Jesus

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
April 24, 2022

2 Easter  

          For Easter, Don and I got our granddaughter Collins a little slide.  Because I don’t know if the ground will ever be dry enough to play outside, this is a collapsible slide made of heavy duty cardboard for indoor use.  The day before Easter, I set it up and brought Collins down after her nap.  She is a very active and physical little girl, so I thought she would climb right up the steps to the slide and slide down.  That’s what one does with a slide, right?  But no.  When you are not quite 2 and see something new, you see all sorts of possibilities.  Sure, sliding is one.  But so is climbing up the slide, hiding under the slide, pretending to catch the bugs painted on the slide, sending a vast number of dolls and stuffed animals down the slide, and rolling the balls up the slide.  All seem to be equally fine uses for a slide according to Collins.  With no preconceived ideas about what a slide is for, the possibilities are endless. 

          This morning, we hear a story about the resurrected Jesus that we hear each and every year on the Sunday after Easter.  We know the story and what the story is about.  We love the story because many of us can identify with Doubting Thomas.  We wish Jesus would come to us and let us touch his wounds so that we can believe, really believe, in the resurrection.  But this is looking at the story like I was looking at that little slide-something so familiar that there seems to be one basic way to understand the story and we know what that is.  Just as there are apparently many ways to play with a slide, there are many ways to look at our story this morning. 

          First, there is the question of who the main character is in the story.  We call this the story of Doubting Thomas.  But is this really a story about the disciple who demanded a sighting of Jesus in order to believe and got one?  Is the message that if we whine long enough, Jesus will do what we ask?  Is this really the story of Thomas the spoiled brat disciple?  And the other disciples are not exactly paragons of faith.  They did believe when they saw the resurrected Jesus in their midst, but their faith was not so great that they left the room in which they were hiding.

Secondly, this passage is problematic because we are told that the disciples are hiding for fear of the Jews.  Those words are not to be taken lightly.  Passages such as this one and the reading from Acts have been wrongly used over the centuries to blame the Jewish people of Jesus’ time and the Jewish people as a whole through out the centuries for the death of Jesus.  The tensions between the early Christians and the Jewish people are certainly at play in this gospel, but John’s gospel is also clear that no one took Jesus’ life from him.  Jesus, a Jew himself, gave up his life for the life of the world as an act of love.  Any use of violence or hatred in the name of the God of love is simply wrong.

The real problem this morning is not who the disciples are afraid of.  The real problem is that the disciples, minus Thomas, are hiding because they are afraid.  The problem is with the disciples, not those they fear.  The tomb is empty, and Mary has seen the risen Christ, but the disciples are hiding behind a locked door.  But a locked door does not stop Jesus.  Jesus enters and says “Peace be with you.”  Then Jesus says “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” and he breathes the Holy Spirit on them making his very own breath part of the disciples.

          One week later, having seen the risen Jesus, having been sent as Jesus was sent, and having received the Holy Spirit, where are the disciples?  Still in that same room.  Easter has still not changed their lives, either externally and gotten them out of that room or internally and transformed them into witnesses to the resurrection.  And yet, Jesus shows up in that room again, to offer proof to Thomas that Jesus is, indeed, alive. 

          The main character in this story is not Thomas, nor are the disciples the main characters.  The main character in this story is Jesus, Jesus who meets us where we are, even when we are too afraid to come out, or when doubt overwhelms us, or when we fail to see what Jesus is asking of us.  Jesus meets us where we are, gives us his breath to empower us, and sends us out despite our fears, doubts, and failures.  We know from the Acts reading, and from the whole book of Acts, that, ultimately, the disciples overcame their fear, believed in the resurrection, and went out into the world to become powerful witnesses to the resurrected Christ.  When we hear this story with Jesus as the main character rather than Thomas, perhaps we can hear more clearly the call to welcome Jesus as the main character in our own lives and hear the many ways Jesus calls us to live as people sent into the world, empowered by the Holy Spirit, with the good news of God’s resurrection love.

                                                                             Amen.

                                                         

Looking for the Living

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
April 17, 2022

Easter

        Graveyards are fascinating to me.  As children, our parents took us to graveyards in Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Alabama to see the graves of those who had gone before us.  Some of the people had died recently enough that our parents could tell stories about them from their own experience.  Some had lived in their parents’ generation so my parents had heard stories about them.  Others were mostly just names, great-grandparents, great-great grandparents, and on and on, without whom our family would not be here but whose stories have been lost.  I walk through graveyards now and see the graves of people I have known and even buried and remember the stories of their lives.  Graveyards are peaceful places, full of memories and stories known and unknown to the living.

          This morning we hear the story of women going to a tomb.  The women know what they have come to do.  They have come to prepare Jesus’ body for burial.  They have gathered up the supplies they will need and summoned the courage for the task ahead.  I wonder if they walked in silence or if they shared memories and stories about Jesus as they walked.  I imagine they anticipated a peaceful place where they could tend to Jesus’ body and their own grief. No doubt, they have done this work before and they are simply doing what needs to be done for their Beloved.

          We know what will happen next. The stone will have been rolled away from the tomb, and the tomb will be empty.  We are here this morning to proclaim that the tomb is empty!  But the women are perplexed, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable response to an empty tomb.  Then the women are terrified, also a perfectly reasonable response to the sudden appearance of two men in dazzling clothes at a tomb that should hold a dead man.  The men remind the women of the story.  They remind the women that Jesus told them that he would be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day, rise again.  With their memories jostled, the women remember what Jesus said and leave the empty tomb to find the other disciples. 

          The first thing the men in dazzling clothes said to Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women was “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”  I am perplexed by that question this Easter.  The men in dazzling clothes do seem to be implying that the women should look elsewhere for Jesus, not in the place of the dead, but among the living.  And I understand that. 

          But this Easter, I hear the question differently.  I hear the question more like a quiz.  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”  I hear the women being challenged to think about life rather than being chastised for looking for death.  After all, the women were simply going about work that needed to be done, work they were doing in love, and work that was not particularly pleasant when they discover the empty tomb.  Had they not been going to the tomb to do that work, they would not have found the tomb empty.  The tomb would still have been empty but the women would not have known.  The women need to be looking for the living among the dead to hear the good news that Jesus has been raised.

          I also believe that looking for the living among the dead is precisely what the resurrection calls us to do.  Looking for the living among the living is hardly good news and worthy of neither perplexity nor terror.  That I feel the good news of new life and the love of God when I hold my new baby grandson is hardly a surprise.  But looking for the living, looking for signs of resurrection life, in the midst of a pandemic that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and altered many more, in the destruction and devastation of war, when gun violence strikes again and again, in the midst of our own losses, and in so many other situations where death and hatred seem to have the final say….looking for the living among the dead is precisely what people of Easter hope do.   The resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the empty tomb, calls us to see God at work even in the midst of what looks to all the world like death.  Where in our world is death being conquered?  Where are people being set free?  How can the work of our own lives, the proclamation of our own faith, point toward all that God is doing in the world now so that the news of resurrection is not an idle tale, but a present reality that points to the eternal truth of the empty tomb?  We may be perplexed about this, and we may even be terrified if we pause long enough to really take in the power of resurrection life and love.  But Easter calls us to go about the work of our daily lives, the work God calls us to do, just as the women were going about their work, with resurrection conviction that even in those places where hatred and death seem to have won, we will find resurrection life and love. 

                                                                             Amen.

Gather

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
April 15, 2022

Good Friday 

          Death has a curious way of gathering people.  The power of death manages to bring people together, sometimes from all over the country or world, sometimes with people who would spend time with one another under no other circumstance, sometimes to celebrate a long life well lived and other times to mourn a life cut short.  When my mother died, the gathering was a simple one of immediate family.  When my father died people from all over the country gathered.  One of the great challenges of the pandemic was the inability to gather at a bedside or celebrate a life together.  The power of death can pull us together in a way few other events can.

          Tonight death has gathered us.  We gather to watch as Jesus is arrested, tried, and led off to be crucified.  We gather with the women and the beloved disciple who gather at the cross.  We gather to hear Jesus say “It is finished” as he gives up his spirit.  We gather with Joseph of Arimathea to care for the dead body of Jesus.  We gather to watch and to wait, allowing ourselves to feel the darkness of this night even as we stand in the hope of resurrection.

          Death also has the power to divide and scatter.  Most of the disciples were not at the cross, having scattered for fear of their own lives.  The people Jesus fed, healed, and taught were scattered.  In our own lives, Covid was and is still the power of death with great power to divide.  Covid has separated us physically from each other and divided society tremendously over issues of how to keep people safe, having taken almost one million lives in this country alone and over 6 million lives around the world.  War is the power of death unleashed deliberately on whole peoples.  Over 10 million Ukrainians have fled their homes, either leaving the country all together or trying to find safety within the country.  Just this week we saw gun violence scatter people in a Brooklyn subway.  Then there is the death and destruction inflicted on people who are deemed different in some way, whether because of their race, their sexual orientation, their economic status, or so many other things that we let divide the human family. 

Part of what we do when death gathers us is to remember.  We remember the good times and the hard times, the funny things and the sad things.  We remember what the person might have taught us or how the person loved us.  So on Good Friday as we gather at the cross, we remember the story.  We remember that not long after Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus said “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  In Jesus’ death, Jesus will gather all the world to himself.   Going further back in John’s gospel, we remember that Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Jesus will give his life for the life of the world.  We remember that Jesus also said “I am the Good Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”  Jesus will lay down his life for the life of the sheep.   And at the very beginning of the story, we are told that “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” As we gather at the cross and remember the stories, we remember that Jesus, the light of the world, told us that he would give us his life to draw the whole world to himself.  Jesus’ life would not be taken from him by anyone, not the religious authorities nor the Roman.  Tonight we watch as Jesus gives up his Spirit.

Tonight we gather, not just to remember the stories or to mourn Jesus’ death, but to think about what it means to be people who believe that Jesus, the light of the world, gave his life to gather the world to himself.  What does it mean to live as followers of the One, who in his death, gathered all people?  What does it mean to live as gathered people?

          In the Episcopal  Church, our baptismal covenant calls us to “Seek and serve Christ in all people,” to “work for justice and peace,” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”  That is the answer to how we are to live as followers of the light of the world who gave his life to gather the world to himself.  Good Friday and our baptismal covenant call us to tear down barriers that divide and scatter and work for all that gathers and unites.  Even on Good Friday and especially on Good Friday, we are called to live as people of hope that out of hatred and death can come love and life.  In the face of the power of death and the darkness of all that divides and scatters us, Good Friday calls us to live as gathered people who believe that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.   

                                                                             Amen.

         

Bold and Extravagant

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
April 3, 2022

5 Lent C 

          On July 15, 2020 our vestry met in the old Parish Hall with a major decision to make.  The pandemic was raging.  Vaccines were still in the early development stage.  So, the vestry gathered masked, with the chairs set a full six feet apart, and with none of the normal catching up and chit chat that comes at the beginning of a gathering.  Prior to the pandemic, we, collectively, all of us, had done the work of dreaming about our future together as a church, running a capital campaign, and making our pledges.  Smaller groups of parishioners had worked with the architects and construction engineers to come up with a plan to transform our functional but awkward gathering space and restrooms into space that was both elegant and worthy of the 21^st century.  Now the vestry needed to decide whether to move forward with the project in the midst of a global pandemic or wait until the pandemic was over.

          The point of the proposed project was not just to create a beautiful and more functional space for our use.  Christ Church is something of a community center with many groups gathering here for a variety of purposes, from AA to Job Search to Boy and Girls Scouts and a whole host of others.  We wanted to create a space that was not the only indoor path from the church to the chapel and our offices, a space that was warm and welcoming to others, and a space we would be proud to call home well into the future.

          The vestry met that night in July 2020 and heard the reports from the architect and construction engineer.  Then they left and our discussion began.  On the one hand, we were in the midst of a global pandemic and we had no idea how long the pandemic would last- although clearly none of us thought it would last this long.  We did not know what the effects on the economy would be, whether we would all be able to pay our pledges over the next three years, or whether the labor or supplies would be available.  Had our common sense completely flown out the window to even consider moving ahead?  How could we look to the future with such a major undertaking when the present felt so uncertain?  On the other hand, the building was not being used because of the pandemic, making tearing the place apart much more convenient.  We had dreamed the dream, made the pledges, come up with a plan, and now was the time.  There was also the fact that Christ Church is a church that tore down the original 1840’s church and started work on what we now call the chapel in 1929.  This is a church that has survived challenges in the past that could have slayed us.  So against all of the reasons not to move ahead was a clear knowledge of all that God had seen us through in the past.  That knowledge propelled the vestry into taking a bold risk and moving forward. 

          This morning we hear God say through the prophet Isaiah “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”  The people to whom Isaiah writes are in exile in Babylon, longing to go home, and afraid that God has forsaken them.  Earlier in this very passage, God has reminded the people of the Exodus and the way God made a way in the sea for the Israelites to escape from the Egyptians.  So what could God possibly mean by “Do not remember the former things?”  God just reminded the people of those very former things!

          The Exodus, the delivery of the Hebrew people from Egypt, was in the DNA of the people.  They owned that story as the powerful way God had worked in the lives of their ancestors.  The story told the people of their special relationship with God.  The temptation was to think that God is a “one and done” God and to hold onto that story as the way God had worked in their collective lives.  Today we hear God tell the people not to hold onto the story of their deliverance so tightly that they cannot see the new thing God is doing in their midst now.  Do not look backwards to the Exodus as if that is the only thing God can do.  Use the story of what God has done in the past to see what God is doing now.  Have faith that God will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert now and in the future. 

          This morning we also hear the story of the dinner party Mary, Martha, and Lazarus gave for Jesus.  Lazarus is newly raised from the dead. Martha is serving as usual, and Mary pours out a pound of costly perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet.  We are told that the house is filled with the scent of the perfume, giving us an image that tantalizes all of our senses from the taste of the dinner, to the sight of friends gathered, to touch of Mary’s hair on Jesus’ feet, to the smell of the perfume.  The sound, however, comes from Judas’ voice protesting that the perfume was a waste of money that could have been given to the poor. 

          The anointing of Jesus’ feet with the costly perfume is an act of extravagant love.  Like the perfume, once that love has been poured out, it cannot be put back in the jar.  This is the same extravagant love that God poured out when God led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, and that God pours out to make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  This is the extravagant love of God we hear about in the words “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son…”  This is the extravagant love of Jesus when Jesus says “Love one another as I have loved you.”  Love is what Mary poured out over Jesus’ feet, the abundant love of God that is not meant to be hoarded but poured out and given away. 

          As we move into Holy Week, God calls us to remember the extravagant love that God has poured over us in the past, in scripture and in our own lives, both individually and as a church, so that we can experience the extravagant love God is pouring out now and trust that extravagant love in the future.  But God also calls us to be that abundant love as God’s people in the world, poured out just as extravagantly and boldly.  When Jesus says “you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” that is not a call to accept poverty, whether physical, spiritual, socio-economic, or in any other form.  That is a call to be the abundant, extravagant love of God poured into the world, for all who are broken or marginalized in any way, remembering all that God’s love has done for us in the past, looking for what God’s love is doing in the present, and trusting that God’s love will meet us in the future, whatever the future holds.

                                                                   Amen.

         

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.