Our Labor

 Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
September 5, 2021

18 Proper B 

          Apparently, Jesus has gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, as my mother used to say when one of her children came downstairs in the morning grumpy and out of sorts.  As a good southern woman, Mom might also add a “Bless his heart.”  Jesus is inexplicably rude to the Gentile woman this morning when she begs Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter.  Jesus’ response is “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.”  Jesus is not talking about household pets waiting patiently for any morsel to be dropped to the floor from the highchair.  Comparing the woman to a beloved household pet would be bad enough.  But he is comparing the women with a mangy wild dog foraging for food. 

          This is totally unexpected behavior from Jesus.  The Gentile woman is of Syrophoenician origin.  She does not live in Israel.  She does not practice Judaism.  Her ancestors were enemies of Israel.  And yet, she approaches Jesus believing that he can heal her daughter.  Jesus seems to be telling us that we should take care of our own people first, and the others can have whatever crumbs are left.  We expect Jesus, based on many of his parables, healings, and teachings, to remind us with his words and actions of God’s call to care for all people.   The reading from Proverbs says “Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the Lord pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.”  And the reading from James reminds us “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Jesus would do well to listen to those words this morning!

          There is no good explanation for Jesus’ rudeness toward the Syrophoenician woman.  Some commentaries chalk it up to Jesus’ being tired and having his time away interrupted by yet more human need.  Others say he was just having a bad day, or he is teasing the woman, or testing her faith.  Still others suggest that Jesus did not understand that his mission was to both Jews and Gentiles until the woman in this story challenges him.  But I do know this: if we let ourselves get hung up on Jesus’ rudeness, we will miss the larger and more important point of the story.

          In the end, Jesus does cast the demon out of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter.  Not only that, Jesus also heals a deaf man with a speech impediment.  The way Jesus goes about that healing is not exactly good pandemic hygiene!  But hygiene aside, Jesus’ healing is effective, and the man can hear and speak clearly.                                                                                                          

Throughout the gospels as well as the book of Isaiah, the sign that the Kingdom of God has come near is that the lame can walk, the deaf can hear, the blind can see, and the oppressed are freed.  In today’s story, the child oppressed by a demon is freed and a man is healed of his deafness.  Jesus’ actions this morning tell us that the Kingdom of God has come near.

The real question this morning is not “Why was Jesus so rude?” The real question is “What are we doing with our lives as followers of Jesus to make the Kingdom of God come near?”  The news of late is filled with images of Afghan refugees fleeing for their lives, devastation from the earthquake in Haiti, mindboggling damage from hurricane Ida, and Covid-ravaged parts of the country and the world.  In some cases, like the Syrophoenician woman, the people do not live here or are not from here. They do not worship like we do and come from a very different culture.  They may even have been our enemies at some point.  In another place in the gospels, Jesus is clear about how we treat our enemies when he tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who harm us.  In other cases, we know victims of the wrath of Hurricane Ida, or know people who know victims, or have visited the affected communities and feel some connection with them.  But whether we feel connected or not, the call of the gospel is to use our lives to make the Kingdom of God a more present reality in the world today, doing what we can to liberate the oppressed, heal the sick, and care for those in need, whoever and wherever they are.  How can we make the Kingdom of God a more present reality for those who will resettle in northeast Ohio, or who have lost everything in Hurricane Ida, or who are grieving the loss of a loved one to Covid-19? 

On this Labor Day Sunday, we ask God's blessing upon all of our labor, on all that we do with our lives.  In a few minutes, we will pray a litany for our labor and you will be invited forward for the anointing or blessing of your hands.  All of our labor, whatever we do and wherever we do it, can be work that makes the Kingdom of God come near, whether here at home, in our country, or around the world.    Jesus calls us to open our hearts to make the Kingdom come near for those close by and those far way, for those we know and for those we don’t know, for those we feel a connection with and for those we don’t. Jesus' work was simply to make the Kingdom of God come near.  Period.  Jesus calls us to do likewise.

                                                                             Amen.

 

 

Flesh

 Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
August 15, 2021

15 Proper B 

          Some years ago, I was doing a Bible study on this morning’s gospel lesson with a group of bright, theologically astute middle school students.  You have really not lived until you have talked with 7^th and 8^th graders about Jesus and what sounds a lot like cannibalism.  They were appalled at Jesus’ words “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  The kids were as horrified as the people in John’s gospel this morning and were no less shy about voicing their disgust. 

          In order to prevent a major rebellion among the kids and rescue our conversation, I asked them to think of ways to express the depth of a relationship or to describe great love.  They came up with ideas like devouring a novel, or sayings like “I could just gobble that baby up.”  They talked about the way having a meal together was about more than just eating and nourishing their bodies-this after they had just consumed a mind-boggling amount of pizza and a large pan of brownies while we talked.  Thinking about relationships and love naturally brought them around to thinking about food.

          In John’s gospel, there is no last supper where Jesus takes bread, breaks it, gives it to his disciples and says “Take, eat, this is my body given for you.”  Jesus does not take wine and say “Drink this all of you.  This is my blood, given for you.”  Those things happen in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that meal is described in 1 Corinthians.  But not in John’s gospel.  In John’s gospel, at the last supper, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet.  So when Jesus talks this morning about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he is up to something else, something even more outrageous. 

          Jesus is describing a relationship so organic and so intimate than only the language of eating and drinking will suffice to explain it.  Jesus is describing a relationship in which his followers are made one with him.  Through out John’s gospel, oneness with Jesus is a theme.  Jesus will use the metaphor of the vine and the branches later in John’s gospel when he says “I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” (John 15:5).  Jesus also says “In a little while, the world will no longer see me.  But you will see me.  Because I live, you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  (14:19-20) And “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” (15:11)  Over and over again in John’s gospel, Jesus uses language that shows how deeply he and his followers are connected.  But none of that language is as jarring as the language about eating flesh and drinking blood.

          This morning, we also hear about God’s great love for David and Solomon, and if this passage gave us all we know about David and Solomon we could easily assume that they were perfect, easy to love people.  God says about David “If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statues and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life.”  And God gives Solomon the wisdom and discerning heart he asks for, plus a bonus of riches and honor all his life.  Solomon must be one faithful guy. However, God seems to be experiencing a bit of divine amnesia!  Has God forgotten about David and Bathsheba and the way David had Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle so he could take Bathsheba as his wife?  And in the verses just prior to this morning’s reading from 1 Kings, Solomon has made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and he marries Pharaoh’s daughter. He finishes building his own house before building God’s house, which means the people had to make their sacrifices at the high places, the places of pagan worship, since they had no temple of their own. We are told that Solomon, too, sacrificed at the high places.  Has God completely forgotten what these two men have done?  Or is God’s love so outrageous that God loves these two men despite their faults?

          Being connected with God, being loved by and loving God, does not make us perfect.  David and Solomon clearly were not always perfect or right.  Jesus’ disciples were not always perfect or right.  Jesus never asked or expected his disciples, past or present to be perfect.  What the love of God and the depth of connection with Jesus give us is not perfection, but an identity, an identity that transcends our own successes and failures and is rooted entirely in the love of God.  In the Episcopal Church, our baptismal covenant spells out what that life of connection looks like.  In the baptismal covenant, we are called to corporate worship, to stay connected even when we have done wrong and would prefer to flee, to seek and serve Christ in all people, to respect the dignity of every human being, and to use our words and our lives to proclaim the gospel-the good news that in the death and resurrection of Jesus we are all connected and that love and life are more powerful than hate and death. 

          These days, the stresses of Covid-19 are working hard to drive us apart and make us each more concerned about our own welfare and our own desires than the common good.  Arguments over masks, vaccines, and what is safe and what is not are rampant in our community and all over the country, making us look a bit more like David and Solomon on their bad days, wanting to satisfy our own desires, than perhaps we would like.  In the midst of the stresses and strains of our current life, we hear Jesus tell his followers that real life, the depth and richness of eternal life, comes from a connection with him that can only be described with the language of eating and drinking and that and our true identity comes from that connection.  As horrified as those middle school students were at Jesus’ language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, much pizza and many brownies later they realized that, as Christians, their identity comes from their connection with Jesus and that their actions are a reflection of that connection.

                                                                   Amen.

Sign

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
August 1, 2021

13 Proper B 

          One of the most memorable lines in “The Wizard of Oz” comes at the end of the film when the good witch Glinda descends in a bubble right in front of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion.  Dorothy and her companions have been following the yellow brick road to find the Wizard who can help Dorothy get hone to Kansas.  Many adventures and misadventures later, Dorothy and her companions finally find the Wizard of Oz who turns out to be “a good man, but a bad wizard,” or in other words of no use to them whatsoever in helping Dorothy get home. When all hope seems lost, Glinda the good witch appears before them and says to Dorothy “You’ve always had the power, my dear.  You just had to learn it for yourself.”  All Dorothy needs to do to get home is to click the ruby red slippers she has been wearing since she arrived in Oz and say “there’s no place like home.”  She had that power all along, but the power was useless until she knew she had it.

          Our gospel reading this morning reminds me of Glinda’s words to Dorothy.  The people have just witnessed the feeding of the 5000, a story we heard last week, where Jesus took a small bit of bread and fish and turned it into such a feast that there were 12 baskets full left over.  This week, the same crowds are chasing Jesus down and when they find Jesus, Jesus says to them “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”  Last week, Janet Daniels reminded us in her sermon that while in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the feeding of the 5000 is a miracle story, in John’s gospel the feeding of the 5000 is a sign, a sign that points to Jesus as God.  The people have seen the miracle and been fed physically by the loaves and fishes, but they have missed the sign that Jesus is the Son of God who satisfies them with life itself.   Then the people ask Jesus “What must we do to perform the works of God?”  In other words, tell us how to do such a miracle.  But Jesus answers “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  Finally, they ask Jesus, “What sign are you going to give us that we may see it and believe you?”  This after Jesus has turned a bit of bread and fish into a meal for thousands complete with leftovers. At the end of the reading, when the people say “Sir, give us this bread always,” I hear Jesus heave a big sigh and say to them “I am the bread of life.”  The bread for which they so long, the bread of life, is standing right in front of them but the people are completely unaware.    

          When the people ask “What must we do to perform the works of God,” Jesus’ response is “Believe in him who he has sent.”  On the one hand, we could take this to mean that if we believe that Jesus is the bread of life, then we will be able to create massive amounts of food from almost nothing.  That is not an unworthy goal.  We could solve the problem of world hunger if we could just replicate Jesus’ miracle.  But on the other hand, I wonder if Jesus is telling us that if we believe that Jesus is the bread of life, our lives will become a sign that points to the living God just as the loaves and fishes did.  The reading from Ephesians calls us to live with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, in other words, putting the needs of others ahead of our own wants and desires and living as people who believe in the Bread of Life.  The reading also reminds us that each of us have been given gifts for the purpose of building up the body of Christ and being signs to the world of the love of God.  Some will be pastors and teachers, others apostles, prophets, or evangelists, and still others parents, medical professionals, trades people, business owners, or chefs. And the list goes on and on.  We have been given those gifts as specific ways to show the world humility, gentleness, patience, and love and be signs to the world of the living love of God.   

The truth is that living lives filled with humility, gentleness, and patience, lives that bear all others in love is hard work.  Even when we want with our whole hearts to live that way, caring for the vulnerable and putting the needs of others ahead of our own as Jesus did, and using our lives as a sign that points to the living God, we sometimes fail.  When we are tempted to think that our particular lives cannot possibly be a sign that points to the living God, we only have to look to David, a great king but a very flawed human being, whose sinfulness is on full display in the reading from 2 Samuel.  Despite his brokenness, sinfulness, lust, deceit, and adultery; despite being the exact opposite of the characteristics described in the reading from Ephesians, David loved God and was beloved of God.  God used David to create a great kingdom that, at its best, pointed to the living God.  The story from 2 Samuel is God saying “no excuses, people.”  If God can use David, God can use us.

The people are looking for Jesus to satisfy their hunger or at least teach them how to do a miracle so they can satisfy their own hunger and perhaps the hunger of others.  Jesus is looking for followers who know him to be the bread of life that satisfies their deep hunger and the hunger of the world.  Jesus is looking for followers who want to use their lives as signs that point to the living love of God.  Like Dorothy, we have already been given every gift we need to be the people Jesus is calling us to be.  Unlike Dorothy, we don’t have to learn it for ourselves.  Jesus stands in our midst to show us the way and says time and time again “I am the bread of life.”

                                                                             Amen.

          

Christmas in July

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
July 11, 2021

Christmas in July 

          When I was a little girl, one of the things I loved best about Christmas was that Christmas was predictable.  Mom cooked the same food.  The same relatives came to visit.  The ritual of Christmas was the same each year-up at 5am to see what Santa brought, then breakfast, then the tree, then a day of family and friends, and an enormous Christmas dinner.  Once I was old enough to go to church on Christmas Eve and pay attention, we sang our way through Jesus’ birth with the same hymns and the same story every year.  The predictability of Christmas was grounding and even though I did not have words for it as a child, no matter what happened in my life or the life of the world, I knew that Christmas would come on schedule and Christmas would be the same.

          On the other hand, Christmas in July is a bit jarring, no matter how excited I am for this day.  Hearing the story and singing the hymns out of season is uncomfortable.  Creating an experience of Christmas in the middle of the summer, out of nowhere, when nothing around us says Christmas, is just weird.  Why, then, other than to rejoice that we can finally be together and sing the Christmas hymns, are we celebrating Christmas in July?

          When the angel Gabriel came to Mary to tell her what her role would be in the salvation of humankind, God didn’t ask Mary to check her calendar and see if perhaps they could meet at the coffee shop later in the week.  Mary didn’t have time to prepare for the conversation or think about what God wanted.  Gabriel just showed up and said to Mary “And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall name him Jesus.” 

          When the time came for Jesus to be born, Mary and Joseph were on their way to Bethlehem to be counted for the census.  Mary had no birth plan, no bag packed weeks ahead with all the things she might need to keep her comfortable during labor.  She had no four weeks of Advent to prepare, there were no casseroles in the freezer for later, and there does not seem to have been any baby shower.  This birth came at a highly inconvenient time.

          Once Jesus was born, there was no stack of freshly laundered onsies for Mary to clothe Jesus.  She had to make do with whatever was available. What was available was scraps of cloth for clothes and a feeding trough for a crib. 

          The Christmas story tells us that Jesus was born on God’s time, not ours, which is often not convenient.  Jesus was born in the midst of less than ideal circumstances, to parents who were hardly ready and had to make do with what they had.  And yet, Jesus was born, the angels sang, the star glowed, the shepherd traveled, and Mary treasured in her heart the story that had been birthed from her womb.

          Collectively, we have been though a year with challenges unlike anything we have ever experienced, and the pandemic is not yet over.  Individually, our lives have held challenges unrelated to the pandemic yet exacerbated by the virus.  God did not show up and say to us “Get ready.  Four weeks from now, the world will shut down.”  We found ourselves on a journey that most of us were totally unprepared for, in a wilderness for which we had no plan, and whether we were trying to educate our children, or worship, or tend to our daily needs, we had to make do with what we had.  Sometimes that felt like the equivalent of wrapping a newborn baby in scraps of cloth and placing him in a feeding trough because that was what was available.

          And yet, over and over again, the Christ Child was born in our midst.  Stars shined with the bright light of Christ, angels sang of God’s glory, and shepherds told the story of God’s love and presence with us to make sure we did not miss the birth.  Sometimes that light was an encouraging card or text from a friend that connected us with each other, the song was the sweet voices of our young choristers that took us beyond ourselves, and the story was one of the community coming together in the face of tragedy, all reminders of Emmanuel, God with Us. Other times we found ways to be the song of the angels in a world we could not enter, providing futons for Family Promise, or medical care through Open M in Akron, or hope for victims of domestic violence, or something so simple as laundry detergent for people in need in Hudson. 

The Good News of Christmas is not that the Christ Child is born only when we have had four weeks of Advent to prepare, the house is decorated, the gifts are wrapped under the tree, and Christmas dinner is in the oven as wonderful and predictable as all of those things are.  The Good News of Christmas is the promise that the Christ Child will be born in our midst at inconvenient times, when life seems totally out of our control, we are scared and frustrated, when we don’t have a plan and we don’t think we have the skills we need to survive.  The promise of Christmas is Emmanuel, God with us absolutely always.  That, my friends, is why we celebrate Christmas in July.

                                                                             Amen.

Extraordinary Hope

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
June 27, 2021

8 Proper B 

          Several years ago, a group of Christ Church leaders gathered in the Parish Hall one Sunday afternoon to talk about how Christ Church had survived some major challenges over the previous 10 years or so.  I had not lived through those challenges, so I wanted to hear the stories for myself.  I also thought, and still think, that perhaps the story of our church could give hope to other churches facing similar challenges.  That afternoon, we talked about motivation and hope; disappointment, grief, and financial challenges; the power of relationships, taking risks and being deliberate about a plan forward.  While perhaps at one dark point the hope was a desperate hope for survival, eventually an extraordinary hope in the future emerged, a future that would not look just like the past but would be a new future as God called the church forward into new life. 

          This morning, we hear two stories of great hope in our gospel reading.  Jairus is a leader of the synagogue, more like a vestry member than a rabbi.   We can hear the desperation in his voice as Jairus begs Jesus to come and heal his little daughter who is at the point of death.  Jesus is the only hope for the little girl’s healing.  Jesus agrees to leave the crowd behind and follows Jairus on this urgent mission.

          While Jairus and Jesus are rushing off to get to Jairus’s daughter before she dies, a woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for 12 years, reaches out in both desperation and hope and touches Jesus clothes.  Immediately she is healed.  Jesus and Jairus are in a hurry to get to Jairus’s daughter.  There is no need for them to stop.  The woman has been healed.  But when Jesus feels the healing power leave him, he stops to connect with the woman and hear her story.  The woman is terrified that her action will come at a cost and her healing will be reversed.  Jairus is terrified as the minutes tick away that this delay will cost his daughter her life.  And, in fact, Jairus receives word that his daughter has died and he should trouble Jesus no more. 

          Jesus has other plans, however. He takes Peter, James, and John, along with the child’s parents, goes into room where the child lies, and commands her to get up.  The little girl gets up and begins to walk around, and we are told that she is 12 years old.

          Two stories of a desperation and two stories of hope.  Two stories of risk, as the woman risked rejection as she was unclean due to the hemorrhage and Jairus risked losing his daughter.  Two stories of healing and the gift of new life.  Two stories that, if we are not careful, lead us to believe in Jesus as Santa Claus or as a magician, here to do whatever we demand, and two stories that can lead us to feel like failures when we do not get the results we want from Jesus.  We want to hear Jesus say “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.

          But I think these two stories are about more than getting whatever we want from Jesus, no matter how desperate we may be.  First, in each story, the two people do more than simply demand, and Jesus does more than simply heal.  The unnamed woman and Jairus both show up to engage Jesus.  Jesus establishes a relationship.  Jesus does not have to stop and talk with the woman who touched his clothes.  She has already been healed.  He could move on and get to Jairus’s daughter in a timely manner.  But Jesus does stop.  He acknowledges the woman as a human being.  He listens to her whole story despite the urgency to get to Jairus’s daughter.  He calls the unnamed woman “daughter” and commends her hope when he tells her that her faith has made her well.  And Jesus could have healed Jairus’s daughter from a distance.  He did not have to actually go to her house.  Jesus’ words alone have the power to calm water and turn small bits of bread into food for thousands.  But Jesus did go.  Jesus wanted a relationship with them, and Jesus wants a relationship with us.  These two stories are about a relationship.

          Secondly, both the unnamed woman and Jairus act on great hope that Jesus can heal.   In their cases, Jesus does heal exactly as they want.  And I wish all of our prayers were answered as quickly and completely as theirs were.  But sometimes we feel more like David this morning as he mourns Saul and Jonathan than we feel like either the unnamed woman or Jairus.  However, the hope Jairus and the unnamed woman have is not just the desperate hope that they will get what they need in the moment, but the extraordinary hope that the way things are now is not the way they will always be.  Their hope is the hope of the psalmist who sings “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope.”  The gospel does not tell us what happened to the unnamed woman and to Jairus’s daughter and her family after their encounter with Jesus.  But we do know that both were made new and given new life, not returned to their old selves.  Both of these stories are about extraordinary hope in a new future. 

When the leadership of Christ Church gathered to talk about the ways they had met past challenges, never in a million years would I have guessed that we might be the congregation that would benefit from that story of extraordinary hope as we look to rebuild our life together after 16 months of a global pandemic.  Our question is not “How do we as a church survive a pandemic?”  Our question is “How is God helping us live and grow in new ways in 2021?”  As with Jairus and the unnamed woman, Jesus invites us to show up and be in relationship with him and with each other.  As with Jairus and the unnamed woman, Jesus offers us a hope that carries us not back into the past but into new life.  We are not people of a desperate hope for survival.  We are people of extraordinary hope for the future.

                                                Amen.

Lame

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
June 13, 2021

6 Proper B 

          Some years ago, Episcopal Retirement Homes bought a low income apartment building in the city where I was the rector of the Episcopal Church.  This seemed like a natural outreach for us, and we developed great relationships with the residents by having a quarterly birthday party for them and hosting other events together.  One Christmas, the outreach team decided to adopt the residents much the way that we had adopted schools for Christmas in the past.  The question was what to do for them.  We talked with the building manager, who knew the residents well, and finally came up with the idea to give each of the 88 residents a $25 gift card to Meijer or Wal-Mart.  This would be a stretch for the church, but that is a good thing.  The problem for me was that the idea of gift cards seemed rather lame.  Gift cards seemed impersonal at best and sort of uncaring at worst-like we had not put a lot of thought into the effort.  However, I kept my mouth shut and between Thanksgiving and mid-December we collected 88 plus gift cards.   The youth group put the cards in envelopes with each resident’s name and decorated the envelopes in the spirit of Christmas which, I admit, did make the gifts a little more personal and thoughtful.

          When the day of the Christmas party arrived, the room was festive and there was lots of great Christmas energy in the air.  The church provided a lovely Christmas dinner for the residents which we all sat and enjoyed together.  After dinner, much to the surprise of the residents, we began calling out names and distributing the envelopes.  As the residents opened the envelopes and found their gift cards, there were shrieks of delight and even some tears.  We heard comments like “Now I can bake Christmas cookies for my grandchildren,” “Now I can make Christmas dinner,” and “Now I can go Christmas shopping for my family.”  I, who had thought the project was impersonal and lame, was stunned at their joy.  Gifts that seemed so small, impersonal and thoughtless to me meant the world to those who received them and told the residents, both individually and collectively, that they were valued and loved.

          This morning, in our scripture readings, we hear about small things with a big impact.  First, we hear about the call of David, the smallest and youngest of Jesse’s sons.  God’s choice of David is a surprising choice.  First, God sends Samuel off to find Jesse the Bethlehemite because God has chosen a king from among Jesse’s sons. Jesse’s grandmother was Ruth, a Moabite so not a pure Israelite, making anyone from her family a surprising choice for a king of Israel. Secondly, Samuel is looking for the next King of Israel, so the oldest son would be the obvious choice and if not the oldest, then the strongest, or the smartest, or the most experienced.  But God says "Do not look on his appearance, or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord does not see as mortals see. They look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."  God has chosen David, the very youngest son.  David, the least likely son from an unlikely family, is anointed king in the presence of his brothers, and, we are told, "the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward."                                                                                                                               

         This morning, we also hear Jesus say "The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs." When Jesus began his ministry, his first words were "The Kingdom of God has arrived, repent and believe in the good news." This parable tells us that the Kingdom of God is growing in our midst, starting from something so small as to perhaps look useless and eventually becoming so large that all the birds of the air can make nests there.

          The parable of the mustard seed and the story of the call of David remind us that God will take what we have to offer, even when we believe our offering is too small or too lame to make a difference and use our offering to help bring about the Kingdom of God.  When we think that the time we have to offer is not enough to matter, or the money we can give won’t make a difference, or our one voice won’t make a difference in a problem so large as racism in our community, we are called to remember the mustard seed, or the little boy who became a great King, or the difference a seemingly small gift card made for the residents of a low income apartment complex.  If everyone thinks they will not make a difference, nothing will ever change.  But when we all believe that our lives, our voices, our dollars matter in bringing about the Kingdom of God, amazing things will happen.  We have seen this in our very own community in the past two weeks as person after person has spoken out against the events on Memorial Day that put Hudson on the global map.  Out of a very bad situation, many of us have learned a piece of history that we did not know, which is the role black people had on the development of Memorial Day.  What some tried to silence was shouted around the world.  The mustard seed that is the Kingdom of God may be tiny, but it cannot be silenced or stopped.  God calls us to use what we have, no matter the size, no matter how seemingly small, lame, or meaningless, to be part of the growing Kingdom of God, and then to be amazed at what can happen when we all work together.  For there is a great deal of work to be done.

                                                                             Amen.

Story

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
May 30, 2021

Trinity Sunday 

          Both Don’s parents and mine were born in the midst of the Great Depression and were children during World War 2.  They all had stories to tell about those years.  My mother’s father was a pharmacist and was often paid in chickens and tomatoes.  Mom remembered having an ice box, with ice delivered to the house.  My dad told stories about ration booklets for everything from sugar to car tires, and black out curtains that made New York City go completely dark at night.  Don’s mom told stories about growing up in Colorado without electricity or toilet paper.  And Don’s dad, the great storyteller, still tells stories about growing up in Arkansas during the depression and the war.  But for all of the stories about hardship, there were also stories about how neighbors came together to share what they had, about the creative use of the resources they did have, about a time when one thought nothing of hitchhiking as a reliable and safe means of transportation, and of the joy of finally having electricity or a refrigerator.

          As I wrote in my June Communicant article, I have been wondering about the stories we will tell years from now about life during a global pandemic.  There will obviously be stories of grief and loss, frustration and shortages.  There will be stories of holidays, whether birthdays or graduations, Christmas, Easter, or Memorial Day, that could not be celebrated in the usual ways.  But I think, I hope, we will also tell stories about how we found new ways to gather, how we learned to appreciate a slower life, about how we learned to find and experience God in new ways and places, what we learned about essential workers, and how we learned to take a lot less for granted.  Our stories, whether of good times, hard times, or a combination of both, help shape who we are and give us part of our identity. 

          Today is Trinity Sunday, the day we celebrate the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  If we had scripture readings this morning that explained the Trinity, that explained how one God can be in three persons without being three gods, that would be lovely.  But there are no such scripture readings to be had.  Yes, there are places in scripture that name all three persons of the Trinity, such as the ending of Matthew’s gospel where the disciples are sent by Jesus into the world to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  But nowhere in scripture are we told how, exactly, one God can be three persons.

What we do have in scripture are stories.  We have stories of the way God is experienced as Father, or Creator, such as the reading from Isaiah where the prophet experiences the magnificence of God and is sent by God to deliver difficult news to God’s people about the consequences of their sin.  The gospels tells stories of how people like Nicodemus experienced God the Son, as Jesus went about preaching, teaching, and healing, and as he was crucified, then resurrected.  The book of Acts is full of stories of people being led by the Spirit.  Paul talks about that very Spirit in the reading from Romans this morning-the Spirit that leads us and bears witness within us that we are children of God.  And scripture has stories of people who served God faithfully and stories of people who were less than faithful.  From all of these stories, Christian theologians developed the understanding that our one God is in three persons-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  One God.  Three persons.  Each fully God but each distinct.

          In the first chapter of Genesis, scripture tells us that we are made in the image of God.  The question I wrestle with every Trinity Sunday is not how God can be three persons yet one God, but what it means that we are made in the image of the Trinity.  What does it mean that humans are made in the image of one God who is simultaneously Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

          The honest answer to that question should be “I don’t know.”  But I do have some thoughts.  First, we are made in the image of God who has always been in relationship.  Not only has God always been in relationship, God’s very being is relationship.  So, we are made to be in relationship both with God and each other, relationships that are lifegiving the way the Trinity is life giving, relationships that complement each other and allow for differences, and yet remind us that we humans are one as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one.  In John’s gospel, Jesus’ prayer for the disciples was not that they would always agree or always be right, but that they would be one as he and the Father are one.  That we are one is actually a fact, whether we live as one is the question.

          Secondly, the God in whose image we are made may be one God in three persons, but this is not a closed community.  In the gospel reading this morning, we heard that God gave God’s only son, gave him, that the world might be saved through him.  God sent Jesus, and then God sent the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, into the world.  We are made in the image of the One who is sent into the world, so we, too, are sent into the world, as Robin said last week in her sermon.  We are sent so that the world may know the love of God and experience God at work in the stories of their own lives.

          The Trinity is the story of God in a word.  We are made in the image of that story, and that story is our story.  We gather here to be nourished by the story of God, and to experience our connection with God and each other.  Then we are sent by the story out into the world, to bring the story to life and be the love of God for the whole human family.

                                                                             Amen.