Feast of St. James

Today, we celebrate the Feast of St. James, the first among the apostles to be martyred, son of Zebedee.  To find out more about James, you can read or listen here.

The collect of the day is: 

O gracious God, we remember before thee this day thy servant and apostle James, first among the Twelve to suffer martyrdom for the Name of Jesus Christ; and we pray that thou wilt pour out upon the leaders of thy Church that spirit of self-denying service by which alone they may have true authority among thy people; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Sermon - God's Shepard

Sometimes, you have to wonder why God answers prayers the way He does.  Even when He gives us what we want – what we've asked for, begged for at times – more of His response has to do with what we need instead.  In today's reading from Jeremiah, we see the results of Him talking with the prophet, essentially planning an end run around the repetitive desire of the Hebrew people for a king.  He'd already provided them with prophets.  Saul, as we saw in the last couple of weeks, ended up being a complete failure as a monarch.  The people didn't need a king other than His own reign, but they could learn a lesson or two along the way, and he would establish the line of David for His plans for their future.

In the meantime, we see His irritation at the scattering of His flock.  Likewise, in our second lesson, we see the separations of people into categories has continued.  That too, seems to be a human trait that we continue through the present time.

Samuel Colgate, the founder of the Colgate business empire, was a devout Christian, and he told of an incident that took place in the church he attended. During an evangelistic service, an invitation was given at the close of the sermon for all those who wished to turn their lives over to Christ and be forgiven. One of the first persons to walk down the aisle and kneel at the altar was a well-known prostitute. She knelt in very real repentance, she wept, she asked God to forgive her, and meanwhile the rest of the congregation looked on approvingly at what she was doing. Then she stood and testified that she believed God had forgiven her for her past life, and she now wanted to become a member of the church. For a few moments, the silence was deafening.

Finally, Samuel Colgate arose and said, "I guess we blundered when we prayed that the Lord would save sinners. We forgot to specify what kind of sinners. We'd better ask him to forgive us for this oversight. The Holy Spirit has touched this woman and made her truly repentant, but the Lord apparently doesn't understand that she's not the type we want him to rescue. We'd better spell it out for him just which sinners we had in mind." Immediately, a motion was made and unanimously approved that the woman be accepted into membership in the congregation.

How many times a day do we categorize people?  How many times do we put ourselves into boxes?  Some labels can outlast your lifetime.  Let's try this:  you finish the name:

• Attila the ---- Hun. 
• Conan the ---- Barbarian. 
• Billy the ---- Kid.
• Catherine the ---- Great. 
• Rahab the ---- Prostitute.

As we become known as our titles, our roles, our circumstances of life, our labels, we tend to act in those ways.  What people expect is what they're going to see, and getting out of those boxes is a long, uphill battle.

But we've also seen how Christ has renamed people – repurposed their lives for His use.  Simon the fisherman became Peter, the fisher of men, the Rock upon which the Church was built; Saul was a destroyer of Christians, but upon becoming Paul, became a builder of the Church.  So let's look at our second lesson.

How many different categories does Paul mention in his letter to the Ephesians?  The circumcised and uncircumsized, aliens, strangers – but he points out what Christ is for us.  In His flesh He has made us one.  He has broken down the dividing wall and the hostility between us.  He creates one new humanity, that they might reconcile to God in one body through the Cross.  And in so doing, we become citizens with the saints, members of the household of God – joining together to become the holy temple of God.

So now we have different labels, far more positive, that call us to be our best selves.  And we're brought to the Gospel.  And brought full circle back to God's plans for humanity.

The liturgy today cuts out portions of this chapter of Mark, but we still know the stories.  We know that Jesus is of the line of King David, established by God so long ago in our history.  And we know that Christ is here to get across to the people that the kingdom is of God, and that God's kingdom is established here on earth through Christ.  But the interesting part of today's Gospel is that in being physically here, God can see what is needed, right now.  He sees a disparate group, separated by their labels, their roles, their preconceptions – wandering around like lost sheep, and knows that what they need, right now, is compassion, and a Shepard, giving them a direction to go.  He provides us the way of uniting as one humanity, working together to form that Kingdom of God.

The challenge to us, the expectation that we accepted when we were baptized, is to live up to what the Shepard expects.  Take a look at Page 305 in your Book of Common Prayer.  "Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?"  Our response, "I will, with God's help."  The Shepard, the King sent to us by God is still our help.  The Holy Spirit is right there, ready, willing and able to help us fulfill this baptismal vow.

"Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?"  Will you set aside labels, categories, skin colors, where somebody came from?  Will you recognize that they, too, are part of the Kingdom of God, that the Shepard has led them to us for a reason?  Our response, "I will, with God's help."

And finally, "Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?"  Our response, "I will, with God's help."

We have a lot going on in this country, where divisions are more and more rampant.  I objected to the concept of a hyphenated American – African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American – but what I was missing was that all of those hyphens ended with American, that the commonality was built into that hyphen.  Our Shepard reminds us that even American is a label – "Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?"  That's our challenge set before us in God's plan.  We know that the only answer to that is that we will strive for that, through Christ.  We will try to see through His eyes, so that all we can see are members of the community of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, and realize that each one is a needed and necessary part of that community.

Let us pray:  O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sermon - Family Drama

Family drama.  We all have it.  Television has an entire genre of soap operas, dedicated to family drama of fictitious characters, and while we think such things could never happen in real life, today's readings are full of family drama.

Michal, David's wife, had once been madly in love with her husband.  We read that David was pleased to know that, but never once does the Bible indicate that he also loved her.  He did, however, kill 200 Philistines and provided their foreskins as the bride price to Saul, Michal's father.  Now, David was looking for a way to find political legitimacy by getting in good with the royal family.  Saul was looking for a way to get rid of this upstart, and so set the bride price, knowing the problem of David would be eliminated once he went up against the Philistines.  He promised David that he could marry his eldest daughter for the bride price, and in the meantime, knowing David was going to die, he married his eldest daughter off to another man.  David returned, and Saul was kind of stuck to keep his promise.  Unfortunately, Saul also realized that David was favored of God, and he didn't want to lose his throne.  After the marriage of David and Michal, he sent men to kill David, and Michal, not wanting to become a widow so soon after marriage, hid David so he could escape.

The drama takes a new twist as Saul, angry with his daughter for letting David get away, declares her deserted, and marries her off to someone else.  David, meanwhile, goes about gathering the kingdom together, gaining supporters, not to mention a couple more wives, and the Lord allows Saul and his sons to die, ironically when they're going to lose to the Philistines, giving the kingdom over to David.  At this point, 18 years later, when we assume that she's learned to live happily with her second husband, David decides he wants his first wife back – he paid for her in foreskins, mind you – and over the objections of her present husband, takes her back with him.  Now Michal's stuck, one among many – which was not what she signed up for – and looking out the window, likely feeling like a prisoner, sees even more evidence that she does not come first with David.  From her perspective, he's out there, dancing like a fool in homage to God, humiliating himself – and her, she believes – by dressing in little clothing, and tossing every ounce of royal decorum on its ear.  He is willing to demean himself in front of his people.  She doesn't recognize that he is willing to humble himself before God in true joy at God's presence.  She only knows that she despises him now.

So let's see what drama the royal family from today's Gospel lesson got to.  First, it gets a little confusing because we actually know some things about this family from the historian, Josephus, including names, which can get a bit confusing in the Bible.  The Herod family really liked the name.  So, Herod I, begat Herod II, also sometimes called Herod Philip – and he married Herodias, named for her grandfather – and if I'm reading the ancestry chart correctly, Herod II was her uncle.  They had a daughter Salome.  Josephus tells us that Herodias divorced her husband by "confounding the laws" (women couldn't divorce men at that point), and then she married Herod Antipas, Herod II's half-brother.  Enter John the Baptist, who immediately condemned the marriage, telling Herod Antipas that he could not legitimately marry his brother's wife, particularly since his brother was still alive.  Like all good couples that don't want to be told what to do, they weren't happy about this.  Herodias was all in favor of killing John the Baptist immediately.  However, her husband, for some reason unknown even to himself (hello – God at work here), liked John the Baptist, and so simply imprisoned him, occasionally having visits and listening to John's words, which he found fascinating.  It was like having his own private prophet he just kept in the dungeon.  Herodias was furious, but unable to persuade her husband, she bided her time and watched for an opportunity.  That opportunity came fairly quickly when her daughter danced for her step-father and the court at a state dinner one night.  She apparently did so well, her step-daddy offered her anything she wanted, up to and including half his kingdom.  Now if this were a soap opera, I've no doubt where the storyline would go, but, this is the Bible, so we get to see a different sort of human atrocity.  Salome didn't know what to ask for, so she asked her mother what she should request.  Herodias took the chance she'd been offered, and told her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist.  Salome took the concept, embellished a little bit, and asked her stepfather for the head of John the Baptist, on a platter.  One has to wonder how many of the dinner guests managed to keep their food down at that presentation.

Even looking at the Episcopal Church – one has to admit that we have more than our fair share of "family" drama.  As an interesting aside, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made the statement, that a priest who follows the plotlines of a soap opera or a novel is someone who "has a fair bit of literacy about the world we're in - literacy about our culture, about the human heart."

Family drama.  We, ourselves, experience our own family dramas – feuds, secrets, skeletons, abuse, addictions, divorce, custody battles – you name it, and families somewhere experience it. 

But since it's such an obvious problem, why is it mentioned in the Bible SO often? 

Well, let's go to our New Testament lesson, and listen to the words of Paul:  God has "blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places."  "He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ."  He blessed us with forgiveness, and gave us a "plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth."  We have a heavenly family, wholly perfect and pure, through the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  No family drama, no soap opera, just a choice to believe, and be adopted into the family of God. 

So next time you're experiencing your own family soap opera, remember that this life is very temporary, and our Father in Heaven is waiting on us to join our family there.  Forgive those driving you crazy today, and look forward to the blessings you'll reap as an adopted son or daughter of God.

Let us pray:  O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Thorns

"Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated." (2 Cor. 12:7)  I chuckled quietly in the back of the church this morning hearing this verse.  We all have our "thorns" to deal with as we move forward, to keep us from our heads getting too big or from letting our egos get away from us.  And to remind us that it's not we who accomplish these things, but we with God's help who accomplish things.

So, in that sense, this past week saw the very slow beginnings of Noonday Prayer each day - a very short (@ 10 min) service to remind us that the thorns God grants us are gentle reminders that we're here for His service.  The middle of the day is a good time for such a reminder - it can get us through the afternoon without wanting to strangle someone. 

This next week, we'll switch things up a little and use the New Zealand Midday Prayer - same length of time, but the wording is slightly different.  The New Zealand Prayer Book is truly a masterpiece of poetry and prose, even just to read through.

We've got a couple of events coming up that I'll put here, just to have you mark them on your calendar - more will be announced later:

Saturday, July 29, 6:45 p.m. - Compline Service followed by a showing of I Can Only Imagine.
Saturday, August 11, 1-5 p.m. - Crockpot Cooking Workshop

Next Sunday will be another Deacon's Distribution (Mass), at 9:00 a.m.   Everyone's welcome, and we hope to see you there!

July Changes and a Sermon

July brings with it a plethora of change.  First, we now have the following schedule of services:

Deacon's Distribution (Deacon led service with Eucharist) - 1st and 3rd Sundays, 9:00 a.m.
Morning Prayer - 2nd, 4th, and 5th Sundays, 9:00 a.m.
Noonday Prayer - Monday through Friday, 12:00 Noon.

We will be adding a Deacon's Distribution to one of the Noonday Prayer days, but we're not sure which day that will be as yet.  Everyone is welcome to attend at any time.

As you can probably tell, we now have a Deacon Administrator for Holy Trinity, and our focus is going to be on getting out into the community and finding ways to serve, both internally and externally.  Regular office hours will now be held from 10:30 to Noon Monday through Friday.  Please feel free to drop by during those hours if you have any questions or need to talk.

The first Deacon's service was held this morning, and the sermon was on the Gospel according to Mark, Chapter 5.  It's a first person account from the point of view of the hemorrhaging woman.  

          "Remember the Law of Tum'ah, הבת שלי (shelli baht), my daughter!"  I can hear my mother's voice in my head, as it has always been since this curse began.  I was 12 when I began to bleed, and as the Law of Tum'ah says, I had to remove myself from the community, for I was unclean.  For most women, this time away lasts for 7 days, and then they present themselves to the temple, give sacrifices and are made ritually pure again. 

          Only, I never stopped bleeding.  I never saw my father or my brothers close up again.  The only people willing to touch me were women in their courses, or who had just had a child, and were ritually unclean themselves – but even they were sometimes afraid to touch me, fearing that they, too, might never stop bleeding.

          It has been a rather lonely existence these last 12 years.  The physical weakness and pains are bearable, but the silence, the fear from others, and being ostracized from my family, from society has been agonizing.  I know that G-d has a purpose for me, but I am lost to figure out what it is.

          If nothing else, I have taught myself to read the Torah, and women who come will bring me other things.  I'm afraid I became rather discouraged when I read of even one of the Roman philosophers, Pliny, who warned that contact with blood like mine will "turn new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seeds in gardens are dried up," and it brings about many other terrifying events.  The Law of Tum'ah is obviously alive and well in more than just my own community.

          I have been to physicians who, while they will not touch me, will listen to my symptoms.  They have recommended this and that and every other thing, and I have tried them all.  Nothing works. 

          I have come to believe that only the Divine Physician, G-d Himself, can heal me.  And that brings me to today, with my mother's voice ringing loudly and repeatedly in my ears.  Remember the Law of Tum'ah, from the Book of וַיִּקְרָא (Vayikra), Leviticus.  I have been absent from the community for so long, very few even know my face. 

          The teeming crowds would part like the Red Sea if they knew I was here.  Have you any idea what it's like to be invisible, to know that you are worthless?  I cannot serve my community.  I cannot marry or have children.  I cannot even take care of my aging parents. 

          I must be losing my mind.  Why would I think this would work when everything else I have tried has failed?  Am I just setting myself up for more heartache?

          I have been hearing stories of this rabbi, of Yeshua, who has been performing miracles, driving out demons, and healing those long forgotten souls at the fringes of society, the ones who know that "Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn." (George Bernard Shaw)  The message from others is loud and clear: "You do not matter." 

          But Yeshua has been preaching about us – the lost, the least, the last.  He tells us that we do matter to the Father in heaven.  "Oh, Abba, tell me what to do!  I know that I put all who touch me in danger of becoming unclean.  Please help me to be invisible just a little while longer, for I know that if I can only touch the hem of the cloak of your Rabbi, you will heal me.  Abba, grant my prayer, and I will serve you and your creation, always."

          The crowds move rather quickly as they follow the Rabbi.  I quicken my steps, doing my best not to touch others around me.  I can see one of the leaders of the synagogue approaching Yeshua, and falling at his feet.  As I draw near, I can hear him begging the teacher to come, lay hands on his daughter and heal her. 

          A part of me weeps, wishing that my own father had had someone to ask for help like this father.  And my tears have been abundant over the years at the loss of my father's presence.  I am grateful Yeshua will hear this man and help the girl.  She will not have to suffer as I have.

          But, he's leaving!  As he gathers his disciples, I know that this is my very last chance.  "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well."  G-d will heal me.  I kneel on the ground, and reaching out my hand, touch the hem of his cloak. 

          At once, I feel a change.  I know that I am healed!  I can feel strength in my body that I have not felt since I was a child!  G-d has made me well.

          Yeshua stopped.  He looked around him, and asked, "who touched my clothes?"  As my heart almost stopped with fear, I could see his disciples looking at him askance – asking him how he could ask such a question with the crowd pressing around him.  I knew that the time of reckoning had come, and I fell at his feet, explaining in a rush of words that probably made no sense at all, about myself, and what I had done.  I was so afraid – even as I had been healed – that I was about to be ostracized again.

          "Daughter," he said to me.  Daughter!  My heart leapt, for I knew with that one word, that I was worthy again.  But it was his next words that astounded me: "your faith has made you well."  He took no credit for healing me.  My faith made me well?  I have been faithful my entire life.  How could my faith make me well?

          And all of a sudden, I knew the purpose that G-d had for me.  This was not just a rabbi.  This man represented G-d Himself.  He told me to "go in peace," and I will.  I will find others who know of Yeshua, and can tell me of his teachings. 

          First, I must go to the temple, for the first time since I was a child, and present myself to be ritually clean again.  I will give thanks to G-d for his generosity – not only for healing me, but for giving me back my family, my community, and giving me purpose for the rest of my days. 

          May any who hear of my story, know that faith can heal them.  May they know that we are not invisible, that we are worthy to be sons and daughters.  May the crowds of people who follow Yeshua realize that with a kind word or a touch or even just a smile, they can make a difference in the lives of the lost and the least.