Jesus’s example seriously, even when it costs us.

But who does that, really?

Enter Julio Diaz. I’m going to let Mr. Diaz tell the story of the night a mugger met him on a train, and, bizarrely, how the two of them found themselves at dinner around a table, sharing a future and maybe, just maybe, sharing a taste of the Kingdom.

[At this point you can click on the link to hear him, or read the author’s account below; in either case, the sermon picks up at the end of the purple text.]

http://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89164759/a-victim-treats-his-mugger-right
-----
Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.
"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.
Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"
"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"
"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.
Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz — or he didn't want to.
When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen's knife — "and he gave it to me."
Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."
"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."
------
"It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Simple, maybe. Easy, no. But after a friend of mine heard that story, he told me: “Maybe, when Jesus said to love our enemies, maybe he meant it.”

Amen.

to be a witness

Another quote Rebekah shared with me, found in Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, and not without relevance with respect to Sunday's gospel:

"As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, 'To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.'"