Going on the way...rejoicing

One of the main things I’ve written about in this space over the last year has been reflecting on my New Pennsylvania Life—not so new, now, having passed the year mark more than a month ago. In March of 2017 I left my parish where I’d served for 11 ½ years to move here, where my husband started as rector of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon, just south of Pittsburgh. I’ve been surprised at what a homecoming it has been; more than 20 years ago when I left my hometown, Erie, 120 miles north of here, I never thought I’d be back. It turns out I really like Pennsylvania.

Part of the plan was to have some time to adjust before getting into a parish.  Maybe a month or two. It’s been 14.  But worth the wait:  I’m excited to share that I’m now the recommended candidate for St John Lutheran (ELCA) in Carnegie, PA (5 miles southwest of the city of Pittsburgh, 5 miles northwest of where I live).  This means that after I meet everyone and lead the service next week, the congregation will have a vote and decide whether to call me as their pastor.      

I was in college and not paying a ton of attention when the 1999-2000 “Agreement of Full Communion-A Call to Common Mission” was adopted.  For more than a hundred years, various configurations of Lutherans and Anglicans had been in conversation, trying to live out Jesus’ instruction “to be One, as I and the Father are One.”   The places we are One are many more than the places where we differ. Our liturgies are very similar, we already shared music, prayer, and theologies of the Eucharist.  The ELCA explains the meaning of full communion this way:

Full communion is when two denominations develop a relationship based on a common confessing of the Christian faith and a mutual recognition of Baptism and sharing of the Lord’s Supper. This does not mean the two denominations merge; rather, in reaching agreements, denominations also respect differences. These denominations worship together, may exchange clergy and also share a commitment to evangelism, witness and service in the world. Each entity agrees that even with differences, there is nothing that is church-dividing.  

The ELCA has full communion relationships with other denominations, as well: The Presbyterian Chruch (USA), United Church of Christ, The Episcopal Church, The Moravian Church, the United Methodist Church and, of course, member churches of the Lutheran World Federation.     The Episcopal Church, meanwhile, is in full communion with all the Provinces of the Anglican Communion, the Old Catholic Churches of Europe, the United churches of the Indian subcontinent, the Mar Thoma Church, the Moravian Church, and the Church of Sweden. The Episcopal Church is also currently in dialogue with the United Methodist Church. We all love: Jesus, the sacraments, the creeds, the Bible. 

I went to an Episcopal seminary that regularly used the Lutheran Book of Worship, and when I planned liturgy at my Episcopal Church I routinely pirated Lutheran Eucharistic prayers for our use.  I held open office hours along with a Lutheran pastor and a rabbi in my parish in Massachusetts.  I went to a Lutheran preaching Bible study for 10 years. My mom grew up Lutheran, in Sweden, and I cannot say how many ancient churches I visited growing up.  I even spent 2 months working at a Lutheran Church when their pastor broke his neck. When I met Donna, the parish secretary from St John, she remarked that the lines between denominations now are more like dotted lines than solid ones.  I have been fortunate to observe for a long time how right she is.

I’ve always explained the Episcopal Church as being about being “close to the ground.” It started over political conflict of King Henry VIII, and while his marital difficulties perhaps were not the first, best, most stellar reason to start a whole new branch of Christendom, the principle of local governance, worship in your own language, and celebrating the sacraments are a pretty good outcome. But those are not uniquely Anglican/Episcopal—Lutherans are right there, too.  

When I read the pieces I’ve written on here about what not being in a parish has taught me about parish ministry, the idea that most stands out is grace. Grace, grace, grace. Totally free, unearned, impossible to comprehend or plan for, grace.  Which, as it happens, is basically the central tenet of Lutheran spirituality. You cannot do anything, ever, at all, to earn God’s love.  There’s no point at which you’ll arrive as being the maximum quality Christian that then puts to shame your previous efforts and gives you the keys to the kingdom. It will never happen.  This is not contrary to anything in the Episcopal Church. But it is not the loudest note we play, either.   Martin Luther says “God doesn't love us because of our worth, we are of worth because God loves us.” That’s it; it’s just love.  Just grace.

The other thing that’s been powerful about this time is how aware I am of my call to parish ministry. It’s been great to have time to write for my town magazine and do a different kind of work. It’s really fun to invite kids over in the middle of the day when school is off to watch movies. (I am also very aware of what a privilege it is to have been able to spend a year unemployed and not have it be financially ruinous) But I’m not called to be a stay at home parent. I’m not called to be a magazine columnist (though I hope to keep doing projects once in a while).  I’m glad I got to do those things, and I’ve had the sense to have fun this year. I’m also not called to be a chaplain, or the director of a churchy organization. Baptizing, burying, and being-with. Preaching and teaching. And those are not confined by denominational lines, either.

So send out extra prayers the weekend of April 28—there will be time for the congregation to meet me and my family that Saturday, and Sunday I lead the service and preach. The passage from Acts is one of my favorites; a Ethiopian eunuch meets Philip on the road, reading Scripture.   Philip interprets Isaiah and teaches him about Jesus.  The eunuch says, “Look! Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Nothing. "He went on his way rejoicing." What is to prevent us all from receiving God’s grace? Nothing. We go on our way rejoicing.

St John Evangelical Lutheran Church

 Carnegie, PA

Easter is an altogether different kind of fact.

We’re pushing 5 weeks of Easter now, almost to the end. We’ve gotten through the empty tomb, “side wound Sunday” with Thomas, and eating fish on the beach.  This past Sunday, the raising of Tabitha in Acts for this Sunday and Jesus talking about his sheep hearing his voice.  All kinds of encounter with Jesus trampling down death.  All kinds of truths, all kinds of people trying to figure it out for themselves.

In my vacation week after Easter, I visited the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, where an exhibition of the artist Walid Raad who, the ICA tells us, “informed by his upbringing in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), has spent the past 25 years exploring the ways we represent, remember, and make sense of history.”  The exhibit is full of things that are “true” in different ways—in a conventionally factual sense maybe or maybe not, but still true. It also holds a not un-pointed critique of American naiveté, which the Boston Globe’s art critic Sebastian Smee grapples with brilliantly in this review.

In all of my preaching this Holy Week I felt confronted by the wideness of the view of our new stations of the cross, as I wrote here in March. The Raad exhibit asks a similar question. How much are we willing to see? What lives, in the words of writer Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, are actually “grievable?” The crucifixion of Jesus only, or also that of the criminals on either side? We can have all kinds of lovely ideas about Jesus and compassion and justice, but if we don’t see those put to death next to him, that’s a pretty thin participation in God’s love.   Any metric of our faith depends more on those criminals and on those in our world now than on Jesus himself.   Too often, we don’t see them, and the American tendency toward tidy narratives and easy answers is literally fatal to those who fall in the cross hairs of our foreign policy.  One of the series of photographs is of shell casings Raad found as a child growing up during the civil war in Lebanon. My kids find Easter eggs; the world that he grew up in is plainly un-imaginable to them. 

In the middle of the Raad exhibit there’s a wall of images where visitors can leave their own categorizations of facts as tending toward one of three categories—emotional, aesthetic, or historical. Easter, it occurred to me, is a different kind of fact altogether.  Factually, the tomb was empty. We can offer explanations about what happened, conjecture about resuscitation or body theft or, even, true resurrection. But the empty tomb is only understood in confrontation with that space of death, at the same time confronting how it becomes a space of life. That transformation, though, doesn’t happen in our heads: the tomb can be empty or not empty, the body stolen by grave robbers or raised by the almighty power of the living God.  The transformation happens in our lives, in our own lives and that of our communities.

I’m not persuaded intellectually that “Christ is raised from the dead and that death no longer has dominion” (Rom 6:9). I have come to believe, day by day and week by week, in what I have experienced and seen of the risen Christ. I don’t believe because I’m afraid of the alternative, of heaven vs hell or joy vs some cartoon of eternal punishment, I believe because I have tasted it and heard it and walked with the truth of the resurrection and I know that that dead don’t always stay dead.   (My sermon about Tabitha is here). It’s not a historical fact or an aesthetic fact or an emotional one. It melts the categories and then knits a scarf out of them.

Just as, or even more powerful than any belief in resurrection, though, is the invitation toward resurrection. I am doing the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace through Dorchester to stand with victims of violence and to go, bodily, in my part of the risen body of Christ to be one with the risen body of Christ of the city.  I am writing Governor Charlie Baker to advocate for full inclusion of transgendered people because the risen body of Christ is a female body and a male body, and a neither, both, between body. All of these encounters with the world are encounters, also of the peculiar kind of truth that Easter is.

So there it is, again—more questions than answers, more labyrinthine steps than journeys  completed. Thanks for reading.

Inky Love

Baby Isaiah and my old tattoo

Two ½  years ago, I had a rather large tattoo on my right arm done by Holly Azzara at Always and Forever in Watertown, Massachusetts.  It’s a mommy tattoo—my kids’ names, flowers, happy swallows.  Like children, it took up more room than I expected—neither population has any sense of moderation.  I had initially planned for it to incorporate the female symbol I had tattooed on my arm when I was 19, but Holly was unimpressed, and advised me to start over on the other arm or cover it up.

But I didn’t want to cover it up.

I wrote in this space then about why—the sentimental value of seeing the same image on my arm at my wedding, nursing my newborn children, graduating from college —that tattoo is in all of those pictures. It’s become lopsided and faded, but it’s me. It’s possible that I am also becoming a little lopsided. 

Until, until. I started to plan my next tattoo.  My first plan was to get a great blue heron. They symbolize a connection to place and wilderness that’s hard to come by so close to the city.  I’ve written tons of poems about the heron in the pond by the cemetery across the street from my house, and in the summer they fly over from daytime feeding grounds at the tiny lake to the west.  They’re beautiful and shadowy, motion and stillness at the same time. Grey, black, muted blue.   

At the end of the day, though, a bird is a bird. And while I may still get the heron done,  there was another image I couldn’t get out of my mind.

There is a woman (at least I see her as a woman) looking out with clear eyes and calm gaze. The green beneath her feet suggests the round earth under her. She is love. Just love. She has kind of a square face and looks like she’s seen a lot. But the way she looks out is just clear compassion. Total and complete love.

I sat opposite her window when I was on sabbatical in 2012 at Grace Medford, where my husband is t  So just over two weeks ago (10 months after the original decision was made), after 6 ½ hours of needle time, here she is.

he rector, which was when I was planning the mommy tattoo. And she just wouldn’t let me go.

And you can still see my old tattoo, shadowy in the background.  I have an appointment for January to go over and fill in any spots that didn’t heal properly, and maybe hide that a bit more. But I kind of love it.

The line in the original window from 1 Corinthians—“The greatest of these is charity”— you’ve heard at every wedding—is in the background, but I went for the Latin “Caritas” just on the top instead of all the words.  I have mixed feelings about Latin—you know, there’s that whole central tenant of Anglicanism that talks about worship in your own language—but I am setting those aside in favor of the wider Christian history of it. 

Getting ready to preach recently, I found another place in Scripture where this image resonates.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

It’s an astonishing and tragic moment: he comes up to Jesus and bows down, offering deference and respect. “We can imagine that maybe he’s expecting to be told he’s doing well; he says he has kept all the commandments. But something unanticipated happens—Jesus looks at him, and loves him.  In that loving glance, Jesus sees him and knows him, and tells him what he’s missing. The man was looking for approval, not grace. Certainly not this kind of love that will change his life.  So he leaves.  For his security, and a deeper grief than he’s ever known.

This, it seems to me, is as clear a picture of hell as we ever see in the New Testament. Never mind all that stuff about the eternal fire where the worm never dies. This is the real thing.  All of the promises of God’s eternity so close he could touch it, and instead he turns his back.  Giving in to his fear, he can’t listen to his sorrow.  He walks away.  Even Job knew he was talking to God in the depths of despair, but the rich man has nothing.  Just his money. And he will find out that that’s not enough.

Jesus looks at him and loves him.  That’s what this woman is doing— this look in her eyes is so astonishingly clear, so generous, you can see her looking at you and loving you for who you are. And all of your anxiety, all of your perceived need to prove yourself or justify your status—it just melts. And you imagine that this is what love is.  With all the transcendent hope in the world, I want to say yes to it.

What about all the other stuff? the lilies and stems are Christ Church Waltham. The anchor is just cool, but we have one of those, too)

Wild Goose Festival 2015: some light reading on jesus, anti-racist work, humilty, and salvation.

I’ve written several versions of this post trying to get to the bottom of what, exactly, I was doing for my time at WildGoose Festival last week.   First I wrote a very tidy “what I learned on my continuing education time” post for my parish newsletter. Then I wrote an uber-confessional piece for this space, and finally managed to put them together.  I’ve been noticing a lot as I’ve blogged more here how my Respectable Lady Rector voice differs from my Free Range Mama Priest voice. So what follows is the result of trying to bring them closer together (and is also with a few edits basically what I sent to the parish).


Trying to share a weekend of gathering with people in the North Carolina heat, a tent revival with real tents (for people who don’t go to tent revivals) it’s easy to share links of what I saw. Information is one thing. But the experience isn’t about data.  The incredible part of it was the amazing sense of how God was working in the lives of the people I met and listened to.   Every person I heard had a deep sense of Scripture. I did the math and I’ve preached at least 400 sermons. I know some things about the Bible. But the way that Mark Charles,  a Navajo activist and educator, talked about how white settlers in the Americas lacked a “land covenant” with God to guide our relationship, or the way Bree Newsome talked about how Jesus worked for peace, not order, or how Tony Campolo talked about the love of Jesus moved in his heart to advocate for GLBT persons in the evangelical movement—literally, OMG.


I worked pretty hard to get my spirituality to fit into the Episcopal Church box. I came to this church, which I love, through sacrament and mystery and astonishment at being fed in the Eucharist, and that was enough fuel wading through the muck of HE-god language and hierarchy and institution. I have often had occasion to remember a conversation with my bishop, Tom Shaw,, when I was first studying to be a priest. I went on this long rant about how much I hated the patriarchy and insularity and pointless attachment to history and tradition of General Seminary. Very patiently, buddhalike, he listened to all of it and finally said, “Well, how is that different from the church you’re eventually going to serve?” 


13 years later, I think I’m glad to say that the rest of the church where I have found myself is totally not as uncomfortable as I was at General seminary (with apologies to all those happy GTS-ers out there).  However, the side effect of all of that squeezing and prodding and poking into more traditional forms was that it came to pass that my faith was most comfortable in a very abstract articulation. I could love the big ideas of the incarnation of God in Jesus and the sweeping movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  But that’s my theology. My passion for Jesus is more in sacrament and symbol. It's a lot less clear than "Ok, Lord, I’ll climb that pole.”  I’d be afraid to climb a flag pole just for the sake of the height, much less risking arrest and the legitimate possibility of being shot. But Bree Newsome pointed out that Jesus was mostly just in the Temple when he was knocking things over. He was out in the world doing his ministry where God called him to be.


So that’s my real invitation from Wild Goose Festival.  Where am I muting the invitation of the Holy Spirit because of fear? Where am I unfree from a disordered attachment to comfort? In church, in my family, in my prayer?  How often am I willing to do the hard work for genuine, holy, peace?  To learn from marginalized voices, not because it’s my “duty,” but because Jesus is there. It’s very comfortable to say that “education” is the key to success and social mobility, and that’s often true. But where we need to lean harder on education is for people like me who don’t get arrested for failing to use a turn signal, to learn what we don’t know.  As a person of privilege in this country I can be like a fish in water and not have to understand what water is.  But that is not the way of Jesus.

A white anti-racist response has to come from humility. This country was founded on the theft of land and came to economic dominance through slavery.  It is coming toward democracy, and is founded on some amazing ideals of freedom and equality that are coming toward being for all people. But those ideals aren’t a reality for all of its people.   The inspiring part, though, is that if the truth really will set us free—and I think we have to believe it does—is that we are all on our way to the vineyard. Some will be on time, some will be late, and some will be really, really late. (I know someone made this reference at WGF and I don’t remember who it was). But as Episcopal priest Paul Fromberg said in his talk on “An apocalyptic of peace:” I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.”

As a Christian I, too, believe in salvation.
 

Happy (yes, happy) Ash Wednesday!

I’m writing early for my parish blog post this week on Ash Wednesday, grateful for the opportunity the holiday—such as it is—offers to remember our creatureliness.  When it comes down to it, Ash Wednesday isn’t a holiday—it doesn’t commemorate anything about our story of faith or any particular person we remember or any event in the life of Jesus. Ash Wednesday instead is a gift the Holy Spirit has come to offer the church through our practice.  It has nothing to do with our virtue or our accomplishment.  I’m pretty sure it’s not our own cleverness. It’s just pure grace.

Wait a minute, Sara. I just got home from church and I listed my sins in excruciating detail--I sin against creation, against others, and against myself. What do you mean it’s pure grace? Shouldn’t grace feel good? Why can’t the church be logical for once? Isn’t this just another time the church says people are bad?

Well, sure. There is that.

Ash Wednesday doesn’t feel good like a massage or a nice curry or a walk at sunset. Still, there’s something almost exhilarating about the honesty that Ash Wednesday invites us into.  We spend a lot of time in this life trying to look like we lead well-curated, well-organized lives in which our kids always say clever things and our spouses never get annoyed with us.  Social media has not improved society in this way. In the US, at least, self-reliance is right up there with cleanliness and godliness. This month I’ve been reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking,  (based on her 2013 TED talk of the same name) which starts with her story about being paralyzed at letting her husband help her financially. He’s rich and famous (the writer Neil Gaiman), and she’s mortified about accepting help from him will mean for their relationship and her identity as an artist. Under it all, she concedes, is her terror vulnerability—we’re all afraid to be vulnerable. You don’t have to be a famous artist to be afraid of that (see also: anything Brene Brown has ever written).

Ash Wednesday just pulls the rug out from all of that. There’s no pretending. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  That’s it.   We are beloved and wondrously gloriously blessed by God, but we are still dust. Ad’ham, made of the earth and to earth we will return.  What a relief! I’m not perfect and I don’t have to pretend.  Widening the view toward eternity puts life in more rightful perspective—both in terms of our frailty and in terms of our power. If we are dust and will return to dust, we can also take some risks once in a while. Longing to be perfect is a pretty heavy burden to bear. You don’t have to.

The other thing that’s great about Ash Wednesday and its focus on our earthy dirty selves is that it’s only one day.  We take ONE day to look at all of this, and then we’re done. Boom, on to Lent, on to the actual repentance part.  And repentance is great—we can always turn around, we can always go in a new direction, we can always try again.   Lent is about all the ways we’re not stuck in our sin.  

 Jesus was waited on by angels in the wilderness. Does God want less for you?

On (not) getting our stories straight: Religion and Fundamentalism

This year through both Advent and Christmas I’ve continually felt drawn toward the multiplicity of our narratives—from Matthew to Mark to Luke to John, the church has long told many stories to explain our faith. To be religious is to be bound by a certain set of questions and symbols, but at the same time to hold a radical openness to truth—to stand at the doorway of Scripture and see shepherds at the manger on our left and Magi at the house with Jesus on the right and be able to extend our arms wide and say to both, “yes,”  “thank you,” “Amen.” The shepherds teach me that God’s truth is revealed in some unlikely corners of society; the Magi teach me that the revelation of truth sometimes comes from far away.

There is much in the media this week over the attacks against the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in which twelve staff members were shot this week in an attack apparently by Islamic fundamentalists.   Is religion the problem? One of my favorite authors, Salman Rushdie, says it is, and calls it “a medieval form of unreason,” and says religion deserves our “fearless disrespect.”  Certainly I have little sympathy for homicidal fundamentalists, but it seems unuseful to lump every impulse toward transcendence and mystery in the same category. Religious violence has endured through millennia. The Egyptians oppressed the Hebrews and the Spanish Inquisition oppressed non-Catholics. Christian fundamentalists have bombed abortion clinics and now Islamic fundamentalists attack cartoonists and school girls. The thing those all have in common is contempt and violence, not religion.  Charlie Hebdo was contemptuous (and from what I’ve seen, probably racist, too)—but not violent, and not deserving of murder. It’s cruel irony that one of the police officers murdered in the attack was Muslim, risking his life to protect those on the magazine who pilloried his prophet. 

So what to do? As thousands in France held up their pens in support of the writers and artists who were killed on Tuesday, as a religious person I hold out two open hands.   I hold out open hands for mystery, for attentiveness and for curiosity. Open hands to say that I don’t come to Scripture—or even my own life!— with certainty, but with faith.  I’ll imagine the magi in the stable and give thanks for the holy strangeness of kings in a barn. I’ll imagine the shepherds at the house and hope that their lambs don’t wander into the kitchen. I’ll get out of bed every day to meet my own chaotic life of distraction and wonder—parenting and preaching and learning and falling and getting up again—through all of it so grateful for a faith big enough to hold the pieces together.

At Epiphany, we remember the magi following a star and listening to the invitation in their dream to go home by another way.  What new path are you on today?  What’s the power of your faith against violence? Where do you need the stars to illuminate your road? Where does mystery win over certainty?

Equal marriage in Pennsylvania--rejoicing, again.

This week, I’m all aflutter about the decision in my home state of Pennsylvania to allow same sex marriage. Of course, it’s been the law in my chosen state for ten years (we moved here in 2004, too, the same year it came through), but this feels different. Pennsylvania is such a big state—the part I’m from is basically Ohio—and while it’s may not be such a paradigm shift for Philadelphia, for Erie, this changes a lot.   Admittedly there was something Onion-satire-like about the headline on the Erie Times-News: “Another same sex couple applies for marriage license.”

In Massachusetts, this is old news.  Still, there’s something about the place where I’m from recognizing the right to marriage for all people that feels healing. My right to marry my spouse was never questioned because my beloved happens to be male, but that is not the case for one of my high school best friends, who had three weddings with her wife—one commitment ceremony, one legal NH civil union (presided over by yours truly), and one party when that civil union became a legal marriage on January 1 2011. Phew. They had to buy a lot of champagne.   

Marriage is a sacrament, a gift, and a blessing. There’s an old image of the church that imagines us as “the bride of Christ”—this is not an image that I feel particularly drawn toward, but it reminds us that the covenant of marriage is holy—and the failure of the church or the state to extend equal benefits to all is just an injustice.  Of course I believe in separation of church and state, but I also want a wedding I officiate in church to be legal in the eyes of the state. I haven’t been to Pennsylvania in years, but I still feel so grateful for this. Judge John Jones, in the PA case wrote, “In the sixty years since Brown was decided, 'separate' has thankfully faded into history, and only 'equal' remains. Similarly, in future generations, the label 'same-sex marriage' will be abandoned, to be replaced simply by 'marriage.' We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history"   

This is the country we are becoming; we’re not there yet, but slowly, slowly.  This is what we say we’ll do in our baptismal covenant: to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being.   With each state where marriage for all becomes a reality, we get just a little closer to making that possible.  Oregon went this week, too.  I’ve written this stuff in my parish newsletter before. I’ll write it again. It’s like that parable Jesus tells in Luke 15:

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.

 Every time, every time there is a victory for peace and justice, we are called to rejoice. So today, I’m rejoicing for those two couples in my hometown who’ve gotten their marriage licenses.  Easter continues! 

PS--for the face of gay Erie, PA, I present Jessie and Ricardo, also known on facebook as "The gay guys who ride around Erie on a bicycle made for two," a fan page with almost 6000 followers."

Interview: Art in Tandem

Making the right mistakes

 This year, again, my parish will participate in “Ashes to go,” a newish practice in the church in which we go to wherever the people are to share prayers (and dust)  for Ash Wednesday. I and a smallish team will be at the Waltham Massachusetts Commuter Rail Station, a few blocks from the parish.  Last year we were on our own—about seven people participated throughout the morning—but this year, we’re partnering with Chaplains on the Way, a mostly-homeless ministry. I appreciate this especialy because, in a way, the street is their church. I wonder about how many people, who, for whatever reason, don’t feel comfortable coming into a church, and how powerful a witness it is to leave our comfort zone of having people come to us.  Will someone have a more “deep” experience in coming to church? As a priest I’d probably hope so, but I also shouldn’t make assumptions about what happens between an individual and God, no matter where they’re standing. I heard a quote about meditation once that said that you could open the window, but you couldn’t make the breeze come in. That probably applies here—when fewer and fewer people having traditional church backgrounds, we need to throw open as many windows as we can.

It’s not an easy question, though—how far can you go from tradition before you’ve lost the center of what you’re committed to in the first place? What are we inviting people toward if we compromise too far?  How much do we ask of people who come to have a child baptized? Do they have to come for a few weeks, months, a year? Do they have to officially join the parish by making a financial pledge? What about receiving communion? It’s the practice in our diocese in many places, including Christ Church, to offer communion to everyone, whether or not they’re baptized. The prayer book and church canons say baptism should come first. Here, again, we are trying to open the windows.

Adherence to tradition is one of those places where we strive for faithfulness, not necessarily the 100% always-and-everywhere-iron-clad rule.  Faithfulness, it seems to me, is deciding which side you’re going to err on.   Will we be devoted to orthodoxy or openness? What’s at stake on both sides?  There are a lot of times when I defer to tradition—the Nicene Creed, for example—but here, I think there is actually something to say for asking what Jesus would do.  His first goal, most often, was to get people to the table.  Once you’re there, you can talk more, debate, pick sides.  As the parable in Luke 14  tells it, when the nice, qualified guests wouldn’t come for the feast, the host told his servant quite unequivocally: “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”  When he does that and there’s still space, he goes out to make everybody else come in.  Would it have been a better party if the well-educated and polite people had come? It’s completely possible. Would they have appreciated the expensive wine more? Maybe. But that’s not what God’s table is about.  (see my post from last year in which I had just been the parent helper in my kid’s Godly Play class in which we did the lesson on the Great Banquet when we were going out for ashes).  

I do appreciate, though, that it’s a discussion to be had. It’s not an uncontroversial stance, it’s not necessarily an “of course!” moment.  And once—if—this gets settled, there will be something else to struggle with. As we grow into the church we’re called to be, we are trying to follow a Jesus who’s always just a little ahead, taking us a little further than we thought we could go.

September 11: Remembering, Again

As I write, it’s September 11, and I’m thinking about how impossible it is not to mark anniversaries like this, year by year. You see bumper stickers and facebook status updates that say “never forget,” and I’m not quite sure what that means.  I don’t think anybody’s in danger of forgetting. Someone commented about how September 11 is a dose of perspective: to always value the ones you love, to be aware of the precariousness of life. I also hope that it can generate perspective in a different way: to also be aware of how the security we normally feel in this country is an abstract fantasy for so many all over the world. We are called to compassion and solidarity as well as gratitude.

Sitting down at my computer, I don’t know what else I could possibly think about other than that morning in New York City twelve years ago, the blue blue of the sky, a fall chill under the late summer sun, the sense of expectation and promise of beginning seminary. I am also aware of how many times I’ve written this exact account of those days; how my now-husband Noah and I had moved to New York a few weeks earlier for school, not married yet and still figuring out who we were individually as well as together. Each year on this day, I remember kneeling in the seminary chapel hoping, praying, for violence to stop, and each year I remember that day and add up another year of violence.   Afghanistan, then Iraq, Libya, Syria. Our violence against ourselves: Islamophobia, the erosion of our civil liberties, the billions that could have relieved poverty and instead funded war.  Our polarized political landscape.  Guantanamo. I go back to where I was September 11, 2002, passing through a border checkpoint in the Holy Land on the first anniversary of that day: again, violence.

In the Gospel last Sunday we heard Jesus lashing out at the crowds who were following him—he’s fed up with their desire just to see the next big thing, watching him do a healing here, an exorcism there. The crowds seem uninterested in real transformation: they want entertainment.  Are you in this for real?  Do you have what it takes to follow me? Do you?  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” You can’t, Jesus, says, just come along for the ride. You have to be in it, all the way, asking hard questions and making hard choices.  

By that standard, nobody can follow. And I do think Jesus was being a little sarcastic—I have a calling from God as a parent and a spouse, and I’m sure I’m not called by Jesus to abandon those I’ve made a life with.  And I do have to commit. Still, the truth is that real discipleship of Jesus is impossible on our own.  Our somewhat clunky prayer for this Sunday begins, “O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.”  The subject/object/agency in that sentence is pretty convoluted: the Holy Spirit moves in us, prays in us—but as we are made in the image of God, there would be no “us” at all without our Creator.

Forgiveness is certainly impossible on our own.  If it’s the life of God within us that makes it possible for us to follow God, it is certainly the life of God in us that enables us to forgive.  It is the providence of God, too, to forgive where we just aren’t ready at the same time as it’s the providence of God to enliven our anger at injustice and oppression.  

So there’s the muddle for today—grief and pain, hope and righteous anger—all one holy stew of God’s presence with us and God’s being intertwined with ours.