Burning Bush

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
March 20, 2022

3 Lent C 

          The other morning, I was out for my walk a little later than usual.  The sun was shining and the day was just gorgeous.  Our little neighborhood was quiet.  The school buses had finished their work.  Most people had already headed out to the office.  Trash day was earlier in the week so there were no trash trucks.  The streets were empty.  My walk is about 45 minutes and I prefer to walk in silence without listening to podcasts or even country music.  My walk that morning was stunningly peaceful, beautiful, and quiet.  For those few moments, all seemed right with the world and I felt briefly like I was beyond the wilderness of Covid, war, social injustice, or anything else dry or barren.  On a morning like that, my walk is admittedly a brief escape to a place beyond the wilderness.

          Moses has led his father-in-law’s flock beyond the wilderness this morning.  The Hebrew people are in slavery in Egypt, where Moses, a Hebrew, had been raised in the house of Pharoah.  As a child, Moses had been isolated from the treatment of his own people.  As an adult, when Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he killed the Egyptian and hid the body.  Moses has now fled for his own life.  In his exile, he meets the priest of Midian, marries one of the priest’s daughters, Zipporah, and is now working for his father-in-law tending his flock.

          Moses is out beyond a wilderness this morning that is largely geographical.  However, I cannot help but think that he feels a sense of being out beyond the wilderness of his own life where he knows that his own people are in slavery, and he is on the run for killing an Egyptian.  I wonder if he was experiencing a sense of peace, and just trying to be present in the quiet moment, when God finds him.  Just when Moses thinks he is safe from his past, God says “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt.  I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.  I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians….so come, I will send you to Pharoah to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”  Now, many years have passed since Moses fled Egypt, and the Pharoah who wanted Moses’ life has died.  But God is asking Moses to go back to the scene of his crime and ask Pharoah to let the Israelites go.  God cannot possibly think that Moses will jump at this opportunity.  But God has heard the sufferings of God’s people and God has a plan.

          With this story in mind, we hear the gospel reading in which Jesus asks if the Galileans who suffered did so because they were worse sinners than all the other Galileans.  Or were those who died when the tower of Siloam fell worse sinners than everyone else in Jerusalem?  No, Jesus says, but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.  At first glance, and maybe second glance, Jesus makes no sense here.  On the one hand, Jesus is clear that the people did not suffer because they were worse sinners than everyone else.  On the other hand, Jesus tells the people that unless they repent-turn from their sin-they will perish just as the others did.  So….is suffering evidence of sin not???

          This is an important question as we look at the world around us.  Some people get Covid and others don’t.  Some recover and others die.  Some don’t die but don’t recover either.  Are those who suffer worse sinners than the rest of us?  Or some of us live in a place where we do not fear that a bomb will be dropped on us.  We are not fleeing violence and disaster.  Others live in constant fear and are fleeing for their lives leaving everything behind.  Are those who suffer worse sinners than the rest of us?

          Jesus is clear that the answer is “no.”  Suffering is not a measure of sin.  But Jesus is also clear that sin has consequences when he says “But unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”  Then Jesus tells a parable about a man who had a fig tree that bore no fruit for three years.  He wanted to cut down the tree because it was wasting good soil.  But the gardener wants to nurture the tree for one more year and see if the tree will bear fruit before cutting it down.  The parable tells us of God’s patience and love, nurturing us and calling us again and again to repent before allowing us the consequences of our poor choices. 

          God calls Moses from out beyond the wilderness because God has heard the cries of God’s people. God knows their suffering.  That is the same God who heard the cries of the Galileans who suffered and the people of Siloam on whom the tower fell.  The same God hears the cries of those who are sick or dying, the people of Ukraine and other war-torn places, those who do not know where the next meal comes from or how they will care for their children, or who live with injustice because of their skin color, sexual orientation, or anything else that society uses to mark a person as less than equal.  And even out beyond the wilderness, where we, like Moses, may flee for a moment of peace, God calls to us.  God hears the cries of God’s people.  God sees their suffering, and God calls us to engage that suffering and do something about it.  God may not speak to us out of a burning bush with exact instructions.  I have not had an angel of the Lord appear to me on the streets of Connecticut Colony and tell me how to make things better for the Ukrainian people, or those impacted by Covid, or those suffering injustice and cruelty.  But that is no excuse because I and we have made promises in baptism.  Our baptismal covenant, the covenant God makes with us in baptism and that we renew at every baptism, calls us to work for justice and peace, to respect the dignity of every human being, and to seek and serve Christ in all people.  We can do that.  We can give to causes that are supporting Ukrainians.  There is information in the announcements about one way to do that.  We can welcome refugees when they arrive in Northeast Ohio and help them settle here.  Our Outreach Committee is working on ways to do just that.  We can listen to the stories of those different from ourselves and seek to understand.  We are doing that in our Lenten series.  Those stories will move us to work for justice and peace. Perhaps the baptismal covenant is our burning bush that will never stop burning, that shows us the misery of God’s people, and challenges us to make a real difference.  We would do well to say with Moses “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” and with Moses, to allow that burning bush to change our lives.

                                                Amen

                                      

Bizarre and Outrageous

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
March 13, 2022

2 Lent C

          A number of years ago, well before Don and I moved to Hudson, I was out and about one day and I stopped for gas at a Speedway station.  I had on my usual attire for a workday which included a black shirt, a collar, and my seminary cross.  You know the outfit.  After I pumped my gas, I went inside to get a Diet Coke, my beverage of choice back in the day.  When I went up to the counter to pay for my soda, the clerk gave me a very odd look, leaned over the counter and said with awe in her voice “Are you a witch?”  Nothing in my seminary education prepared me for that question.  I do not think fast enough to come up a good reply, but I knew enough to know that if she wondered if I was a witch, explaining that I am a priest in 10 seconds or less was not going to help matters.  Her knowledge of my world, what I do and what I believe was as limited as mine was of hers.  There was a line behind me so I just politely said “no,” paid for my drink and went on my way.

          Who I am and what I do and believe was as bizarre to the cashier in Speedway as whatever God and Abram are up to this morning is to me.  God and Abram have been going round and round about Abram’s descendants since Genesis 12 when God starts talking about Abram’s offspring.  At that point, Abram was 75 years old.  Now Abram and Sarah have traveled through Canaan and the Negeb, then gone down to Egypt to avoid a famine, back to the Negeb, to Bethel, and back to Canaan, where God again promises Abram offspring that number the dust of the earth.  Then there was some war and fighting over the land before we hear God say to Abram in a vision “Do not be afraid, Abram.” And Abram reminds God that he continues childless.  Again God promises Abram descendants that number the stars in the sky.  God’s promise looks a little unreliable at this point.  Abram is pushing 100 and Sarah is not far behind.  Who could blame Abram for being a little skeptical about offspring at his age?  Yet Abram believes and it is reckoned to him as righteousness. 

          Then we hear God promise that God will give Abram the land to possess.  When Abram asks God how he is to know that he will possess the land, land that other people clearly want both in the book of Genesis and throughout history, the story gets really bizarre.   The instructions are very specific: Take a 3 year old heifer, a three year old female goat, a three year old ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon.  All the animals except the birds are cut in half and laid out in a particular way.  After dark, while Abram was in a deep sleep, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces and we are told that God made a covenant with Abram to give him the land from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.

          What are we to make of this ritual and what on earth could dead animals and a smoking pot say to us in the 21^st century?

          Actually, this story is a powerful account of God meeting Abram where he is, in the midst of his doubt, and using an ancient form of sealing a covenant. * The ritual described is called “cutting a covenant.”  The two parties involved promise to keep the covenant they make lest their own bodies be cut in two like the animals through whose blood they walk.  The story that sounds so strange to our ears showed the ancient Hebrews the power of God’s promise to Abram.  How did the descendants of Abram know that the promised land belonged to them?  God had cut a covenant with Abram that promised God’s life if God failed to keep the covenant.  God met Abram where he was, in the midst of his doubt, and used ancient human convention to seal a promise. 

          If there is any point of similarity between Abram’s situation and that of Jesus this morning, perhaps the similarity is that Jesus looks no more chosen this morning than Abram felt at the beginning of the reading from Genesis.  We heard God claim Jesus as God’s own beloved Son at Jesus’ baptism.  Now, Herod wants to kill Jesus.  Jesus is heading to Jerusalem because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside the city.  Jesus wants to gather the people together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but the people are not willing.  Jesus is headed to Jerusalem to die a painful and public death.  Not much about that sounds chosen or beloved to me. 

God met Abram where he was with a ritual that sealed an outrageous promise.  Likewise, God meets humankind where we are in the person of Jesus.  When times are hard, when God’s promises seem farfetched or even outrageous, when death and evil seem to be winning, how do we know, really know, that we belong to God and that God will keep God’s promises?  We know because God was willing to meet us where we are by becoming a human to live among us, show us what love looks like, and lay down God’s life for us in the person of Jesus, turning death into life and hatred into love. 

          Because God has been outrageously and bizarrely clear about God’s deep love for humankind throughout scripture and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the faith expressed in the psalm this morning makes sense.  In the midst of a pandemic, war, personal challenges, the challenges our city faces, and any other situation in which we find ourselves, we can say “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?  The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid.”  We know that God’s promise of life and love is solid because the story of God and God’s people has shown that to us over and over again, meeting us where we are, and giving God’s life for the life of the world.  Perhaps bizarre and outrageous are required to convince our hearts of the depth of God’s love.

                                                                             Amen.

 

          *www.workingpreacher.org March 13 2022 Justin Michael Reed

Gifts

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
March 2, 2022 

Ash Wednesday

Mario and I began talking about Ash Wednesday and Lent almost two months ago.  Our concern was how to observe a holy Lent in a time when people feel stretched to the breaking point by the wilderness of the pandemic.  I, personally, found it hard to even think about Lent when we were once again masking up, not offering the chalice at communion, and had suspended coffee hour.  Was all that not denial enough?  And, as it turns out, we begin the holy season of Lent as pandemic restrictions ease, but as we enter the wilderness of war and a new time of great uncertainty.  How might Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent give us insight and even strength in the current circumstances?

          We tend to think of Lent as a time of spiritual discipline, of focusing on our mortality, and of repentance as we prepare for Easter.  And Lent is certainly all of those things.  We think of what we might take up or give up as a Lenten discipline.  On Ash Wednesday, however, Jesus gives us three gifts.  Those gifts are almsgiving, prayer, and fasting.  In a service in which we confess a whole host of ways we fail to live as God's children, it is easy to assume that almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are, if not punishment for our sins, at least our way of making things up to God, or earning a little forgiveness. We are also tempted to understand fasting as just about giving up food, prayer as just about talking to God, and almsgiving as about putting a few more dollars in the offering plate.  On Ash Wednesday, however, we are reminded that forgiveness is God's job, and that what Jesus offers us this day are gifts, not punishments.

          The first gift Jesus mentions is almsgiving.  Almsgiving is not just a matter of denying ourselves so that we have some extra money to give to the poor.  Almsgiving is about acknowledging that all of humanity is connected and that when one person suffers from lack of food, clothing, or shelter, lack of medical care, or lives in fear, we are all responsible for that.  The global pandemic has brought this home in a whole new way, and the current war in yet another way.  The litany of penitence, which we will pray in a few minutes, gives us a whole host of ways that we fail to live as if we are connected to our fellow human being: not loving our neighbor as ourselves, our dishonesty in our daily life and work, our exploitation of other people, and blindness to human need and suffering.  Jesus offers us the gift of almsgiving as a way to reconnect and be reminded that God made us all from the dust of the earth and that we are all connected.

          Jesus' second gift is the gift of prayer.  The world tells us that we should fill our lives with activity, and the one who accomplishes the most, wins.  From sun up to sun down and beyond, we are busy to the point that busyness has become competitive sport.  Jesus' tells us to stop.  Stop and make room for God.  Be still and feel the connection not only with each other but with the God who created us.  That is prayer.  In our Litany of Penitence we also confess the ways we fail to make room for God: filling our lives with our self-indulgent appetites and ways, our negligence in prayer and worship, our pride, hypocrisy and impatience, and our love of worldly goods and comforts.  Jesus offers us the gift of prayer as a way to empty ourselves of that which clutters our souls and make room for the God who creates in us a new and contrite heart.

          Jesus' final gift is the gift of fasting.  Fasting is usually and historically associated with abstaining from food.  In a world that tells us that the one who dies with the most toys wins, fasting can have a broader meaning.  We fill our lives with possessions, people, food, all kinds of things in order to make ourselves feel full.  Jesus calls us to a different kind of fullness.  Jesus calls us to a life that is full and rich because it is centered in the richness of God's Spirit.  Again, in the Litany of Penitence we confess the many ways we try to make ourselves feel less empty by relying on material things rather than God for that sense of fullness: our self- indulgent appetites and ways, our intemperate love of worldly goods, our waste and pollution of creation.  Jesus offers us the gift of fasting so that we may know God as the source of our contentment and fullness.

          In the reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul entreats us to be reconciled to God.  Lent is a time to live into that reconciliation and to learn how to better live as the children of God we were created to be.  Jesus does not leave us to our own devices to figure out how to do that, but instead gives us almsgiving, prayer, and fasting as gifts to help us on that journey.  In a few minutes, we will be anointed with ashes in the form of a cross, just as we were anointed with oil at our baptism in the form of a cross.  Both the cross made of oil and the one made of ashes are reminders that we are children of God, not the world, and that without God, we are empty.  On this Ash Wednesday, Jesus offers us the gifts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, not to make us suffer for our sins, but so that we may deepen our relationship with the God who created us. May this Lenten time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving be a holy time that breathes life into the weary dust of our being.

                                                                             Amen.

Tools

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
February 27, 2022

Last Epiphany 

          A couple of weeks ago, our family gathered in Springfield, Ohio to celebrate my father-in-laws 90^th birthday.  My father-in-law’s name is Fred, although he is called Papa by his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Both of Fred’s sons and daughters-in-law were there, three grandsons and their wives or girlfriend, and two of his six greatgrandchildren were there.   Our daughter-in-law, Leslie, had decorated the hotel banquet room beautifully, making the room warm and festive.  We had been planning this night for a very long time, knowing well that Covid might keep us from having this celebration.  But the evening was everything we hoped it would be-full of laughter, stories, photos, good food, and lots and lots of love.  After two years of not being together as a whole family, not since Papa’s 88^th birthday right before covid, the evening was a balm for our souls as we reconnected with each other and spent a few brief hours as a family and away from ongoing concerns about Covid, global issues, and the various other challenges of everyday life.  The experience was a precious gift, even if temporary, as we reconnected with each other around our beloved 90 year old Papa.  We drew energy from our time together that we would take back with us into normal life. 

          Today, we hear about a different sort of experience that was a gift, temporary, and very precious as Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on the mountain to pray.  We hear the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain every year on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and at Christ Church we try to give ourselves a bit of a mountain top experience as we sing glorious Alleluia hymns and bury the alleluias in a very festive way.  This year, we throw in a little Mardi Gras and celebrate the loosening of our covid policies, making masks optional for those who are comfortable going without them.  Today was planned to be a festive, glorious, mountain top-style experience to take us down the mountain into Ash Wednesday and Lent.

          And yet, in the midst of our festivities, the concerns of the world press upon us as we gather.  In addition to the wilderness of Covid, the injustices of the world, and whatever personal wildernesses we confront, the wilderness of war is very present and on the minds of all of us.  I, and perhaps you, feel like we have already been living in the wilderness for a very long time and have now entered yet another earthly wilderness even as we prepare on this morning to enter the spiritual wilderness of Lent on Wednesday.  I’m with Peter this morning as he says “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  My version is just “Mario, can we stay here and sing these hymns every Sunday?”

          So the question becomes “What does the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain tell us about how we live faithfully in the wilderness, whether of Lent, Covid, war, or personal challenge?”  What tools does this story give us for life in the wilderness?

          First, Jesus, Peter, John, and James went up the mountain together, and in the verses following this passage, they all came down together.  Jesus did not go up the mountain alone, nor did he send the disciples up the mountain alone.  They all went together.  Likewise, we are called to travel together, whether up the mountain to experience the glory of Jesus or back down the mountain into the wilderness.  Wherever we go, we go together and Jesus goes with us. 

          Secondly, when Peter wants to try something new and build three houses, he is speaking from his heart, wanting not just to capture the moment, but to provide hospitality for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.  Even though his idea is rather preposterous and perhaps inappropriate, I hear no judgment in this story.  I hear no one say “What a ridiculous idea.”  Not every idea we have for showing the love of God will work and we will make mistakes along the way.  Sometimes we, like Peter, may even look foolish.  We won’t hear Jesus judge us so long as we work from our hearts and out of love and are willing to recognize when we need to change course. 

          Lastly, we hear the voice of God proclaim Jesus as God’s son, God’s chosen one and command the disciples to listen to him.  The only problem is that Jesus has said not one word in this whole story for the disciples or us to listen to.  The last thing Jesus said before this passage is “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.”  Perhaps that is what the disciples and we are to listen to.  Where the disciples and we are to follow Jesus is down the mountain into the world where people need to hear the Good News of the love of God, which Jesus delivers by healing, teaching, feeding, and ultimately giving his life for the life of the world.  We live faithfully in the wilderness when we follow Jesus and engage the wilderness rather than run from it or count the days until we get out of it.  We have learned that over these last two years in a wilderness we could not run from and in which the days were and seem ot remain numberless.  There is always beauty and life in following Jesus!

          Mountain top experiences, whether large or small, of divine origin or are contrived, are a precious gift.  Sometimes they come in pretty ordinary ways and other times they come in epic, life altering ways.   Those moments, this moment, give us tools to live faithfully and to change to world as we follow Jesus down the mountain together to try new ways to engage the world with the news of God’s great.  What we learn from the rest of Jesus’ story is that no wilderness will be a match for God’s love.

                                                                             Amen.