Monday, April 23, 2012

How Do You Say Goodbye?

May I speak in the name of Christ who sends the sweet, sweet Spirit to this place.  Amen.

How do you say goodbye?

Imagine.
.
.
.
Spending three years of your life with the same group of people.

You’ll see them at their best and their worst.

You’ll be annoyed at them. Laugh at their jokes. Watch them cry,   across the room. Pray for them.

Get angry at them sometimes.  Maybe hate them.  Feel rejected by them.

You’ll be desperate for solitude, for silence, for personal space.

You’ll be so lonely you can’t stand it. 

You’ll know every detail of their personality. 

You might know something of their faith.

If you’re lucky, you’ll treasure them always.

 
The thing about goodbye is,     you can see it from a long way off.

But you don’t really believe it will come.

In my mind, it’s kind of like death that way.


Right after graduating college, my choir toured Europe.

Some simple goodbyes were easy.

“You won’t see me for a little while.

After a little while you’ll see me again.”

My best friend Ryan was on the choir tour.

We saw goodbye, but didn’t believe it would come.

8 hours on the plane from Rome to JFK.

12 hours from JFK to Houghton, and I have never been sicker.

Packing until 3 am.

A flight at 8, an hour a way.

Up at 5 to shower, still sick.

Ryan put my suitcase in the trunk at 6.

I opened my mouth to say the words,

And all I could do was cry.


There are certain things you can’t just say to certain people.

You have to use the wrong words

To get at what you really mean.

Good-bye.

I love you.


Jesus can’t shut up in the gospel of John.

You know where I’m going.  There are many mansions there.  I’ll send the comforter.  I am the vine, You are the branches.  Abide in me.  Greater love has no man than this: that he lay his life down for his friend.  You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.  I pray, Father, that they all may be one.

Prophecy?  Philsophy?  Theology, metaphysics?

No.

Jesus is human like the rest of us,

Afraid. 

Hurting.

He’s trying to say goodbye.

He’s trying to say I love you.


I count it a deep tragedy that in my three years here, I have heard

And I have used

All the wrong words.

I have only said the words “I love you” to a handful of people.

I have only heard them from a handful of people.

And believe me, both saying them and hearing them is terrifying.

Those words are powerful.

It costs us something to say them.

No wonder we use the wrong words!

It is so much easier to only hint at what we really mean.

I think we die a little bit to ourselves each time we say them.

It is any wonder I strain so hard to hear the calling placed on my life?

Is it any wonder I strain so hard to hear God’s voice saying “Shane, I love you?”

The right message is covered up in the wrong words.


The problem with saying good bye is that what we really mean is “I love you,”

But we never found the time or the words to say it.

My prayer for all of us –

Seniors coming to graduation,

Middlers and Juniors with lots of time left before their final goodbye.,

Inspired by the sweet sweet spirit in this place,

Is that we find the times and the places to say “I love you” to each other,

To die to ourselves.

To let the sweet, sweet Spirit fill us with God’s new life.

With God’s very self.

Then, goodbye can be simple.

Because love will already be so,
                                                            So,
                                                                   So very deep.

Amen.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Easter 2: Rehabilitating Thomas, Rehabilitating Evangelism


May I speak in the name of the Risen Christ.  Amen.


Who does the church belong to?

I interviewed Daniel Webster over the weekend, the Canon for mission in the diocese of Maryland.

He spends time working with congregations trying to help them become healthy,

Healthy enough that they can begin to share their spiritual narratives with each other,

So that they can start to DREAM:

Do Real Evangelism Almost Mindlessly.  

He says he sees a troubling split between two different ideas about why the church does the work of evangelism:

His own is DREAM.

What he sees far more often is the dedicated few trying to play the GODsquad:

GODsquad: the Grow or Die squad.  



The DREAM team doesn't have to work to share their faith.

It flows from who they are: out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

The GODsquad is filled with doubt.

How will we survive?  What will become of us if we do not grow?  How can we pay our bills?



Thomas was a disciple filled, so the story usually goes, with doubt.

Unless I see him,

Unless I touch him,

Unless I put my fingers in his side and his hands,

I will not believe.

I cannot believe.

Thomas takes a lot of flak every year come Eastertide for his doubts.

But what's interesting to me about Thomas's so-called "doubt"  isn't the resurrection.

It's what Thomas has to teach us about community, about equality, about evangelism.


First of all, can you really blame Thomas?

His friends were talking about resurrection. 

From the dead.

You know, like, when people die.

Get buried.

They don’t usually come back.

It’s not that Thomas doesn’t have faith.

Thomas, perhaps more clearly than any other disciple, knows what resurrection would mean.

The women who encounter the empty tomb rush away, terrified.

Mary Magdalene thinks the risen Christ is just the gardener.

The disciples

even after Jesus breaks in on their closed and locked room,

And appears to them in the flesh,

And they themselves touch his wounds

They are shaken, and fearful.

Their whole world came apart when Jesus was crucified.

Reality itself came apart when Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them.

After the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus went underground, afraid that they would meet the same fate as their beloved.

After the resurrection, the followers of Jesus stayed underground

Afraid they would meet the same fate as their beloved.

Thomas is the one, the first one, to immediately proclaim what resurrection means:

My Lord and My God!

Thomas’s faith in Jesus was deep, powerful, unwavering.

But he had to know it was Jesus.

Thomas is the first disciple, after the resurrection, to make the intellectual shift from social movement to theology, from Messiah to “My Lord and My God!”

In a way – with apologies to St. Peter – Thomas might be the true head fo the church.

He understands what resurrection means. 
He understands it first. 
He understands it most clearly.

Thomas might have doubted for a moment.

But the result of his doubt is the most profound faith,.

The most sublime theology,

The most mindless evangelism.

His confession is ripped from his mouth by his unique experience of Jesus.

This is the last act of the disciples in John’s gospel,

Because now the story must shift to the book of Acts, the story of the church.

This shift does not happen without Thomas,

Who brought the disciples out of their cave,

Their hushed and fearful locked-inner rooms,

The true knowledge of what Jesus’ resurrection really means.

And prepared them for the DREAM space of evangelism.


Canon Daniel Webster  describes the difference between DREAMteam and GODsquad this way:

When he was the rector of a tiny, struggling church in the Diocese of New York he had a secretary.

The secretary came in one day and said she'd been asked why she spent so much time at church.

Her answer was that she was the secretary and the treasurer,
And the church’s bills had to get paid.

What a loss, he says, of an evangelism opportunity.

Why didn’t she talk about the eighteen twelve-step programs that met there,
The food ministry they have making sandwiches for the homeless,
The fact that this church staying open saves lives.

We saved lives, at that church.

Shouldn’t that be what we answer when anyone asks us anything about it?

We.  Save.  Lives.



Who does the church belong to?

I said a minute ago that Thomas is perhaps the true head of the church,

It’s first post-resurrection theologian.

In our first Sunday after Easter, our celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Does the church belong to the ones who know what resurrection means?

Does the church belong to us? 



If today’s reading from Acts doesn’t scare you out of wanting to own the church, just wait a couple of weeks.

No one claimed private ownership of their possessions.

Everyone shared everything in common.

So Luke would have us believe, there was no poverty within the early church.

Poverty wasn’t even a category they thought of, because they were not concerned with possessions, with wealth.

They were not concerned with ownership.

They were concerned with fellowship.

Is it too much to suggest that they were guided by Thomas’ leadership?

That the one who insisted on a radical equality of experience –

I want to touch his wounds also –

Also insisted on a radical equality of possession, of wealth, of fellowship?



The question “Who does the church belong to?”

Is closely related to the question “Who would miss the church if it were gone?”

Certainly we would.

But our circle of fellowship has to extend to everyone who comes through these doors –

Not just the people who come here on Sunday morning –

We need to answer the questions “Why are we still open? and “Why are we here”

With the reality that Family and Children’s Agency needs us,

That the 12 step programs that meet here save lives,

We need to fully become a DREAM team and not a GOD squad –

We need to participate in God’s mission rather than the church’s mission, to borrow a phrase from Bishop Douglas –

Maybe then we will understand, like Thomas, the incredible evangelistic force of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Maybe then we will know that the Church belongs to everyone,
To all of us,
But really most of all to the one who would miss it the most if it were gone:

Our bridegroom, Jesus Christ

We are here to share in God’s fellowship,

The fellowship which 1 John tells us has been from the beginning and is now is the same that always will be,

The love that Jesus Christ shares with his Father in heaven through the power of the Holy Spirit,

The love that is God that is very life itself,

The risen life that insists on radical equality of fellowship with everyone we meet,

With everyone who comes through these doors.


As we approach this table, unworthy even to gather up its crumbs,

May God make us worthy to know the risen Jesus as our Lord and our God,

And to go forth in the power of the Spirit witness to how we, like Thomas, have been changed.

Amen.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Tenebrae: Service of Shadows

Holy Week.

I keep hearing people say "Happy Easter!" and my only thought is: Wow.  It's still a long time until Easter.

Last night we observed the service of Tenebrae.  Normally a service of shadows cast from extinguished candles and the anguish of Jeremiah's Lamentations, we combined the structure of the service with words and images from the Civil Rights movement, the Arab Spring, and Hurricane Katrina.  The result was an overwhelming cascade of images and emotions forcing us all to consider how the world we live in is a world of crucifixion, not a world of delight in which Jesus happened to be crucified.

The following is the (207 word) reflection I gave.

(It makes more sense if you have the context of the readings from the whole service.   It has even more power if you get the context of my other Chapel Ministers who gave reflections as well.  One student asked how long (if) we had planned our reflections together, because they were so coherent and harmonious.  We hadn't, actually.  We called it groupness, teamwork, truth, the Holy Spirit.)

What was shocking to me was my experience of preaching.  I was saying to my wife last night that normally I (think I) preach more like a poet.  Emphasis on breath and pause and silence; attention to the specific meanings of words and their interplay.  That is what made my Advent sermon so special to me, was that I exercised my poetic gifts that often remain dormant in the rush of hundreds of other things.  You can judge my poetry for it's value separately from considering that it has been since high school one of the chief ways I process faith and emotion.

Last night's experience of preaching - even though it was very short - was one where I felt completely out of control of my delivery.  I felt something like anger coursing through me as I spoke.  There was a force, a power, something HUGE within me as I delivered the word.  My wife suggested that it was the Holy Spirit taking control of my words, and I was glad someone else reflected that back to me.  It was incredible, frightening, and I'll be processing those feelings for a long time.  Perhaps it is the mystical experience I have in some ways craved for a long time as a confirmation of the calling I have claimed but never, in the literal sense, heard.

Tenebrae: Nocturn 3


“God has allowed me to go up to the mountain.
I’ve seen the Promised Land.      
I may not get there with you.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Moses saw the Promised Land from the mountain, yet he died and did not enter into it.
Stephen saw the heavens open, even between the flying stones.
Jesus was willing to be betrayed, to be given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross.
Jesus became obedient to death.
It is easy to believe there is a promised land.
It is quite another thing to see it.
It is easy to speak of God’s power.
Resurrection.  HALLE-
It is not the time to speak of God’s power.
Now is the time to be dissatisfied.
Now is the time to become incarnate
As Jesus,
 to the world of suffering.
Incarnational love is not what we choose instead of death.
Choosing to love in the world of crucifixion is choosing TO die.
Now is the time to speak of the most awesome human power, revealed by Jesus himself:
The ability to rush headlong into the darkness of death.
To enter into the Promised Land.